"Howdy, Mr. Blake," greeted the cowman, "I thought I'd just ride up to see how things are coming along."

"Not so fast as they might, Mr. Knowles. We have stopped for repairs."

"Haven't broken your level?"

"No. Ashton is laid up for the day with a scalp wound. We were shot at this morning from up there—other side of the crest."

"Shot at, and Lafe hit?"

"Not seriously, though it could not well have been a closer shave. He says he will be all right by tomorrow," said Blake, and he gave the bald details of the occurrence in a few words.

Knowles listened without comment, his leathery face stolid, but his eyes glinting. When Blake had finished, he remarked shortly: "Must be the same man. Let's see those shells."

Blake handed over the two empty cartridge shells.

"Thirty-eight," confirmed Knowles. "Same as were fired at Lafe before. Kid and Chuckie showed me how a thirty-eight fitted the hole in Lafe's silver flask. About where did the snake crawl down the hill?"

"Not far from here. He could not have gone any considerable distance along the top or side. He was down and riding away when I reached the crags, and I had not lost much time coming up the other side."

"It'll take an Indian to make out his tracks on this dry ground," remarked the cowman. "We'll try a look, though, at his hawss's hoof prints. Just keep behind, if you don't mind."

He threw the reins over the head of his horse, and dismounted, to walk slowly along the more level ground at the foot of the slope. Blake followed, as he had requested, but scrutinizing the ground with a gaze no less keenly observant than that of his companion.

"Mighty queer," said Knowles, after they had carried their examination over a hundred yards. "Either he came down more slanting or else—"

"What do you make of this?" Blake interrupted, bending over a blurred round print in the dust between two grass tufts.

"Sho!" exclaimed the cowman as he peered at the mark. "That's why, of course."

"Indian shoes," said Blake.

"You've seen a thing or two. You're no tenderfoot," remarked Knowles.

"I have myself shrunk rawhide shoes on horses' hoofs when short of iron shoes," Blake explained. "This would make a hard trail to run down without hounds."

The cowman straightened and looked at his companion, his weather-beaten face set in quiet resolve.

"I know what's better than hounds," he said. "This is one badman who has played his game once too often. I'm going to run him down if it takes all year and all the men in the county. There's a couple of Ute bucks being held in the jail at Stockchute, to be tried for hunting deer. I'm going to get the loan of them. The sheriff will turn out with a posse, and we'll trail that snake, if it takes us clear over into Utah."

"We'll have a fair chance to get him with Ute trackers," agreed Blake.

Knowles shook his head. "Unless you're particular to come along, Mr. Blake, I'd like you and Lafe to keep on with this survey. I've been worrying over the chance of losing my range, till it's got on my nerves."

"Certainly, Mr. Knowles. I shall go ahead in the morning, if Ashton is able to rod. It will be best, I suppose, for my wife and Miss Chuckie to remain close at the ranch until you make sure where this trail leads."

"No; he's a snake, but the Indian shoes prove he's Western—He won't strike at the ladies. Another thing, I'm going to give you Kid for guard."

"He may prefer to join the posse."

"Of course he'll prefer that. You can count on Kid Gowan when it comes to a man hunt. He'll stay, though, all right. I don't want Mrs. Blake to think she has to stop indoors. With Kid on the lookout around your camp, the ladies can feel free to come and go any time between sunup and sundown, and you and Lafe can do what you want. There won't be any more shooting, unless it's by Kid."

"Very well," said Blake. "I'm not anxious to play hide and seek with a man who shoots and runs. When can we expect the rope and spikes?"

"That's another thing," replied Knowles. "Kid can be packing them and your camp outfit up to the canyon while you and Lafe are running your line of levels. He ought to be home by now. He was gone when the men turned out this morning. Soon as I get back I'll send him up to camp with you. He can bring along Rocket, to be ready for a chase, providing we can find the brute. Queer about that hawss. Wanted to ride him this morning. Found he'd got out and gone off the way he used to before Lafe gentled him."

While talking, the two men had returned to the cowman's horse and started around the hill to the camp. They found Isobel and Genevieve and the baby all engaged in entertaining Ashton. Knowles briefly congratulated the wounded man, and led his pony down to the pool for a drink. Blake had seated himself beside his wife. She handed the baby to him, and remarking that she also wished to drink, she followed Knowles.

The cowman smiled at her reassuringly. "You're not afraid of any more shooting, ma'am, are you?" he asked. "I've told your husband that Kid is to come up to keep guard. He will stay right along, unless that scoundrel is trailed down sooner."

"Then I shall have no fear, Mr. Knowles."

"You needn't, and you and Chuckie can come and go just the same as ever. I don't want your visit spoiled. It's a great treat to all of us to have you with us."

"And to my husband and myself to be your guests! I have quite fallen in love with your daughter, Mr. Knowles. If you'll permit me to say it, you are very fortunate to have so lovely and lovable a girl."

"Don't I know it, ma'am!"

"So beautiful—and her character as beautiful as her face. How you must prize her!"

"Prize her!" repeated Knowles, his usual stolid face aglow with pride and tenderness. "Why, ma'am, I couldn't hold her more in liking if she was my own flesh and blood!"

Genevieve suddenly bent down to hide the intense emotion that had struck the color from her face. Yet after a moment's pause, she spoke in a composed, almost casual tone: "Then Chuckie is not your own daughter?"

"Not in the way you mean. Hasn't she told you? I adopted her."

"I see," remarked Genevieve, with a show of polite interest. "But of course, taking her when a young infant, she has always thought of you as her own father."

"No—what I can't get over is that she feels that way, and I feel the same to her, though I never saw or heard of her till she was going on fourteen."

"Ah!" Genevieve could no longer suppress her agitation. "Then she is—I'm sure that she must be—You said she came from the East, from Chicago?"

"No, ma'am! I didn't say where she came from," curtly replied the cowman.

The shock of his brusqueness restored the lady to her usual quiet composure. Looking up into his face, she found it as blank and impenetrable as a cement wall.

"You must pardon me," she murmured. "I myself am a Chicago girl, so you must see how natural it is for me to hope that so sweet and beautiful a girl as Chuckie came from my city."

"Chuckie is my daughter," stated Knowles in a flat tone.

"If you will kindly permit me to explain. My husband—"

"Chuckie is my daughter, legally adopted," repeated the cowman. "You can see what she is like. If that is not enough, ma'am, I can't prevent you from declining our hospitality, though we'd be mighty sorry to have you and your husband leave."

The tears started into Genevieve's hazel eyes. "Mr. Knowles! how could you think for a moment that I—that we—"

"Excuse me, ma'am!" he hastened to apologize. "I didn't mean to hurt your feelings. You see, I'm kind of prejudiced along some lines. I've been bred up to the Western idea that it isn't just etiquette to ask about people's antecedents. Real Western, I mean. Our city folks are nearly as bad as you Easterners over family trees. As if a child isn't as much descended from its mother's maternal grandmother as from its father's paternal grandfather!"

Genevieve smiled at this adroit diversion of the subject by the seemingly simple Westerner, and replied: "My father's and mother's parents were farm people. My husband worked his way up out of the Chicago slums."

"He did?" The cowman could not conceal his astonishment. He looked curiously into the lady's high-bred face. "Well, now, that sure is something to be right proud of—not that I'd have exactly expected you to think so. If you'll excuse me, ma'am, I'm more surprised at the way you feel about it than that he was able to do such a big thing."

"No one is responsible for what he is born. But we are at least partly entitled to the credit or discredit of what we become," she observed.

"That's good American doctrine, ma'am—Western American!" approved Knowles.

"It should apply to women as well as men," she stated.

"It ought," he dryly replied, and he jerked up the head of his pawing horse. "Here, you! I guess it's high time we were starting in, ma'am. Kid may think he's to lay over at the ranch until morning. We want to get him out here before dusk. I don't reckon there's any show of that snake coming back tonight, but it's as well to be on the safe side."

He walked up the slope towards the others, unbuckling his cartridge belt as he went.

"Sling on your saddle, honey," he called to his daughter.

The girl sprang up from beside Ashton and ran to fetch her own and Genevieve's picketed ponies. Her father held out his belt and revolver to the engineer.

"Here's my Colt's, Mr. Blake," he said. "I have another at home. You won't need it, but I may as well leave it. We're going to lope in now, so as to hustle Kid out to you before night. Just swap me that yearling for my gun. It wouldn't seem natural not to be toting something that can make a noise."

"Thomas never cries unless he needs attention," Genevieve sought to defend her infant.

"Yes, ma'am. It's a good thing he knows that much already. You have to make yourself heard to get what you want in the world generally, as well as in hostleries and eating-houses."

Blake buckled on the cartridge belt, with its holstered revolver, and went to help saddle the ponies. Ashton watched him and Isobel narrowly. He was far from pleased with the familiarity of their talk and manner towards one another. Twice the girl put her hand on Blake's arm.

In marked contrast to this affectionate intimacy, Isobel was distrait and hurried when she came to take leave of the wounded man. He had risen to his feet, and she could not ignore his proffered hand. But she avoided his gaze and quickly withdrew her fingers from his warm clasp to hurry off.



CHAPTER XXI

MADONNA DOLOROSA

Blake was cooking supper when, shortly before sunset, Gowan drove up to the waterhole, with a pony in lead behind the heavy wagon. Leaving the wagon with the rope and other articles of his load on the far side of the creek bed, he watered and picketed the horses, and came across to the tent with his rifle and a roll of blankets.

"Howdy, Mr. Blake. Got here in time for supper, I see," he remarked as he unburdened himself. "Met Mr. Knowles and the ladies down near the ranch. They told me about the shooting." He faced about to stare at Ashton's bandaged head. "They told me you came mighty near getting yours. You shore are a lucky tenderfoot."

Ashton shrugged superciliously. "The worst of it is the additional hole in my hat. I see you have a new one. Is that the latest style on the range?"

"Stetson, brand A-1.," replied the puncher. "How does it strike you, Mr. Blake?—and my new shirt? Having a dude puncher on our range kind of stirred up my emulosity. They don't have real cowboy attire like his at an ordinary shorthorn cow town like Stockchute—but I did the best I could."

