She exited the small room and pulled the door shut behind her, re-locking it. Then Bette untied the rope around her waist and tied it to one of the posts near the door that led to the room with the gold, because the door was in one of the recessed corners of the tunnel, and could be difficult to find.

She hurried to where she’d left the man who’d attacked her and re-checked his condition. He was still out.  She thought quickly about what she should do about him and decided she needed to get him away from the proximity of the room where the gold was hidden away.

She dragged him to one of the side tunnels about thirty feet from the tunnel that led to the room with the gold, and tied his hands behind his back with one of the nylon ties that had been looped around the rope she’d carried into the tunnels.  She also removed his shoes and socks, figuring he’d have a difficult time negotiating the sharp rocks lining the floors of the tunnels in case he woke before they returned.  At the last minute, before hurrying away, she decided to tie his belt around his legs.

As she hurried back to Jules and Tom, following the rope, she tossed each shoe into the darkness of a couple of the tunnels she’d walked past.

Finally she emerged into the tunnel that led to the small staircase she’d descended about forty minutes previously.   Jules must have seen traces of her torchlight because Bette heard the welcome sound of her friend’s concerned voice calling out to her in the darkness.

As Bette hurriedly explained her brief altercation with the man, once she’d ascended the short staircase that led into the tunnel, she began texting the man’s partner, pretending to be the man who’d attacked her, and using words she’d seen in other text the man had sent previously. She told the partner that this man was still looking through the forest for Bette.   His claim earlier that he’d stumbled into an entrance into some tunnels turned out to be a wild goose chase, she added.

Almost immediately the partner responded with a string of curses about his incompetence and said that the partner was hurrying back to his vantage point that allowed him to observe the crowd from the top of a tree about 500 feet from the gravel road that led to the parking lot of the polo grounds. “Not the first time the target has pulled a fake on us, right?  You shoulda learned from the last time, punk!” the man’s partner admonished him in a final text.  And then the partner advised he would come back for the man at the spot he’d dropped him off once he could pick up where Bette would be headed to for the rest of the night.  So he could likely come for the man early the next morning, yet.