Overland by John William De Forest (page 5)

“Don’t seem to need much help. The river doos the paddlin’; wish it didn’t. No ‘casion to send anybody aloft. I’ll take a seat in the stern ‘n’ mind the hellum. Guess that’s all they is to be done.”

“You dum paddywhack,” he presently reopened, “what d’ye break yer paddle for?”

“I didn’t break it,” yapped Sweeny indignantly. “It broke itself.”

“Well, what d’ye say y’ could paddle for, when y’ couldn’t?”

“I can paddle. I paddled as long as I had anythin’ but a sthick.”

“Oh, you dum landlubber!” smirked Glover. “What if I should order ye to the masthead?”

“I wouldn’t go,” asseverated Sweeny. “I’ll moind no man who isn’t me suparior officer. I’ve moindin’ enough to do in the arrmy. I wouldn’t go, onless the liftinint towld me. Thin I’d go.”

“Guess y’ wouldn’t now.”

“Yis I wud.”

“But they an’t no mast.”

“I mane if there was one.”

This kind of babble Glover kept up for some minutes, with the sole object of amusing and cheering Thurstane, whose extreme depression surprised and alarmed him. He knew that the situation was bad, and that it would take lots of pluck to bring them through it.

“Capm, where d’ye think we’re bound?” he presently inquired. “Whereabouts doos this river come out?”

“It runs into the Colorado of the West, and that runs into the head of the Gulf of California.”

“Californy! Reckon I’ll git to the diggins quicker ‘n I expected. Goin’ at this rate, we’ll make about a hundred ‘n’ twenty knots a day. What’s the distance to Californy?”

“By the bends of the river it can’t be less than twelve hundred miles to the gulf.”

“Whew!” went Glover. “Ten days’ sailin’. Wal, smooth water all the way?”

“The San Juan has never been navigated. So far as I know, we are the first persons who ever launched a boat on it.”

“Whew! Why, it’s like discoverin’ Ameriky. Wal, what d’ye guess about the water? Any chance ‘f its bein’ smooth clear through?”

“The descent to the gulf must be two or three thousand feet, perhaps more. We can hardly fail to find rapids. I shouldn’t be astonished by a cataract.”

Glover gave a long whistle and fell into grave meditation. His conclusion was: “Can’t navigate nights, that’s a fact. Have to come to anchor. That makes twenty days on’t. Wal, Capm, fust thing is to fish up a bit ‘f driftwood ‘n’ whittle out ‘nother paddle. Want a boat-pole, too, like thunder. We’re awful short ‘f spars for a long voyage.”

His lively mind had hardly dismissed this subject before he remarked: “Dum cur’ous that towline breaking. I overhauled every foot on’t. I’d a bet my bottom fo’pence on its drawin’ ten ton. Haul in the slack end ‘n’ let’s hev a peek at it.”

The tip of the lariat, which was still attached to the boat, being handed to him, he examined it minutely, closed his eyes, whistled, and ejaculated, “Sawed!”

“What?” asked Thurstane.

“Sawed,” repeated Glover. “That leather was haggled in tew with a jagged knife or a sharp flint or suthin ‘f that sort. Done a purpose, ‘s sure ‘s I’m a sinner.”

Thurstane took the lariat, inspected the breakage carefully, and scowled with helpless rage.

“That infernal Texan!” he muttered.

“Sho!” said Glover. “That feller? Anythin’ agin ye? Wal, Capm, then all I’ve got to say is, you come off easy. That feller ‘d cut a sleepin’ man’s throat. I sh’d say thank God for the riddance. Tell ye I’ve watched that cuss. Been blastedly afeard ‘f him. Hev so, by George! The further I git from him the safer I feel.”

“Not a nice man to leave _there_” muttered Thurstane, whose anxiety was precisely not for himself, but for Clara. The young fellow could not be got to talk much; he was a good deal upset by his calamity. The parting from Clara was an awful blow; the thought of her dangers made him feel as if he could jump overboard; and, lurking deep in his soul, there was an ugly fear that Coronado might now win her. He was furious moreover at having been tricked, and meditated bedlamite plans of vengeance. For a time he stared more at the mangled lariat than at the amazing scenery through which he was gliding.

And yet that scenery, although only a prelude, only an overture to the transcendent oratorios of landscape which were to follow, was in itself a horribly sublime creation. Not twenty minutes after the snapping of the towline the boat had entered one of those stupendous canons which form the distinguishing characteristic of the great American table-land, and make it a region unlike any other in the world.

Remember that the canon is a groove chiselled out of rock by a river. Although a groove, it is never straight for long distances. The river at its birth was necessarily guided by the hollows of the primal plateau; moreover, it was tempted to labor along the softest surfaces. Thus the canon is a sinuous gully, cut down from the hollows of rocky valleys, and following their courses of descent from mountain-chain toward ocean.

In these channels the waters have chafed, ground, abraded, eroded for centuries which man cannot number. Like the Afreets of the Arabian Nights, they have been mighty slaves, subject to a far mightier master. That potent magician whose lair is in the centre of the earth, and whom men have vaguely styled the attraction of gravitation, has summoned them incessantly toward himself. In their struggle to render him obedience, they have accomplished results which make all the works of man insignificant by comparison.

To begin with, vast lakes, which once swept westward from the bases of the Rocky Mountains, were emptied into the Pacific. Next the draining currents transformed into rivers, cut their way through the soil which formerly covered the table-lands and commenced their attrition upon the underlying continent of sandstone. It was a grinding which never ceased; every pebble and every bowlder which lay in the way was pressed into the endless labor; mountains were used up in channelling mountains.

The central magician was insatiable and pitiless; he demanded not only the waters, but whatever they could bring; he hungered after the earth and all that covered it. His obedient Afreets toiled on, denuding the plateaux of their soil, washing it away from every slope and peak, pouring it year by year into the canons, and whirling it on to the ocean. The rivers, the brooklets, the springs, and the rains all joined in this eternal robbery. Little by little an eighth of a continent was stripped of its loam, its forests, its grasses, its flowers, its vegetation of every species. What had been a land of fertility became an arid and rocky desert.

Then the minor Afreets perished of the results of their own obedience. There being no soil, the fountains disappeared; there being no evaporation, the rains diminished. Deprived of sustenance, nearly all the shorter streams dried up, and the channels which they had hewn became arid gullies. Only those rivers continued to exist which drew their waters from the snowy slopes of the Rocky Mountains or from the spurs and ranges which intersect the plateaux. The ages may come when these also will cease to flow, and throughout all this portion of the continent the central magician will call for his Afreets in vain.

For some time we must attend much to the scenery of the desert thus created. It has become one of the individuals of our story, and interferes with the fate of the merely human personages. Thurstane could not long ignore its magnificent, oppressive, and potent presence. Forgetting somewhat his anxieties about the loved one whom he had left behind, he looked about him with some such amazement as if he had been translated from earth into regions of supernature.

The canon through which he was flying was a groove cut in solid sandstone, less than two hundred feet wide, with precipitous walls of fifteen hundred feet, from the summit of which the rock sloped away into buttes and peaks a thousand feet higher. On every side the horizon was half a mile above his head. He was in a chasm, twenty-five hundred feet below the average surface of the earth, the floor of which was a swift river.

He seemed to himself to be traversing the abodes of the Genii. Although he had only heard of “Vathek,” he thought of the Hall of Eblis. It was such an abyss as no artist has ever hinted, excepting Dore in his picturings of Dante’s “Inferno.” Could Dante himself have looked into it, he would have peopled it with the most hopeless of his lost spirits. The shadow, the aridity, the barrenness, the solemnity, the pitilessness, the horrid cruelty of the scene, were more than might be received into the soul. It was something which could not be imagined, and which when seen could not be fully remembered. To gaze on it was like beholding the mysterious, wicked countenance of the father of all evil. It was a landscape which was a fiend.

The precipices were not bare and plain faces of rock, destitute of minor finish and of color. They had their horrible decorations; they showed the ingenuity and the artistic force of the Afreets who had fashioned them; they were wrought and tinted with a demoniac splendor suited to their magnitude. It seemed as if some goblin Michel Angelo had here done his carving and frescoing at the command of the lords of hell. Layers of brown, gray, and orange sandstone, alternated from base to summit; and these tints were laid on with a breadth of effect which was prodigious: a hundred feet in height and miles in length at a stroke of the brush.

The architectural and sculptural results were equally monstrous. There were lateral shelves twenty feet in width, and thousands of yards in length. There were towers, pilasters, and formless caryatides, a quarter of a mile in height. Great bulks projected, capped by gigantic mitres or diadems, and flanked by cavernous indentations. In consequence of the varying solidity of the stone, the river had wrought the precipices into a series of innumerable monuments, more or less enormous, commemorative of combats. There had been interminable strife here between the demons of earth and the demons of water, and each side had set up its trophies. It was the Vatican and the Catacombs of the Genii; it was the museum and the mausoleum of the forces of nature.

At various points tributary gorges, the graves of fluvial gods who had perished long ago, opened into the main canon. In passing these the voyagers had momentary glimpses of sublimities and horrors which seemed like the handiwork of that “anarch old,” who wrought before the shaping of the universe. One of these sarcophagi was a narrow cleft, not more than eighty feet broad, cut from surface to base of a bed of sandstone one-third of a mile in depth. It was inhabited by an eternal gloom which was like the shadow of the blackness of darkness. The stillness, the absence of all life whether animal or vegetable, the dungeon-like closeness of the monstrous walls, were beyond language.

