We all laughed at this.
'Long enough before. Before the Pilgrim Fathers, Perce. Maybe they came along this very river. They always followed the watercourses.'
'I wonder where this river really does begin?' Tip mused. That was an old and a favorite mystery which the map did not clearly explain. On the map the little black line stopped somewhere in western Kansas; but since rivers generally rose in mountains, it was only reasonable to suppose that ours came from the Rockies. Its destination, we knew, was the Missouri, and the Hassler boys always maintained that we could embark at Sandtown in floodtime, follow our noses, and eventually arrive at New Orleans. Now they took up their old argument. 'If us boys had grit enough to try it, it wouldn't take no time to get to Kansas City and St. Joe.'
We began to talk about the places we wanted to go to. The Hassler boys wanted to see the stockyards in Kansas City, and Percy wanted to see a big store in Chicago. Arthur was interlocutor and did not betray himself.
'Now it's your turn, Tip.'
Tip rolled over on his elbow and poked the fire, and his eyes looked shyly out of his queer, tight little face. 'My place is awful far away. My Uncle Bill told me about it.'
Tip's Uncle Bill was a wanderer, bitten with mining fever, who had drifted into Sandtown with a broken arm, and when it was well had drifted out again.
'Where is it?'
'Aw, it's down in New Mexico somewheres. There aren't no railroads or anything. You have to go on mules, and you run out of water before you get there and have to drink canned tomatoes.'
'Well, go on, kid. What's it like when you do get there?'
Tip sat up and excitedly began his story.
'There's a big red rock there that goes right up out of the sand for about nine hundred feet. The country's flat all around it, and this here rock goes up all by itself, like a monument. They call it the Enchanted Bluff down there, because no white man has ever been on top of it. The sides are smooth rock, and straight up, like a wall. The Indians say that hundreds of years ago, before the Spaniards came, there was a village away up there in the air. The tribe that lived there had some sort of steps, made out of wood and bark, bung down over the face of the bluff, and the braves went down to hunt and carried water up in big jars swung on their backs. They kept a big supply of water and dried meat up there, and never went down except to hunt. They were a peaceful tribe that made cloth and pottery, and they went up there to get out of the wars. You see, they could pick off any war party that tried to get up their little steps. The Indians say they were a handsome people, and they had some sort of queer religion. 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. While they were camped at the foot of the rock, wondering what to do, a war party from the north came along and massacred 'em to a man, with all the old folks and women looking on from the rock. Then the war party went on south and left the village to get down the best way they could. Of course they never got down. They starved to death up there, and when the war party came back on their way north, they could hear the children crying from the edge of the bluff where they had crawled out, but they didn't see a sign of a grown Indian, and nobody has ever been up there since.'
We exclaimed at this dolorous legend and sat up.
'There couldn't have been many people up there,' Percy demurred. 'How big is the top, Tip?'
'Oh, pretty big. Big enough so that the rock doesn't look nearly as tall as it is. The top's bigger than the base. The bluff is sort of worn away for several hundred feet up. That's one reason it's so hard to climb.'
I asked how the Indians got up, in the first place.
'Nobody knows how they got up or when. A hunting party came along once and saw that there was a town up there, and that was all.'
Otto rubbed his chin and looked thoughtful. 'Of course there must be some way to get up there. Couldn't people get a rope over someway and pull a ladder up?'
Tip's little eyes were shining with excitement. 'I know a way. Me and Uncle Bill talked it over. There's a kind of rocket that would take a rope over--lifesavers use 'em--and then you could hoist a rope ladder and peg it down at the bottom and make it tight with guy ropes on the other side. I'm going to climb that there bluff, and I've got it all planned out.'
Fritz asked what he expected to find when he got up there.
'Bones, maybe, or the ruins of their town, or pottery, or some of their idols. There might be 'most anything up there. Anyhow, I want to see.'
'Sure nobody else has been up there, Tip?' Arthur asked.
'Dead sure. Hardly anybody ever goes down there. Some hunters tried to cut steps in the rock once, but they didn't get higher than a man can reach. The Bluff's all red granite, and Uncle Bill thinks it's a boulder the glaciers left. It's a queer place, anyhow. Nothing but cactus and desert for hundreds of miles, and yet right under the Bluff there's good water and plenty of grass. That's why the bison used to go down there.'
Suddenly we heard a scream above our fire, and jumped up to see a dark, slim bird floating southward far above us--a whooping crane, we knew by her cry and her long neck. We ran to the edge of the island, hoping we might see her alight, but she wavered southward along the rivercourse until we lost her. The Hassler boys declared that by the look of the heavens it must be after midnight, so we threw more wood on our fire, put on our jackets, and curled down in the warm sand. Several of us pretended to doze, but I fancy we were really thinking about Tip's Bluff and the extinct people. Over in the wood the ring doves were calling mournfully to one another, and once we heard a dog bark, far away. 'Somebody getting into old Tommy's melon patch,' Fritz murmured sleepily, but nobody answered him. By and by Percy spoke out of the shadows.
'Say, Tip, when you go down there will you take me with you?'
'Maybe.'
