ttle that never
knew the shelter of fold or stable, nor the taste of man-grown grain or
fodder, from the day of their birth to the day of their marketing.
Winter and summer alike, under the parching sun, under the strangling
drifts, that clinging, gray vegetation was the animals' sole nutriment.

Behind the couple the noises of Comanche died to murmurs. Ahead of them
rose the dark line of cottonwoods which stood upon the river-shore.

"I want to take another look at the Buckhorn Canyon," said the doctor,
stalking on in his sturdy, farm-bred gait.

"It makes a fearful roar," she remarked as they approached the place
where the swift river, compressed into the flumelike passage which it
had whetted out of the granite, tossed its white mane in the moonlight
before plunging into the dark door of the canyon.

"I've been hearing yarns and traditions about that canyon ever since I
came here," he told her. "They say it's a thousand feet deep in
places."

"June and I came over here this morning," said Agnes, "along with
Sergeant Schaefer. He said he didn't believe that June could hike that
far. I sat here on the rocks a long time watching it. I never saw so
much mystery and terror in water before."

She drew a little nearer to him as she spoke, and he put his hand on her
shoulder in an unconscious movement of restraint as she leaned over
among the black boulders and peered into the hissing current.

"Do you suppose anybody ever went in there?" she asked.

"They say the Indians know some way of getting through," he replied,
"but no white man ever went into the canyon and came out alive. The last
one to try it was a representative of a Denver paper who came out here
at the beginning of the registration. He went in there with his camera
on his back after a story."

"Poor fellow! Did he get through--at all?"

"They haven't reported him on the other side yet. His paper offers a
reward for the solution of the mystery of his disappearance, which is no
mystery at all. He didn't have the right kind of footgear, and he
slipped. That's all there is to it."

He felt her shudder under his hand, which remained unaccountably on her
warm shoulder after the need of restraint had passed.

"It's a forbidding place by day," said she, "and worse at night. Just
think of the despair of that poor man when he felt himself falling down
there in the dark!"

"Moccasins are the things for a job like that," he declared. "I've
studied it all ou