Another gorge was a ruin. The rock here being of various degrees of density, the waters had essayed a thousand channels. All the softer veins had been scooped out and washed away, leaving the harder blocks and masses piled in a colossal grotesque confusion. Along the sloping sides of the gap stood bowlders, pillars, needles, and strange shapes of stone, peering over each other’s heads into the gulf below. It was as if an army of misshapen monsters and giants had been petrified with horror, while staring at some inconceivable desolation and ruin. There was no hope for this concrete despair; no imaginable voice could utter for it a word of consolation; the gazer, like Dante amid the tormented, could only “look and pass on.”

At one point two lateral canons opened side by side upon the San Juan. The partition was a stupendous pile of rock fifteen hundred feet in altitude, but so narrow that it seemed to the voyagers below like the single standing wall of some ruined edifice. Although the space on its summit was broad enough for a cathedral, it did not appear to them that it would afford footing to a man, while the enclosing fissures looked narrow enough to be crossed at a bound. On either side of this isolated bar of sandstone a plumb-line might have been dropped straight to the level of the river. The two chasms were tombs of shadow, where nothing ever stirred but winds.

The solitude of this continuous panorama of precipices was remarkable. It was a region without man, or beast, or bird, or insect. The endless rocks, not only denuded, but eroded and scraped by the action of bygone waters, could furnish no support for animal life. A beast of prey, or even a mountain goat, would have starved here. Could a condor of the Andes have visited it, he would have spread his wings at once to leave it.

Yet horrible as the scene was, it was so sublime that it fascinated. For hours, gazing at lofty masses, vast outlines, prodigious assemblages of rocky imagery, endless strokes of natural frescoing, the three adventurers either exchanged rare words of astonishment, or lay in reveries which transported them beyond earth. What Thurstane felt he could only express by recalling random lines of the “Paradise Lost.” It seemed to him as if they might at any moment emerge upon the lake of burning marl, and float into the shadow of the walls of Pandemonium. He would not have felt himself carried much beyond his present circumstances, had he suddenly beheld Satan,

High on a throne of royal state, which far Outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind.

He was roused from his dreams by the quick, dry, grasshopper-like voice of Phineas Glover, asking, “What’s that?”

A deep whisper came up the chasm. They could hardly distinguish it when they stretched their hearing to the utmost. It seemed to steal with difficulty against the rushing flood, and then to be swept down again. It sighed threateningly for a moment, and instantaneously became silence. One might liken it to a ghost trying to advance through some castle hall, only to be borne backward by the fitful night-breeze, or by some mysterious ban. Was the desert inhabited, and by disembodied demons?

After a further flight of half a mile, this variable sigh changed to a continuous murmur. There was now before the voyagers a straight course of nearly two miles, at the end of which lay hid the unseen power which gave forth this solemn menace. The river, perfectly clear of rocks, was a sheet of liquid porphyry, an arrow of dark-red water slightly flecked with foam. The walls of the canon, scarcely fifty yards apart and more stupendous than ever, rose in precipices without a landing-place or a foothold. So far as eye could pierce into the twilight of the sublime chasm, there was not a spot where the boat could be arrested in its flight, or where a swimmer could find a shelf of safety.

“It is a rapid,” said Thurstane. “You did well, Captain Glover, to get another paddle.”

“Lord bless ye!” returned the skipper impatiently, “it’s lucky I was whittlin’ while you was thinkin’. If we on’y had a boat-hook!”

From moment to moment the murmur came nearer and grew louder. It was smothered and then redoubled by the reverberations of the canon, so that sometimes it seemed the tigerish snarl of a rapid, and sometimes the leonine roar of a cataract. A bend of the chasm at last brought the voyagers in sight of the monster, which was frothing and howling to devour them. It was a terrific spectacle. It was like Apollyon “straddling quite across the way,” to intercept Christian in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. From one dizzy rampart to the other, and as far down the echoing cavern as eye could reach, the river was white with an arrowy rapid storming though a labyrinth of rocks.

Sweeny, evidently praying, moved his lips in silence. Glover’s face had the keen, anxious, watchful look of the sailor affronting shipwreck; and Thurstane’s the set, enduring rigidity of the soldier who is tried to his utmost by cannonade.

CHAPTER XXVI.

The three adventurers were entering the gorge of an impassable rapid.

Here had once been the barrier of a cataract; the waters had ground through it, tumbled it down, and gnawed it to tatters; the scattered bowlders which showed through the foam were the remnants of the Cyclopean feast.

There appeared to be no escape from death. Any one of those stones would rend the canvas boat from end to end, or double it into a wet rug; and if a swimmer should perchance reach the bank, he would drown there, looking up at precipices; or, if he should find a footing, it would only be to starve.

“There is our chance,” said Thurstane, pointing to a bowlder as large as a house which stood under the northern wall of the canon, about a quarter of a mile above the first yeast of the rapid.

He and Glover each took a paddle. They had but one object: it was to get under the lee of the bowlder, and so stop their descent; after that they would see what more could be done. Danger and safety were alike swift here; it was a hurry as of battle or tempest Almost before they began to hope for success, they were circling in the narrow eddy, very nearly a whirlpool, which wheeled just below the isolated rock. Even here the utmost caution was necessary, for while the Buchanan was as light as a bubble, it was also as fragile.

Sounding the muddy water with their paddles, they slowly glided into the angle between the bowlder and the precipice, and jammed the fragment of the towline in a crevice. For the first time in six hours, and in a run of thirty miles, they were at rest. Wiping the sweat of labor and anxiety from their brows, they looked about them, at first in silence, querying what next?

“I wish I was on an iceberg,” said Glover in his despair.

“An’ I wish I was in Oirland,” added Sweeny. “But if the divil himself was to want to desart here, he couldn’t.”

Thurstane believed that he had seen Clara for the last time, even should she escape her own perils. Through his field-glass he surveyed the whole gloomy scene with microscopic attention, searching for an exit out of this monstrous man-trap, and searching in vain. It was as impossible to descend the rapid as it was to scale the walls of the canon. He had just heard Sweeny say, “I wish I was bein’ murthered by thim naygurs,” and had smiled at the utterance of desperation with a grim sympathy, when a faint hope dawned upon him.

Not more than a yard above the water was a ledge or shelf in the face of the precipice. The layer of sandstone immediately over this shelf was evidently softer than the general mass; and in other days (centuries ago), when it had formed one level with the bed of the river, it had been deeply eroded. This erosion had been carried along the canon on an even line of altitude as far as the softer layer extended. Thurstane could trace it with his glass for what seemed to him a mile, and there was of course a possibility that it reached below the foot of the rapid. The groove was everywhere about twenty feet high, while its breadth varied from a yard or so to nearly a rod.

Here, then, was a road by which they might perhaps turn the obstacle. The only difficulty was that while the bed of the river descended rapidly, the shelf kept on at the same elevation, so that eventually the travellers would come to a jumping-off place. How high would it be? Could they get down it so as to regain the stream and resume their navigation? Well, they must try it; there was no other road. With one eloquent wave of his hand Thurstane pointed out this slender chance of escape to his comrades.

“Hurray!” shouted Glover, after a long stare, in which the emotions succeeded each other like colors in a dolphin.

“Can we make the jump at the other end?” asked the lieutenant.

“Reckon so,” chirruped Glover. “Look a here.”

He exhibited a pile of unpleasant-looking matter which proved to be a mass of strips of fresh hide.

“Hoss skin,” he explained. “Peeled off a mustang. Borrowed it from that Texan cuss. Thought likely we might want to splice our towline. ‘Bout ten fathom, I reckon; ‘n’ there’s the lariat, two fathom more. All we’ve got to de is to pack up, stick our backs under, ‘n’ travel.”

It was three o’clock in the afternoon when they commenced their preparations for making this extraordinary portage. Sunk as they were twenty-five hundred feet in the bowels of the earth, the sun had already set for them; but they were still favored with a sort of twilight radiance, and they could count upon it for a couple of hours longer. Carefully the guns, paddles, and stores were landed on the marvellous causeway; and then, with still greater caution, the boat was lifted to the same support and taken to pieces. The whole mass of material, some two hundred pounds in weight, was divided into three portions. Each shouldered his pack, and the strange journey commenced.

“Sweeny, don’t you fall off,” said Glover. “We can’t spare them sticks.”

“If I fall off, ye may shute me where I stand,” returned Sweeny. “I know better’n to get drowned and starved to death in wan. I can take care av meself. I’ve sailed this a way many a time in th’ ould counthry.”

The road was a smooth and easy one, barring a few cumbering bowlders. To the left and below was the river, roaring, hissing, and foaming through its _chevaux-de-frise_ of rocks. In front the canon stretched on and on until its walls grew dim with shadow and distance. Above were overhanging precipices and a blue streak of sunlit sky.

It was quite dusk with the wanderers before they reached a point where the San Juan once more flowed with an undisturbed current.

“We can’t launch by this light,” said Thurstane. “We will sleep here.”

“It’ll be a longish night,” commented Glover. “But don’t see’s we can shorten it by growlin’. When fellahs travel in the bowels ‘f th’ earth, they’ve got to follow the customs ‘f th’ country. Puts me in mind of Jonah in the whale’s belly. Putty short tacks, Capm. Nine hours a day won’t git us along; any too fast. But can’t help it. Night travellin’ ain’t suited to our boat. Suthin’ like a bladder football: one pin-prick ‘d cowallapse it. Wal, so we’ll settle. Lucky we wanted our blankets to set on. ‘Pears to me this rock’s a leetle harder’n a common deck plank. Unroll the boat, Capm? Wal, guess we’d better. Needs dryin’a speck. Too much soakin’ an’t good for canvas. Better dry it out, ‘n’ fold it up, ‘n’ sleep on’t. This passageway that we’re in, sh’d say at might git up a smart draught. What d’ye say to this spot for campin’? Twenty foot breadth of beam here. Kind of a stateroom, or bridal chamber. No need of fallin’ out. Ever walk in yer sleep, Sweeny? Better cut it right square off to-night. Five fathom down to the river, sh’d say. Splash ye awfully, Sweeny.”

