“Just as I find the meaning of the hieroglyphics; by studying the symbols already familiar to me, and from them arriving at the natural relation of the unknown characters. This thing left tracks, and it managed to accomplish a certain amount of destruction in a given time. To-morrow morning I’ll take a look at your cave, and the answer to the puzzle will not be so hard to find as you imagine.” Bill mumbled a half-finished sentence and lay down on the torn tent, and presently the rhythmic sound of snoring hushed the strident chorus of stone crickets on the ledge. Until the moon had swum its purple sea and reached shore on the western rim of the valley, Abington lounged beside the cliff, so quiet that any observer might have thought him asleep. For a time his pipe sent up a thin column of aromatic smoke, then went cold; and after that only the moonlight shining on his wide-open eyes betrayed the fact that Abington was very much awake. An owl hooted monotonously in the cañon at his right, probably near the spring. A coyote yammered on the steep hillside across the cañon mouth, and a little later Abington heard the frightened, squealing cry of a rabbit caught unawares by that coyote or another. On a cliff just over his head, shadowed now as the moon slipped behind the hill, the ancient people he was tracing had carved intricate tribal records. These had endured far beyond the last vague legend of those whose valor had thus been blazoned before their little world, a world that had seemed so vast and imperishable, no doubt, to heroes and historians alike. It seemed to him that here was a land well fitted to hold the full story of these forgotten lives. Could he but find it, and read it aright, might not his own name be blazoned before his own people--to be forgotten perchance in ages to come, as these were forgotten now? * * * * * The cave that held fast the bones of these ancients lay somewhere in the bewildering maze of cañons across the valley. Bill Jonathan would recognize the spot, so he had declared whenever Abington questioned him. A certain rock on the cañon’s northern rim, shaped like the head of a huge rhinoceros with two tusks on his snout--Bill was positive he could not miss it, once he got inside the cañon. The opening to the cave was directly under the first tusklike rock spire. A matter of ten miles perhaps, Bill had guessed as he stood on the ledge and gazed across.