Blake made no response to this heavy badinage. He set the supper on the chuck-box, and laconically said: "Come and get it."

"Might have known you've been on round-up," remarked Gowan, with an insistent sociability oddly at variance with his usual taciturn reserve. "According to Miss Chuckie, you're some rider, and according to Mr. Knowles, you can shoot. I wouldn't mind hearing from you direct about that shooting this morning."

Blake recounted the affair still more briefly than he had told it to Knowles.

"That shore was a mighty close shave," commented the puncher. "But you haven't said what the fellow looked like."

"He wore ordinary range clothes," replied Blake. "I couldn't see him behind the rocks, and caught only a glimpse of him as he went around the ridge. His horse was much the same build and color as Rocket."

The puncher stared at Ashton with his cold unblinking eyes. "You shore picked out a Jim Dandy guide, Mr. Tenderfoot. According to this, it looks mighty like he's gone and turned hawss thief. Mr. Knowles says your Rocket hawss has vamoosed. If he's moving to Utah under your ex-guide, it'll take some lively posse to head him. What d'you say, Mr. Blake?"

"I think the man is apt soon to come to the end of his rope—after dropping through a trap door," said the engineer.

Gowan looked at him between narrowed eyelids, and paused with upraised coffee cup to reply: "A man that has shown the nerve this one has won't let anyone get close enough to rope him."

"It will be either that or a bullet, before long," predicted Blake. "The badman is getting to be rather out of date."

"Maybe a bullet," admitted Gowan. "Never any rope, though, for his kind.—Guess I'll turn in. It's something of a drive over to Stockchute and back with the wagon, and I got up early. You and Ashton might go on watch until midnight, and turn me out for the rest of the night."

"Very well," agreed Blake.

The puncher stretched out on his blankets under a tree, a few yards from the tent. Ashton took the dishes down to sand-scour them at the pool, while Blake saw that everything damageable was disposed safe from the knife-like fangs of the coyotes.

"How about keeping watch?" asked Ashton, when he returned with the cleansed dishes. "Shall I take first or second?"

"Neither," answered Blake. "You will need all the sleep and rest you can get. Tomorrow may be a hard day. Turn in at once."

"If you insist," acquiesced Ashton. "I still am rather weak and dizzy." He went to the tent and disappeared.

Blake took the lantern and strolled across to the wagon, to look at the numerous articles brought by Gowan. He set the lantern over in the wagon bed on top of what seemed to be a heap of empty oat sacks, while he overhauled the load. It included three coils of rope of a hundred feet each, a keg of railroad spikes, two dozen picket-pins, two heavy hammers, a pick and shovel, and a crowbar.

The last three articles had not been ordered by Blake. The puncher had brought them along, apparently with a hazy idea that the descent of the canyon would be something on the order of mining. There were also in the wagon two five-gallon kerosene cans to use in carrying water up the mountain, a sack of oats, Gowan's saddle, and two packsaddles.

In shifting one of the packsaddles to get at the hammers, Blake knocked it against the sack on which the lantern had been set. The lantern suddenly fell over on its side. Blake reached in to pick it up, and perceived that the sack was rising in a mound. He caught up one of the hammers, and held it poised for a stroke. From the sack came a muffled rattle. The hammer descended in a smashing blow.

The sack rose and fell as if something under it was squirming about convulsively. But to Blake's surprise it did not fall aside and disclose that which was making the violent movement. The squirming lessened. He grasped an outer corner of the sack and jerked it upward. It failed to flip into the air. The lower part sagged heavily. The squirmer was inside and—the mouth of the sack was tied fast.

Blake looked at it thoughtfully. After some moments, he placed the sack where it had lain at first, and upset the keg of spikes on top of it. He then carefully examined Gowan's saddle; but it told him nothing. He shook his head doubtfully, and returned to camp.

Going quietly around to Gowan, he set down the lantern close before the puncher's face and stopped to light a cigar. Gowan stirred restlessly and rolled half over, but did not open his eyes. Blake smoked his cigar, extinguished the lantern, and quietly stretched out on the edge of the sleeper's blankets. In a few moments he, too, was asleep.

About two o'clock Gowan stirred and rolled over, pulling at his blankets. Instantly Blake was wide awake. The puncher mumbled, drew the blankets closer about him, and lay quiet. Blake went into the tent and dozed on his own blankets until roused by the chill of dawn. He went down for a plunge in the pool, and was dressed and back at the fireplace, cooking breakfast, when Gowan started up out of his heavy slumber.

"Yes, it's getting along about that time," Blake called to him cheerfully. "You might turn out Ashton. He has made as good a night of it as you have."

Gowan had been staring at the dawn, his lean jaw slack. As Blake spoke, he snapped his mouth shut and came over to confront the engineer. "You agreed to call me at midnight," he said.

"My apology!" politely replied Blake. "I know how you must feel about it. But I hope you will excuse me. I saw that you, like Ashton, needed a full night's sleep, and so did not disturb you."

The puncher looked away and muttered: "I'm responsible for you to Mr. Knowles. He sent me here to guard you."

"That is true. Of course you will say it's owing to no fault of mine that we have come through the night safely. Well, we have a big day's work before us. May I ask you to call Ashton? Breakfast is ready."

At this the puncher sullenly went to rouse the sleeper. Ashton came out rubbing his eyes; but after a dip in the pool, he declared himself restored by his long sleep and ready for a day's work. During the night his bandage had come loose. He would have tossed it away, but Blake insisted upon re-dressing the wound. He did so with as much skill and almost as much gentleness as had his wife.

When Blake and Ashton left the camp, the puncher was leading the horses across to load their first packs. The two levelmen walked briskly up the valley, carrying only enough food and water to last themselves until evening, when Gowan was to have the camp moved to the top of High Mesa.

Beginning from his bench-mark at the foot of the mountain, Blake carried the level line slantingly up the ridge side. The work was slow and tedious, since the telescope of the level could never be on a horizontal line either higher or lower respectively than the top and bottom of the thirteen-foot rod. This necessitated setting-up the instrument every few feet during the steepest part of the ascent.

They saw nothing of Gowan, who had chosen a more roundabout but easier trail. At midmorning, however, they were overtaken by Genevieve and Isobel and Thomas Herbert Vincent Leslie Blake. Knowles had started for Stockchute to seek the aid of the sheriff and his Indian prisoners. The ladies divided the ascent into several stages, riding ahead of the surveyors and resting in the shade of a rock or pine until the men had passed them.

Near noon, when the levels had been carried up close to the top of High Mesa, Gowan rode down to the party to inquire where the new camp was to be pitched.

"I've brought up a lot this trip," he stated. "I can fetch the rest by sundown, if I don't have to meander all over the mesa with these first packs."

"Where did you leave the packhorses?" asked Blake.

"Up along the canyon where Ashton shot his yearling deer," answered the puncher. "It's about half way between that gulch where you say you're going down and the bend across from the head of Dry Fork Gulch."

"We'll camp there," decided Blake. "It is on the shortest trail to that gulch, and you'll not have time to get your second load farther before dark."

The puncher started back. But Isobel, who had come riding up with Genevieve, called out to stop him: "Wait, Kid. It is almost noon. You must take lunch with us."

"Can't leave those hawsses standing with the packs, Miss Chuckie, if they're to make another trip today," he replied.

"Suppose you unload them and come back along the edge of the canyon?" suggested Blake. "We shall knock off soon and all go over to give my wife her first look at the canyon. We can eat lunch there together."

To this Gowan nodded a willing assent, and he jogged away, with a half smile on his thin lips. But that which pleased him had precisely the opposite effect on Ashton. He did not fancy sharing the companionship and attention of Miss Knowles with the puncher. As this interference with his happiness was due to Blake, he showed a petulant resentment towards the engineer that won him the girl's sympathetic concern. She attributed his fretfulness to his wound. Blake made the same mistake.

"You've done quite enough for the morning, Ashton, with that head of yours," he said. "We're over the worst now, and can easily run on up to the camp this afternoon. We shall knock off for a siesta."

"Needn't try to make out I'm a baby!" snapped Ashton.

"Leave your rod here," went on Blake, disregarding the other's irascibility. "I'll take the level. It may enable us to see the bottom of the canyon."

He started on up the slope beside his wife's pony. Ashton was somewhat mollified when he saw Isobel linger for him to walk beside her horse. She was carrying the baby, who, regardless of scenic attractions, had fallen asleep during the long climb from the lower mesa. The sight of the child clasped to her bosom awakened all that was highest in his nature. Concern over his wound had sobered her usual gay vivacity to a look of motherly tenderness.

"Do you know," he murmured during a pause in their conversation, "you make me think of pictures of the Madonna!"

"Lafe!" she protested, blushing and as quickly paling. "You should not say such a thing. It is lovely—a beautiful thing to tell me; but—but I do not deserve it!"

"Madonna!—my Madonna!" he murmured in ardent adoration.

"Oh, please! when I've asked you not to!" she implored. "It is not right! I—I am not!—" Tears glistened in her soft eyes. She bent over to suppress a sob that might have awakened the sleeping infant.

Ashton gazed up at her, wonder and contrition mingling with his deepening adoration. "Forgive me, Miss Chuckie! But I meant it—I feel it! I never before felt this way towards any girl!... I know I have no right to say anything now. I am a pennyless adventurer, a disgraced, disinherited son, a mere cowpuncher apprentice; but if, by next spring, I shall have—"

"Oh, see. They're getting such a long way ahead of us!" exclaimed the girl, urging her pony to a faster gait.

The animal started forward with a suddenness that left Ashton behind. He made no effort to regain his position beside the girl's stirrup. Instead, he lagged farther and farther in the rear, his face crimson with mortification and anger. As his chagrin deepened, his flush became almost feverish and there was a suggestion of wildness in his flashing eyes. It was as though his passion was intensifying some injury to his brain caused by the concussion of the bullet on his skull.



CHAPTER XXII

A REAL WOLF

When the loiterer came over the second ridge into view of the booming chasm in the top of the plateau, he saw the others down near the brink. The baby had been laid on a soft bed of pine needles, and Blake was leading the ladies down to look over into the abyss, one on each arm.

