ne on its lank ribs! Taken completely by surprise, it hightailed
clumsily up through the pines, with me and my trusty broom lending
encouragement. When morning came, showing the havoc wrought on my
despoiled posies, I was ready to weep.

Ranger Winess joined me on my way to breakfast.

"Don't get far from Headquarters today," he said. "Dollar Mark Bull is
in here and he is a killer. I've been out on Tony after him, but he
charged us and Tony bolted before I could shoot. When I got Tony down to
brass tacks, Dollar Mark was hid."

I felt my knees knocking together.

"What's he look like?" I inquired, weakly.

"Big red fellow, with wide horns and white face. Branded with a Dollar
Mark. He's at least twenty years old, and mean!"

My midnight visitor!

I sat down suddenly on a lumber pile. It was handy to have a lumber
pile, for I felt limp all over. I told the ranger about chasing the old
beast around with a broom. His eyes bulged out on stems.

Frequent appearances of "Dollar Mark" kept me from my daily tramps
through the pines, and I spent more time on the Rim of the Canyon.

Strangely, the great yawning chasm itself held no fascination for me. I
could appreciate its dizzy depths, its vastness, its marvelous color
effects, and its weird contours. I could feel the immensity of it, and
it repelled instead of attracted. I seemed to see its barrenness and
desolation, the cruel deception of its poisonous springs, and its
insurmountable walls. I could visualize its hapless victims wandering
frantically about, trying to find the way out of some blind coulee,
until, exhausted and thirst-crazed, they lay down to die under the
sun's pitiless glare. Many skeletons, half buried in sand, have been
found to tell of such tragedies.

It was only in the evenings, after the sun had gone down, that I could
feel at ease with the Canyon. Then I loved to sit on the Rim and look
down on the one living spot far below, where, almost a century ago, the
Indians made their homes and raised their crops, watering the fields
from the clear, cold spring that gushes out of the hillside. As the
light faded, the soft mellow moon would swim into view, shrouding with
tender light the stark, grim boulders. From the plateau, lost in the
shadows, the harsh bray of wild burros, softened by distance, floated
upward.

On a clear day I could see objects on the North Rim, thirteen miles
away, and with a pair of strong field glasses I could bring the sce