All the day long I waited for Chantry to get back.  Pa seen I was restless, and a couple of times he stopped to say something but he didn't.  It was away after dark before we heard his horse come clip-clopping into the yard.  He hallooed the house, then he rode on to the barn to put up his black.

Pa had left some bacon an side meat on the table, but he only ate a mite.  "I had a little something in the hills," he said.

Now I knew he taken nofhin' with him, so's he must have been fed.  Was it her he got his food from?

"Did you find the place?" Pa asked.

"I spent most of the afternoon up there," said Chantry quietly.  "And I can see why Doby was impressed.  My brother had a love for this county."

"Wonder how come he got clear up there?" Pa said.  "It ain't a likely place."

"Prob'ly hunting meat," I said.

"Or searching..." Chantry said.

Well, then I looked at him, and so did pa.  "You mean he might have knowed somethin' was up there?" I asked him.

"My brother was a man who knew much about a lot of things.  He had a gift for languages.  Let him hear one... or so I was told... and inside a few days he'd be speaking it.  I think when he came north he rode to a place he'd been told to find.  I don't think it was accidental."

"But why?" I insisted.

He shrugged.  "Sometimes a man just wants to know what happened and how."  He paused.  "You know, Doby, this is Ute country, with Navajos west and south of here.  But even they never saw this country until about the year one thousand, when they came down from the north.

"They were migrants then, as we are now.  They came, they conquered whoever was here, and they settled down.  Just a few miles east of here the Utes will tell you there are ghost houses along the sides of the mesas.  No white man has seen them, but I believe the Indians.

"Who built those houses?  Where did they come from?  How long have they been there?  Who was here first?  Did the builders invent the structures they built?  Or were they drawing on memories of other houses somewhere else?"