Sid stood looking at them, reverently, and then stooped to examine the oven door, for the dull white of pottery decoration within had caught his eye. Raking out the sticks and charcoal, a great vase standing bottom upright within the oven came to view. Carefully he lifted it out and stood looking at it in wonder. It was tall and beautifully formed, with a swelling base and wide columnar neck that flared like a trumpet flower at the top. It was covered with black and white symbolic decorations,--rainbows, rain, clouds, lightnings, mountains, mesas, all in conventional figures that thrilled him with their mystic significance. Now, _why_ should these two have spent the last hours of life left to them in producing--this? ruminated Sid. Why, but the love of art, the worship of beauty that would not die within them so long as a spark of life remained! It was their monument, that immortal flowering of art,--the desire to make something beautiful that is bedded in the soul of man, is in truth the wine of life to those who have it, rich and fertile, in their beings. Sid at length climbed up the ladder, thoughtfully, and went along the roofs of the three other pueblos. They were deserted and empty, but outside in the sun against the Old People’s room was the empty wooden frame of their blanket loom. “Thus we lived, and thus we died; mark and learn who will!” sighed the boy, philosophically, clapping his hands together abstractedly. “And now,--how am I going to get back to Pinto and the Canyon?” he asked himself briskly. The climb back down those frightful ledges to the fir tree was only to be considered as a last resort. As he had passed no way out of the box canyon in getting to the pueblo, Sid reasoned that the entrance the former dwellers used must be somewhere up near its head, where there would be a slope of some sort. He went forward along the roofs of the four houses, hoping to find a trail that would lead to this route. As he approached the last end wall, a faint but noisome odor smote his nostrils. The boy hesitated and laid hand on his small .32-20 belt pistol, for this smell was of tainted meat, and it warned him that an animal lair of some kind was near him. Cautiously he advanced and peered over the wall. Below him the ledge ended abruptly--the cliff men had built right to the end of it, so as to make it inaccessible from below at that end. Spruces grew out of the cliff wall and concealed it, but through their roots Sid thought he could detect worn spots where some creature had been in the habit of passing.