ow 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