o cover as if there were eyes in
every stone of those houses. One-eye crept at his side with his head and
tail up, very much as if there had been game ahead. It was a curious
piece of business. The nearer they drew to the objects of their
curiosity the safer and lonelier became the appearance of all things.
Some of the stone walls had tumbled down, and not one of them had a roof
over it of any sort. That was nothing to Two Arrows. For all he knew
there were tribes of cunning and wicked pale-faces who built their
lodges without roofs. If the world contained anything cunning and wicked
and dangerous, in the mind of Two Arrows it was a pale-face. He had been
brought up to look upon a white man as a being to be watched, and as an
evil to be avoided or destroyed, as the case might be, and yet as a sort
of magician, capable of doing wonders, and of bringing the richest
presents in all the earth.

He now at last felt confidence and courage to actually crawl through an
opening of one of those walls and look around him. It was one great,
empty room, strewn with bits of stone, and growing thickly, here and
there, were grass and tall weeds.

"Nobody here for ever so long," had already been his conclusion, and he
was thoroughly satisfied of it now. He arose and walked around and
looked at things in that and every other house. Some of them had
windows so high up as to prove that they must have had two or even three
stories in some old time when people used them, but those were "signs"
that Two Arrows could not read. The main thing to him was that he was
still all alone and in perfect safety. If the wisest white man in the
world had been there with him, he could not have formed an idea by whom
those houses were constructed. Just such ruins have been found in many
places among the valleys of the western mountains, and all that learned
people can yet do is to guess how they came to be there. The houses did
not come up like so many mushrooms, and beyond that they have almost
nothing to say for themselves. Two Arrows had no further questions to
ask, and One-eye had searched nooks and corners with an assiduity which
had been duly rewarded: he had captured a fine, fat rabbit, and he
brought it to his master as a sort of token. No rabbit would have made a
home in a place infested by white men, for rabbits have the same idea of
them that Indians have and for somewhat similar reasons. The rabbits get
very little good from them, however, and