Thus did Captain Glover prattle in his cheerful way while the party made its preparations for the night.

They were like ants lodged in some transverse crack of a lofty wall. They were in a deep cut of the shelf, with fifteen hundred or two thousand feet of sandstone above, and the porphyry-colored river thirty feet below. The narrow strip of sky far above their heads was darkening rapidly with the approach of night, and with an accumulation of clouds. All of a sudden there was a descent of muddy water, charged with particles of red earth and powdered sandstone, pouring by them down the overhanging precipice.

“Liftinant!” exclaimed Sweeny, “thim naygurs up there is washin’ their dirty hides an’ pourin’ the suds down on us.”

“It’s the rain, Sweeny. There’s a shower on the plateau above.”

“The rain, is it? Thin all nate people in that counthry must stand in great nade of ombrellys.”

The scene was more marvellous than ever. Not a drop of rain fell in the river; the immense facade opposite them was as dry as a skull; yet here was this muddy cataract. It fell for half an hour, scarcely so much as spattering them in their recess, but plunging over them into the torrent beneath. By the time it ceased they had eaten their supper of hard bread and harder beef, and lighted their pipes to allay their thirst. There was a laying of plans to regain the river to-morrow, a grave calculation as to how long their provisions would last, and in general much talk about their chances.

“Not a shine of a lookout for gittin’ back to the Casa?” queried Captain Glover. “Knowed it,” he added, when the lieutenant sadly shook his head. “Fool for talkin’ ’bout it. How ’bout reachin’ the trail to the Moqui country?”

“I have been thinking of it all day,” said Thurstane. “We must give it up. Every one of the branch canons on the other bank trends wrong. We couldn’t cross them; we should have to follow them; it’s an impassable hell of a country. We might by bare chance reach the Moqui pueblos; but the probability is that we should die in the desert of thirst. We shall have to run the river. Perhaps we shall have to run the Colorado too. If so, we had better keep on to Diamond creek, and from there push by land to Cactus Pass. Cactus Pass is on the trail, and we may meet emigrants there. I don’t know what better to suggest.”

“Dessay it’s a tiptop idee,” assented Glover cheeringly. “Anyhow, if we take on down the river, it seems like follyin’ the guidings of Providence.”

In spite of their strange situation and doubtful prospects, the three adventurers slept early and soundly. When they awoke it was daybreak, and after chewing the hardest, dryest, and rawest of breakfasts, they began their preparations to reach the river. To effect this, it was necessary to find a cleft in the ledge where they could fasten a cord securely, and below it a footing at the water’s edge where they could put their boat together and launch it. It would not do to go far down the canon, for the bed of the stream descended while the shelf retained its level, and the distance between them was already sufficiently alarming. After an anxious search they discovered a bowlder lying in the river beneath the shelf, with a flat surface perfectly suited to their purpose. There, too, was a cleft, but a miserably small one.

“We can’t jam a cord in that,” said Glover; “nor the handle of a paddle nuther.”

“It’ll howld me bagonet,” suggested Sweeny.

“It can be made to hold it,” decided Thurstane. “We must drill away till it does hold it.”

An hour’s labor enabled them to insert the bayonet to the handle and wedge it with spikes split off from the precious wood of the paddles. When it seemed firm enough to support a strong lateral pressure, Glover knotted on to it, in his deft sailor fashion, a strip of the horse hide, and added others to that until he had a cord of some forty feet. After testing every inch and every knot, he said: “Who starts first?”

“I will try it,” answered Thurstane.

“Lightest first, I reckon,” observed Glover.

Sweeny looked at the precipice, skipped about the shelf uneasily, made a struggle with his fears, and asked, “Will ye let me down aisy?”

“Jest ‘s easy ‘s rollin’ off a log.”

“That’s aisy enough. It’s the lightin’ that’s har-rd. If it comes to rowlin’ down, I’ll let ye have the first rowl. I’ve no moind to git ahead of me betthers.”

“Try it, my lad,” said Thurstane. “The real danger comes with the last man. He will have to trust to the bayonet alone.”

“An’ what’ll I do whirl I get down there?”

“Take the traps off the cord as we send them down, and pile them on the rock.”

“I’m off,” said Sweeny, after one more look into the chasm. While the others held the cord to keep the strain from coming on the bayonet, he gripped it with both hands, edged stern foremost over the precipice, and slipped rapidly to the bowlder, whence he sent up a hoot of exultation. The cord was drawn back; the boat was made up in two bundles, which were lowered in succession; then the provisions, paddles, arms, etc. Now came the question whether Thurstane or Glover should remain last on the ledge.

“Lightest last,” said the lean skipper. “Stands to reason.”

“It’s my duty to take the hot end of the poker,” replied the officer. “Loser goes first,” said Glover, producing a copper. “Heads or tails?”

“Heads,” guessed Thurstane.

“It’s a tail. Catch hold, Capm. Slow ‘n’ easy till you get over.”

The cord holding firm, Thurstane reached the bowlder, and was presently joined by Glover.

“Liftinant, I want me bagonet,” cried Sweeny. “Will I go up afther it?”

“How the dickens ‘d you git down again?” asked Glover. “Guess you’ll have to leave your bayonet where it sticks. But, Capm, we want that line. Can’t you shute it away, clost by th’ edge?”

The third shot was a lucky one, and brought down the precious cord. Then came the work of putting the boat into shape, launching it, getting in the stores, and lastly the voyagers.

“Tight’s a drum yit,” observed Glover, surveying the coracle admiringly. “Fust time I ever sailed _on_ canvas. Great notion. Don’t draw more’n three inches. Might sail acrost country with it. Capm, it’s the only boat ever invented that could git down this blasted river.”

Glover and Sweeny, two of the most talkative creatures on earth, chattered much to each other. Thurstane sometimes listened to them, sometimes lost himself in reveries about Clara, sometimes surveyed the scenery of the canon.

The abyss was always the same, yet with colossal variety: here and there yawnings of veined precipices, followed by cavernous closings of the awful sides; breakings in of subsidiary canons, some narrow clefts, and others gaping shattered mouths; the walls now presenting long lines of rampart, and now a succession of peaks. But still, although they had now traversed the chasm for seventy or eighty miles, they found no close and no declension to its solemn grandeur.

At last came another menace, a murmur deeper and hoarser than that of the rapid, steadily swelling as they advanced until it was a continuous thunder. This time there could be no doubt that they were entering upon a scene of yet undecided battle between the eternal assault of the river and the immemorial resistance of the mountains.

The quickening speed of the waters, and the ceaseless bellow of their charging trumpets as they tore into some yet unseen abyss, announced one of those struggles of nature in which man must be a spectator or a victim.

CHAPTER XXVII.

As Thurstane approached the cataract of the San Juan he thought of the rapids above Niagara, and of the men who had been whirled down them, foreseeing their fate and struggling against it, but unable to escape it.

“We must keep near one wall or the other,” he said. “The middle of the river is sure death.”

Paddling toward the northern bank, simply because it had saved them in their former peril, they floated like a leaf in the shadows of the precipices, watching for some footway by which to turn the lair of the monster ahead.

The scenery here did not consist exclusively of two lofty ramparts fronting each other. Before the river had established its present channel it had tried the strength of the plateau in various directions, slashing the upper strata into a succession of canons, which were now lofty and arid gullies, divided from each other by every conceivable form of rocky ruin. Rotundas, amphitheatres, castellated walls, cathedrals of unparalleled immensity, facades of palaces huge enough to be the abodes of the principalities and powers of the air, far-stretching semblances of cities tottering to destruction, all fashions of domes, towers, minarets, spires, and obelisks, with a population of misshapen demons and monsters, looked down from sublime heights upon the voyagers. At every turn in the river the panorama changed, and they beheld new marvels of this Titanic architecture. There was no end to the gigantic and grotesque variety of the commingling outlines. The vastness, the loneliness, the stillness, the twilight sombreness, were awful. And through all reverberated incessantly the defiant clarion of the cataract.

The day was drawing to that early death which it has always had and must always have in these abysses. Knowing how suddenly darkness would fall, and not daring to attempt the unknown without light, the travellers looked for a mooring spot. There was a grim abutment at least eighteen hundred feet high; at its base two rocks, which had tumbled ages ago from the summit, formed a rude breakwater; and on this barrier had collected a bed of coarse pebbles, strewn with driftwood. Here they stopped their flight, unloaded the boat and beached it. The drift-wood furnished them a softer bed than usual, and materials for a fire.

Night supervened with the suddenness of a death which has been looked for, but which is at last a surprise. Shadow after shadow crept down the walls of the chasm, blurred its projections, darkened its faces, and crowded its recesses. The line of sky, seen through the jagged and sinuous opening above, changed slowly to gloom and then to blackness. There was no light in this rocky intestine of the earth except the red flicker of the camp-fire. It fought feebly with the powers of darkness; it sent tremulous despairing flashes athwart the swift ebony river; it reached out with momentary gleams to the nearer facades of precipice; it reeled, drooped, and shuddered as if in hopeless horror. Probably, since the world began, no other fire lighted by man had struggled against the gloom of this tremendous amphitheatre. The darknesses were astonished at it, but they were also uncomprehending and hostile. They refused to be dissipated, and they were victorious.

