. A few words of instruction made an
efficient rodwoman of Genevieve, so that they soon reached the foot of
the ridge up which her husband had led Ashton the previous day. Here
he established a bench-mark, and turned along the base of the
escarpment to the mouth of Dry Fork Gully, where he checked the line
of levels that had been run up the bed of the creek.

"Good work--less than three tenths difference, and all that I am
concerned about is an error in feet," he commented. "It's getting
along towards noon. We'll go up the gulch, and eat our lunch in the
shade. This place is almost as much of a sight as the canyon."

Genevieve more than agreed with her husband's opinion when he led her
up into the stupendous gorge and the walls of rock began to tower on
each side ever steeper and loftier.

"Oh, I do not see how anything can be so grand, so awesome as this!"
she cried, gazing up the precipices. "It makes me positively giddy to
look at such heights!"

"Better stop off for a while," advised Blake. "We are almost to where
the bottom tilts skyward. You can stargaze while we are eating lunch.
It's rougher along here. We can get on faster this way."

He picked her up in his arms as though she were a feather, and carried
her on up the gulch to the foot of the Titanic chute. Here, resting on
a flat rock in the cool semi-twilight of the gorge bottom, they ate
their lunch and talked with as much zest as if they were still new
acquaintances.

"Those awful cliffs!" she murmured, lowering her gaze from the
colossal walls above her. "I cannot bear to look at them any longer.
They overpower me!"

"Wait till you look down into the canyon," replied her husband. "In
some ways it is more tremendous than the Grand Canyon of the
Colorado--the width is so much narrower in proportion to the depth."

"What makes these frightful chasms?--earthquakes?"

"Water," he replied.

"Water? Not all these hundreds and thousands of feet cut down through
the solid rock!"

"Every foot," he insisted. "Think of water flowing along in the
same bed and always washing sand and gravel and even bowlders
downstream--grind, grind, grind, through the centuries and hundreds of
centuries."

"But there is no water here, Tom."

"Not now, and no chance of any this time of year, else I wouldn't
have brought you in here. A sudden heavy June rain up above there
would pour down a torrent that would drown us before we could run
three hundred yards. Imagine a f