strung along
juniper poles and cedar shakes; no house, no stable, no buildings of any
sort. The horses are staked out. A woman is cooking a meal above the
chip fire. A lantern hangs on a bush in front of the tent flap. Miles
ahead you see another lantern gleam and swing, and dimly discern the
outlines of another tent--the homesteader's nearest neighbor. Just now
Casa Grande town boasts 400 people housed chiefly in one story adobe
dwellings. Come in five years, and Casa Grande will be boasting her ten
and twenty thousand people. Like mushrooms overnight, the little towns
spring up on irrigation lands.

You catch the first glimpse of the ruins about eighteen miles out--a red
roof put on by the Government, then a huge, square, four story mass of
ruins surrounded by broken walls, with remnants of big elevated
courtyards, and four or five other compounds the size of this central
house, like the bastions at the four corners of a large, old-fashioned
walled fort. The walls are adobe of tremendous thickness--six feet in
the house or temple part, from one to three in the stockade--a thickness
that in an age of only stone weapons must have been impenetrable. The
doors are so very low as to compel a person of ordinary height to bend
almost double to enter; and the supposition is this was to prevent the
entrance of an enemy and give the doorkeeper a chance to eject unwelcome
visitors. Once inside, the ceilings are high, timbered with _vigas_ of
cedar strengthened by heavier logs that must have been carried in a
horseless age a hundred miles from the mountains. The house is laid out
on rectangular lines, and the halls straight enough but so narrow as to
compel passage sidewise. In every room is a feature that has puzzled
scientists both here and in the cave dwellings. Doors were, of course,
open squares off the halls or other rooms; but in addition to these
openings, you will find close to the floor of each room, little round
"cat holes," one or two or three of them, big enough for a beam but
without a beam. In the cave dwellings these little round holes through
walls four or five feet thick are frequently on the side of the room
opposite the fireplace. Fewkes and others think they may have been
ventilator shafts to keep the smoke from blowing back in the room, but
in Casa Grande they are in rooms where there is no fireplace. Others
think they were whispering tubes, for use in time of war or religious
ceremony; but in a house of ope