After two hours a change came upon the scene. The moon rose, filled the upper air with its radiance, and bathed in silver the slopes of the mountains. The narrow belt of visible sky resembled a milky way. The light continued to descend and work miracles. Isolated turrets, domes, and pinnacles came out in gleaming relief against the dark-blue background of the heavens. The opposite crest of the canon shone with a broad illumination. All the uncouth demons and monsters of the rocks awoke, glaring and blinking, to menace the voyagers in the depths below. The contrast between this supereminent brilliancy and the sullen obscurity of the subterranean river made the latter seem more than ever like Styx or Acheron.

The travellers were awakened in the morning by the trumpetings of the cataract. They embarked and dropped down the stream, hugging the northern rampart and watching anxiously. Presently there was a clear sweep of a mile; the clamor now came straight up to them with redoubled vehemence; a ghost of spray arose and waved threateningly, as if forbidding further passage. It was the roar and smoke of an artillery which had thundered for ages, and would thunder for ages to come. It was a voice and signal which summoned reinforcements of waters, and in obedience to which the waters charged eternally.

The boat had shudders. Every spasm jerked it onward a little faster. It flew with a tremulous speed which was terrible. Thurstane, a good soldier, able to obey as well as to direct, knowing that if Glover could not steer wisely no one could, sat, paddle in hand, awaiting orders. Sweeny fidgeted, looked from one to another, looked at the mist ahead, cringed, wanted to speak, and said nothing. Glover, working hard with his paddle, and just barely keeping the coracle bows on, peered and grinned as if he were facing a hurricane. There was no time to have a care for sunken bowlders, reaching up to rend the thin bottom. The one giant danger of the cataract was enough to fill the mind and bar out every minor terror. Its deafening threats demanded the whole of the imagination. Compared with the probability of plunging down an unknown depth into a boiling hell of waters, all other peril seemed too trifling to attract notice. Such a fate is an enhancement of the horrors of death.

“Liftinant, let’s go over with a whoop,” called Sweeny. “It’s much aisier.”

“Keep quiet, my lad,” replied the officer. “We must hear orders.”

“All right, Liftinant,” said Sweeny, relieved by having spoken.

At this moment Glover shouted cheerfully, “We ain’t dead yit There’s a ledge.”

“I see it,” nodded Thurstane.

“Where there’s a ledge there’s an eddy,” screamed Glover, raising his voice to pierce the hiss of the rapid and the roar of the cascade.

Below them, jutting out from the precipitous northern bank, was a low bar of rock over which the river did not sweep. It was the remnant of a once lofty barrier; the waters had, as it were, gnawed it to the bone, but they had not destroyed it. In two minutes the voyagers were beside it, paddling with all their strength against the eddy which whirled along its edge toward the cataract, and tossing over the short, spiteful ripples raised by the sudden turn of the current. With a “Hooroo!” Sweeny tumbled ashore, lariat in hand, and struck his army shoes into the crevices of the shattered sandstone. In five minutes more the boat was unloaded and lifted upon the ledge.

The travellers did not go to look at the cataract; their immediate and urgent need was to get by it. Making up their bundles as usual, they commenced a struggle with the intricacies and obstacles of the portage. The eroded, disintegrated plateau descended to the river in a huge confusion of ruin, and they had to pick their way for miles through a labyrinth of cliffs, needles, towers, and bowlders. Reaching the river once more, they found themselves upon a little plain of moderately fertile earth, the first plain and the first earth which they had seen since entering the canon. The cataract was invisible; a rock cathedral several hundred feet high hid it; they could scarcely discern its lofty ghost of spray.

Two miles away, in the middle of the plain, appeared a ruin of adobe walls, guttered and fissured by the weather. It was undoubtedly a monument of that partially civilized race, Aztec, Toltec, or Moqui, which centuries ago dotted the American desert with cities, and passed away without leaving other record. With his field-glass Thurstane discovered what he judged to be another similar structure crowning a distant butte. They had no time to visit these remains, and they resumed their voyage.

After skirting the plain for several miles, they reentered the canon, drifted two hours or more between its solemn walls, and then came out upon a wide sweep of open country. The great canon of the San Juan had been traversed nearly from end to end in safety. When the adventurers realized their triumph they rose to their feet and gave nine hurrahs.

“It’s loike a rich man comin’ through the oye av a needle,” observed Sweeny.

“Only this haint much the air ‘f the New Jerusalem,” returned Glover, glancing at the arid waste of buttes and ranges in the distance.

“We oughter look up some huntin’,” he continued. “Locker’ll begin to show bottom b’fore long. Sweeny, wouldn’t you like to kill suthin?”

“I’d like to kill a pig,” said Sweeny.

“Wal, guess we’ll probably come acrost one. They’s a kind of pigs in these deestricks putty nigh’s long ‘s this boat.”

“There ain’t,” returned Sweeny.

“Call ’em grizzlies when they call ’em at all,” pursued the sly Glover.

“They may call ’em what they plaze if they won’t call ’em as long as this boat.”

Fortune so managed things, by way of carrying out Glover’s joke, that a huge grizzly just then snowed himself on the bank, some two hundred yards below the boat.

After easily slaughtering one bear, the travellers had a far more interesting season with another, who was allured to the scene by the smell of jerking meat, and who gave them a very lively half hour of it, it being hard to say which was the most hunted, the bruin or the humans.

“Look a’ that now!” groaned Sweeny, when the victory had been secured. “The baste has chawed up me gun barrl loike it was a plug o’ tobacky.”

“Throw it away,” ordered Thurstane, after inspecting the twisted and lacerated musket.

Tenderly and tearfully Sweeny laid aside the first gun that he had ever carried, went again and again to look at its mangled form as if it were a dead relative, and in the end raised a little mausoleum of cobble-stones over it.

“If there was any whiskey, I’d give um a wake,” he sighed. “I’m a pratty soldier now, without a gun to me back.”

“I’ll let ye carry mine when we come to foot it,” suggested Glover.

“Yis, an’ ye may carry me part av the boat,” retorted Sweeny.

The bear meat was tough and musky, but it could be eaten, must be eaten, ind was eaten. During the time required for jerking a quantity of it, Glover made a boat out of the two hides, scraping them with a hunting knife, sewing them with a sailor’s needle and strands of the sounding-line, and stretching them on a frame of green saplings, the result being a craft six feet long by nearly four broad, and about the shape of a half walnut-shell. The long hair was left on, as a protection against the rocks of the river, and the seams were filled and plastered with bear’s grease.

“It’s a mighty bad-smellin’ thing,” remarked Sweeny. “An who’s goin’ to back it over the portages?”

“Robinson Crusoe!” exclaimed Glover. “I never thought of that. Wal, let’s see. Oh, we kin tow her astarn in plain sailin’, ‘n’ when we come to a cataract we can put Sweeny in an’ let her slide.”

“No ye can’t,” said Sweeny. “It’s big enough, an’ yet it won’t howld um, no more’n a tayspoon’ll howld a flay.”

“Wal, we kin let her slide without a crew, ‘n’ pick her up arterwards,” decided Glover.

We must hasten over the minor events of this remarkable journey. The travellers, towing the bearskin boat behind the Buchanan, passed the mouth of Canon Bonito, and soon afterward beheld the San Juan swallowed up in the Grand River, a far larger stream which rises in the Rocky Mountains east of Utah. They swept by the horrible country of the Utes and Payoches, without holding intercourse with its squalid and savage inhabitants. Here and there, at the foot of some monstrous precipice, in a profound recess surrounded by a frenzy of rocks, they saw hamlets of a few miserable wigwams, with patches of starveling corn and beans. Sharp wild cries, like the calls of malicious brownies, or the shrieks of condemned spirits, were sent after them, without obtaining response.

“They bees only naygurs,” observed Sweeny. “Niver moind their blaggard ways.”

After the confluence with the Grand River came solitude. The land had been swept and garnished: swept by the waters and garnished with horrors; a land of canons, plateaux, and ranges, all arid; a land of desolation and the shadow of death. There was nothing on which man or beast could support life; nature’s power of renovation was for the time suspended, and seemed extinct. It was a desert which nothing could restore to fruitfulness except the slow mysterious forces of a geologic revolution.

Beyond the Sierra de Lanterna the Grand River was joined by the Green River, streaming down through gullied plateaux from the deserts of Utah and the mountains which tower between Oregon and Nebraska. Henceforward, still locked in Titanic defiles or flanked by Cyclopean _debris_, they were on the Colorado of the West.

Thurstane meditated as to what course he should follow. Should he strike southward by land for the Bernalillo trail, risking a march through a wide, rocky, lifeless, and perhaps waterless wilderness? Or should he attempt to descend a river even more terrible to navigate than the San Juan? It seemed to him that the hardships and dangers of either plan were about the same.

But the Colorado route would be the swiftest; the Colorado would take him quickest to Clara. For he trusted that she had long before this got back to the Moqui country and resumed her journey across the continent. He could not really fear that any deadly harm would befall her. He had the firmness of a soldier and the faith of a lover.

At last, silently and solemnly, through a portal thousands of feet in height, the voyagers glided into the perilous mystery of the Great Canon of the Colorado, the most sublime and terrible waterway of this planet.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

Thurstane had strange emotions as he swept into the “caverns measureless to man” of the Great Canon of the Colorado.

It seemed like a push of destiny rather than a step of volition. An angel or a demon impelled him into the unknown; a supernatural portal had opened to give him passage; then it had closed behind him forever.