Ashton's chagrin flared into jealous hate. He felt certain that the girl was quite capable of strolling along the extreme edge of the precipice without a trace of giddiness. Yet now she was clinging to Blake even more closely than was Genevieve. There was more than apprehension in the clasp of her little brown hand on the engineer's shoulder. Her cheek brushed his sleeve.

The anger of the onlooker was so intense that he did not see Gowan riding towards him from the left. The puncher dismounted and came forward, his cold gaze fixed on Ashton's face.

"So you're beginning to savvy it, too," he remarked.

Ashton confronted him, vainly attempting to mask his telltale look and color with a show of hauteur. "I never discuss personal matters with acquaintances of your stamp," he said.

"That's too bad," coolly deplored Gowan. "Maybe you've heard the saying about cutting off your nose to spite your face."

"What do you mean?"

"If you want to go it alone, I can't stop you," replied the puncher. "Needn't think I'm sucking around you for any favors or friendship. If this was my range, I would run you off it so fast you'd reach Stockchute with your tongue hanging out like a dog's. That's how much I like you."

"The feeling is fully reciprocated, I assure you," rejoined Ashton.

"All right. Now what're we going to do about him?—each play a lone hand, or make it pardners for this deal?"

"I—fail to understand," hesitated Ashton.

"No, you don't," jeeringly contradicted the puncher. "It's a three-cornered fight. You see it now, even if you have been too big a fool to see it before. We can settle ours after. But I'm free to own up to it that you're a striped skunk if you won't work with me first to get rid of him. Look at him now—and him married!"

Ashton's flush deepened to purple. "Married!—yes, married!" he choked out.

"Right alongside his wife, too!" Gowan thrust the goad deeper. "You'd think even that brand of skunk would have more decency. Not that his wife is any friend of mine, like she is yours. But for a man with such a wife and baby ... with Miss Chuckie! The—"

Gowan ended with a string of oaths so virulent that even Ashton's half-mad anger was checked.

"You may be—er—I fear that we—Perhaps it's not so bad as it appears!" he stammered.

"Bah!" disgustedly sneered the puncher, and he strode on ahead, leaving Ashton torn between rage and doubt and terror of his own furious jealousy.

The others continued to stand on a flat ledge that here formed the lip of the canyon. Genevieve was trembling with awed delight. Her husband and the girl appeared more calm, but they were drinking in the grandeur of the tremendous gorge below them with no less intense appreciation of its gloomy vastness.

Upstream, to their left, the precipices jutted so far out from each wall of the canyon that they overlapped, a thousand or fifteen hundred feet from the top. But downstream the upper part of the chasm flared to a width that permitted the noonday sun to penetrate part way down through the blue-black shadows.

"O-o-o-oh!" sighed Genevieve, for the tenth time, and she clung tighter than ever to the strong arm of her husband. "Isn't it fearfully, fearfully delightful? It makes the soles of my feet tingle to look at it!"

"That tickly feeling!" exclaimed Isobel. "I often ride up here to the canyon, I do so love to feel that way! Only with me it's like ants crawling up and down my back."

"O-o-o-oh!" again sighed Genevieve. "It—it so overpowers one!"

"It's sure some canyon," admitted her husband. "That French artist Dore ought to have seen it."

"If only we had a copy of Dante's Inferno to read here on the brink!" she whispered.

"It always reminds me of Coleridge's poem," murmured Isobel, and she quoted in an awed whisper:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man, Down to the sunless sea.

"Fortunately for us, this is a canyon, not a string of measureless caverns," said Blake. "It can be measured, one way or another. If I had a transit, I could calculate the depth at any point where the water shows—triangulate with a vertical angle. But it would cause a long delay to send on for a transit. We shall first try to chain down at that gulch break."

Genevieve shrank back from the verge of the precipice and drew the others after her.

"Dear!" she exclaimed, "I did not dream it was so fearful. One has to see to realize! You will not go down—promise me you will not go down!"

"Now, now, little woman," reproached Blake. "What's become of my partner?"

"But baby—? If you should leave him fatherless!"

"Better that than for him to have a father who is a quitter! Just wait, Sweetheart. That break looks much less overwhelming than these sheer cliffs. You know I shall not attempt anything foolhardy. If it is not possible to get down without too great risk, I shall give it up and send for a transit."

"Oh, will you?" exclaimed Isobel, hardly less apprehensive than his wife. "Why not wait anyway until you can send for your transit?"

"Because I cannot triangulate the bottom within half a mile upstream from where the tunnel would have to be located. That roar and the wildness of the water wherever we can see it is proof that it is flowing down a heavy grade. At the point where I triangulated it might be above the level of Dry Mesa, and way below the mesa here at the tunnel site."

"You could triangulate at the first place where the bottom can be seen, beyond here," suggested Genevieve.

"Suppose it proved to be lower than Dry Mesa, wouldn't that still leave us up in the air?" he asked. "Like this—"

He pulled out his notebook and drew a rough sketch.

[Transcriber's Note: an illustration showing "Elevation of bench-mark at foot of chute in Dry Fork Gulch" appears in the text here.]

"I see, Dear," said his wife. "When do you plan to go down?"

"Tomorrow morning."

"Can you wait until we come up from the ranch?"

"Yes. Mr. Knowles will no doubt be back by then. He can bring you out early."

"We shall come early, anyway," said Isobel.

"Of course!" added Genevieve. She drew a deep breath. "I shall see the place before you attempt to descend."

Her husband nodded reassuringly and looked around to where Gowan and Ashton stood waiting, several yards from one another.

"About lunch time, isn't it?" he remarked. "Mr. Gowan will wish to be starting soon to bring up his second load."

At the suggestion, the ladies hastened to spread out their own lunch and the one brought by Blake. When called by Isobel, Gowan came forward to join the party, with rather less than his usual reserve in his speech and manner.

Ashton was the last to seat himself on the springy cushion of brown pine needles, and he sat throughout the meal in moody silence. Blake and the ladies attributed this to the fatigue of working through the long hot morning while suffering from his unhealed wound. He repulsed the sympathetic attentions of the Blakes. But he could not long continue to resist the kindly concern of the girl. After lunch she made him lie down in the shade while she bathed his wound with a good part of the small supply of water remaining in the canteens.

Gowan had been asking questions about the work. Blake explained at some length why he considered it necessary not only to descend into the canyon but to carry the line of levels down along the bed of the subterranean stream to this point opposite Dry Fork Gulch. When Isobel drew apart with Ashton the puncher did not look at them, though his eyes narrowed to slits and his mouth straightened.

"You shore have nerve to tackle it, Mr. Blake," he commented. "Everything alive that I know of that's ever gone down into Deep Canyon hasn't ever come up again, except it had wings."

"We'll prove that the rule has an exception," replied Blake, smiling away the reawakened apprehension of his wife.

Gowan shook his head doubtfully, and strolled down the slope to peer into the canyon. The level was directly in his path, set up firmly on its tripod, about six feet from the brink. The puncher stopped beside it to squint through the telescope.

"You'll have one—peach of a time seeing anything through this contraption down there," he remarked. "I can't see even right here in the sun."

"The telescope is out of focus," explained Blake. "Turn that screw on the side." Gowan twisted a protruding thumbscrew. "Not that—the one above it," directed Blake.

"Can't stop to fool now," replied the puncher. "I've got to hustle along."

He started hastily around between the level and the precipice. The toe of his boot struck hard against the iron toe of the outer tripod-leg. He stumbled and sprawled forward on his hands and knees. Behind him the instrument toppled over towards the brink.

Genevieve cried out in alarm at Gowan's fall. Her husband sprang to the rescue—not of the puncher, but of the level. It had crashed down with its head to the chasm, and was sliding out over the brink. Blake barely caught it by the tip of one of the legs as it swung up for the plunge. He drew it back and set it up to see what damage had been done to the head. Gowan watched him, tight-lipped.

"This is luck!" exclaimed the engineer, after a swift examination. "Nothing broken—only knocked out of adjustment. I can fix that in half an hour. She struck with the telescope turned sideways. You must have set the clamp screw."

The puncher's face darkened. "Wish the—infernal machine had gone plumb down to hell!" he growled. "It came near tripping me over the edge."

"My apology," said Blake. "I spraddled the tripod purposely to keep it from being upset."

"Oh, Kid, you've hurt yourself," called Isobel, as the puncher began to wrap a kerchief about his hand. "Come here and let me bandage it."

"No," he replied. "Two babies are enough for you to coddle at one time. I've got to hit out."

He turned his back on Blake and hurried up to his horse. The engineer followed as far as the nearest tree, where he set up the instrument in the shade and began to adjust it.

"Good thing she has platinum crosshairs," he said to Ashton. "A fall like that would have been certain to break the old-style spiderweb hairs."

Ashton did not reply. He was absorbed in a murmured conversation with Isobel. Blake completed the adjustments of the level and stretched out beside his wife to play with his gurgling son. A half hour of this completed the two hours that he had set apart for the noon rest. He placed the baby back in his wife's lap and stood up to stretch his powerful frame.

"How about it, Ashton?" he inquired. "Think you feel fit to rod this afternoon? Don't hesitate to say no, if that's the right answer. I expect my wife and Miss Chuckie, between them, can help me carry the line as far as the camp."

"I can do it alone," interposed the girl. "Let them both stay here and rest all afternoon."

"No, Miss Chuckie. I can and shall do my work," insisted Ashton, springing up with unexpected briskness for one who had appeared so fatigued. "It is you and Mrs. Blake who must stay here to rest—unless you wish to keep us company."

"Might we not go to the new camp and put it in order?" suggested Genevieve.

"What if that outlaw should come sneaking back?" objected Ashton. "It seems to me you should keep with us."

"He would not trouble us," replied Isobel.

"Yet if he should? Anyway, Blake and I saw a wolf up here the other day."

"A real wolf! Where?"

"Yes," answered Blake. "Over in the ravine the other side of the head of Dry Fork Gulch."

"He may attack you," argued Ashton.

The girl laughed. "You're still a tenderfoot to think a wolf wouldn't know better than that. Wish he didn't! It would mean the saving of a half dozen calves this winter." She flashed out her long-barreled automatic pistol and knocked a cone from the tree above Blake's head with a swiftly aimed shot.

