While Florrie, letting out little shrieks now and then interspersed with gay cries of delight, led a half-timorous way and Elmer went with her upon the tour of discovery, Virginia and Norton stood a moment at the front entrance looking down upon the fertile plateau and across it to the level miles running out to San Juan and beyond.

“Who were they?” asked Virginia, unconscious of a half-sigh as she withdrew abstracted eyes from the wide panorama which had filled the vision of so many other men and women and little children before the white man came to claim the New World.  “They who builded here and lived and died here.  What has become of them?  Where did they go?”

“All questions asked a thousand times and never answered.  I don’t know.  But they were good builders, good engineers, good pottery-makers, good farmers and hunters and fighters; rather a goodly crowd, I take it.  Come, and I’ll share my secret with you while Florrie and Elmer discover the skeleton a little farther on and stop to exclaim over it.”

[Illustration:  “Come, and I’ll share my secret with you.”]

Norton’s secret was a hidden room of the King’s Palace.  While many men knew of the Palace itself, he believed that none other than himself had ever ferreted out this particular chamber which he called the Treasure Chamber.  It was to be reached by clambering through an orifice of the eastern wall, over a clutter of fallen blocks of stone and a score of feet along the narrowing ledge.  Just before they came to the point where the encroaching wall of cliff denied farther foothold they found a fissure in the rock itself wide enough to allow them to slip into it.  Again they climbed, coming presently to a ledge smaller than the one below and hidden by an outthrust boulder.  Here was the last of the rooms of the King’s Palace, cunningly masked, to be found only by accident, even the cramped door concealed by the branches of a tortured cedar.  Norton pushed them aside and they entered.

“I have cached a few of my things here,” he told her as they confronted each other in the gloom of the room’s interior.  “And the joke of it is that my hiding-place is almost if not quite directly below the caves where Galloway’s rifles are.  This is a secret, mind you! . . .  If you’ll look around, you’ll find some of the articles our friends the cliff-dwellers left behind them when they made their getaway.”

In a dark corner she found a blackened coffee-pot and a frying-pan, proclaiming anachronistically that here was the twentieth century interloping upon the fifteenth, articles which Norton had hidden here.  In another corner were jumbled the things which the ancient people had left to mark their passing, an earthenware water-jar, half a dozen spear and arrow points of stone, a clumsy-looking axe still fitted to its handle of century-seasoned cedar, bound with thongs.

“But,” exclaimed the girl, “the wood, the raw-hide . . . they would have disintegrated long ago.  They must belong to the age of your coffee-pot and frying-pan!”