"Bien!" exclaimed Cojuelo, as the motor disappeared. "Everything is working according to plan. In the unlikely event of the car being stopped, it is found to contain Garcilaso, Don Carlos's steward, returning from doing some marketing in the city. And who would guess that the fair senorita had been spirited away in one of Don Carlos's own cars?" "So some of Don Carlos's servants are in your pay?" exclaimed Myra. "They are all in my pay, sweet lady, and every man knows it is as much as his life is worth to betray me," Cojuelo answered, with a triumphant laugh. "But we waste time, and must not take the risk, remote as it is, of being seen. Let me assist you to mount." He picked Myra up in his arms and swung her up without any apparent effort on to the saddle of a mule which one of the men had led forward, mounted another mule himself, and gave some rapid orders. "Follow me and ride carefully, senorita, for there are some steep and dangerous paths to negotiate," he called to Myra. "Mendoza will lead your mule at the most perilous places. _Avanzar!_" To anyone less accustomed to riding and to taking risks than Myra, that night ride through the mountains of the Sierra Morena would have been a blood-curdling and nerve-shattering experience. Often she had to guide her mule along a rough path barely a couple of yards wide, with a sheer drop of hundreds of feet on one side, a path where a stumble or a false step on the part of the animal would have meant certain death. 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, Senor 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, senorita, 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."