Blake caught the cone as it fell and looked at the bullet hole through its center. "Unless that was an accident, I should call it some shooting," he remarked.

"Accident!" she called back. "Stand sideways and see what happens to your cigar."

"No, thanks. I'll take your word for it. Just lit this one, and I've only a few left. By by, Tommy! Don't let the wolves eat mamma and the poor little cowlady!"

He picked up the level and started off at a swinging stride. Ashton followed several paces behind. His face was sullen and heavy, but in their merriment over Blake's banter, the ladies failed to observe his expression.

They rested for a while longer. Then, after venturing down for another awed look into the abyss, they rode along, parallel with the stupendous rift, to the place selected for the new camp. As Gowan had brought up the tent in one of the first packs, the ladies pitched it on the level top of the ridge.

"This is real camping!" delightedly exclaimed Genevieve, as they set to gathering leafy twigs for bedding and dry branches for fuel. "How I wish we could stay all night!"

"We can, if you wish," replied Isobel.

"Can we, really?"

"Our men often sleep out in the open, this time of year. We shall take the tent for ourselves. Won't it be fun! But will Thomas be all right?"

"I can manage with what I have until tomorrow afternoon."

"How long do you think they will be down in the canyon?" the girl inquired.

Genevieve shuddered. "I wish I could tell! If only Tom finds that he cannot get down at all, how thankful I shall be!"

"And—Lafe!" murmured the girl.

"It is possible that they may be unable to do it in one day," went on Genevieve apprehensively—"Down, down into those dreadful depths, and then along the river, all the way to where the tunnel is to be, and back again, and then up the awful cliffs! Surely they cannot finish in one day! Of course they will succeed—Tom can do anything, anything! Yet how I dread the very thought—!"

"We must prepare to stay right here on High Mesa until they do finish!" declared Isobel. "It will be impossible to go back to the ranch tomorrow if they are still in that frightful place! Kid will have to take the hawsses down to the waterhole. He shall go on home, and tomorrow morning fetch us cream and eggs and everything you need. They will have to be told at the ranch; and if Daddy has returned, he will come up to help and be with us."

"You dear girl! The more I think of this terrible descent, the more I dread it. I feel a presentiment that—But I must try to be brave and not interfere with Tom's work! It will be a great comfort to have your father with us."

"Daddy will surely come if he has returned. Isn't he kind and good? He couldn't have done more to make me happy if he had been my own real father!"

Genevieve smiled into the girl's glowing face. "Yes, dear. Yet I am far from surprised, since you are the daughter he wished to make happy. I was more surprised to have him tell me you were adopted. You have never said a word about it."

"I—you see, I did not happen to," confusedly murmured the girl.

"Chuckie Knowles is not your real name," Genevieve gently reproached her.

"No, it is the pet name Daddy gave me. My real one is—Isobel."

"Isobel—?"

"Yes. Daddy's sister, in Denver, always calls me that. But here on the ranch—"

"Isobel—?" repeated Genevieve, with a rising inflection.

The color ebbed from the girl's face, but she answered steadily: "Chuckie—Isobel—Knowles. I am Daddy's daughter. I have no other father."

"Is-o-bel—Is-o-bel," Genevieve intoned the name musically. "It has a beautiful sound. I had a friend at school—Isabella—but we always called her Belle."

The girl suddenly faced away from her companion, and darted to meet Blake and Ashton, who were bringing the line of levels up over the ridge.



CHAPTER XXIII

THE TEMPTATION

When the ladies explained their plans for remaining in camp on High Mesa, Blake gave a ready assent.

"All right, Jenny. It'll be something like old times. Can't scare you up any lions or fever, leopards or cyclones; but you may see that wolf."

"I should welcome all savage Africa if it would rid us of this awful canyon!" replied his wife.

"Won't you please give it up?" begged Isobel. "I am to blame for your coming here. If anything should happen to you, I—I could never forgive myself—never!"

Blake looked at the two lovely, anxious faces before him, and smiled gravely. "There you go again, and you have yet to see that gulch. But even if you find that it looks dangerous, you wouldn't want me to let a little risk interfere with my work, would you? Think of the fools who climb the highest and steepest mountains just for sport. I am going down there because it is necessary."

"But is it?" the girl half sobbed.

"Someone must do it, sooner or later," he replied, and he took his wife's hand in his big palm. "Come, little woman, speak up. Do you want your husband to be a shirker and quitter?"

"Of course not, Tom. Yet one should be reasonable."

"I have had enough experience in climbing to know not to attempt the impossible, Sweetheart," he assured her. "The worst looking places are not always the most dangerous. I promise you to take only reasonable risks."

"Have we time enough to look at the place this afternoon?" she inquired.

Blake glanced at the sun, and nodded. "The riding is good. We can get back long before dark. Ashton, you had better stretch out and rest."

"No, I shall go with you," replied Ashton, his lips set in as firm lines as Blake's.

"You cannot go, Lafe, unless you agree to ride my pony," said Isobel.

"I'm not going to have Gowan call me a baby again," he objected.

"You will need all your strength tomorrow," predicted Blake.

"You must ride," insisted Isobel.

"Very well—to please you," he agreed. "We shall take turns."

Blake again looked at the sun. "As long as we are going, we may as well carry forward the line of levels. We can take long turns nearly all the way, so there will be little delay."

"And I shall rod for you!" delightedly exclaimed Isobel.

"Only part of the time," qualified Ashton with a sharpness that the others attributed to his zeal to serve her.

He filled his canteen from one of the cans of water brought up by Gowan, and rinsed out the mouths and nostrils of the thirsty ponies. This done, he and Genevieve mounted, and the party started off on a route parallel with the canyon, which here trended back away from the edge of the plateau.

They soon came to where the surface of the mesa was slashed with gulleys and ravines, all running down into the canyon. Blake swung away from the canyon, in order to head the worst of these ravines or to cross them where they were less precipitous. Presently, however, he struck in again towards the great rift along the flank of a high barren ridge. At last he led over the ridge and down to the side of a very large ravine where it pitched into the canyon at an angle little less steep than the descent of Dry Fork Gulch.

The line of levels, as Blake had foretold, had been an easy one to run. It was stopped on the corner of a shelf of rock that jutted out above the gorge. Having provided a soft nest for the baby, the four went out on the shelf and peered down the dizzy slope into the black shadows of the depths.

The two ladies drew back shuddering. Blake looked about at them and seeing their troubled faces, sought to quiet their dread.

"You have not looked close enough," he said. "With spikes and ropes, the worst of this will be comparatively easy. There are ledges and crevices all the way down. You cannot see the lower half. When I was here with Gowan and Mr. Knowles, the sun was shining to the bottom. The lower half of the descent is much less steep than this you see."

Genevieve smiled trustfully. "Oh, if you say it is safe, Tom!"

"We shall take down the rope and all the spikes we can carry," he explained in further reassurance. "At the worst places a spike and a piece of the rope will not only let us down safely, but can be left for our ascent."

"Then it will be all right!" sighed Isobel.

"For him—yes!" broke in Ashton, his voice harsh and strained. He was cringing back, white-faced, from the edge of the gulch.

"Why, Lafe!" exclaimed the girl. "If Tom—Mr. Blake goes down, surely you can't mean that you—"

"He's used to climbing—I'm not!" Ashton sought to excuse himself.

"Oh, very well," she said. "Of course it is not right to ask you to do it if you suffer from vertigo. I shall ask Kid to take your place. If he refuses, Daddy will do it."

"That may mean delay," remarked Blake. "If that scoundrel really is headed for Utah, your father may not be back for several days. Yet he asked me to settle this matter as soon as possible."

"Then, if Kid will not go down with you, I shall," declared the girl, her blue eyes flashing.

"No, no indeed, dear!" protested Genevieve. "It is simply impossible! You shall not do it!"

"I shall, unless Kid—"

"You shall not ask him!" interposed Ashton, his pale face suddenly flushing a hot red. "I am going down!"

"You will, Lafayette?" cried Genevieve. "That is very brave and—and kind of you!"

"But if you have no experience in climbing?" objected Isobel in a tone that transmuted the young man's angry flush into a glow of delight.

"Don't inexperienced climbers go up the Alps with guides?" he nonchalantly replied. "I can trust Blake to get me safe to the bottom. He will need me in his business."

"Good for you, Lafe!" commended Blake.

It was the first time that he had ever addressed Ashton so familiarly. He accompanied it with the proffer of his hand. But Ashton did not look at him. He was basking in the frankly admiring gaze of Miss Knowles.

The party returned in the same manner that they had come out, for Isobel firmly refused to permit Ashton to walk. Blake allowed her to set the pace, and she chose such a rapid one that they reached camp a full half hour before sunset.

A few minutes later, as they were sitting down to a hastily prepared supper, Gowan appeared with the second load from the lower camp. Blake and Ashton sprang up to loosen the packs of the sweating, panting horses. The puncher swung down from his saddle, not to assist them, but to remonstrate with Isobel.

"Been expecting to meet you, all the way up, Miss Chuckie," he said. "Ain't you staying too late? You won't get home before long after dark."

"Mrs. Blake and I are not going down tonight, Kid," replied the girl, and she explained the change of plans.

Gowan listened attentively, though without commenting either by look or word. When she had quite finished, he asked a single question: "Think your Daddy won't mind, Miss Chuckie?"

"He will understand that we simply can't leave here until Lafe and—Mr. Blake are safe up out of the canyon."

"All right. You're the boss," he acquiesced. "Just write out a list of what you want. I'll take all the hawsses down to the waterhole, and go on to the ranch. You can look for me back at sunup. The moon rises between three and four."

"Genevieve, will you make out the list? Sit down and eat, Kid."

"Well, just a snack, Miss Chuckie. Wouldn't stop for that if the hawsses didn't know the trail well enough to go down in the dark."

"Have you seen any sign of the murderer?" inquired Ashton.

Gowan drained the cup of scalding hot coffee handed to him by Isobel, and answered jeeringly: "Don't worry, Tenderfoot. He won't try to get you tonight. If he came back today, he saw me around. If he comes back tonight, he won't think of climbing High Mesa to look for you."

