"It is the Valley of Lost Souls," Torres utterly solemnly. "I have heard of it, but never did I believe."
"So have I heard of it and never believed," Leoncia
"And what of it?" demanded Francis. We're not lost souls, but good flesh-and-blood persons. We should worry." "But Francis, listen," Leoncia said. "The tales I have heard of it, ever since I was a little girl, all agreed that no person who ever got into it ever got out again."
"Granting that that is so," Francis could not help smiling, "then how did the tales come out? If nobody ever came out again to tell about it, how does it happen that everybody outside knows about it?"
"I don't know," Leoncia admitted. "I only tell you what I have heard. Besides, I never believed. But this answers all the descriptions of the tales."
"Nobody ever got out," Torres affirmed with the same solemn utterance.
"Then how do you know that anybody got in?" Francis persisted.
"All the lost souls live here," was the reply. "That is why we've never seen them, because they never got out. I tell you, Mr. Francis Morgan, that I am no creature without reason. I have been educated. I have studied in Europe, and I have done business in your own New York. I know science and philosophy; and yet do I know that this is the valley, once in, from which no one emerges."
"Well, we're not in yet, are we?" retorted Francis with a slight manifestation of impatience. "And we don't have to go in, do we?" He crawled forward to the verge of the shelf of loose soil and crumbling stone in order to get a better view of the distant object his eye had just picked out. "If that isn't a grass-thatched roof-"
At that moment the soil broke away under his hands. In a flash, the whole soft slope on which they rested broke away, and all three were sliding and rolling down the steep slope in the midst of a miniature avalanche of soil, gravel, and grass-tufts.