Boynton, the athlete of the party, volunteered to climb back to the main entrance and down to the cave of the maiden to discover whether signals could be heard through the intervening rock. It seemed only a moment after his leaving that a sharp tap came from a point near the inner wall of the hidden chamber. It was followed by other rappings, each seeming nearer than the last. The pounding stopped, and there was a rasping suspiciously like scraping of heavy shoes dragging behind a man crawling through the narrow opening between the cave of the maiden and the lateral chute into which we had dug in the previous year. Furlong was remarking that the sound came from a point only a few feet distant when, with unbelievable distinct

later the wind died down. The candles were relighted. The opening was widened, and the smiling face of Boynton appeared as he climbed through.

Scant eighteen inches of earth and gravel had separated the highest point of excavation in the previous summer from the floor of the hidden chamber. The chute, the hidden chamber, and the shallow outer grotto partly filled with earth in which our shaft was sunk, formed a passageway reaching through the limestone cliff to the cave of the maiden. When, later, the earth was partly cleared the opening showed itself sufficiently large and easy of travel for ready use of the animals discovered in the cave. There could be no doubt that one of the mysteries of the cavern was solved. A

large part, if not all, of the creatures we had found entered by this route. Like the unfortunate Indian girl, the mountain-lion at the foot of the ladder may have lost its footing at the mouth of the pit and fallen to the floor below. Other animals possibly entered by passages as yet unknown, but the wide and relatively direct way furnished by the opening we had just followed was clearly the principal means of entrance for the ancient population.

How long this buried entrance had been closed, and the precise time at which it was open, we may never know in terms of years and dates such as are used in description of events and periods of recent human history. When the creatures found resting on the cave floor lived and were moving back and forth through the ancient entrance, the face of the land and the life roaming over it differed from what we see to-day. At the time the entrance

was blocked the landscape approached more closely its present features. When the Indian maiden, clambering over the rocks to the upper cave, looked back toward the blue river for the last time, the early entrance was already lost to view behind a mask of débris.

Such are the outlines of a story that as yet we read only in part. Lured by the possibility of bringing to her use something of the mysterious power she saw everywhere in nature about her, the Indian girl opened the way to mysteries which the obscuring veil of time had seemed completely to protect. The fragment of a tooth that parted, when she "struck and struck again," brings before us in clear reality the maiden in her strange adventuring, who joined the sleeping company of ages past, and led us to a place where we could have a fleeting vision of the world in other days.

ESSIR, the country is all shot to pieces, the range is all gone, the cowboys have turned farmers, and the whitefaced muley cow, which to me looks like a cross between a hog and a rhinoceros, has took the place of the wild-eyed range critter we used to know."

Old Dan Whitney was talking on his favorite subject again. It was a subject he more than liked to hark back on on account that it all had been his life. He'd been born and raised in the cow country, and the fortune he was now having the benefit of had come from range cattle and the holdings he'd fought for while a

cowman.

He'd been a king at the hard game, made his pile while the making was good, and happened to sell out at the right time, which was when the "doped up" homesteader begin to fence up the land, and before the first clouds of the World War appeared on the skyline.

In the years that followed, after Old Whitney had turned the deed over and changed his home grounds from the long rambling log house on the river bottom to a Spanish style "dobie" mansion on a California beach, that old cowboy had turned his back to the cow country for good, he didn't feel able to stand the sight of what he thought had happened there; instead he'd let his imagination exterminate the big range world till he'd figgered every part of it was cut up into ten acre plots with a fenced-in farmer on each.

He'd took it for granted that when he left the cow country the range cow had disappeared too and he could near see the plow and wire fences swarm over where all that critter had roamed. Then prohibition came in and that, he thought,

sure put a cap on things. He'd settled back in his comfortable chair more satisfied than ever that he'd quit just in time and before the country was too far gone. He pictured the cowboys with a glass of soda pop on one hand and a hoe in the other.

"Yessir, the range country is sure all shot to pieces," he remarked once more to the man setting near him. He waved a hand at the big stretch of ocean could be viewed from the porch, "and now I'm thankful," he went on, "that I can at least depend on that never being fenced."

The other man looked at the long straight line where ocean and sky met and grinned. Frank Baldwin understood. He was an old timer too and felt the same and all what Old Dan kept a ruminating on.

