What was the use in borrowing trouble, anyway? To-morrow had not come, and wasn’t his good mother always telling him that old maxim “sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof?”
So Billie concluded he would live in the present, and let the future take care of itself.
They were heading for the queer Zuni village right now, and before long he expected to get busy with his camera, taking all sorts of entertaining snapshots that later on must astonish and delight hosts of friends in the faraway East, after he returned home.
That they were now drawing very close to the Zuni settlement all of them knew to a certainty. Plenty of signs pointed that way—they could hear loud voices, and the laughter of children, just as though they might be approaching a village of white people; for after all, children do not differ very much, whether they be white, black, copper-colored or yellow; it is only when they grow older and copy the characteristics of their parents that they change, and follow the groove of their species.
“I can see the cliff, all right!” announced Billie, in some little excitement, as he stretched his fat
neck to a dangerous degree, “rubbering,” as he himself described it.
“Yes,” said Adrian, “that’s the top row of homes we see yonder; and if things are anything like I expect, from what I’ve heard we’ll find a dozen other rows of holes in the rock most all the way down the cliff.”
“But not near the bottom,” corrected Donald; “because, you see, the only object that ever made these people, away back many hundreds of years ago, build their homes in this way was to feel free from their enemies, whoever they might be; and so far as I’ve been able to find out, nobody really knows who they were afraid of.”
“P’raps the Injuns got on the warpath every little while; and made a raid, looking for scalps and plunder?” suggested Billie, quickly.
“You might think so,” Adrian told him; “but it’s been agreed on that when these same old cliff-dwellers held out in these valleys, making their homes high up in the air, and digging them out of the solid rock in certain places where it was easy to do the job, why, there were no Indians. That was long before the time of the red man, as we know him in history. So there you are, Billie.”