and then pulled out." The driver was attempting to hold out gamely,
but the excitement and the severe shaking-up were evidently telling on
him.

Firmstone and Zephyr left the office and followed the wagon-trail down
the canon. Neither spoke a word.

They reached the scene of the wreck and, still silent, began to look
carefully about. A hundred feet below them the San Miguel, swollen by
melting snows, foamed and roared over its boulder-strewn bed. Near the
foot of the cliff one of the horses was impaled on a jagged rock; its
head and shoulders in the lapping water. In mid-stream and further down
the other was pressed by the current against a huge rock that lifted
above the flood. No trace of the stage was to be seen. That, broken into
fragments by the fall, had been swept away.

The spot where the accident occurred was a dangerous one at best. For
some distance after leaving the mill the trail followed a nearly level
bench of hard slate rock, then, dipping sharply downward, cut across a
long rock-slide that reached to the summit of the mountain a thousand
feet above. On the opposite side a square-faced buttress crowded the
trail to the very brink of the canon. The trail followed along the foot
of this buttress for a hundred feet or more, and at the edge it again
turned from the gorge at an acute angle. At the turning-point a cleft,
twenty feet wide, cut the cliff from the river-bed to a point far above
the trail. A bridge had spanned the cleft, but it was gone. The accident
had been caused by the giving way of the bridge when the stage was on
it.

"Well, what do you make of it?" Firmstone turned to Zephyr and Zephyr
shook his head.

"That's a superfluous interrogation. Your thinks and mine on this
subject under consideration are as alike as two chicks hatched from a
double-yolked egg."

"This is no accident." Firmstone spoke decidedly.

Zephyr nodded deliberately.

"That's no iridescent dream, unless you and I have been hitting the same
pipe."

"The question is," resumed Firmstone, "was the safe taken from the stage
before the accident?" He looked at Zephyr inquiringly.

"That depends on Jim Norwood." Zephyr whistled meditatively, then spoke
with earnest decision. "That safe's in the river. The Blue Goose has
been setting for some time. This ain't the first gosling that's pipped
its shell, and 'tain't going to be the last one, either, unless the nest
is broken up."

"That's what I think." Firmstone spoke