Him and Dan had been neighbors when neighbors was forty miles and more apart, when, as they liked to keep a saying, it was "just the government and us." They'd rode side by side from the time the long horned cattle begin to take the place of the buffalo, fought side by side when the sheepman came afterward and tried to graze his blatting woollies on their range. They'd stuck it out together through blizzards and droughts and won out in spite of everything.

Yep, they'd fought the injun, the cattle rustler, and the sheepman, and even with all that fighting they'd enjoyed the life; it was free and they was fighting with a chance to win, the big odds against 'em had made it all the more worth while. But when the railroads begin to come, and branch out here and there, was when the two old cowboys had sort of felt a pinching at the throat. Pretty soon there was plenty of wagon tracks to be seen; them wagon tracks had branched out both ways from the iron trails and was scattering out on their range, bringing set

tlers. Then it wasn't long when the first strands of barb wire begin to make their stand and a few years later that barb wire had accumulated till it sort of formed an entanglement and trap which threatened to cut the cowmen's throats. There was no fighting chance no more.

The range that Dan and Frank had blazed a trail to and which they'd stood up for was gradually took away from 'em by the homesteaders. The big flat benches which was fit for nothing but cattle and horses was soon fenced up; so was the creek bottoms, and when the two old timers begin to gather up their scattering cattle they found many dead alongside some homesteader's fence. The fences had kept the stock from drifting in to shelter and out of the sting of the blizzards.

But that wasn't all; cattle had been killed by them same homesteaders and carcasses of fine steers was found where they'd been butchered only for one hind quarter, the rest would be left to waste and the cayotes.

After a lot of hard riding going through a lot of fences, following lanes and opening many gates the two old timers finally got their cattle off what once was free government range onto what was left of their leases and other holdings; then one evening Old Dan heard a queer chugchugging noise coming up the creek and opening the door of the old ranch house he saw a buggy on the road. The old cowboy couldn't believe his eyes when he seen that buggy moving right along with out any horses pulling it, but somehow he kind of figgered the noise that rig was making was what took the place of the horses.

It was the first automobile in that country. Old Dan watched the queer rig work its way on up to the house and to a stop, then two slick looking hombres in long dusters got out and smiled their way on up to the door and where Old Dan was standing.

The old cowman had his suspicions of what these two gents was the minute they got out of the horseless rig; they was land boosters. A few words was exchanged and then it dawned on Old Dan that they was out to buy his land and cattle.

That was agreeable to Dan, he was more than ready to sell. He set a price and the two men went chugging away remarking that the price was too steep but that they'd think it over. They thought it over two or three different times and made as many trips, and each time Old Dan raised his price five thousand more.

"And it'll keep on being five thousand more every time you come and inquire about it," Old Dan had warned 'em, "so if you want this layout you'd better decide on it mighty quick."

So that's how come that the deal was put through mighty sudden one day. And when the final settlement come and all the cattle and land was accounted for, one of the gents remarked that they got the layout mighty cheap at that.

"We're going to build a farming center right here," says that hombre, "and make millions out of cutting this all into small farms and a town site; in another two years you'll see this country in waving grain fields and supporting happy families.”

"That sounds all right," says Old Dan. "But I'll bet if anybody gets any riches or happiness out of farming this land it won't be the families."

It didn't take Old Dan many days to make ready to leave the old spread. He hated to leave Old Frank behind and have him see the country get tore up, but as Frank said "he'd soon be leaving too."

Old Dan spent his last night with a few of his riders at an old cow camp, and his last words as he left the next morning was that soon as they'd turned over all the cattle to "for god sake hit out for a country where it'll never be farmed,-line out for the desert where the water is far apart and scarce."

It was a year or so later when Frank, Old Dan's neighbor, sold out and joined his partner to stargaze acrost the big stretch of ocean and imagine it all as prairie and range land instead of water. Old Frank brought stories with him as to what'd happened to the country since Dan left. A town had sure enough went up, and right where the old home ranch used to be, and the whole country around it had been cut up in small patches and plowed and sowed.

they'd been wrong, that the old range country had sure enough agreed with the farmer and was giving returns for the tilling.

So, as it was, the two old timers gradually resigned themselves to thinking that the cow country had passed away the day they left it. They'd figgered that all the land of the cowboy, from Texas to Canada, had gone under in the same way as they'd seen theirs go under. Near every day the newspapers told of some new land that'd been opened to flocking homesteaders all over the West; then once in a while a whole sheet of the paper would tell of a new big dam gone up which would redeem the desert for miles around; truck farms and gardens would flourish where the bleached skull of a critter once told of