The canon, with all its two hundred and forty miles of marvels and perils, presented itself to his imagination as a unity. The first step within it placed him under an enchantment from which there was no escape until the whole circuit of the spell should be completed. He was like Orlando in the magic garden, when the gate vanished immediately upon his entrance, leaving him no choice but to press on from trial to trial. He was no more free to pause or turn back than Grecian ghosts sailing down Acheron toward the throne of Radamanthus.

Direct statement, and even the higher speech of simile, fail to describe the Great Canon and the emotion which it produces. Were its fronting precipices organs, with their mountainous columns and pilasters for organ-pipes, they might produce a _de profundis_ worthy of the scene and of its sentiments, its inspiration. This is not bombast; so far from exaggerating it does not even attain to the subject; no words can so much as outline the effects of eighty leagues of mountain sculptured by a great river.

Let us venture one comparison. Imagine a groove a foot broad and twenty feet deep, with a runnel of water trickling at the bottom of it and a fleck of dust floating down the rivulet. Now increase the dimensions until the groove is two hundred and fifty feet in breadth by five thousand feet in depth, and the speck a boat with three voyagers. You have the Great Canon of the Colorado and Thurstane and his comrades seeking its issue.

“Do you call this a counthry?” asked Sweeny, after an awe-stricken silence. “I’m thinkin’ we’re gittin’ outside av the worrld like.”

“An’ I’m thinkin’ we’re gittin’ too fur inside on’t,” muttered Glover. “Look’s ‘s though we might slip clean under afore long. Most low-spirited hole I ever rolled into. ‘Minds me ‘f that last ditch people talk of dyin’ in. Must say I’d rather be in the trough ‘f the sea.”

“An’ what kind av a trough is that?” inquired Sweeny, inquisitive even in his dumps.

“It’s the trough where they feed the niggers out to the sharks.”

“Faix, an’ I’d loike to see it at feedin’ time,” answered Sweeny with a feeble chuckle.

Nature as it is is one image; nature as it appears is a thousand; or rather it is infinite. Every soul is a mirror, reflecting what faces it; but the reflections differ as do the souls that give them. To the three men who now gazed on the Great Canon it was far from being the same object.

Sweeny surveyed it as an old Greek or Roman might, with simple distaste and horror. Glover, ignorant and limited as he was, received far more of its inspiration. Even while “chirking up” his companions with trivial talk and jests he was in his secret soul thinking of Bunyan’s Dark Valley and Milton’s Hell, the two sublimest landscapes that had ever been presented to his imagination. Thurstane, gifted with much of the sympathy of the great Teutonic race for nature, was far more profoundly affected. The overshadowing altitudes and majesties of the chasm moved him as might oratorios or other solemn music. Frequently he forgot hardships, dangers, isolation, the hard luck of the past, the ugly prospects of the future in reveries which were a succession of such emotions as wonder, worship, and love.

No doubt the scenery had the more power over him because, by gazing at it day after day while his heart was full of Clara, he got into a way of animating it with her. Far away as she was, and divided from him perhaps forever, she haunted the canon, transformed it and gave it grace. He could see her face everywhere; he could see it even without shutting his eyes; it made the arrogant and malignant cliffs seraphic. By the way, the vividness of his memory with regard to that fair, sweet, girlish countenance was wonderful, only that such a memory, the memory of the heart, is common. There was not one of her expressions which was not his property. Each and all, he could call them-up at will, making them pass before him in heavenly procession, surrounding himself with angels. It was the power of the ring which is given to the slaves of love.

He had some vagaries (the vagaries of those who are subjugated by a strong and permanent emotion) which approached insanity. For instance, he selected a gigantic column of sandstone as bearing some resemblance to Clara, and so identified it with her that presently he could see her face crowning it, though concealed by the similitude of a rocky veil. This image took such possession of him that he watched it with fascination, and when a monstrous cliff slid between it and him he felt as if here were a new parting; as if he were once more bidding her a speechless, hopeless farewell.

During the greater part of this voyage he was a very uninteresting companion. He sat quiet and silent; sometimes he slightly moved his lips; he was whispering a name. Glover and Sweeny, who had only known him for a month, and supposed that he had always been what they saw him, considered him an eccentric.

“Naterally not quite himself,” judged the skipper. “Some folks is born knocked on the head.”

“May be officers is always that a way,” was one of Sweeny’s suggestions. “It must be mighty dull bein’ an officer.”

We must not forget the Great Canon. The voyagers were amid magnitudes and sublimities of nature which oppressed as if they were powers and principalities of supernature. They were borne through an architecture of aqueous and plutonic agencies whose smallest fantasies would be belittled by comparisons with coliseums, labyrinths, cathedrals, pyramids, and stonehenges.

For example, they circled a bend of which the extreme delicate angle was a jutting pilaster five hundred feet broad and a mile high, its head towering in a sharp tiara far above the brow of the plateau, and its sides curved into extravagances of dizzy horror. It seemed as if it might be a pillar of confinement and punishment for some Afreet who had defied Heaven. On either side of this monster fissures a thousand feet deep wrinkled the forehead of the precipice. Armies might have been buried in their abysses; yet they scarcely deformed the line of the summits. They ran back for many miles; they had once been the channels of streams which helped to drain the plateau; yet they were merely superficial cracks in the huge mass of sandstone and limestone; they were scarcely noticeable features of the Titanic landscape. From this bend forward the beauty of the canon was sublime, horrible, satanic. Constantly varying, its transformations were like those of the chief among demons, in that they were always indescribably magnificent and always indescribably terrible. Now it was a straight, clean chasm between even hedges of cliff which left open only a narrow line of the beauty and mercy of the heavens. Again, where it was entered by minor canons, it became a breach through crowded pandemoniums of ruined architectures and forsaken, frowning imageries. Then it led between enormous pilasters, columns, and caryatides, mitred with conical peaks which had once been ranges of mountains. Juttings and elevations, which would have been monstrous in other landscapes, were here but minor decorations.

Something like half of the strata with which earth is sheathed has been cut through by the Colorado, beginning at the top of the groove with hundreds of feet of limestone, and closing at the bottom with a thousand feet of granite. Here, too, as in many other wonder-spots of the American desert, nature’s sculpture is rivalled by her painting. Bluish-gray limestone, containing corals; mottled limestone, charged with slates, flint, and chalcedony; red, brown, and blue limestone, mixed with red, green, and yellow shales; sandstone of all tints, white, brown, ochry, dark red, speckled and foliated; coarse silicious sandstone, and red quartzose sandstone beautifully veined with purple; layers of conglomerate, of many colored shales, argillaceous iron, and black oxide manganese; massive black and white granite, traversed by streaks of quartz and of red sienite; coarse red felspathic granite, mixed with large plates of silver mica; such is the masonry and such the frescoing.

Through this marvellous museum our three spectators wandered in hourly peril of death. The Afreets of the waters and the Afreets of the rocks, guarding the gateway which they had jointly builded, waged incessant warfare with the intruders. Although the current ran five miles an hour, it was a lucky day when the boat made forty miles. Every evening the travellers must find a beach or shelf where they could haul up for the night. Darkness covered destruction, and light exposed dangers. The bubble-like nature of the boat afforded at once a possibility of easy advance and of instantaneous foundering. Every hour that it floated was a miracle, and so they grimly and patiently understood it.

A few days in the canon changed the countenances of these men. They looked like veterans of many battles. There was no bravado in their faces. The expression which lived there was a resigned, suffering, stubborn courage. It was the “silent berserker rage” which Carlyle praises. It was the speechless endurance which you see in portraits of the Great Frederick, Wellington, and Grant.

They relieved each other. The bow was guard duty; the steering was light duty; the midships off duty. It must be understood that, the great danger being sunken rocks, one man always crouched in the bow, with a paddle plunged below the surface, feeling for ambushes of the stony bushwhackers. Occasionally all three had to labor, jumping into shallows, lifting the boat over beds of pebbles, perhaps lightening it of arms and provisions, perhaps carrying all ashore to seek a portage.

“It’s the best canew ‘n’ the wust canew I ever see for sech a voyage,” observed Glover. “Navigatin’ in it puts me in mind ‘f angels settin’ on a cloud. The cloud can go anywhere; but what if ye should slump through?”

“Och! ye’re a heretic, ‘n’ don’t belave angels can fly,” put in Sweeny.

“Can’t ye talk without takin’ out yer paddle?” called Glover. “Mind yer soundings.”

Glover was at the helm just then, while Sweeny was at the bow. Thurstane, sitting cross-legged on the light wooden flooring of the boat, was entering topographical observations in his journal. Hearing the skipper’s warning, he looked up sharply; but both the call and the glance came too late to prevent a catastrophe. Just in that instant the boat caught against some obstacle, turned slowly around before the push of the current, swung loose with a jerk and floated on, the water bubbling through the flooring. A hole had been torn in the canvas, and the cockle-shell was foundering.

“Sound!” shouted Thurstane to Sweeny; then, turning to Glover, “Haul up the Grizzly!”

The tub-boat of bearskin was dragged alongside, and Thurstane instantly threw the provisions and arms into it.

“Three foot,” squealed Sweeny.

“Jump overboard,” ordered the lieutenant.

By the time they were on their feet in the water the Buchanan was half full, and the swift current was pulling at it like a giant, while the Grizzly, floating deep, was almost equally unmanageable. The situation had in one minute changed from tranquil voyaging to deadly peril. Sweeny, unable to swim, and staggering in the rapid, made a plunge at the bearskin boat, probably with an idea of getting into it. But Thurstane, all himself from the first, shouted in that brazen voice of military command which is so secure of obedience, “Steady, man! Don’t climb in. Cut the lariat close up to the Buchanan, and then hold on to the Grizzly.”

