Lone Pine: The Story of a Lost Mine

by R. B. Townshend

He went to the tree and unfastened the lariat from the hole. Then he stooped to pick up the spade which lay beside the new-made mound. As he did so his eye was caught by a little fragment of rock that lay by it, which had been thrown out in sinking the grave. Mechanically he picked it up, and its weight at once revealed to his practised experience that it was a mineral of some kind. He slipped it into his pocket and led his horse over to the big rock. "It does look rather like an outcrop," he said, as he carelessly knocked off a few small specimens with the angle of the spade. He had done this so many hundred times before, that he pocketed them almost without interest, as a matter of habit, and set off in the direction of the trail. Before very long he came to a stop.

The meadow was bounded by a low cliff, which, farther down, became the wall of the cañon where he had killed the deer. It was not more than about twenty or thirty feet high, but it was perpendicular, in places even overhanging, and blocked his way absolutely. He turned to the right along it in order to find where he might cross it. The cliff faced south and west, and the bright light of the moon made every detail distinct. Before he had gone far the opening of another little cubby-hole showed dark on a ledge of the moonlit cliff, which was overhung by the projecting brow above. Then there came half a dozen of them close together. Then the ledge broadened and ran inwards in a softer stratum of the cliff face, so that a whole row of little houses were built along it. The ledge was ten or twelve feet up the cliff face, so that the houses could only have been approached by ladders, while the overhanging cliff brow afforded them absolute protection from above.

"By George!" he said, "this must be the old pueblo I've heard of as being up here in the mountain; they say the Aztecs used to live here before the days of Montezuma."

The ledge ceased presently, and here there were rooms absolutely carved out of the living rock itself. Nor were these aloft in air like the former ones; it seemed as if the people who had evolved the idea of building their houses like swallows' nests under the eaves, for security, had gained confidence and come boldly down to the level of the ground. He looked into one, and struck a match; it was just a little square room with a doorway, all cut out of solid rock. The floor was bare rock too. "Lots of cheap labour going when they made houses like that," he said. "There must have been a whole heap of folks living here once."

Farther on there were the remains of stone houses built on the ground, close to, or against, the cliff face. "Thick as bees they must have been," he said; "I'd no sort of idea there had been such a vast number of them. It must have been a regular swarmery of Indians."

He went on half a mile or more, and the buildings were continuous either on the ground or upon the ledge, which ran right along. They were almost all square or oblong in plan, but here and there at intervals appeared one that was round and of a sort of beehive form. These were old estufas. "I've a good mind to camp here," he said, "and see what this place looks like by daylight. I never had the least notion there was so much of it. Some of those scientific chaps at the Smithsonian ought to be told about this. I bet it's the oldest thing in the United States."

He stopped before one of the ancient cave-dwellings. It was not one of those excavated entirely out of the rock, for here there was a natural cave on the ground level. Across the front of this a wall had been built, enclosing the space behind it as a dwelling-room, but the wall had been partly broken down by time. In the angle where the wall joined the rock there was a fireplace. Close by, an external house had been built as a sort of lean-to against the rock face, with a roof supported by beams that had now fallen in.

"I guess I'll just move in and take possession," he said as he looked at the cave-dwelling, and, suiting the action to the word, he stripped the saddle from his horse and put it inside, and then led him out in the meadow to picket him.

He returned to where he had left his saddle; he could see by the moonlight the fallen roof-beams of the outside house lying confusedly here and there. The roof had been of clay, but this had all washed down and now was indistinguishable from the floor, while the layers of brushwood that had supported it had crumbled into dust. But the primeval rafters of enduring pitch-pine were still mostly sound.

Entering the cave-dwelling, where he had put his saddle, his eye was caught by the old fireplace; it was still blackened with the flame of the fire that had so long ago been quenched, and still there lay visible on the hearth, cold and black, the dead embers that had once been live and glowing coals of fire.