“When you told me last night . . . when you put your rope around me and said that I might fall half a dozen feet. . . .”

“Had we fallen it would have been a hundred feet, many a time,” he said quietly.  “But I knew we wouldn’t fall.  And,” looking into her face with an expression in his eyes which the shadows hid, “I shouldn’t have sought to minimize the danger to you had I known you as well as I think I know you now.”

“Thank you,” she said lightly.  But she was conscious of a warm pleasurable glow throughout her entire being.  It was good to live life in the open, it was good to stand upon the cliff tops with a man like Roderick Norton, it was good to have such a man speak thus.

Five minutes later they were making their way down the cliffs toward the horses.

CHAPTER IX

YOUNG PAGE COMES TO TOWN

Here and there throughout the great stretches of the sun-smitten southwest are spots which still remain practically unknown, wherein men come seldom or not at all, where no man cares to tarry.  Barren mountains that are blistering hot, sucked dry long ago of their last vestige of moisture; endless drifts of sand where the silent animal life is scanty, where fanged cactus and stubborn mesquite fight their eternal battles for life; mesas and lomas little known, shunned by humanity.  True, men have been here, some few poking into the dust of ancient ruins, more seeking minerals, and now and then one, fleeing the law, to be followed relentlessly by such as Roderick Norton.  And yet there is the evidence, if one looks, that this desolate, shunned land once had its teeming tribes and its green fields.

Virginia and Roderick, having made their hazardous way down the cliffs and to their horses in silence, found their tongues loosened as they rode westward in the soft dawn.  Virginia put her questions and he, as best he could, answered them.  She asked eagerly of the old cliff-dwellers and he shrugged his shoulders.  Aztecs, were they?  Toltecs?  What? Quien sabe!  They were a people of mystery who had left behind them a silence like that of the desert wastes themselves.  Whence they came, where they went, and why, must long remain questions with many answers and therefore none at all.  But he could tell her a few things of the ancient civilization . . . and a civilization it truly was . . . and of the signs left for posterity to puzzle over.

They had builded cities, and the ruins of their pueblos still stand scattered across the weary, scorched land; they constructed mile after mile of aqueducts whose lines are followed to-day by reclamation engineers; they irrigated and cultivated their lands; they made abodes high up on the mountains, dwelling in caves, enlarging their dwellings, shaping homes and fortresses and lookouts.  And just so long as the mountains themselves last, will men come now and then into such places as that wherein Jim Galloway’s rifles lay hidden.