ht sooner have thought of the stream. But well he knew that
Saleratus Bill had spoken right when he had said that there were "no
swimming holes" here. The strongest swimmer could not have taken two
strokes in that cauldron of seething white water. But now, as Bob
looked, he saw that a little back eddy along the perpendicularity of the
cliff slowed the current close to the sheer rock. It might be just
possible, with luck, to win far enough along this cliff to lie concealed
behind some outjutting boulder until Saleratus Bill had examined the
beach and gone his way. Bob was too much in haste to consider the
unexplained tracks he must leave on the sand.

He thrust the branch he carried into the still black water. To his
surprise it hit bottom at a foot's depth. Promptly he waded in. Sounding
ahead, he walked on. The underwater ledge continued. The water never
came above his knees. Out of curiosity he tapped with his branch until
he had reached the edge of the submerged shelf. It proved to be some
four feet wide. Beyond it the water dropped off sheer, and the current
nearly wrenched the staff from Bob's hand.

In this manner he proceeded cautiously for perhaps a hundred feet. Then
he waded out on another beach.

He found himself in a pocket of the cliffs, where the precipice so far
drew back as to leave a clear space of four or five acres in the river
bottom. Such pockets, or "coves," are by no means unusual in the
inaccessible depths of the great box canons of the Sierras. Often the
traveller can look down on them from above, lying like green gems in
their settings of granite, but rarely can he descend to examine them.
Thankfully Bob darted to one side. Here for a moment he might be safe,
for surely no one not driven by such desperation as his own would dream
of setting foot in the river.

A loud snort almost at his elbow, and a rush of scurrying shapes,
startled him almost into crying aloud. Then out into the moonlight from
the shadow of the cliffs rushed two horses. And Bob, seeing what they
were, sprang from his fancied security into instant action, for in a
flash he saw the significance of the broken horseshoe on the beach, the
sunken ledge, and the secret of the horses' pasture. By sheer chance he
had blundered on one of Saleratus Bill's outlaw retreats.

Hastily he skirted the walls of the tiny valley. They were unbroken. The
river swept by tortured and tumbled. He ran to the head of the cove. No
sunken ledge the