ing of water trickling down from the rocks, while a short
distance in front what seemed to be a wide crack appeared in the plain,
zigzagging here and there, one end going off into the distance, the
other appearing to pass round close by the mountain; and as soon as they
were dismounted and the horses tethered, the Beaver signed to Bart and
the Doctor to accompany him, while the interpreter followed close
behind.

It was a glorious evening, and after the heat of the day, the soft, cool
breeze that swept over the plain was refreshing in the extreme; but all
the same Bart felt very hungry, and his thoughts were more upon some
carefully picked sage grouse that Joses and Maude were roasting than
upon the search for silver; but the Doctor was excited, for he felt that
most likely this would prove to be the goal of their long journey. His
great fear was that the Indians in their ignorance might have taken some
white shining stone or mica for the precious metal.

The crack in the plain seemed to grow wider as they approached, but the
Indians suddenly led them off to the right, close under the towering
flank of the mountain, and between it and a mass of rock that might have
been split from it at some early stage in the world's life.

This mass was some forty or fifty feet high, and between it and the
parent mountain there was a narrow rift, so narrow in fact that they had
to proceed in single file for about a hundred yards, winding in and out
till, reaching the end, the Indians stood upon a broad kind of shelf of
rock in silence as the Doctor and Bart involuntarily uttered a cry of
surprise.

For there was the crack in the plain below their feet, and they were
standing upon its very verge where it came in close to the mountain,
whose top was some seven hundred feet above their heads, while here its
perpendicular side went down for fully another thousand to where, in the
solemn dark depths of the vast canyon or crack in the rocky crust of the
earth, a great rushing river ran, its roar rising to where they stood in
a strangely weird monotone, like low echoing thunder.

The reflections in the evening sky lighted up the vast rift for a while,
and Bart forgot his hunger in the contemplation of this strange freak of
nature, of a river running below in a channel whose walls were perfectly
perpendicular and against which in places the rapid stream seemed to
beat and eddy and swirl, while in other parts there were long stretches
of