Andy returned his look honestly. "There was, and there is yet, I
guess," he asserted. "I'll tell you how you can find it and what it's
like--if yuh doubt my words." He glanced around and found every man,
including the cook, listening intently. He picked a blade of new grass
and began splitting it into tiny threads. The host found boxes for the
women to sit upon, and the men sat down upon the grass.

"Before I come here to work, I was riding for the Circle C. One day I
was riding away down in the Bad-lands alone and my horse slipped in
some shale rock and went lame; strained his shoulder so I couldn't
ride him. That put me afoot, and climbing up and down them hills I
lost my bearings and didn't know where I was at for a day or two. I
wandered around aimless, and got into a strip uh country that was new
to me and plumb lonesome and wild.

"That second day is when I happened across this ruin. I was looking
down into a deep, shut-in coulee, hunting water, when the sun come out
and shone straight on to this place. It was right down under me; a
stone ruin, with a tower on one end and kinda tumbled down so it
wasn't so awful high--the tower wasn't. There was a--a--"

"Moat," Branciforte suggested.

"That's the word--a moat around it, and a bridge that was just about
gone to pieces. It had loopholes, like the pictures of castles, and
a--"

"Battlement?" ventured one of the musical-comedy cowgirls.

Andy had not meant to say battlement; of a truth, his conception of