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."