"Waa-hoo!" yelled Jones with all the power of his wide, leather lungs.

Thousands of devilish voices rushed at us, seemingly on puffs of wind.
Mocking, deep echoes bellowed from the ebon shades at the back of the
cave, and the walls, taking them up, hurled them on again in fiendish
concatenation.

We did not again break the silence of that tomb, where the spirits of
ages lay in dusty shrouds; and we crawled down as if we had invaded a
sanctuary and invoked the wrath of the gods.

We all proposed names: Montezuma's Amphitheater being the only rival of
Jones's selection, Echo cave, which we finally chose.

Mounting our horses again, we made twenty miles of Snake Gulch by noon,
when we rested for lunch. All the way up we had played the boy's game
of spying for sights, with the honors about even. It was a question if
Snake Gulch ever before had such a raking over. Despite its name,
however, we discovered no snakes.

From the sandy niche of a cliff where we lunched Wallace espied a tomb,
and heralded his discovery with a victorious whoop. Digging in old
ruins roused in him much the same spirit that digging in old books
roused in me. Before we reached him, he had a big bowie-knife buried
deep in the red, sandy floor of the tomb.

This one-time sealed house of the dead had been constructed of small
stones, held together by a cement, the nature of which, Wallace
explained, had never become clear to civilization. It was red in color
and hard as flint, harder than the rocks it glued together. The tomb
was half-round in shape, and its floor was a projecting shelf of cliff
rock. Wallace unearthed bits of pottery, bone and finely braided rope,
all of which, to our great disappointment, crumbled to dust in our
fingers. In the case of the rope, Wallace assured us, this was a sign
of remarkable antiquity.

In the next mile we traversed, we found dozens of these old cells, all
demolished except a few feet of the walls, all despoiled of their
one-time possessions. Wallace thought these depredations were due to
Indians of our own time. Suddenly we came upon Jones, standing under a
cliff, with his neck craned to a desperate angle.

"Now, what's that?" demanded he, pointing upward.

High on the cliff wall appeared a small, round protuberance. It was of
the unmistakably red color of the other tombs; and Wallace, more
excited than he had been in the cougar chase, said it was a sepulcher,
and he believed it had never been opened.