Restored to his self-possession, Sweeny laboriously wound the straining lariat around his left arm and sawed it in two with his jagged pocket-knife. Then came a doubtful fight between him and the Colorado for the possession of the heavy and clumsy tub.

Meantime Thurstane and Glover, the former at the bow and the latter at the stern of the Buchanan, were engaged in a similar tussle, just barely holding on and no more.

“We can’t stand this,” said the officer. “We must empty her.”

“Jest so,” panted Glover. “You’re up stream. Can you raise your eend? We mustn’t capsize her; we might lose the flooring.”

Thurstane stooped slowly and cautiously until he had got his shoulder under the bow.

“Easy!” called Glover. “Awful easy! Don’t break her back. Don’t upset _me_.”

Gently, deliberately, with the utmost care, Thurstane straightened himself until he had lifted the bow of the boat clear of the current.

“Now I’ll hoist,” said the skipper. “You turn her slowly–jest the least mite. Don’t capsize her.”

It was a Herculean struggle. There was still a ponderous weight of water in the boat. The slight frame sagged and the flexible siding bulged. Glover with difficulty kept his feet, and he could only lift the stern very slightly.

“You can’t do it,” decided Thurstane. “Don’t wear yourself out trying it. Hold steady where you are, while I let down.”

When the boat was restored to its level it floated higher than before, for some of the water had drained out.

“Now lift slowly,” directed Thurstane. “Slow and sure. She’ll clear little by little.”

A quiet, steady lift, lasting perhaps two or three minutes, brought the floor of the boat to the surface of the current.

“It’s wearing,” said the lieutenant, cheering his worried fellow-laborer with a smile. “Stand steady for a minute and try to rest. You, Sweeny, move in toward the bank. Hold on to your boat like the devil. If the water deepens, sing out.”

Sweeny, gripping his lariat desperately, commenced a staggering march over the cobble-stone bottom, his anxious nose pointed toward a beach of bowlders beneath the southern precipice.

“Now then,” said Thurstane to Glover, “we must get her on our heads and follow Sweeny. Are you ready? Up with her!”

A long, reeling hoist set the Buchanan on the heads of the two men, one standing under the bow and one under the stern, their arms extended and their hands clutching the sides. The beach was forty yards away; the current was swift and as opaque as chocolate; they could not see what depths might gape before them; but they must do the distance without falling, or perish.

“Left foot first,” shouted the officer. “Forward–march!”

CHAPTER XXIX.

When the adventurers commenced their tottering march toward the shore of the Colorado, Sweeny, dragging the clumsy bearskin boat, was a few yards in advance of Thurstane and Glover, bearing the canvas boat.

Every one of the three had as much as he could handle. The Grizzly, pulled at by the furious current, bobbed up and down and hither and thither, nearly capsizing Sweeny at every other step. The Buchanan, weighing one hundred and fifty pounds when dry, and now somewhat heavier because of its thorough wetting, made a heavy load for two men who were hip deep in swift water.

“Slow and sure,” repeated Thurstane. “It’s a five minutes job. Keep your courage and your feet for five minutes. Then we’ll live a hundred years.”

“Liftinant, is this soldierin’?” squealed Sweeny.

“Yes, my man, this is soldiering.”

“Thin I’ll do me dooty if I pull me arrms off.”

But there was not much talking. Pretty nearly all their breath was needed for the fight with the river. Glover, a slender and narrow-shouldered creature, was particularly distressed; and his only remark during the pilgrimage shoreward was, “I’d like to change hosses.”

Sweeny, leading the way, got up to his waist once and yelled, “I’ll drown.”

Then he backed a little, took a new direction, found shallower water, and tottled onward to victory. The moment he reached the shore he gave a shrill hoot of exultation, went at his bearskin craft with both hands, dragged it clean out of the water, and gave it a couple of furious kicks.

“Take that!” he yelped. “Ye’re wickeder nor both yer fathers. But I’ve bate ye. Oh, ye blathering jerkin’, bogglin’ baste, ye!”

Then he splashed into the river, joined his hard-pressed comrades, got his head under the centre of the Buchanan, and lifted sturdily. In another minute the precious burden was safe on a large flat rock, and the three men were stretched out panting beside it. Glover was used up; he was trembling from head to foot with fatigue; he had reached shore just in time to fall on it instead of into the river.

“Ye’d make a purty soldier,” scoffed Sweeny, a habitual chaffer, like most Irishmen.

“It was the histin’ that busted me,” gasped the skipper. “I can’t handle a ton o’ water.”

“Godamighty made ye already busted, I’m a thinkin’,” retorted Sweeny.

As soon as Glover could rise he examined the Buchanan. There was a ragged rent in the bottom four inches long, and the canvas in other places had been badly rubbed. The voyagers looked at the hole, looked at the horrible chasm which locked them in, and thought with a sudden despair of the great environment of desert.

The situation could hardly be more gloomy. Having voyaged for five days in the Great Canon, they were entangled in the very centre of the folds of that monstrous anaconda. Their footing was a lap of level not more than thirty yards in length by ten in breadth, strewn with pebbles and bowlders, and showing not one spire of vegetation. Above them rose a precipice, the summit of which they could not see, but which was undoubtedly a mile in height. Had there been armies or cities over their heads, they could not have discovered it by either eye or ear.

At their feet was the Colorado, a broad rush of liquid porphyry, swift and pitiless. By its color and its air of stoical cruelty it put one in mind of the red race of America, from whose desert mountains it came and through whose wildernesses it hurried. On the other side of this grim current rose precipices five thousand feet high, stretching to right and left as far as the eye could pierce. Certainly never before did shipwrecked men gaze upon such imprisoning immensity and inhospitable sterility.

Directly opposite them was horrible magnificence. The face of the fronting rampart was gashed a mile deep by the gorge of a subsidiary canon. The fissure was not a clean one, with even sides. The strata had been torn, ground, and tattered by the river, which had first raged over them and then through them. It was a Petra of ruins, painted with all stony colors, and sculptured into a million outlines. On one of the boldest abutments of the ravine perched an enchanted castle with towers and spires hundreds of feet in height. Opposite, but further up the gap, rose a rounded mountain-head of solid sandstone and limestone. Still higher and more retired, towering as if to look into the distant canon of the Colorado, ran the enormous terrace of one of the loftier plateaus, its broad, bald forehead wrinkled with furrows that had once held cataracts. But language has no charm which can master these sublimities and horrors. It stammers; it repeats the same words over and over; it can only _begin_ to tell the monstrous truth.

“Looks like we was in our grave,” sighed Glover.

“Liftinant,” jerked out Sweeny, “I’m thinkin’ we’re dead. We ain’t livin’, Liftinant. We’ve been buried. We’ve no business trying to _walk_.”

Thurstane had the same sense of profound depression; but he called up his courage and sought to cheer his comrades.

“We must do our best to come to life,” he said. “Mr. Glover, can nothing be done with the boat?”

“Can’t fix it,” replied the skipper, fingering the ragged hole. “Nothin’ to patch it with.”

“There are the bearskins,” suggested Thurstane.

Glover slapped his thigh, got up, danced a double-shuffle, and sat down again to consider his job. After a full minute Sweeny caught the idea also and set up a haw-haw of exultant laughter, which brought back echoes from the other side of the canon, as if a thousand Paddies were holding revel there.

“Oh! yees may laugh,” retorted Sweeny, “but yees can’t laugh us out av it.”

“I’ll sheath the whole bottom with bearskin,” said Glover. “Then we can let her grind. It’ll be an all day’s chore, Capm–perhaps two days.”

They passed thirty-six hours in this miserable bivouac. Glover worked during every moment of daylight. No one else could do anything. A green hand might break a needle, and a needle broken was a step toward death. From dawn to dusk he planned, cut, punctured, and sewed with the patience of an old sailor, until he had covered the rent with a patch of bearskin which fitted as if it had grown there. Finally the whole bottom was doubled with hide, the long, coarse fur still on it, and the grain running from stem to stern so as to aid in sliding over the sand and pebbles of the shallows.

While Glover worked the others slept, lounged, cooked, waited. There was no food, by the way, but the hard, leathery, tasteless jerked meat of the grizzly bears, which had begun to pall upon them so they could hardly swallow it. Eating was merely a duty, and a disagreeable one.

When Glover announced that the boat was ready for launching, Sweeny uttered a yelp of joy, like a dog who sees a prospect of hunting.

“Ah, you paddywhack!” growled the skipper. “All this work for you. Punch another hole, ‘n’ I’ll take yer own hide to patch it.”

“I’ll give ye lave,” returned Sweeny. “Wan bare skin ‘s good as another. Only I might want me own back agin for dress-parade.”

Once more on the Colorado. Although the boat floated deeper than before, navigation in it was undoubtedly safer, so that they made bolder ventures and swifter progress. Such portages, however, as they were still obliged to traverse, were very severe, inasmuch as the Buchanan was now much above its original weight. Several times they had to carry one half of their materials for a mile or more, through a labyrinth of rocks, and then trudge back to get the other half.

Meantime their power of endurance was diminishing. The frequent wettings, the shivering nights, the great changes of temperature, the stale and wretched food, the constant anxiety, were sapping their health and strength. On the tenth day of their wanderings in the Great Canon Glover began to complain of rheumatism.

“These cussed draughts!” he groaned. “It’s jest like travellin’ in a bellows nozzle.”

“Wid the divil himself at the bellys,” added Sweeny. “Faix, an’ I wish he’d blow us clane out intirely. I’m gittin’ tired o’ this same, I am. I didn’t lisht to sarve undher ground.”

