, opened the door and joined the platform
party. Miss Brewster's animation died out and her voice trailed away
into--"and that's all; I don't know the rest of it."

Lidgerwood's laugh was as hearty as Van Lew's or the collegian's.

"Please go on," he teased. Then quoting her: "'And after they had shot
up all the peaceable people in the town, they fell to killing each
other, and'--Don't let me spoil the dramatic conclusion."

"You are the dramatic conclusion to that story," retorted Miss Brewster,
reproachfully. Whereupon she immediately wrenched the conversation aside
into a new channel by asking how far it was to the canyon portal.

"Only a mile or two now," was Lidgerwood's rejoinder. "Williams has
been making good time." And two minutes later the one-car train, with
the foaming torrent of the Timanyoni for its pathfinder, plunged between
the narrow walls of the upper canyon, and the race down the grade of the
crooked water-trail through the heart of the mountains began.

There was little chance for speech, even if the overawing grandeurs of
the stupendous crevice, seen in their most impressive presentment as
alternating vistas of stark, moonlighted crags and gulches and depths of
blackest shadow, had encouraged it. The hiss and whistle of the
air-brakes, the harsh, sustained note of the shrieking wheel-flanges
shearing the inner edges of the railheads on the curves, and the
stuttering roar of the 266's safety-valve were continuous; a deafening
medley of sounds multiplied a hundred-fold by the demoniac laughter of
the echoes.

Miss Carolyn clung to the platform hand-rail, and once Lidgerwood
thought he surprised Van Lew with his arm about her; thought it, and
immediately concluded that he was mistaken. Miriam Holcombe had the
opposite corner of the platform, and Jefferis was making it his business
to see to it that she was not entirely crushed by the grandeurs.

Miss Brewster, steadying herself by the knob of the closed door, was
not overawed; she had seen Rocky Mountain canyons at their best and
their worst, many times before. But excitement, and the relaxing of the
conventional leash that accompanies it, roused the spirit of daring
mockery which was never wholly beyond call in Miss Brewster's mental
processes. With her lips to Lidgerwood's ear she said: "Tell me, Howard;
how soon should a chaperon begin to make a diversion? I'm only an
apprentice, you know. Does it occur to you that these young persons need
t