jumped off into space.

"I'd a been a goner that time," he said, "if I hadn't a had time to
think it over and decide what to do." (He fell something like five
thousand feet.) "So when my horse got within about fifteen feet from the
ground, I rose up in the stirrups and gave a little hop and landed on
the ground. All I got was a twisted ankle."

A lady approached him one day while he stood on the Rim gazing into the
mile-deep chasm.

"Captain Hance," she said, "I don't see any water in the Canyon. Is this
the dry season, or does it never have any water in it?"

Gazing at her earnestly through his squinty, watery eyes, he exclaimed:

"Madam! In the early days many's the time I have rode my horse up here
and let him drink _right where we stand_!"

The old fellow was a bachelor, but he insisted that in his younger days
he had married a beautiful girl. When asked what had become of her he
would look mournful and tell a sad tale of her falling over a ledge down
in the Canyon when they were on their honeymoon. He said it took him
three days to reach her, and that when he did locate her he found she
had sustained a broken leg, so he had to shoot her.

As he grew feeble, he seemed to long for the quiet depths of the gorge,
and several times he slipped away and tried to follow the old trail he
had made in his youth. He wanted to die down at his copper mine. At
last, one night when he was near eighty years old, he escaped the
vigilance of his friends and with an old burro that had shared his
happier days he started down the trail. Ranger West got wind of it and
followed him. He found him where he had fallen from the trail into a
cactus patch and had lain all night exposed to the raw wind. He was
brought back and cared for tenderly, but he passed away. Prominent men
and women who had known and enjoyed him made up a fund to buy a bronze
plate for his grave. Remembering the size of his yarns, whoever placed
the enormous boulders at his head and feet put them nine feet apart.

Halfway between my cabin and the Rim, in the pine woods, is a well-kept
grave with a neat stone and an iron fence around it. Here lies the body
of United States Senator Ashurst's father, who was an old-timer at the
Canyon. Years ago, while working a mine at the bottom of the Canyon, he
was caught by a cave-in and when his friends reached him he was dead.
They lashed his body on an animal and brought him up the steep trail to
be buried. While I was in Was