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"They pretended to have a revelation from the Sun-god stating that if my life were sacrificed the curse that rested on the cliff-dwellers would be removed. Accordingly I was seized and chained and would certainly have died had it not been for you. But alas, young men, I fear you are doomed to forfeit your lives as the cost of rescuing an old man who is not long for this life in any event.
I had planned to see the Cliff-Dwellers' home; to live right there until I caught the spirit of the surroundings enough to live over their lives in imagination anyway. I had planned to see the old missions and to go to Alaska; to hunt in Canada. I even dreamed of Honolulu. Life stretched out before me one long, happy jaunt.
The cliff-dwellers, driven by dreaded enemies to this last stand, had cunningly cut the rock until it balanced perfectly, ready to be dislodged by strong hands. Just below it leaned a tottering crag that would have toppled, starting an avalanche on an acclivity where no sliding mass could stop.
But he knew they had been cut there by hand, and, though age-worn, he recognized them as steps cut in the rock by the cliff-dwellers. With a pulse beginning to beat and hammer away his calmness, he eyed that indistinct line of steps, up to where the buttress of wall hid further sight of them.
Some of these ancient gardens are still cultivated by Indians, descendants of cliff-dwellers, who raise corn, squashes, melons, potatoes, etc., to reinforce the produce of the many wild food-furnishing plants nuts, beans, berries, yucca and cactus fruits, grass and sunflower seeds, etc. and the flesh of animals deer, rabbits, lizards, etc.
The cliff-dwellers had chipped and chipped away at this boulder fill it rested its tremendous bulk upon a mere pin-point of its surface. Venters pondered. Why had the little stone-men hacked away at that big boulder? It bore no semblance to a statue or an idol or a godhead or a sphinx. Instinctively he put his hands on it and pushed; then his shoulder and heaved.
China and Japan are, at this late day, giving something to the world's store of beauty and utility; but the mound-builders and cliff-dwellers, the Mayas and Toltecs and Incas, have given absolutely nothing which the world cared to accept. But this does not argue that it is not worth while to learn what we can of the rude civilization of the races whom we have displaced.
The muskrat goes scouring the water, searching for booty near the river's bank or submerges like a submarine when discovered by a noisy convoy of Senegalese boys on the bank. A wily weasel, no doubt considered by those cliff-dwellers, the kingfishers, as one of the "Ladies from Hell," was being hustled out of their dugout at the point of the bayonet.
Uncle Bill thinks they were Cliff-Dwellers who had got into trouble and left home. They weren't fighters, anyhow. "One time the braves were down hunting and an awful storm came up a kind of waterspout and when they got back to their rock they found their little staircase had been all broken to pieces, and only a few steps were left hanging away up in the air.
Fuller joined them with minute, accurate, amused representations of Chicago in The Cliff-Dwellers and With the Procession. Then, as if bored with longer flights, he settled himself to writing sharp-eyed stories concerning the life of art as conducted in Chicago Under the Skylights and of Americans traveling in Europe From the Other Side, Waldo Trench and Others. After Spoon River Anthology Mr.
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