“Patience, Sweeny,” smiled Thurstane. “We must be nearly through the canon.”

“An’ where will we come out, Liftinant? Is it in Ameriky? Bedad, we ought to be close to the Chaynees by this time. Liftinant, what sort o’ paple lives up atop of us, annyway?”

“I don’t suppose anybody lives up there,” replied the officer, raising his eyes to the dizzy precipices above. “This whole region is said to be a desert.”

“Be gorry, an’ it ‘ll stay a desert till the ind o’ the worrld afore I’ll poppylate it. It wasn’t made for Sweenys. I haven’t seen sile enough in tin days to raise wan pataty. As for livin’ on dried grizzly, I’d like betther for the grizzlies to live on me. Liftinant, I niver see sich harrd atin’. It tires the top av me head off to chew it.”

About noon of the twelfth day in the Great Canon this perilous and sublime navigation came to a close. The walls of the chasm suddenly spread out into a considerable opening, which absolutely seemed level ground to the voyagers, although it was encumbered with mounds or buttes of granite and sandstone. This opening was produced by the entrance into the main channel of a subsidiary one, coming from the south. At first they did not observe further particulars, for they were in extreme danger of shipwreck, the river being studded with rocks and running like a mill-race. But on reaching the quieter water below the rapid, they saw that the branch canon contained a rivulet, and that where the two streams united there was a triangular basin, offering a safe harbor.

“Paddle!” shouted Thurstane, pointing to the creek. “Don’t let her go by. This is our place.”

A desperate struggle dragged the boat out of the rushing Colorado into the tranquillity of the basin. Everything was landed; the boat itself was hoisted on to the rocks; the voyage was over.

“Think ye know yer way, Capm?” queried Glover, squinting doubtfully up the arid recesses of the smaller canon.

“Of course I may be mistaken. But even if it is not Diamond Creek, it will take us in our direction. We have made westing enough to have the Cactus Pass very nearly south of us.”

As there was still a chance of returning to the river, the boat was taken to pieces, rolled up, and hidden under a pile of stones and driftwood. The small remnant of jerked meat was divided into three portions. Glover, on account of his inferior muscle and his rheumatism, was relieved of his gun, which was given to Sweeny. Canteens were filled, blankets slung, ammunition belts buckled, and the march commenced.

Arrived at a rocky knoll which looked up both waterways, the three men halted to take a last glance at the Great Canon, the scene of a pilgrimage that had been a poem, though a terrible one. The Colorado here was not more than fifty yards wide, and only a few hundred yards of its course were visible either way, for the confluence was at the apex of a bend. The dark, sullen, hopeless, cruel current rushed out of one mountain-built mystery into another. The walls of the abyss rose straight from the water into dizzy abutments, conical peaks, and rounded masses, beyond and above which gleamed the distant sunlit walls of a higher terrace of the plateau.

“Come along wid ye,” said Sweeny to Glover, “It’s enough to give ye the rheumatiz in the oyes to luk at the nasty black hole. I’m thinkin’ it’s the divil’s own place, wid the fires out.”

The Diamond Creek Canon, although far inferior to its giant neighbor, was nevertheless a wonderful excavation, striking audaciously into sombre mountain recesses, sublime with precipices, peaks, and grotesque masses. The footing was of the ruggedest, a _debris_ of confused and eroded rocks, the pathway of an extinct river. One thing was beautiful: the creek was a perfect contrast to the turbid Colorado; its waters were as clear and bright as crystal. Sweeny halted over and over to look at it, his mouth open and eyes twinkling like a pleased dog.

“An’ there’s nothing nagurish about that, now,” he chuckled. “A pataty ud laugh to be biled in it.”

After slowly ascending for a quarter of a mile, they turned a bend and came upon a scene which seemed to them like a garden. They were in a broad opening, made by the confluence of two canons. Into this gigantic rocky nest had been dropped an oasis of turf and of thickets of green willows. Through the centre of the verdure the Diamond Creek flowed dimpling over a pebbly bed, or shot in sparkles between barring bowlders, or plunged over shelves in toy cascades. The travellers had seen nothing so hospitable in nature since leaving the country of the Moquis weeks before.

Sweeny screamed like a delighted child. “Oh! an’ that’s just like ould Oirland. Oh, luk at the turrf! D’ye iver see the loikes o’that, now? The blessed turrf! Here ye be, right in the divil’s own garden. Liftinant, if ye’ll let me build a fort here, I’ll garrison it. I’ll stay here me whole term of sarvice.”

“Halt,” said Thurstane. “We’ll eat, refill canteens, and inspect arms. If this is Diamond Canon, and I think there is no doubt of it, we may expect to find Indians soon.”

“I’ll fight ’em,” declared Sweeny. “An’ if they’ve got anythin’ betther nor dried grizzly, I’ll have it.”

“Wait for orders,” cautioned Thurstane. “No firing without orders.”

After cleaning their guns and chewing their tough and stale rations, they resumed their march, leaving the rivulet and following the canon, which led toward the southwest. As they were now regaining the level of the plateau, their advance was a constant and difficult ascent, sometimes struggling through labyrinths of detached rocks, and sometimes climbing steep shelves which had once been the leaping-places of cataracts. The sides of the chasm were two thousand feet high, and it was entered by branch ravines of equal grandeur.

The sun had set for them, although he was still high above the horizon of upper earth, when Thurstane halted and whispered, “Wigwams!”

Perched among the rocks, some under projecting strata and others in shadowy niches between huge buttresses, they discovered at first three or four, then a dozen, and finally twenty wretched cabins. They scarcely saw before they were seen; a hideous old squaw dropped a bundle of fuel and ran off screeching; in a moment the whole den was in an uproar. Startling yells burst from lofty nooks in the mountain flanks, and scarecrow figures dodged from ambush to ambush of the sombre gully. It was as if they had invaded the haunts of the brownies.

The Hualpais, a species of Digger Indians, dwarfish, miserable, and degraded, living mostly on roots, lizards, and the like, were nevertheless conscious of scalps to save. In five minutes from the discovery of the strangers they had formed a straggling line of battle, squatting along a ledge which crossed the canon. There were not twenty warriors, and they were no doubt wretchedly armed, but their position was formidable.

Sweeny, looking like an angry rat, his nose twitching and eyes sparkling with rage, offered to storm the rampart alone, shouting, “Oh, the nasty, lousy nagurs! Let ’em get out of our way.”

“Guess we’d better talk to the cusses,” observed Glover. “Tain’t the handiest place I ever see for fightin’; an’ I don’t keer ’bout havin’ my ears ‘n’ nose bored any more at present.”

“Stay where you are,” said Thurstane. “I’ll go forward and parley with them.”

CHAPTER XXX.

Thurstane had no great difficulty in making a sort of let-me-alone-and-I’ll-let-you-alone treaty with the embattled Hualpais.

After some minutes of dumb show they came down from their stronghold and dispersed to their dwellings. They seemed to be utterly without curiosity; the warriors put aside their bows and lay down to sleep; the old squaw hurried off to pick up her bundle of fuel; even the papooses were silent and stupid. It was a race lower than the Hottentots or the Australians. Short, meagre, badly built, excessively ugly, they were nearly naked, and their slight clothing was rags of skins. Thurstane tried to buy food of them, but either they had none to spare or his buttons seemed to them of no value. Nor could he induce any one to accompany him as a guide.

“Do ye think Godamighty made thim paple?” inquired Sweeny.

“Reckon so,” replied Glover.

“I don’t belave it,” said Sweeny. “He’d be in more rispactable bizniss. It’s me opinyin the divil made um for a joke on the rest av us. An’ it’s me opinyin he made this whole counthry for the same rayson.”

“The priest’ll tell ye God made all men, Sweeny.”

“They ain’t min at all. Thim crachurs ain’t min. They’re nagurs, an’ a mighty poor kind at that. I hate um. I wish they was all dead. I’ve kilt some av um, an’ I’m goin’ to kill slathers more, God willin’. I belave it’s part av the bizniss av white min to finish off the nagurs.”

Profound and potent sentiment of race antipathy! The contempt and hatred of white men for yellow, red, brown, and black men has worked all over earth, is working yet, and will work for ages. It is a motive of that tremendous tragedy which Spencer has entitled “the survival of the fittest,” and Darwin, “natural selection.”

The party continued to ascend the canon. At short intervals branch canons exhibited arid and precipitous gorges, more and more gloomy with twilight. It was impossible to choose between one and another. The travellers could never see three hundred yards in advance. To right and left they were hemmed in by walls fifteen hundred feet in height. Only one thing was certain: these altitudes were gradually diminishing; and hence they knew that they were mounting the plateau. At last, four hours after leaving Diamond Creek, wearied to the marrow with incessant toil, they halted by a little spring, stretched themselves on a scrap of starveling grass, and chewed their meagre, musty supper.

The scenery here was unearthly. Barring the bit of turf and a few willows which had got lost in the desert, there was not a tint of verdure. To right and left rose two huge and steep slopes of eroded and ragged rocks, tortured into every conceivable form of jag, spire, pinnacle, and imagery. In general the figures were grotesque; it seemed as if the misshapen gods of India and of China and of barbarous lands had gathered there; as if this were a place of banishment and punishment for the fallen idols of all idolatries. Above this coliseum of monstrosities rose a long line of sharp, jagged needles, like a vast _chevaux-de-frise_, forbidding escape. Still higher, lighted even yet by the setting sun, towered five cones of vast proportions. Then came cliffs capped by shatters of tableland, and then the long, even, gleaming ledge of the final plateau.