Blake came to the puncher with a list written by himself and his wife on a leaf from his fieldbook. Gowan folded it in his hatband, washed down the last mouthful of bread and ham that he had been bolting, and went to shift his saddle to Isobel's pony, the youngest and freshest of the horses. In two minutes he was riding away down the ridge, willingly followed by the four other horses. They knew as well as he that they were returning to the waterhole.

As the campers again sat down to their supper Isobel paused with the coffeepot upraised. "Genevieve," she inquired, "did you put cream on the list?"

"Why, no, my dear. It did not occur to me."

"Nor may it to Yuki. He will be sure to send eggs and butter, but unless he thinks to save tonight's cream—I'll run and tell Kid."

Ashton sprang up ahead of her. "I'll catch him," he said, and sprinted down the ridge.

Racing around a thicket of scrub oak, he caught sight of Gowan more than an eighth of a mile ahead. He whistled repeatedly. At last Gowan twisted about in the saddle, and drew rein. He did not turn back, but made Ashton come all the way to him.

"Well, what's wanted?" he demanded.

"Cream," panted Ashton. "Miss Chuckie says—tell Yuki."

"Shore pop, I'll bring all there is," replied Gowan. Ashton started back. "Hold on," said the puncher. "I want to say something to you, and here's the chance."

"What is it?"

"About him. I want you to keep a mighty close watch tonight."

"But you said that the murderer would not—"

"Bah! What does he count in this deal? It's this engineer. I've been chewing it over all afternoon. Miss Chuckie is as innocent and trusting as a lamb, spite of her winterings in Denver, and she's plumb locoed over him, reading so much about him in the reports."

"Still, it does not necessarily follow—"

"Don't it, though!" broke in the puncher. "Guess you didn't find it any funnier than I did seeing her hanging onto his shoulder."

"Curse him!" cried Ashton, his jealousy flaring at the remembrance.

"Now you're talking!" approved Gowan. "That shows you like her like I do. You're not going to stand for her losing her fortune."

"Her fortune?"

"By his flooding us off our range."

"Ah—as for that, I have been thinking it over. She told me Mr. Knowles owns five sections. If water is put on them—Western Colorado fruit lands are very valuable, you know."

"That's a lie. Water can't make five sections worth a range like ours. But supposing it could—" the puncher leaned towards Ashton, his eyes glaring with the cold malignancy of a striking rattlesnake's—"supposing it could, how about us letting her lose her good name?"

"Good God!" gasped Ashton. "It can't come to that!"

"Can't it? can't it? Where's your eyes? And him a married man! The—" Gowan cursed horribly.

"You really believe it!" cried Ashton, convinced by the other's outburst.

"Believe it? I know it!" declared Gowan. "If you thought half as much of her as I do—"

"I do!—not half, but a hundred times more!"

"Yes, you do?"

"I swear it! I'd do anything for her!"

"Except save her from him."

"No, no! How can I? Tell me how!"

The puncher bent nearer to the half-frenzied man. "You're going down that gulch with him. Suppose a spike gets knocked out or a rope breaks or a loose rock gets pushed over?"

"God!" cried Ashton, putting his hands over his eyes. "That would be murder!"

"Bah! You'd make a dog sick! Willing to do anything for her—except save her from him! And nothing to it but just an accident that's just as like as not to happen anyway."

"But—murder!" shudderingly muttered Ashton.

"Murder a skunk," sneered Gowan. "If saving her from him isn't a case of justifiable homicide, what is? Don't you get the idea? Just a likely accident, down there where nobody can see."

Ashton dropped his hands, half clenched, to his sides. Beads of cold sweat were gathering and running down his drawn face.

"I can't!" he whispered. "I—I can't!"

"Not if I agree to get out of the way and give you clear running?" tempted Gowan.

"You would?"

"Yes. You see how much I like her. You rid her of him, and I'll let you have her for doing it."

Ashton shuddered.

"Think it over—and watch him mighty close tonight," advised the tempter.

A red flush leaped into Ashton's face. Gowan struck his spurs into his horse's flank and loped away.

Ashton stood motionless. The puncher disappeared down the mountain side. The twilight faded and darkness closed down about the tortured man. He stood there motionless, his convulsed face alternately flushing and paling, his eyes now clouding, now burning with rage and hate.

When at last he returned to the camp he kept beyond the circle of firelight. Hurriedly he rolled up in his blankets for the night, muttering something about his head and his need of rest for the next day's work. The others accepted the explanation without question. They formed a cheerful domestic group about the fire from which he was shut out by his passion.

The ladies withdrew into the tent at an early hour. Blake strolled around the camp until after nine o'clock, but finally came with his blankets and companionably rolled up near Ashton. He was soon fast asleep. But Ashton lay tossing until after midnight. Weariness at last weighed down the lids of his hot eyes and numbed his tortured brain. He sank into a feverish sleep haunted with evil dreams.



CHAPTER XXIV

BLIND LOVE

At sunrise the harassed dreamer awoke to find Gowan gazing down at him somberly.

"You—you here?" he exclaimed, starting up on his elbow. "What is—" He checked himself and muttered brokenly, "I've been dreaming—horrible nightmares."

"He's down there overhauling his outfit," said Gowan. "Hope you've thought the matter over."

"My answer must be the same. I cannot do it, I cannot!" replied Ashton. He spoke hurriedly, as if afraid to linger on the thought.

"You can't—not to save her and have me give her to you?" asked Gowan.

Ashton clenched his hands and bent over in an agony of doubt and indecision.

"You devil!" he groaned.

"What! Because I'm willing to give her up, in order to see her saved?"

"Why don't you shoot him, if you're so anxious?" queried Ashton.

"And hang for it," retorted the puncher. "You can do it with an accident, and no risk. Anyway, that'll make things easier for his wife—to have him meet a natural death. Won't be anything said about why he was taken off. She hasn't begun to suspect what's going on between him and—"

Gowan paused, looked at the tent, and concluded: "I've done my part. I won't say any more. But just you remember what I've told you. You won't run any risk. Mr. Knowles hasn't come back yet. There'll be only them and me along, and we won't be able to see you do it. Just remember what it will mean to her—just remember that—when you get him where a shove or a loosened spike—Savvy?"

He went to loosen the diamond hitch of the packs that he had brought with him from the ranch. Ashton sank back and lay brooding until the girl came from the tent and called to inquire how he felt. Too wretched to care about his appearance, he rose and went over to her.

"Oh!" she exclaimed at sight of his haggard face. "You are ill!"

"Only an attack of indigestion and loss of sleep—something I often have," he lied. "A cup of coffee will set me up. Don't worry. I'm strong—head doesn't bother me at all this morning, except a numb feeling inside."

"I shall dress the wound at once, while the coffee is boiling," she replied.

He would have objected. She silenced him with a look that acted on his chafed spirit like oil upon a burn. Her kind, almost tender voice and the soft touch of her fingers on his head soothed his anguish and seemed to counteract the poison instilled by Gowan. He began to doubt the puncher and the witness of his own eyes.

When Blake and his wife came to breakfast, Ashton was so cheerful that they hardly noticed the traces of haggardness that yet lingered in his face. Blake at once centered the attention of all by explaining his plans for the exploration of the canyon. In addition to the surveyor's chain, a hammer, and the rope and spikes,—which were to be used only in making the descent,—he and Ashton were to carry the level and rod and a quantity of food. At the suggestion of Isobel, he agreed to take her father's revolver and fire it at intervals, on the chance that the watchers above might see the flash of the shots and so be able to follow the progress of the explorers down in the depths.

Genevieve quickly thought out signals to be given in response. If at night, a torch was to be cast down into the chasm; if in the daytime, a white flag, made of a sheet sent by Yuki, was to be waved out over the brink. As the explorers might become confused in the gloom of the canyon bottom, the point of the bend opposite Dry Fork Gulch was to be marked by a beacon fire built on the verge of the canyon wall.

Blake had already arranged everything that he and Ashton were to take down with them. Immediately after breakfast the outfit was fastened on the packhorses, together with food, water and blankets for those who were to remain on the heights. The ladies were determined to keep above the explorers at all points where the rim of the canyon could be approached. Gowan was to fetch and carry for them and take the horses down to the pool for water at night.

Within half an hour after breakfast the party was jogging away from camp, fully equipped for the great undertaking. Gowan was afoot. His horse, as well as the regular pack animals, was heavily loaded with stores. He walked with Isobel, who had insisted that Ashton should ride her pony. Blake strode along at his wife's stirrup, carrying his son in a clasp as tender as it was strong.

The engineer was the only cheerful member of the party. Even Thomas Herbert, that best tempered of babies, was peevish and fretful. He was instinctively reflexing the suppressed nervousness and anxiety of his mother. Gowan and Ashton were as gloomy in look and speech as the shadowy depths of the canyon. Isobel bravely sought to respond to Blake's confidence in the favorable outcome of the survey; but her smile, like Genevieve's, was forced and her eyes were troubled.

They reached the point of attack as the rays of the morning sun were beginning to strike down into the side gorge. This was as Blake had planned. He at once began to direct the preparations for the descent, himself doing the lion's share of the work.

A long detour to a point higher up the ravine offered an easy descent of its bottom to the place where it pitched steeply into the canyon. Blake preferred to take a short cut down the almost vertical side of the gulch. The three pieces of rope, each a hundred feet long, were knotted together and used to lower a grass-padded package containing all the equipment of the explorers except the level. The bundle was lodged on a broad shelf of rock, over two hundred and fifty feet down.

"Our first measurement," remarked Blake, as he subtracted from three hundred feet the length of the line left above the edge of the cliff. He jotted down the remainder in his notebook, and nodded to Ashton, who, with Gowan and Isobel, was holding the end of the rope. "You see why I had Mr. Gowan bring gloves and chaps and your leggins. We will make the line fast around that rock, and follow our outfit."

Ashton stared, slack jawed. "Really, you cannot mean—?"

"Yes. Why not?" asked Blake. "There's nothing to a slide like this except the look of it."

"Oh, Tom!" breathlessly cried Genevieve. "Are you sure—quite sure!"

"Sure I'm sure, little woman," he replied. "There's not the slightest danger. This is a new manila rope, and the package, with all those spikes in it, weighs as much as I do. That gives us a sure test."

"I might have known!" she sighed her relief.

