Free Redeye by Clyde Edgerton Page A

shall endeavour faithfully to convert my findings into a book-length publication that might well establish these people as being worthy of future archaeological study.
    Father, my extended stay will make necessary about two hundred pounds for my expenses during the next six months. Would you please arrange for my trust to send the funds in said amount to me, in care of the Merriwether Ranch, Mumford Rock, Colorado, USA? I should be most grateful. A portion of these funds will be used to outfit myself for trips into the mesa.
    Warmest regards to Mother. Please convey my love to Mary Charlotte and tell her that I am thinking of her and that Iimagine her applying herself to her studies with gusto, especially to her Latin, which will certainly be of service in her botany lessons next year.
    With Sincerest Regards and
with Love,
Your devoted son,
Andrew

BUMPY
    Next morning, the road we got on was mostly rutted. Mr. Pittman said it was made by the Mormons when they first come out here. By the time it was getting hot we had left the river for good. The road dropped down to an arroyo and we went along it with Zack, Mr. Pittman, and the bell cow up front, and me bringing up the rear. We had tall mountains to the east and mostly mesas and buttes to the west. We were in a long valley. It was getting just as hot as the day before.
    At dinnertime we drove the cows into the shade of some bushy little trees that looked like buffalo berry, but wasn’t. We ate the same stuff we’d been eating, but added some beans.
    After dinner we started along a little sand flat in the arroyo, and saw right off that two cows were missing. The only place they could have gone was up this little finger gorge in the plateau, a right considerable mesa, but not close to as big as Mesa Largo. There was a little draw close by where we could corralthe cows and mules while we tracked the missing ones. Mr. Pittman said he’d stay with the cattle—and that he had some work to do with Redeye.
    Once we got a ways up the gorge on a narrow ledge along the wall of the plateau, we got off the horses, hobbled them, and blocked the trail so they couldn’t go back down. We started up on foot. Cattle hoofprints were right there along the ledge. Zack said it didn’t make sense that they’d be going up, unless they was smelling water. He said they could smell better than a deer.
    The cliff below us had started out at ten or fifteen feet high, but had gotten higher and higher until we was I guess over eighty feet straight up walking along this ledge which was down to less than four feet across, and if you looked down you got dizzy. We thought there might be a tank or a spring on top where we’d find our cattle.
    The ledge ended up ahead of us where there’d been a old slide, but when we got a little closer we saw a new slide—which had taken out a big rock that must have rested right in the middle of the ledge because when we got near we saw that there was a hole in the slide that you could step through and it led into a kind of cave.
    We stepped through and there was all these little rooms all built together and looking really . . . old. Light come in through a big opening on the far side. It was a cliff dwelling—looked like what Star had told me about Mr. Merriwether finding in Mesa Largo. I’d never seen one. And there stood the cows at a seep spring back where the cave wall met the cave floor, just like aslanting attic wall. The rooms were crumbled in most places and the whole place was covered by the roof of this cave. The cave floor, before the slide, had been a ledge that dropped off into the canyon. It was a more or less long shallow cave right in the wall of the cliff. Some of the littlest square rooms were on top of each other. There was little doors in the walls shaped like a fat T. You could tell they was doors and not windows because the windows were smaller and there wadn’t no way to get in except through these