As has been said, the cliff, at the summit of which were the cave dwellings, lay about half a mile back from the huts of the Far Pasture cow-punchers. The cliff was in itself a remarkable formation. It towered sheer up and down like the wall of a house. It was just as if a giant cheese-knife had shaved a neat slab off the face of the mountain--a slab some four hundred or more feet in height, and a mile or more wide at the base. From where the boys were, however, they could perceive an old cattle trail winding up the mountainside, off beyond one edge of the smooth cliff. It traced its way among the scrub growth and stunted trees almost--so far as they could judge--to a point near the summit, and afforded an easy way of reaching the top of the cliff. An hour or more of tough climbing brought them to the top of the mountain--or high hill--which formed a sort of plateau. No time was lost in making for the edge of the cliff, in the face of which, some twenty feet or more from the top, were bored the entrances to the cave-dwellers' mysterious homes. "Well," said Tubby triumphantly, as he gazed over the dizzy precipice "no cave man's home for us." It looked as if the stout youth was right. A narrow ledge, forming a sort of pathway against the naked side of the cliff, ran below the cave dwellings as a shelf is seen to extend sometimes below a row of pigeon holes. But from the summit of the cliff to the ledge was, as has been said, all of twenty feet, and there seemed to be no way of bridging the distance. "Those cave men must have been way ahead of the times," mused Tubby. "How do you make that out?" inquired Jack Simmons, Bill's younger brother. "Why, they must have had air ships. They couldn't have rung their front door bells any other way." "Nonsense they must have had some way of getting down," interposed Rob, who was looking about carefully--"Hooray, fellows! I've got it," he exclaimed suddenly, "look!" He pushed aside a clump of brush and exposed to view a flight of steps cut in the face of the rock. So filled with dust were they, however, that they had not been visible to any but the sharp eyes of the Boy Scout leader. "What are you going to do?" asked Merritt, as Rob made for the lip of the cliff. "Going down there, of course," rejoined Rob. Merritt, as he gazed over the brink and viewed the sheer drop, down which one false step would have sent its maker plunging like a loosened stone, was about to utter a warning. He checked himself, however, and, with the rest, eagerly watched Rob, as the boy made his way down the precipitous steps, or rather niches, cut in the face of the rock. It was breath-catching work. The descending boy was compelled to cling to the surface of the cliff like a fly to a window-pane. Between him and the ground, four hundred feet under his shoe soles, nothing interposed but the narrow ledge of rock outside the cliff-dwellers' "front doors."