“But I don’t want to sleep, Bill. This little mystery must be solved before we go any farther with our chief business. Couldn’t sleep if I wanted to.”
“You’ll stay awake a darn long while, professor, if you wait to put salt on the tail of the thing that haunts this valley,” Bill opined.
Abington calmly knocked the dottle from his pipe and began to refill it, ready for another long, meditative smoke. “For every problem in the universe there is a correct answer,” he said quietly. “It is only our ignorance that makes mysteries of things simple enough in themselves. A peculiar arrangement of details has given this ‘gosh-awful’ animal of yours an air of mystery, but the explanation is simple enough, I’ll guarantee.”
“Yeah, but how are you going to find this explanation—that you think is so darned simple?” Bill stifled a yawn.
“Just as I find the meaning of the hieroglyphics; by studying the symbols already familiar to me, and from them arriving at the natural relation of the unknown characters. This thing left tracks, and it managed to accomplish a certain amount of destruction in a given time. To-morrow morning I’ll take a look at your cave, and the answer to the puzzle will not be so hard to find as you imagine.”
Bill mumbled a half-finished sentence and lay down on the torn tent, and presently the rhythmic sound of snoring hushed the strident chorus of stone crickets on the ledge.
Until the moon had swum its purple sea and reached shore on the western rim of the valley, Abington lounged beside the cliff, so quiet that any observer might have thought him asleep. For a time his pipe sent up a thin column of aromatic smoke, then went cold; and after that only the moonlight shining on his wide-open eyes betrayed the fact that Abington was very much awake.
An owl hooted monotonously in the cañon at his right, probably near the spring. A coyote yammered on the steep hillside across the cañon mouth, and a little later Abington heard the frightened, squealing cry of a rabbit caught unawares by that coyote or another.
On a cliff just over his head, shadowed now as the moon slipped behind the hill, the ancient people he was tracing had carved intricate tribal records. These had endured far beyond the last vague legend of those whose valor had thus been blazoned before their little world, a world that had seemed so vast and imperishable, no doubt, to heroes and historians alike.
It seemed to him that here was a land well fitted to hold the full story of these forgotten lives. Could he but find it, and read it aright, might not his own name be blazoned before his own people—to be forgotten perchance in ages to come, as these were forgotten now?