Yet Myra was conscious of no sense of fear now, and the dangers only made her pulse beat faster and stirred her blood. But it was no easy task riding a mule along precipitous paths and keeping her seat while slithering down slopes, clad as she was in only a filmy evening frock and a fur coat, and she cried out in protest at last:
"How much further, Señor Cojuelo? I cannot sit this ungainly brute much longer in these clothes."
"Courage, sweet lady, we have but a little further to go," Cojuelo called back to her over his shoulder.
He spoke truly. A few minutes later the party halted in a narrow, pitch-dark ravine, and Myra was lifted from her mule.
"Take my arm, señorita, lest you stumble in the darkness on the rough ground," said the muffled voice of El Diablo Cojuelo. "The entrance to my mountain eyrie is narrow and unprepossessing, but I promise you that you shall find comfort within."
He pressed the switch of an electric torch as he spoke, and guided Myra over rocky ground to what seemed a mere cleft in a wall of rock.
"You will notice that this entrance to my lair is only wide enough to allow of the passage of one person at a time," he resumed. "Here a handful of men could defy an Army Corps, and there are other means of entry—and other ways of escape. I give you welcome, sweet lady, to the fortress of El Diablo Cojuelo."
Myra, again with the sensation that the whole affair was a sort of fantastic dream, squeezed through the cleft revealed by the light of the electric torch, advanced two or three yards, passed through another cleft at right-angles to the first, and stopped at Cojuelo's bidding.
"You perceive, señorita, that we seem to have come to a dead end," said the bandit, flashing the light about. "What appears to be a solid wall of rock confronts us. It is actually a cunningly-contrived door giving entrance to a series of caves which Nature must surely have constructed for my use. And El Diablo Cojuelo has improved on nature. He aqui!"
With his foot he pressed some hidden spring or lever on the ground, and a massive door swung open, revealing to the astonished eyes of Myra a big, irregularly-shaped room that looked as if it had been hewn out of the solid rock, a room furnished with roughly-constructed chairs and a settee on which there were many cushions, and with many rugs on the rocky floor. Most amazing feature of all, the place was lighted with electricity and warmed by an electric radiator.