"Still it does look a bit stiff for a start-off," he admitted. "If Lafe prefers, he can go around and come down the ravine bed. I shall slide the line and be getting the outfit in shape for shooting the chutes."

"How about the rope?" asked Isobel.

"You are to drop it to me as soon as I get down and stand from under," directed Blake. He examined with minute care the loop and knot with which Gowan and Isobel had made the rope fast around the point of rock. Having satisfied himself that the knot was perfectly secure, he turned to his wife and opened his arms. "Now, Sweetheart! Wish us good luck and a quick journey!"

Gowan and Ashton drew back and looked away as Genevieve flung herself on her husband's broad chest, unable to restrain her tears.

"Now, now, little woman," he soothed, patting her shoulder. "There's nothing to be afraid of, and you know it."

"If—if only we could see you down there!" she sobbed.

"You will, part of the time, with your glasses. And you'll be sure to see the flash of some of my shots. That's all that I'm worrying about—you'll be skirting along the canyon rim. Promise me you'll not go near the edge except where the footing is perfectly safe."

"Yes, Dear. I shall have Thomas to remind me to be careful. But you?"

"I shall have the thought of you both to keep me from being rash. Remember that."

"You will not be rash, I know," she answered, smiling up at him bravely. "You will go and come back to us soon. Now kiss me and Thomas. I shall not detain you from your work."

"Spoken like my partner," he quietly praised her.

Both by tone and manner he was plainly seeking to ease the parting to the calmness of an ordinary farewell. His wife responded to this, outwardly at least. Not so Isobel. From the moment he had turned to Genevieve, the girl had betrayed a rapidly increasing agitation.

He went to kiss his baby, who had fallen asleep during the last half mile of the trip and lay sprawled in the shade of a bowlder. As he came back, Genevieve lingered beside the child, as if half fearful of watching her husband begin his dizzy descent of the rope.

Isobel was standing close to the verge, her bosom heaving with quick-drawn breaths, her excited face flushing and paling in rapid alternation. Blake had pulled on his left glove, but had kept his right hand bare for her. As he held it out he looked up from the taut rope at his feet and saw her excessively agitated face.



"Why, Miss Chuckie!" he remonstrated, "you're not going to break down now. You see how Jenny takes it. There's nothing to fear."

"Oh, but, Tom!" she panted, "you—you don't understand! you don't know! It's not merely the danger! It's the dreadful thought that if you—if you should not—come back—and I hadn't told you!"

"Told me?" he echoed in hushed wonderment as her anguished soul looked out at him through her wide eyes and he sensed the first vague foreshadowing of the truth. "You have something to tell me—your voice!—your eyes!—"

"You see it! You know me!" she gasped, and she flung herself into his arms. Straining herself to him in half frantic ecstasy, she murmured in a broken whisper: "Yes! I am—am Belle! It is wicked and selfish to tell you; but to have you go down there without first—I could not bear it! Yet I—I shall not drag you down—disgrace you. Never that! I'll go away!... Oh, Tom! dear Tom!"

He had stood dumfounded by the revelation of her identity. At first he could not speak; hardly could he think. His eyes stared into hers with a dazed look. But before she could finish her impassioned declaration of self-abnegation he roused from his bewilderment, and his great arms closed about her quivering body. He crushed her to him and pressed his lips upon her white forehead.

"Belle!—poor little Belle!... But why? Tell me why? All this time, and you never showed by a single word or look!"

"I did!" she sought to defend herself from the tender reproach. "I did, but I—I was afraid to tell."

"Afraid?"

The girl's face flamed scarlet with shame. She sought to draw away from him. "Let me go, Tom! oh, please, let me go! I am a selfish, wicked girl! I have done it! I have done it! Now there is no help for it! She must be told—all!"

"All?" he questioned.

"Yes, all, Tom! I cannot deny Mary! She saved me! I believe she is in Heaven. She could not help doing what she did. She could not help it, Tom—and she saved me! I must give you up—go away; but I can never, never deny my sister!"

Blake swung half around with the quivering girl, and looked over her downbent head at his wife. Genevieve stood almost within arm's-length of them. He met her gaze, and immediately pushed the girl out towards her.

"Listen, Belle," he said. "It is all right. Here is Jenny waiting for you. She understands."

Gowan, watching rigid and tense-lipped, with his hand clenched on the hilt of his half-drawn Colt's, was astonished to see Mrs. Blake step forward and clasp Isobel in her arms. But Ashton did not see the strange act that checked the puncher's vengeful shot. While the girl was yet clinging to Blake, he had turned and fled along the edge of the ravine, for the moment stark mad with rage and despair.

He rushed off without a cry, and the others were themselves far too surcharged with emotion to heed his going until he had disappeared around a turn in the ravine. When at last, almost spent with exertion, he staggered up a ridge to glare back at those from whom he had fled, his bloodshot eyes could perceive only three figures on the brink of the gorge. They were kneeling to look over into the ravine.

His thoughts were still in a wild whirl, but the heat of his mad rage had passed and left him in a cold fury. He instantly comprehended that Blake had swung over the edge and was descending the rope down the almost sheer face of the ravine wall.

Now was the time! A touch of a knife-edge to the rope, and the girl would be saved. Would Gowan think of it?... Of course he would think of it. But he would not do it. He would leave the deed to be done by the man to whom he had relinquished Miss Chuckie. It was for that man to save her—to destroy the tempter and break the spell of fascination that was drawing her over the brink of a pit far deeper than any earthly canyon. He, Lafayette Ashton—not Gowan—was the man. He must save her—down there in the depths, where no eye could see.

[Transcriber's Note: Map of High Mesa and Dry Mesa with place of descent and other landmarks shown appears here.]



CHAPTER XXV

THE DESCENT INTO HELL

Dangling like a spider on its thread, with a twist of the rope around one of his legs, Blake had gone down into the ravine, hand under hand, with the agility of a sailor. The tough leather of his chapareras prevented the rope from chafing the leg around which it slipped, and he managed with his free foot to fend himself off from the sharp-cornered ledges of the cliff side. In this he was less concerned for himself than for his level, which he carried in a sling, high up between his shoulders.

He was soon safe at the lower end of the rope, on the shelf beside the bundled outfit. He waved his hat to the down-peering watchers, and climbed a few yards up the ravine, to creep in under an overhanging rock. A few moments later the loosened rope came sliding down the steep descent, the last length whipping from ledge to ledge with a velocity that made it hiss through the air.

Blake was not disturbed by this proof of the cumulative speed of falling bodies. He came down and coolly set about his preparations for the descent of the gorge bottom. He unlashed the bundle and divided its contents. This done, he took a vertical measurement by going out towards the canyon along a horizontal shelf on the side wall of the gorge, until he could drop his surveying chain down the sheer precipice to a shelf almost a hundred feet below him.

Unaware of Ashton's mistake and furious flight, the engineer was proceeding with his work in the expectation that he would soon be joined by his assistant. He was not disappointed. As he returned along the shelf, after entering the measurement in his notebook, Ashton came bounding and scrambling down the ravine bottom at reckless speed. He fetched up on the verge of the break, purple-faced and panting. His mouth twitched nervously and there was a wild look in his dark eyes. But Blake attributed all to the excitement and exertion of the headlong rush down the ravine.

"No need for you to have hurried so, Lafe," he said. "I suppose you had to go farther around than I thought would be necessary. But I'd rather you had kept me waiting an hour than for you to have chanced spraining an ankle."

"Yes, you need me in your business!" scoffed Ashton.

"Your employer's business," rejoined the engineer. He straightened up from the packs that he was lashing together and gazed gravely at his scowling assistant. "See here, Mr. Ashton, this is no time for you to raise a row. We shall have quite enough else to think about from now on, until we are up again out of the canyon."

"I've enough to think about—and more!" muttered Ashton.

"Understand? I'm not asking anything of you for myself," said Blake. "You are doing this survey for your employer."

"I'm here because of her!" retorted the younger man. "I'm here to make it certain that no harm is to come to her!"

Blake smiled. "Good for you! I hardly thought you were here for the fun of it. You are going to prove to us that you have the makings. We're both working for her, Lafe. I don't mind telling you now that I am planning to do something big for her." He looked up the ravine wall, his eyes aglow with tenderness. "Belle! dear little Belle! To think that after all these years—"

"Shut up!" cried Ashton. "Stop that! stop it, and get to work! I know what you're planning to do! Don't talk to me!"

Blake stared in astonishment. "Didn't think you were so sore over that old affair. I told you I had nothing to do about your father's—"

"Don't talk to me! don't talk to me!" frantically cried Ashton. "You ruined me! Now her!"

"Lord! If you're as sore as all that!" rejoined Blake, his eyes hardening. "Look here, Mr. Ashton, we'll settle this when we get up on top again. Meantime, I shall do my work, and I shall see to it that you do yours. Understand?"

"Get busy, then! I shall do my work!" snarled Ashton.

Blake pointed to one of the three bundles that he had tied together. "There's half the grub, the tripod and the rod. I can manage the rest. I've dropped a measurement to the foot of the first incline."

He swung one of the other bundles on his back, under the level. The third, which was made up of railroad spikes and picket-pins, he sent rolling down the steep slope, tied to one end of the rope. He had driven a spike into a crevice of the rock. Hooking the other end of the rope over its head with an open loop, he grasped the line and started to walk down the gorge bottom. As he descended he dragged the loose lengths of rope after him.

Ashton stood rigid, staring at the spike and loop. If the loop should slip or the spike pull out, he need only climb back out of the ravine—to her. But Blake's work was not the kind to slip or pull out. The watcher looked at the powerful figure backing rapidly down that roof-like pitch. One of the toes of the level tripod under the taut loop would easily pry the rope off the spike-head. He turned his pack around to get at the tripod—and paused to look upwards at the three tiny faces peering down over the brink of the cliff.

He slung the pack over his shoulder and grasped the rope to follow his leader, who had come to the narrow shelf from which another measurement must be taken. He made the descent no less rapidly and easily than had the engineer. He was naturally agile, and now he was too full of his purpose to have any thought of vertigo. Yet quickly as he followed, when he reached the shelf he found that Blake had already lowered the bundle of spikes over the cliff below and was reenforcing with a spike a picket-pin that he had driven deep into a crevice.

