By the time the Apaches were out of range the emigrants were well up the slope of the hill which occupied the extreme elbow of the bend in the river. It was a bluff or butte of limestone which innumerable years had converted into marl, and for the most part into earth. A thin turf covered it; here and there were thickets; more rarely trees. Presently some one remarked that the sides were terraced. It was true; there were the narrow flats of soil which had once been gardens; there too were the supporting walls, more or less ruinous. Curious eyes now turned toward the seeming mound on the summit, querying whether it might not be the remains of an antique pueblo. At this instant Clara uttered a cry of anxiety, "Where is Pepita?" The girl was gone; a hasty looking about showed that; but whither? Alas! the only solution to this enigma must be the horrible word, "Apaches." It seemed the strangest thing conceivable; one moment with the party, and the next vanished; one moment safe, and the next dead or doomed. Of course the kidnapping must have been accomplished during the frenzied riot in the stream, when the two bands were disentangling amid an uproar of plungings, yells, and musket shots. The girl had probably been stunned by a blow, and then either left to float down the brook or dragged off by some muscular warrior. There was a halt, an eager and prolonged lookout over the plain, a scanning of the now distant Indians through field glasses. Then slowly and sadly the train resumed its march and mounted to the summit of the butte. Here, in this land of marvels, there was a new marvel. Incredible as the thing seemed, so incredible that they had not at first believed their eyes, they were at the base of the walls of a fortress. A confused, general murmur broke forth of "Ruins! Pueblos! Casas Grandes! Casas de Montezuma!" The architecture, unlike that of Tegua, but similar to that of the ruins of the Gila, was of adobes. Large cakes of mud, four or five feet long and two feet thick, had been moulded in cases, dried in the sun, and laid in regular courses to the height of twenty feet. Centuries (perhaps) of exposure to weather had so cracked, guttered, and gnawed this destructible material, that at a distance the pile looked not unlike the natural monuments which fire and water have builded in this enchanted land, and had therefore not been recognized by the travellers as human handiwork. What they now saw was a rampart which ran along the brow of the bluff for several hundred yards. Originally twenty feet high, it had been so fissured by the rains and crumbled by the winds, that it resembled a series of peaks united here and there in a plane surface. Some of the gaps reached nearly to the ground, and through these it could be seen that the wall was five feet across, a single adobe forming the entire thickness. All along the base the dampness of the earth had eaten away the clay, so that in many places the structure was tottering to its fall.