"Who were they?" asked Virginia, unconscious of a half-sigh as she
withdrew abstracted eyes from the wide panorama which had filled the
vision of so many other men and women and little children before the
white man came to claim the New World. "They who builded here and
lived and died here. What has become of them? Where did they go?"
"All questions asked a thousand times and never answered. I don't
know. But they were good builders, good engineers, good
pottery-makers, good farmers and hunters and fighters; rather a goodly
crowd, I take it. Come, and I'll share my secret with you while
Florrie and Elmer discover the skeleton a little farther on and stop to
exclaim over it."
[Illustration: "Come, and I'll share my secret with you."]
Norton's secret was a hidden room of the King's Palace. While many men
knew of the Palace itself, he believed that none other than himself had
ever ferreted out this particular chamber which he called the Treasure
Chamber. It was to be reached by clambering through an orifice of the
eastern wall, over a clutter of fallen blocks of stone and a score of
feet along the narrowing ledge. Just before they came to the point
where the encroaching wall of cliff denied farther foothold they found
a fissure in the rock itself wide enough to allow them to slip into it.
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