ABOVE a timbered valley in the southwest rises a towering wall of gorgeous cliffs such as only Arizona can produce. Their rock pinnacles are banded with color—red strata, ochre, blue, green, and white—all in wavy horizontal lines like layer cake. These long walls were scoured clean and smooth long ago by prehistoric water action. They were broken with deep fissures—fissures that now cleave the cliff from top to bottom—“chimneys” that mean seven hundred feet of sheer ascent to him who would dare scale these heights.
Two riders sat gazing up, searching this cliff face, while an Airedale dog of huge and leonine aspect prowled about in the creek bottom near them, investigating this and that with snuffing nose.
“That cliff dwelling is up here somewhere, according to Doctor Fewkes’ map, John,” said the smaller and rangier of the pair, his puckered-up black eyes never leaving off their scrutiny of the cliff face. “Think we’ll find her?”
The older man, a great, bony and leathery cowman, who might have hailed from anywhere in the west from Montana to Arizona, took off his sombrero and mopped a sweaty brow with the loose end of his bandanna.
“Search me!” he grinned. “I’m a cowman, not no prophet—as the greenhorn axman said when the lumber boss as’t him which way his tree was goin’ to fall.” He looked lugubriously up at the cliff, shaking his head solemnly. “It’d take a horned toad with suckers on his feet to bust her, Siddy son.”
The youth tugged determinedly at the fine fuzz of black mustache that adorned his upper lip. “Honanki Ruins or bust—that’s our motto, John!” he retorted, his black eyes twinkling merrily at the reluctant cowman. “Here’s Fewkes’ map, with the ruins marked ‘Inaccessible’ on it, and, by jerry, we’re here, if the map’s right. They’re somewhere above us, and it’s up to us to bust ’em.”
“Yaas,” said Big John, shifting his weight to the nigh stirrup to give the white horse under him a change of load. “Somethin’ hed orter be done about it, thet’s shore! You mosey up—an’ I’ll hold yore hoss!”
All of which preliminaries usually meant that Big John really meant to take the lead in climbing himself once the ruins were found. Sid knew that all this feigned reluctance about climbing cliffs was mere camouflage on Big John’s part. He urged his pinto across the cañon so as to get a better view of the cliff face. He wanted to size up that cañon wall first, for he knew that the only way to keep Big John off that cliff was to tie him down, which “ain’t done.” The two had been boon comrades for a long time; first up in Montana on the hunt for the Ring-Necked Grizzly, later in the Cañon de Chelly region where the Black Panther of the Navaho had met his end. That expedition had been Sid’s start in practical ethnology. Now they were down in the White River reservation of the Apache, seeking out ruins that had been noted by Dr. Fewkes of the Smithsonian but had been left unexplored for lack of time and facilities.
Tags in Action & Adventure : Red Mesa: A Tale of the Southwest Warren Hastings Miller ebook , Red Mesa: A Tale of the Southwest Warren Hastings Miller epub , Red Mesa: A Tale of the Southwest Warren Hastings Miller AUDIOBOOK , Red Mesa: A Tale of the Southwest by Warren Hastings Miller ePub (.epub) , Red Mesa: A Tale of the Southwest book review , Action & Adventure