"Drop over the chain at that point," curtly ordered the engineer. "Think you can climb back up this slope without the rope?"

"Yes," answered Ashton, still more curtly.

Blake lifted the line and sent up it a wave that carried to the upper end and flipped the loop from the spike-head. He jerked the freed end down to him and knotted it securely to the picket-pin, while Ashton was making the third vertical measurement. He then lowered everything except the level in loops of the line, and wrapped a strip of canvas around the line where it bent over the sharp edge of the cliff.

Ashton laconically reported the measurement. Blake noted it in his book, and promptly swung himself out over the edge of the cliff. Again his assistant looked at the fastening of the rope; again he looked upwards at the three tiny down-peering faces; and again he followed his leader. The sun was glaring directly down into the gorge. Later they would descend into the shadows where no eye could perceive from above the loosening of the rope.

Blake cut off the line at the foot of the cliff and left it dangling. They would require it for their ascent. Another Titan step took fifty feet more of the rope.

There followed a series of steep pitches, which they descended like the first, unlooping the rope from spike-head after spike-head. The only real difficulty of this part of the descent was the tedious task of carrying the vertical measurement down the slopes at places where even Blake could not find footing to climb out horizontally on either wall of the gorge to obtain a clear drop.

Always, as they descended, the engineer scanned the rocks both above and below, calculating where the gorge bottom could be reascended without a line. Whenever he considered the incline too smooth or too steep for safe footing, he drove in spikes near enough together to be successively lassoed from below with a length of line.

Had not the nature and condition of the rock provided frequent faults and crevices that permitted the driving of spikes, the descent must soon have become impracticable. But the engineer invariably found some chink in which to hammer a spike with his powerful blows. As, time after time, he overcame difficulties so great that his companion could perceive no possible solution, Ashton began to feel himself struggling against a feeling of reluctant admiration.

All his hate could not blind him to the extraordinary mental and physical efficiency displayed by the engineer. Never once did the steely muscles permit a slip or false step, never once did the cool brain miscalculate the next most advantageous movement.

They were now so deep that Blake had to shout his infrequent directions, to be heard above the booming reverberations of the canyon. Half way down they came to a forty-foot cliff. Blake made his preparations, and swung over the edge. Here was an opportunity. Ashton instantly bent over the knot of the rope.

Close before his eyes he saw the clearly outlined shadow of his head. He hesitated and straightened on his knees to stare up at the top of the gorge. He could no longer discern the three down-peering faces, but he knew that they were still there. And the sunrays still pierced down to him between the walls of the gorge. The shadows were farther down, in the lower depths. He must follow and wait.

When he slid to the foot of the cliff, Blake silently cut off the rope. There was still nearly a hundred and fifty feet left for them to use below. But they went down more than a thousand feet before they again had need of it. As Blake had foretold, the lower half of the descent was far less precipitous than the upper. In places the vertical measurements were carried down by rod readings, the level being set without its tripod on the points of rock where the previous readings had been taken. At other places Blake marked out horizontal points ahead on the gorge wall, and climbed to them with the chain.

All the time the reverberations of the canyon were becoming louder. Dark shadows began to gather along one wall of the gorge. The sun was no longer directly in line with the ravine, and they were now far down in the lower depths. Ashton's knees were beginning to tremble with weakness. They had brought no water, for they were descending to the river. The torment of thirst was added to the torment of his hate. He began to look with fierce eagerness for the opportunity to do his work—to accomplish the deed for which he had descended into this inferno. Then he could go up again, out of the roaring, reverberating hell about him, away from the burning hell within him.

The shadows were creeping out at him from the side of the gorge. The sunshine was going—it was flickering away up the opposite precipices. Now it had gone. All the gorge was somber with shadows. And below were the blue-black depths of the canyon bottom. Dread crept in upon his smoldering hate to sweep across its white-hot coals with chill gusts of fear.

But now they were come to another sheer cliff—the last in the descent. From its foot the gorge bottom inclined easily down the final three hundred feet to its mouth, where the river of the deep roared past along the canyon bed, its foam flashing silvery white through the gloom.

Here at last was the opportunity for which he had waited—here down in these dark shadows where no eye could see—here where no shriek or cry could pierce up to the outer world of light and sunshine through the wild uproar of the angry waters. He awaited the moment, aflame with pent-up fury, shivering with cold dread.

Blake dropped his chain from the cliff-edge and took the last vertical measurement—fifty-three feet. He smiled. The hardest part of the work was almost accomplished. He swung over the edge.

Ashton flung himself on his knees beside the triple knot that held the line fast to its spike. This time he did not hesitate, but began to tug at the rope end with fierce eagerness. He loosened one knot. The next was harder to unfasten. Blake had tied it with utmost secureness. At last it yielded to the tugging of his gloved fingers. He started to loosen the third knot. Suddenly the taut line slackened. With a stifled cry of rage, he paused to peer over the edge. Blake had slipped down the line so rapidly that he was already at the foot of the cliff.

Reaching back, Ashton jerked the rope from the spike-head, to cast it down on the engineer. A glimpse of the flashing water in the canyon bottom gave momentary check to his vengeful impulse. If only he had a drink of that cool water! He was parched; his lips were cracking; in his mouth was the taste of dust. Must he stay up here on the dry rock while Blake went on down beside the foaming river to drink his fill?

As he paused, a doubt clutched his heart in an icy grip. All the way down that devil's stairway he had been witness to Blake's extraordinary resourcefulness and tremendous strength. What if he should find a way to clamber up the precipices? He had lowered everything before descending. There was nothing to fling down upon him—no loose rock or stone to topple over and crush him.

Chilled by that doubt, Ashton hesitated, his hands alternately tightening and relaxing their grip on the rope. What if the man should contrive to escape? There seemed no bounds to his ingenuity.... No, he must be followed on down into the canyon and destroyed, else he would escape—he would come up out of this inferno, like the demon he was, and destroy her. He must be followed!... And the water—the cool, refreshing water!

His thirst now seized upon Ashton with terrible intensity. Rage, no less than the laborious exertion of the descent, had dried up his body with its feverish fire. Almost maddened with the torment of his craving, he looped the rope on the spike-head with reckless haste and slid down over the edge of the cliff.

As the line tautened with his weight it gave several inches, but he was too nearly frantic to heed. He slipped down it so swiftly that the strands burned his hands through the tough palms of his gloves. In a few moments his feet were on a level with Blake's head. He clutched the rope tighter to check his fall. An instant later he dropped heavily on the rock shelf at the cliff foot, and the rope came swishing down after him.

"God!" shouted Blake. Involuntarily he flung back his head and stared up the great gorge to the faraway heights where were waiting his wife and child.

But Ashton neither paused nor looked upward. Rebounding from his fall, he rushed down the slope to the river, with a gasping cry—"Water! water!"

For a time the engineer stood as if stunned, his big fists clenched, his broad chest heaving laboriously. Yet he was far too well seasoned in desperate adventure to give way to despair. Soon he rallied. He lowered his gaze from the heights to examine the cliff and the adjoining walls of the gorge. All were alike sheer and unscalable. The lines about his big mouth hardened with grim determination. He picked up the rope and began winding it about his mid-body above the low-buckled cartridge belt.

He arranged the coils with such care that he did not notice the condition of the end of the line until he had drawn in over eighty feet. Then at last he saw. Though he had not forgotten to wrap the line with canvas where it passed over the cliff edge, he had thought the strands must have been frayed through on a sharp corner of rock. Instead, he found himself staring at the clean-cut string-wrapped rope end that he had knotted to the spike.

For several moments he stood looking at it, his forehead creased in thought. What had become of the knot?... He could think of only one solution to the puzzle. He turned and gazed down through the gloom at the dim figure crouched beside the edge of the swirling water.

"Locoed," he said pityingly—"Locoed.... Poor devil!"



CHAPTER XXVI

IN THE GLOOM

When the engineer came down to the river, Ashton still crouched low, his dripping head close over the water, as if he was afraid even to look away from it. Blake rinsed out his mouth and stood up to sip slowly from his hat, while looking about at the awesome spectacle of the canyon bottom.

His first glance was at the swift-flowing stream. His eyes brightened and the furrows in his forehead smoothed away. The river was not as formidable as its tumult and foam had threatened. It could be descended by wading at the places where ledges and bowlders along the base of the canyon walls failed to afford safe footing. He glanced up the stupendous precipices at the blue-black ribbon of sky, but only for a moment. His present thought was not of escape from the depths.

He bent over to grip the crouching man by the shoulder and lift him to his feet. Ashton writhed about and glared at him like a trapped wolf.

"Let go!" he snarled. "It was an accident! I didn't mean to do it!"

"Of course not," replied Blake, releasing his grip but standing close that he might not have to shout. "It's all right, old man—my fault. The knot slipped."

"You own it! You own it's your fault!" cried Ashton. "You've brought me down here into this hell-pit! We can't get out! Lost! All your fault—yours!"

He made a frantic snatch and jerked the revolver from Blake's holster. The engineer caught his wrist in an iron grasp and wrenched the weapon from him.

"None of that, old man," he admonished with a cool sternness that chilled the frenzy of the other like a dash of ice water. "You're here to do your work, and you're going to do it. Understand?"

"My work!" repeated Ashton wildly.

"Yes, your work," commanded Blake, his face as hard as iron. "We're going to survey Deep Canyon down to the tunnel site. Your work is to carry rod. Do you get that?"

"Down the canyon?—deeper!"

"We can't get back up here. There's a place down there beyond the tunnel site where perhaps we can make it up the canyon wall."

"A place where we—?" shrilled Ashton. "A place—Good God! and you stand here doing nothing!"

He whirled to spring out into the swirling water. Blake was still swifter in his movements. He caught the fugitive by the arm and dragged him back.

"Wait!" he commanded. "We must first carry the levels down to the tunnel site. You hear that? Stick by me, and I'll pull you through. Try to run, and, by God, I'll shoot you like a dog!"

The captive glared into the steel-white eyes of the engineer, anger overcoming his panicky fear.

"Let go!" he panted. "Don't worry! I'll do my work—I'll do my work!"

