notwithstanding its small size. Its water freezes in winter, but it
never dries up completely during the summer months.

Bunches of tall grass, low shrubbery, and cactus grow in the open spaces
between rocky debris fallen from above. They also cover in part low
mounds of rubbish, and ruins of a large pentagonal building erected
formerly at the foot of a slope leading to the cliffs. In the cliffs
themselves, for a distance of about two miles, numerous caves dug out by
the hand of man are visible. Some of these are yet perfect; others have
wholly crumbled away except the rear wall. From a distance the
port-holes and indentations appear like so many pigeons' nests in the
naked rock. Together with the cavities formed by amygdaloid chambers and
crevices caused by erosion, they give the cliffs the appearance of a
huge, irregular honeycomb.

These ruins, inside as well as outside the northern walls of the canon
of the Rito, bear testimony to the tradition still current among the
Queres Indians of New Mexico that the Rito, or Tyuonyi, was once
inhabited by people of their kind, nay, even of their own stock. But the
time when those people wooed and wed, lived and died, in that secluded
vale is past long, long ago. Centuries previous to the advent of the
Spaniards, the Rito was already deserted. Nothing remains but the ruins
of former abodes and the memory of their inhabitants among their
descendants. These ancient people of the Rito are the actors in the
story which is now to be told; the stage in the main is the Rito itself.
The language of the actors is the Queres dialect, and the time when the
events occurred is much anterior to the discovery of America, to the
invention of gunpowder and the printing-press in Europe. Still the Rito
must have appeared then much as it appears now,--a quiet, lovely,
picturesque retreat, peaceful when basking in the sunlight, wonderfully
quiet when the stars sparkled over it, or the moon shed its floods of
silver on the cliffs and on the murmuring brook below.

In the lower or western part of its course the Tyuonyi rushes in places
through thickets and small groves, out of which rise tall pine-trees. It
is very still on the banks of the brook when, on a warm June day,
noon-time is just past and no breeze fans the air; not a sound is heard
beyond the rippling of the water; the birds are asleep, and the noise of
human activity does not reach there from the cliffs. Still, on the day
of which we