g it to come to the narrow
doorway. Holding hands, Norton in the lead, Elmer in the rear, they
made their breathless way. And then they were in the hushed, shaded
anteroom.

The dust of untroubled ages lay upon the surprisingly smooth floor.
Walls of cemented rock rose intact on two sides, broken here and there
on a third, while the cliff itself made the fourth at the rear. And
unusually spacious, wide, and high-ceiled was this room, which may have
had its use when time was younger as a council-chamber. At one end was
another door, small and dark and forbidding, leading to another room.
Beyond lay other quarters, a long line of them, which might have housed
scores in their time.

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 boulde