“This thing is all assayed and fire tested, professor, and I’m no fool. May I give you an outline of it?”
“You know where the San Marcos pueblo is—away down south of Bonanza?” Mackintavers struck into his subject without further parley. “It was abandoned about 1680 because of attacks from the Comanches, who destroyed several pueblos down in that country. There’s a tradition that the Injuns migrated west of the Rio Grande and settled the Cochiti and Domingo pueblos. Has that tradition ever been proved up?”
The professor evinced an awakening interest.
“No, sir. We know that the survivors of the Pecos pueblo went to Jimez, but the older migrations are hidden in the mists of time, unfortunately. Where the present Pueblos came from we do not know. The migrations——”
“They won’t be hid very long,” said Mackintavers, complacently. “Aiblins, now, we’ll clear ’em up a bit, eh?”
The only Scottish evidences which remained from Sandy’s youth were an uncanny acquisitiveness and a habit of interjecting the word “aiblins” into the conversation at random. When Sandy used that word, it betrayed mental effort.
“Some time ago,” he resumed, “a man found seven stone idols in a bit of the adobe ruins at San Marcos. They had been walled up and buried alive, ye might say. The heavy rains last year, which took out some pieces of the adobe walls, washed ’em out. I’ve got ’em now, down to my ranch near Magdalena.”
At this announcement the professor displayed mild disappointment. He had been more than interested in Sandy’s preamble, but this supposed climax caused him to shake his gray head regretfully.
“My dear sir, these idols are of course very rare things, but not exceptionally so. I fail to see how they would give any proof of migration——”
“Hold on; I ain’t done yet! A drunken Injun from Cochiti seen those idols and spilled a good deal of information, calling them by name and so on. That is not evidence which would stand on a scientific basis, I reckon. But if a Cochiti man could be made to talk, and if he was to recognize those idols first crack as his ancestral gods——”
“And not be drunk at the time,” interjected the other, smiling.
“Sure. If he was to name ’em like old friends, and they corresponded with the same idols from Cochiti which are in various museums—then wouldn’t all this go to show mighty plain that the migration theory was true?”