“Fat Man’s Misery,” as he named the cleft, began with a steep slope of loose, dry earth. You could climb it with your elbows jammed into the rock on either side. Squirming and twisting, Sid wormed up through it, hanging on most of the time by the rocks, where a slip would have dropped him down like an avalanche, to land on Pinto’s pied back far below. Then the opposite downward slope began, just as steep. That ledged cliff was a mere wall—and he had climbed through it!
When he got down out of the cleft he found himself looking into a small valley choked full of tall spruces. Their tops rose out of the green below him. It was a small box canyon, sure enough, not over a mile to the head of it. Sid started down, his feet slipping and sliding in loose shale rock that refused to halt anywhere. Grabbing a sapling, he hung fast and listened to the shower of small stones dropping down into the valley over some ledge below him.
No way down there! He grimaced to himself, shrugging his shoulders. All right!—down the flanks of the canyon, then! He started off, sloping down wherever possible, and little by little worked below. A last plunge through firs and thick needles, and he stood on the floor of the valley. It was filled with mossy bowlders, just like those under his camp, and down in between them were cool, clear wells of running water.
Sid drank, and then started up the valley, searching the cliff walls for some of the swallow-nest houses of the cliff dwellers. Then, in a widening of the valley floor, something attracted him. Thick-grown with weeds were clumps of bladed grasses that looked somehow familiar.
“Indian corn!—Wild maize,—I do believe!” he exclaimed, examining one of the stalks curiously. A small ear with a black tassel on it arrested his hand as it slipped up a stalk. Ripping open the husk, a tiny knot of blue and white kernels came to view. There were not over thirty of them all told.
“Corn!” cried Sid. “Relapsed back to Nature! This is what it looks like in its wild state—and this little flat must have been an Indian planting ground!”
A wild vine that ran thickly through the growth like a ground nut next confirmed it. It was a true bean, gone wild, all right! It did not need the stringy pod, filled with small red beans, to reassure him. And rambling profusely over the rocks in the sunlight was a large-leaved plant that he knew to be squash or gourd, he was not sure which. Looking further he discovered a rocky and ruined trail leading upward from the vegetable patch. Overgrown with briers and weeds, still it had that look of going somewhere that marks the human trail no matter how old. Sid ran out into the valley and peered upward, but could see nothing but ledges above, half hidden behind thick evergreens that were sprouting out of every crack and crevice in the walls. He climbed up the trail, often leaping to a spruce trunk and back again to avoid places where the rock was weathered and shelving. High up on the cliff he came at last to a great out-jutting wall of rock that stood out like a bare chimney from the cliff face. Rude stone steps led up through it, and over the cleft hung balanced a great bowlder, held up on its inner side by a stout, bare tree trunk. All the former cliff dwellers had to do was to knock away that trunk to let the rock fall and seal up the entrance to their village forever.
Sid labored up the steps under it gingerly. Something great was coming off! He was surely discovering a new ruin!
If so, it must have been abandoned within the memory of men now living, reasoned Sid, for a weatherworn pole ladder next came to view, leading up to the top of the first pueblo. As the boy mounted it, he examined the rock walls closely. They were not of ’dobe clay, but of stone, closely fitted, without mortar in the joints. This placed it as having been built by someone of the San Juan tribes, for they invariably used the flat stratified rock of the region to make their fine walls. Arrived at the top of the ladder, Sid looked about him with wonder. Overhead hung the immense smooth roof of a cave scoured by water action long ago. In it was a small pueblo, only four rooms, but they were cunningly built back from the edge of the ledge, so that it could not be seen from below nor, indeed, from anywhere but the opposite wall of the canyon. And it was a little gem, in a fine state of preservation, for the characteristic blue and red porous pottery water jars still stood cemented on the corners of its roofs. The pueblo had manifestly never been attacked by hostile Navahos.
“Gorry, what a find!” ejaculated Sid to himself as he walked over the roof of the nearest trap door, out of which stuck the poles of a ladder. He looked down it, letting his eyes become adjusted to the semidarkness within. A faint, musty odor pervaded the place; somehow the very air seemed full of whispering ghosts, for the wind scoured through the vast cave and moaned in the empty windows of the houses. Gradually objects developed out of the gloom. Two large, gayly decorated granary baskets, filled with musty corn, sagged in the corners. Then he made out pottery jars, covered with black and white symbolical Indian designs. Festoons of dusty red and blue corn ears hung from the rafters, and rows of what looked like shriveled and dried red peppers. Over in one corner Sid finally made out the pottery oven, its sooty door still filled with the fragments of charcoal and sticks.