He was struck so near the brain that there was nothing to do. It lasted nearly two hours.
Then we carried him home. Roddy dropped down the ladder into Cow Canyon, caught his horse, and rode into Tarpin for the coroner. Father Duchene was preaching there at the mission church that Sunday, and came back with him.
We buried Henry on the mesa. Father Duchene stayed on with us a week to keep us company. We were so cut up that we were almost ready to quit. But he had been planning to come out to see our find for a long while, and he got our minds off our trouble.
He worked hard every day. He went over everything we’d done, and examined everything minutely:
- the pottery,
- cloth,
- stone implements,
- and the remains of food.
He measured the heads of the mummies and declared they had good skulls. He cut down one of the old cedars that grew exactly in the middle of the deep trail worn in the stone, and counted the rings under his pocket microscope. You couldn’t count them with the unassisted eye, for growing out of a tiny crevice in the rock as that tree did, the increase of each year was so scant that the rings were invisible except with a glass.
The tree he cut down registered three hundred and thirty-six years’ growth, and it could have begun to grow in that well-worn path only after human feet had ceased to come and go there.
Why had they ceased? That question puzzled him, too.