|
Main
- books.jibble.org
My Books
- IRC Hacks
Misc. Articles
- Meaning of Jibble
- M4 Su Doku
- Computer Scrapbooking
- Setting up Java
- Bootable Java
- Cookies in Java
- Dynamic Graphs
- Social Shakespeare
External Links
- Paul Mutton
- Jibble Photo Gallery
- Jibble Forums
- Google Landmarks
- Jibble Shop
- Free Books
- Intershot Ltd
|
books.jibble.org
Previous Page
| Next Page
Page 34
Turning a little to look southward, she saw the cliffs standing farther
and farther back on each side so that the eye might travel between them
and out over the lower slopes and the distant stretches of level land
which, more now than ever, seemed a great limitless sea. The stars
were paling rapidly; the first glint of the new day was in the air, the
world lay shadowy and silent and lifeless, softened in the seeming,
but, as in the daytime, slumbrous under an atmosphere of brooding
mystery.
"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.
"I have lived in this part of the world all but two or three years of
my life," said Norton at the end, "and yet I never heard of these
particular caves until a very few days ago. I don't believe that there
are ten people living who know of them; so Galloway, hiding his stuff
out there was playing just as safe as a man can play--when he plays the
game crooked, anyway."
"But won't he guess something when he misses Moraga?"
"I don't think so." Norton shook his head. "Tom Cutter and Brocky made
Moraga talk. His job was to keep an eye on this end, but he was
commissioned also to make a trip over to the county line. The first
thing Jim Galloway will hear will be that Moraga got drunk and into a
scrape and was taken in by Sheriff Roberts. Then I think that Galloway
himself will slip out of San Juan himself some dark night and climb the
cliffs to make sure. When he finds everything absolutely as it was
left, when time passes and nothing is done, I think he will replace
Moraga with another man and figure that everything is all right. Why
shouldn't he?"
Previous Page
| Next Page
|
|