ONCE IN A THOUSAND YEARS.
BY JAMES BARNES
It was quite dark. The sun was not high enough as yet to shine down into the long narrow crevice up which Professor Jensen and the two boys were clambering.
A short distance ahead of them stalked John Coleman, the guide. He was a tall thin man with drooping shoulders, and he carried the Professor's camera, a heavy pick, and a long-handled shovel as if they were no more than feather-weights.
Suddenly the little party turned around a steep wall of shale, and the main cañon was in sight. The Professor paused and mopped his forehead. "There, boys, there it is," he said, pointing with his finger.
Half-way up the steep side of the cliff, in what looked to be a long narrow cleft in the steep descent of rock, stood the home and fortress of the ancient cliff-dwellers, which the boys had come so many miles to see.
From where they were they could make out nothing but some square windows in what appeared to be a line of half-crumbling adobe houses that nearly filled the huge shadowy recess.
George Lyman and Carter Randall were two boys of sixteen who had left home some two months before under the charge of young Professor Jensen. They were making a trip through Arizona and New Mexico in the search of fossils and traces of the prehistoric inhabitants. "Bones and battle-axes," George called them. Through their acquaintance with an army officer at one of the forts they had heard of the guide Coleman, who knew more about the habitations of the old cliff-dwellers than probably any man in the region, for he had been one of the first explorers up in the Glachens and the Black River country.
With this recommendation the Professor had engaged Coleman to guide his little party into the Black River cañon, and show them how to reach one or two of the more accessible fortresses that the strange, almost unknown people had built ages and ages ago.
When they had reached the bottom of the arroyo, and were following the shallow stream, John Coleman turned.