s. "I've ridden the border of
Utah. I've seen people--know how they live--but they must be few of all
who are living. I had my books and I studied them. But all that doesn't
help me any more. I want to go out into the big world and see it. Yet I
want to stay here more. What's to become of us? Are we cliff-dwellers?
We're alone here. I'm happy when I don't think. These--these bones that
fly into dust--they make me sick and a little afraid. Did the people who
lived here once have the same feelings as we have? What was the good of
their living at all? They're gone! What's the meaning of it all--of us?"

"Bess, you ask more than I can tell. It's beyond me. Only there was
laughter here once--and now there's silence. There was life--and now
there's death. Men cut these little steps, made these arrow-heads and
mealing-stones, plaited the ropes we found, and left their bones to
crumble in our fingers. As far as time is concerned it might all have
been yesterday. We're here to-day. Maybe we're higher in the scale of
human beings--in intelligence. But who knows? We can't be any higher in
the things for which life is lived at all."

"What are they?"

"Why--I suppose relationship, friendship--love."

"Love!"

"Yes. Love of man for woman--love of woman for man. That's the nature,
the meaning, the best of life itself."

She said no more. Wistfulness of glance deepened into sadness.

"Come, let us go," said Venters.

Action brightened her. Beside him, holding his hand she slipped down
the shelf, ran down the long, steep slant of sliding stones, out of the
cloud of dust, and likewise out of the pale gloom.

"We beat the slide," she cried.

The miniature avalanche cracked and roared, and rattled itself into an
inert mass at the base of the incline. Yellow dust like the gloom of the
cave, but not so changeless, drifted away on the wind; the roar clapped
in echo from the cliff, returned, went back, and came again to die
in the hollowness. Down on the sunny terrace there was a different
atmosphere. Ring and Whitie leaped around Bess. Once more she was
smiling, gay, and thoughtless, with the dream-mood in the shadow of her
eyes.

"Bess, I haven't seen that since last summer. Look!" said Venters,
pointing to the scalloped edge of rolling purple clouds that peeped over
the western wall. "We're in for a storm."

"Oh, I hope not. I'm afraid of storms."

"Are you? Why?"

"Have you ever been down in one of these walled-up pocket