r. Here was the last of the
rooms of the King's Palace, cunningly masked, to be found only by
accident, even the cramped door concealed by the branches of a tortured
cedar. Norton pushed them aside and they entered.

"I have cached a few of my things here," he told her as they confronted
each other in the gloom of the room's interior. "And the joke of it is
that my hiding-place is almost if not quite directly below the caves
where Galloway's rifles are. This is a secret, mind you! . . . If
you'll look around, you'll find some of the articles our friends the
cliff-dwellers left behind them when they made their getaway."

In a dark corner she found a blackened coffee-pot and a frying-pan,
proclaiming anachronistically that here was the twentieth century
interloping upon the fifteenth, articles which Norton had hidden here.
In another corner were jumbled the things which the ancient people had
left to mark their passing, an earthenware water-jar, half a dozen
spear and arrow points of stone, a clumsy-looking axe still fitted to
its handle of century-seasoned cedar, bound with thongs.

"But," exclaimed the girl, "the wood, the raw-hide . . . they would
have disintegrated long ago. They must belong to the age of your
coffee-pot and frying-pan!"

"The air is bone-dry," he reminded her. "What little rain there is
never gets in here. Nothing decays; look yonder."

He showed her a basket made of withes, a graceful thing skilfully made,
small, frail-looking, and as perfect as the day it had come from a pair
of quick brown hands under a pair of quick black eyes. She took it
almost with a sense of awe upon her.

"Keep it, will you?" he asked lightly. "As a memento. Presented by a
caveman through your friend the sheriff. Now let's get back before
they miss us. I may have need of this place some time and I'd rather
no one else knew of it."

They made their way back as they had come and in silence, Virginia
treasuring the token and with it the sense that her friend the sheriff
had cared to share his secret with her.

They made of the day an occasion to be remembered, to be considered
wistfully in retrospect during the troubled hours so soon to come to
each one of the four of them. While Elmer and Florrie gathered
fire-wood, Norton showed Virginia how simple a matter it was here in
this seldom-visited mountain-stream to take a trout. Cool, shaded
pools under overhanging, gouged-out banks, tiny falls, and shimm