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.