"If you don't, you'll never get out of this canyon," grimly rejoined Blake. He released his hold, and started up the slope, with a curt order: "Come along. We can rod down the slope."

Ashton followed him, silent and morose. The instrument was screwed to its tripod, and a line of levels from the foot of the last vertical measurement was carried down the slope to the canyon. The last rod reading was on a ledge, three feet above the water, at the corner of the gorge. Blake considered the reading worthy of permanent record. They had measured all the many hundreds of feet down from the top of High Mesa to these profound depths. With his two-pound hammer and one of the few remaining spikes, he chiseled a cross deep in the surface of the black rock.

That mark of the engineer-captain, scouting before the van of man's Nature-conquering army, was the sign of the first human beings that had ever descended alive to the bottom of Deep Canyon.

When he had cut the cross, Blake took out his Colt's, and, gazing up the heights, began to fire at slow intervals. Confined between the walls of gorge and canyon, each report of the heavy revolver crashed out above the tumult of the river and ran echoing and reechoing up the stupendous precipices. Yet long before they reached the rim of those towering walls they blurred away and merged and were lost in the ceaseless reverberations of the waters.

Blake well knew that this would happen. But he also knew that the flash of the shot would be distinctly discernible in the gloom of the abyss. As he fired, he scanned the verge of the uppermost precipices. After the fourth shot he ceased firing and flung up his hand to point at the heights.

"Look!" he shouted. "They see! There is the flag!"

Ashton stared up with wide, feverish eyes. From an out-jutting point of rock on the lofty rim he saw a tiny white dot waving to and fro against the blue-black sky. The watchers above had seen the flash of the revolver shots and were fluttering the white flag in responsive signal. Though on the world above the sun beat down its full mid-afternoon flood of light, the two men in the abyss could see stars twinkling in the dark sky around the waving fleck of white.

Blake fired two shots in quick succession, the agreed signal that told the flag was seen. He then calmly seated himself and began to add together the vertical measurements taken during the descent of the gorge. But Ashton groaned and flung himself face downward on the rough stone.

Blake soon finished his sum in addition, and the result brought a smile to his serious face. He checked the figures with painstaking carefulness, and nodded, fully satisfied. Replacing book and pencil in the deep pocket of his shirt, he opened one of the packages of food. When he had laid out enough for a hearty meal, he looked at Ashton. The prostrate man had not stirred.

"Come, Lafe," he called encouragingly. "Time to eat."

Ashton lay still and made no response.

Blake raised his voice—"Come! You're not going to quit. You're going to eat. You must keep your strength to fight your way through and up out of here—to her!"

Ashton sullenly rose and came to sit down on the rock beside the outspread food. He was silent, but he ate even more heartily than his companion. When they had finished, Blake swung his pack and level on his shoulder, fired one shot, and stepped out into the swift but shallow river. Wading as far downstream as he could see to read the rod in the twilight of the depths, he set up the tripod of his instrument on a rock and took the reading given him by Ashton.

The survey of the canyon itself had begun. Unappalled by the awful height of the mighty precipices on either side, undaunted by the uncertainty of escape, heedless of the gloom of the deep, of the tumult and rush and chill of the icy waters, the engineer boldly advanced to the attack of this abysmal stronghold of Primeval Nature, his square jaw set in grim determination to wrest from these hitherto inviolate depths that which he sought to learn. Whatever might follow, he must and would unlock the secret of the hidden waters. Afterwards might come death by slow starvation or the quick dashing down from some half-scaled precipice. That mattered not now. First must the engineer perform his work,—first must he execute the task that he had set himself for the conquest of the chasm that was likely to prove his tomb.

Vastly different in purpose, yet no less resolute than the engineer, Ashton joined zealously in the grim battle with the abyss—for battle it soon proved to be. Only in places was the subterranean river shallow and easy to wade. More often it foamed in wild fury down steep rapids, to fling itself over ledges into black pools; or, worst of all, it swirled deep and arrowy-swift between fanged rocks where the channel narrowed.

Wading, swimming, leaping from rock to rock, scrambling up and down the steep precipice foot, creeping along narrow shelves,—stubbornly the explorers fought their way deeper through that wild passage. Chilled by the icy waters and bruised by many a slip on loose stones and wet, water-polished rocks, ever they carried the line of levels down alongside the torrent, crossing over and back from side to side, twisting and turning with the twists and bends of the chasm. And at every stand Blake jotted down the rod readings in his half-soaked book with his pencil and figured the elevation of each turning point before "pulling up" his instrument to move on downstream to the next "set up."

At the end of every half hour he fired a single shot to signal their progress in the depths to the watchers above. But never once did he stop to look up for the flag. Occasionally he was required to help Ashton through or over some unusually difficult passage. For the most part, however, each fought his own way. The odds were not altogether in favor of the older man. He was hampered by the care of the instrument, which must be shielded from all blows or falls. The rod, on the contrary, served as a staff and support to Ashton, alike in the water and on the rocks.

Some time before sunset the waning light in the canyon bottom became so dim that Blake was compelled to cease work. He took a last reading on a broad shelf of rock well above the surface of the water, joined Ashton on the shelf, and began firing the revolver at five-minute intervals. After the fifth shot he at last perceived the white dot of the flag far above on the opposite brink of the chasm. He fired two shots in quick succession, and calmly sat down to open one of the soaked packages of food.

Ashton did not wait to be bidden to supper. He fell to on the food and ate ravenously. Blake did not check him, though he himself took little and carefully gathered up and returned to the package every scrap of food left at the end of the meal. As Ashton lay back on the rock he squirmed from side to side and groaned. His bruises were so numerous that he could not find a comfortable position.

"Cheer up!" grimly quoted Blake. "The worst is yet to come."

He stretched himself out on the rock-shelf and, regardless of the sullen resistance of the younger man, drew him into his arms. Chilled to the marrow by his frequent icy drenchings, Ashton was shivering in the cold wind which came down the canyon with the approach of night. But Blake's massive body and limbs were aglow with abundant vitality. Warmed and sheltered from the wind, the exhausted man relaxed like a child in the strong arms of his companion and quickly sank into the deep slumber of overtaxed nature.

Blake lay awake until the narrow strip of sky that showed between the vast walls of rock deepened to an inky blackness thickly sprinkled with scintillating stars. The light of a watchfire flamed red far above on the opposite rim of the chasm wall. To the man below it was like the glow of human love in the chill darkness of the Unknown. With a gesture of reverent passion and adoration, he put his fingers to his lips and flung a kiss up out of the abyss. Then he, too, relaxed on the hard rock and sank into heavy sleep.

Ashton was the first to waken. The wind had changed, and he was roused by the different note in the ceaseless roar of the river. He stared up at the star-jeweled sky. It was still intensely black; yet the gloom of the depths was lessened by a vague pale illumination, a faint shadow of light that might have been the ghost of a dead day. He thought it was the gray dawn, and sought to roll over on his rock bed away from the sheltering embrace of Blake. The engineer was still deep in profound slumber. His big arm slipped laxly from across the moving man's breast.

The change of position wrung a groan from Ashton. Every muscle in his body was cramped, every bruise stiff and sore. Not until he had turned and twisted for several moments was he able to rise to his feet. The vague ghost light about him brightened. He gazed upwards. He did not notice the tiny flame of the fire that told of the anxious watchers above. Out over the monstrous black wall of the abyss was drifting a burnished silver-white disk.

"The moon!" he groaned. "Only the moon! To wait here—with him!—with him!"

He looked down at the big form of the sleeping man, and suddenly all his pent-up rage burst its bounds. It poured through his veins in streams of fire. He stared about in fierce eagerness in search of a weapon. Blake lay upon the hilt of the revolver; the level rod lacked weight and balance. But the heavy hammer—a blow on the upturned temple of the sleeper!—

With the cunning stealth of madness, Ashton took up the hammer and crept around back of Blake's head. He straightened on his knees, and peered down at the calm, powerful face of the engineer.

What if he was a veritable Samson, this conqueror of canyons? Where now was his power? Sleep had bound fast his steel muscles, had numbed his indomitable will and locked his keen intellect in the black prison of unconsciousness.

The avenger hovered over him, gloating. Now at last was come the opportunity—the perfect opportunity, down in these uttermost depths, in the secret night time. The world above slept—and he slept. Never should he waken from that sleep; never should he rouse up in his evil strength to escape out of the abyss and bring ruin to her!

Lightly the hammer swung over and downward, measuring the curve of the stroke. It lifted and poised. Again it swung down; and again it lifted and poised. The blow must be certain—there must not be the slightest chance of missing.

Each time the heavy steel head stopped a full two inches short of the upturned temple—but each time its shadow fell across the eyes of the sleeper. He stirred. The hammer whirled up, gripped in both hands of the kneeling man. The sleeper turned flat on his back, with his face full to the light. A quiver ran through the tense muscles of the avenger. Had the eyes of the sleeper opened, had their lids so much as fluttered, the hammer must have crashed down.

But it was the sleeper's lips that moved. As it were by a miracle of acuteness, the tense nerves of the other's ear caught the whispered words through the roaring of the river—"Jenny! Son!"

The hammer hurled away out into the swirl of the foam-flecked waters. The avenger flung himself about, face downward on the rock.

"God!" he sobbed, in an agony of remorse. "Forgive me, God! I cannot do it! I am weak—unfit!... Not even to save her!—not even to save her!"

He writhed in the anguish of his love and rage and self-abasement. He had failed; he was too weak to do the deed. But God—Would God permit that evil should befall her?

He struggled to his feet and flung up his quivering hands to moon and stars and black sky in passionate invocation—"O God! You say that vengeance is Yours; that You will repay! Take me, if You will—I give myself! Only destroy him too! Save her! save her!"

Again Blake stirred, and this time he opened his eyes. Ashton had sunk down in a huddled silent heap. Blake gazed up at the watchfire on the heights, smiled, and turned over to again fall asleep.



CHAPTER XXVII

LOWER DEPTHS

Beetling precipices shut off the direct light of the moonbeams and left the abyss again in dense darkness long before the coming of the laggard dawn. Blake slept on, storing up strength for the renewal of the battle. Yet even he could not outsleep the reluctant lingering of night. He awoke while the tiny flame of the watchfire still flickered bright against the inky darkness of the sky.