ll asleep.

When his eyes unclosed, day had come again, and he saw the rim of the
opposite wall tipped with the gold of sunrise. A few moments sufficed
for the morning's simple camp duties. Near at hand he found Wrangle,
and to his surprise the horse came to him. Wrangle was one of the horses
that left his viciousness in the home corral. What he wanted was to be
free of mules and burros and steers, to roll in dust-patches, and then
to run down the wide, open, windy sage-plains, and at night browse and
sleep in the cool wet grass of a springhole. Jerd knew the sorrel when
he said of him, "Wait till he smells the sage!"

Venters saddled and led him out of the oak thicket, and, leaping
astride, rode up the canyon, with Ring and Whitie trotting behind. An
old grass-grown trail followed the course of a shallow wash where flowed
a thin stream of water. The canyon was a hundred rods wide, its yellow
walls were perpendicular; it had abundant sage and a scant growth of oak
and pinon. For five miles it held to a comparatively straight bearing,
and then began a heightening of rugged walls and a deepening of the
floor. Beyond this point of sudden change in the character of the
canyon Venters had never explored, and here was the real door to the
intricacies of Deception Pass.

He reined Wrangle to a walk, halted now and then to listen, and then
proceeded cautiously with shifting and alert gaze. The canyon assumed
proportions that dwarfed those of its first ten miles. Venters rode on
and on, not losing in the interest of his wide surroundings any of his
caution or keen search for tracks or sight of living thing. If there
ever had been a trail here, he could not find it. He rode through sage
and clumps of pinon trees and grassy plots where long-petaled purple
lilies bloomed. He rode through a dark constriction of the pass no wider
than the lane in the grove at Cottonwoods. And he came out into a great
amphitheater into which jutted huge towering corners of a confluences of
intersecting canyons.

Venters sat his horse, and, with a rider's eye, studied this wild
cross-cut of huge stone gullies. Then he went on, guided by the course
of running water. If it had not been for the main stream of water
flowing north he would never have been able to tell which of those many
openings was a continuation of the pass. In crossing this amphitheater
he went by the mouths of five canyons, fording little streams that
flowed into the larger one. Ga