Venters had visited cliff-dwellings before, and they had been in ruins, and of no great character or size but this place was of proportions that stunned him, and it had not been desecrated by the hand of man, nor had it been crumbled by the hand of time.  It was a stupendous tomb.  It had been a city.  It was just as it had been left by its builders.  The little houses were there, the smoke-blackened stains of fires, the pieces of pottery scattered about cold hearths, the stone hatchets; and stone pestles and mealing-stones lay beside round holes polished by years of grinding maize—­lay there as if they had been carelessly dropped yesterday.  But the cliff-dwellers were gone!

Dust!  They were dust on the floor or at the foot of the shelf, and their habitations and utensils endured.  Venters felt the sublimity of that marvelous vaulted arch, and it seemed to gleam with a glory of something that was gone.  How many years had passed since the cliff-dwellers gazed out across the beautiful valley as he was gazing now?  How long had it been since women ground grain in those polished holes?  What time had rolled by since men of an unknown race lived, loved, fought, and died there?  Had an enemy destroyed them?  Had disease destroyed them, or only that greatest destroyer—­time?  Venters saw a long line of blood-red hands painted low down upon the yellow roof of stone.  Here was strange portent, if not an answer to his queries.  The place oppressed him.  It was light, but full of a transparent gloom.  It smelled of dust and musty stone, of age and disuse.  It was sad.  It was solemn.  It had the look of a place where silence had become master and was now irrevocable and terrible and could not be broken.  Yet, at the moment, from high up in the carved crevices of the arch, floated down the low, strange wail of wind—­a knell indeed for all that had gone.

Venters, sighing, gathered up an armful of pottery, such pieces as he thought strong enough and suitable for his own use, and bent his steps toward camp.  He mounted the terrace at an opposite point to which he had left.  He saw the girl looking in the direction he had gone.  His footsteps made no sound in the deep grass, and he approached close without her being aware of his presence.  Whitie lay on the ground near where she sat, and he manifested the usual actions of welcome, but the girl did not notice them.  She seemed to be oblivious to everything near at hand.  She made a pathetic figure drooping there, with her sunny hair contrasting so markedly with her white, wasted cheeks and her hands listlessly clasped and her little bare feet propped in the framework of the rude seat.  Venters could have sworn and laughed in one breath at the idea of the connection between this girl and Oldring’s Masked Rider.  She was the victim of more than accident of fate—­a victim to some deep plot the mystery of which burned him.  As he stepped forward with a half-formed thought that she was absorbed in watching for his