attack, leaped to their feet.
“The car!” cried Sidney. “Let’s get out of here!”
They both started to move. Then George stopped and grabbed Sidney’s arm. “Wait!”
“Wait?” Sidney demanded. “They’ll kill us!”
“Look,” advised George, indicating the red men who surrounded them; they now made no further move of attack.
George gazed about. “Oh,” he said, “you think somebody’s playing a joke on us?”
“Could be,” said George. He ran one hand over his bald head.
“Some dear friends,” Sidney went on, resenting the scare that had been thrown into them, “hired some Indians to pretend to attack us?”
“Maybe Pimas,” said George. He peered at the Indians, who now were jabbering among themselves and making lamenting sounds as they glanced about at the ruins of the ancient village. There were eighteen of them. They were clad in nothing more than a curious cloth of some kind run between their legs and up and over a cord about their waists, to form a short apron, front and back.
“Or Zunis,” said Sidney.
“Maybe Maricopas,” said George.
“Except,” Sidney observed, “none of them look like those kind of Indians. And those arrows they shot.” He stared at the two sticking in the U-Haul-It. “Those aren’t arrows, George—they’re atlatl lances!”
“Yes,” said George.
Sidney breathed, “They aren’t holding bows—they’ve got atlatls!”
“No modern Indian of any kind,” said George, “uses an atlatl.”
“Most of them wouldn’t even know what it was,” Sidney agreed. “They haven’t been used for hundreds of years; the only place you see them is in museums.”
An atlatl was the weapon which had replaced the stone axe in the stone age. It was a throwing stick consisting of two parts. One was the lance, a feathered shaft up to four feet long, tipped with a stone point. The two-foot flat stick that went with this had a slot in one end and two rawhide finger loops. The lance end was fitted in the slot to be thrown. The stick was an extension of the human arm to give the lance greater force. Some atlatls had small charm stones attached to them to give them extra weight and magic.
Charm stones could be seen fastened to a few of the atlatls being held by the Indians now standing like bronze statues regarding them.
George whispered, “What do you make of it?”
“It isn’t any joke,” replied Sidney. He gazed tensely at the Indians. “That’s all I’m sure of.”
“Have you noticed their breechclouts?”
Sidney stared again. “They aren’t modern clouts. George, they’re right out of Hohokam culture!”
“They aren’t made of cloth, either. That’s plaited yucca fibre.”
“Just like we’ve dug up many times. Only here . . . ” George faltered. “It’s being worn by—by I don’t know what.”
“Look at their ornaments.”
Necklaces, made of pierced colored stones, hung about many of the brown necks. Shell bracelets were to be seen, and here and there a carved piece of turquoise appeared.
“Look at the Indian over there,” George urged.
Sidney looked to the side where George indicated, and croaked, “It’s a girl!”
It was a girl indeed. She stood straight and magnificent in body completely bare except for the brief apron at her loins. Between her beautiful full copper breasts there hung a gleaming piece of turquoise carved in the shape of a coyote.
At her side stood a tall young Indian with a handsome face set with great pride. On her other side was a wizened little old fellow with a wrinkled face and ribs corrugated like a saguaro.
Sidney turned back and demanded, “What do you make of this? Are we seeing things?” Hopefully, he suggested, “A mirage or sort of a mutual hallucination?”
In a considered, gauging tone George replied, “They’re real.”
“Real?” cried Sidney. “What do you mean, real?”
“Real in a way. I mean, Sidney, these—I sound crazy to myself saying it—but I think these are—well, Sid, maybe they’re actual prehistoric Indians.”
“Huh?”
“Well, let’s put it this way: We asked for them and we got them.”
Sidney stared, shocked at George’s statement. “You’re crazy, all right,” he said. “Hohokams in the middle of the Twentieth Century?”
“I didn’t say they’re Hohokams, though they probably are, of the village here.”
“You said they’re prehistoric,” Sidney accused. He quavered, “Just how could they be?”
“Sid, you remember in our Indian studies, again and again, we meet the medicine man who has visions. Even modern ones have done things that are pretty impossible to explain. I believe they have spiritual powers beyond the capability of the white man. The prehistoric medicine men may have developed this power even more. I think the old man there is their medicine man.”
“So?” Sidney invited.
“I’m just supposing now, mind you,” George went on. He rubbed his bald pate again as though afraid of what thoughts were taking place under it. “Maybe way back—a good many hundreds of years ago—this medicine man decided to have a vision of the future. And it worked. And here he is now with some of his people.”
“Wait a minute,” Sidney objected. “So he had this vision and transported these people to this moment in time. But if it was hundreds of years ago they’re already dead, been dead for a long time, so how could they—”
“Don’t you see, Sid? They can be dead, but their appearance in the future—for them—couldn’t occur until now because it’s happened with us and we weren’t living and didn’t come along here at the right time until this minute.”
Sidney swallowed. “Maybe,” he muttered, “maybe.”
“Another thing,” George said. “If we can talk with them we can learn everything we’ve tried to know in all our work and solve in a minute what we’re ready to spend the whole summer, even years, digging for.”
Sidney brightened. “That’s what we wanted to do.”
George studied the Indians again. “I think they’re just as surprised as we are. When they discovered themselves here and saw us—and you must remember we’re the first white men they’ve ever seen—their immediate instinct was to attack. Now that we don’t fight back they’re waiting for us to make a move.”
“What
