In time a draught of pure air began coming down from somewhere above. Sid could see nothing, yet with the buoyancy of youth he was strangely happy and also consumed with curiosity. They would probably stake him out and build a slow fire on his stomach when he got up out of this tunnel, but while it lasted it was all as exciting as exploring it on his own would have been! More air and purer came to him now. The sulphur fumes disappeared. Something wooden like an upright log ladder struck him on his forehead and the Indian raised him up and called out loudly. Muffled voices answered him from somewhere up above. Then he felt his guard stoop and lift him by the legs while invisible hands above reached down and seized him under the armpits. He was hauled up the ladder and then he sensed being in some sort of a room--being guided across it. The indescribable sweetish odor of Indian was strong in here. Sid had been so often in tepees and hogans as to be able to recognize that smell instantly. All the races of man have a distinctive smell of their own, and the aboriginal ones, Malay, black boy, yellow man and red Indian are all agreed that the white man has a smell, too. “White man smell like sheep!” as a Piute chief had once truthfully put it! The odor of corn meal, burnt feathers, paints and greases told Sid, too, that he was in some sort of medicine lodge. It could not have been a kiva, for the dank smell of damp stone was wanting. Then a sudden lightening of all the cracks around that bandanna told him that he was in bright sunlight once more. There was the perfume of growing squash and melon and pepper, the faint odor of green beans, the smell of grass--and of water! Red Mesa was really a valley then, inclosed by two giant walls and shut off from below by that ancient lava apron! And it was inhabited by a band of Apache! That much Sid’s sense of reasoning had told him before the squeals of children and the cries of squaws and shouts of men came to his ears. People were all around him now, exclaiming in Apache, every word of which he understood. Then the deep voice of some one in authority came toward them and a guttural command to untie him was given. The bandanna was at once whisked from Sid’s eyes. He stood for a time blinking in the glare of the sun. High red walls rose up to right and left of him. A large tank of water, almost a pond, filled much of the basin between them, but there were strips of cultivated plants along its borders, too, and here and there he noted a grass Apache hut.