The
generous sportive boy, who cared naught for gold, actually grew rich,
for the Sphinx had granted him the most lucrative office in the
county, the people made him their sheriff. He rose step by step to
the highest place of honor in the community until he became the mayor
of Prescott. Not satisfied with this token of its favor, the Sphinx
rewarded him in a most extraordinary and convincing manner. By the
help of nature, its help-meet, it transformed a great deposit of
siliceous limestone into beautiful onyx and painted it in all the
colors and after the pattern of the rainbow. This magnificent gift
made Captain O'Neill independently rich, but it is a fact that as
soon as it passed from his hands, the stone lost in value and no one
has since profited from it. I believe that our hero would have risen
to the highest position of dignity on earth, the Presidency of the
United States, if he had not unwittingly aroused the jealousy of the
terrible heathen god. When he chose a wife from the lovely maidens of
Prescott, then the vengeful Sphinx laid its sinister plans for his
undoing, for it is in the nature of cats, small or great, to be
exceedingly jealous. The furious idol remembered the people of a long
forgotten race, its loyal subjects, who had reared and worshiped it,
inconceivably long ago, when the Grand Canyon of Arizona was but a
tiny ravine and before icy avalanches had ground the rocks at the
Dells into boulders.
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