Locked in this bedlam of crazed strata, unable to see or guess a way out of it, the wanderers fell asleep. There was no setting of guards; they trusted to the desert as a sentinel.

At daylight the blind and wearisome climbing recommenced. Occasionally they found patches of thin turf and clumps of dwarf cedars struggling with the rocky waste. These bits of greenery were not the harbingers of a new empire of vegetation, but the remnants of one whose glory had vanished ages ago, swept away by a vandalism of waters. Gradually the canon dwindled to a ravine, narrow, sinuous, walled in by stony steeps or slopes, and interlocking continually with other similar chasms. A creek, which followed the chasm, appeared and disappeared at intervals of a mile or so, as if horrified at the face of nature and anxious to hide from it in subterranean recesses.

The travellers stumbled on until the ravine became a gully and the gully a fissure. They stepped out of it; they were on the rolling surface of the tableland; they were half a mile above the Colorado.

Here they halted, gave three cheers, and then looked back upon the northern desert as men look who have escaped an enemy. A gigantic panorama of the country which they had traversed was unrolled to their vision. In the foreground stretched declining tablelands, intersected by numberless ravines, and beyond these a lofty line of bluffs marked the edge of the Great Canon of the Colorado. Through one wide gap in these heights came a vision of endless plateaux, their terraces towering one above another until they were thousands of feet in the air, the horizontal azure bands extending hundreds of miles northward, until the deep blue faded into a lighter blue, and that into the sapphire of the heavens.

“It looks a darned sight finer than it is,” observed Glover.

“Bedad, ye may say that,” added Sweeny. “It’s a big hippycrit av a counthry. Ye’d think, to luk at it, ye could ate it wid a spoon.”

Now came a rolling region, covered with blue grass and dotted with groves of cedars, the earth generally hard and smooth and the marching easy. Striking southward, they reached a point where the plateau culminated in a low ridge, and saw before them a long gentle slope of ten miles, then a system of rounded hills, and then mountains.

“Halt here,” said Thurstane. “We must study our topography and fix on our line of march.”

“You’ll hev to figger it,” replied Glover. “I don’t know nothin’ in this part o’ the world.”

“Ye ain’t called on to know,” put in Sweeny. “The liftinant’ll tell ye.”

“I think,” hesitated Thurstane, “that we are about fifty miles north of Cactus Pass, where we want to strike the trail.”

“And I’m putty nigh played out,” groaned Glover.

“Och! _you_ howld up yer crazy head,” exhorted Sweeny. “It’ll do ye iver so much good.”

“It’s easy talkin’,” sighed the jaded and rheumatic skipper.

“It’s as aisy talkin’ right as talkin’ wrong,” retorted Sweeny. “Ye’ve no call to grunt the curritch out av yer betthers. Wait till the liftinant says die.”

Thurstane was studying the landscape. Which of those ranges was the Cerbat, which the Aztec, and which the Pinaleva? He knew that, after leaving Cactus Pass, the overland trail turns southward and runs toward the mouth of the Gila, crossing the Colorado hundreds of miles away. To the west of the pass, therefore, he must not strike, under peril of starving amid untracked plains and ranges. On the whole, it seemed probable that the snow-capped line of summits directly ahead of him was the Cerbat range, and that he must follow it southward along the base of its eastern slope.

“We will move on,” he said. “Mr. Glover, we must reach those broken hills before night in order to find water. Can you do it?”

“Reckon I kin jest about do it, ‘s the feller said when he walked to his own hangin’,” returned the suffering skipper.

The failing man marched so slowly and needed so many halts that they were five hours in reaching the hills. It was now nightfall; they found a bright little spring in a grassy ravine; and after a meagre supper, they tried to stifle their hunger with sleep. Thurstane and Sweeny took turns in watching, for smoke of fires had been seen on the mountains, and, poor as they were, they could not afford to be robbed. In the morning Glover seemed refreshed, and started out with some vigor.

“Och! ye’ll go round the worrld,” said Sweeny, encouragingly. “Bones can march furder than fat anny day. Yer as tough as me rations. Dried grizzly is nothin’ to ye.”

After threading hills for hours they came out upon a wide, rolling basin prettily diversified by low spurs of the encircling mountains and bluish green with the long grasses known as _pin_ and _grama_. A few deer and antelopes, bounding across the rockier places, were an aggravation to starving men who could not follow them.

“Why don’t we catch some o’ thim flyin’ crachurs?” demanded Sweeny.

“We hain’t got no salt to put on their tails,” explained Glover, grinning more with pain than with his joke.

“I’d ate ’em widout salt,” said Sweeny. “If the tails was feathers, I’d ate ’em.”

“We must camp early, and try our luck at hunting,” observed Thurstane.

“I go for campin’ airly,” groaned the limping and tottering Glover.

“Och! yees ud like to shlape an shnore an’ grunt and rowl over an’ shnore agin the whole blissid time,” snapped Sweeny, always angered by a word of discouragement. “Yees ought to have a dozen o’ thim nagurs wid their long poles to make a fither bed for yees an’ tuck up the blankets an’ spat the pilly. Why didn’t ye shlape all ye wanted to whin yees was in the boat?”

“Quietly, Sweeny,” remonstrated Thurstane. “Mr. Glover marches with great pain.”

“I’ve no objiction to his marchin’ wid great pain or annyway Godamighty lets him, if he won’t grunt about it.”

“But you must be civil, my man.”

“I ax yer pardon, Liftinant. I don’t mane no harrum by blatherin’. It’s a way we have in th’ ould counthry. Mebbe it’s no good in th’ arrmy.”

“Let him yawp, Capm,” interposed Glover. “It’s a way they hev, as he says. Never see two Paddies together but what they got to fightin’ or pokin’ fun at each other. Me an’ Sweeny won’t quarrel. I take his clickatyclack for what it’s worth by the cart-load. ‘Twon’t hurt me. Dunno but what it’s good for me.”

“Bedad, it’s betther for ye nor yer own gruntin’,” added the irrepressible Irishman.

By two in the afternoon they had made perhaps fifteen miles, and reached the foot of the mountain which they proposed to skirt. As Glover was now fagged out, Thurstane decided to halt for the night and try deer-stalking. A muddy water-hole, surrounded by thickets of willows, indicated their camping ground. The sick man was _cached_ in the dense foliage; his canteen was filled for him and placed by his side; there could be no other nursing.

“If the nagurs kill ye, I’ll revenge ye,” was Sweeny’s parting encouragement. “I’ll git ye back yer scallup, if I have to cut it out of um.”

Late in the evening the two hunters returned empty. Sweeny, in spite of his hunger and fatigue, boiled over with stories of the hairbreadth escapes of the “antyloops” that he had fired at. Thurstane also had seen game, but not near enough for a shot.

“I didn’t look for such bad luck,” said the weary and half-starved young fellow, soberly. “No supper for any of us. We must save our last ration to make to-morrow’s march on.”

“It’s a poor way of atin’ two males in wan,” remarked Sweeny. “I niver thought I’d come to wish I had me haversack full o’ dried bear.”

The next day was a terrible one. Already half famished, their only food for the twenty-four hours was about four ounces apiece of bear meat, tough, ill-scented, and innutritious. Glover was so weak with hunger and his ailments that he had to be supported most of the way by his two comrades. His temper, and Sweeny’s also, gave out, and they snarled at each other in good earnest, as men are apt to do under protracted hardships. Thurstane stalked on in silence, sustained by his youth and health, and not less by his sense of responsibility. These men were here through his doing; he must support them and save them if possible; if not, he must show them how to die bravely; for it had come to be a problem of life and death. They could not expect to travel two days longer without food. The time was approaching when they would fall down with faintness, not to rise again in this world.

In the morning their only provision was one small bit of meat which Thurstane had saved from his ration of the day before. This he handed to Glover, saying with a firm eye and a cheerful smile, “My dear fellow, here is your breakfast.”

The starving invalid looked at it wistfully, and stammered, with a voice full of tears, “I can’t eat when the rest of ye don’t.”

Sweeny, who had stared at the morsel with hungry eyes, now broke out, “I tell ye, ate it. The liftinant wants ye to.”

“Divide it fair,” answered Glover, who could hardly restrain himself from sobbing.

“I won’t touch a bit av it,” declared Sweeny. “It’s the liftinant’s own grub.”

“We won’t divide it,” said Thurstane. “I’ll put it in your pocket, Glover. When you can’t take another step without it, you must go at it.”

“Bedad, if ye don’t, we’ll lave yees,” added Sweeny, digging his fists into his empty stomach to relieve its gnawing.

Very slowly, the well men sustaining the sick one, they marched over rolling hills until about noon, accomplishing perhaps ten miles. They were now on a slope looking southward; above them the wind sighed through a large grove of cedars; a little below was a copious spring of clear, sweet water. There they halted, drinking and filling their canteens, but not eating. The square inch of bear meat was still in Glover’s pocket, but he could not be got to taste it unless the others would share.

“Capm, I feel’s though Heaven’d strike me if I should eat your victuals,” he whispered, his voice having failed him. “I feel a sort o’ superstitious ’bout it. I want to die with a clear conscience.”

But when they rose his strength gave out entirely, and he dropped down fainting.

“Now ate yer mate,” said Sweeny, in a passion of pity and anxiety. “Ate yer mate an’ stand up to yer marchin’.”

Glover, however, could not eat, for the fever of hunger had at last produced nausea, and he pushed away the unsavory morsel when it was put to his lips.

“Go ahead,” he whispered. “No use all dyin’. Go ahead.” And then he fainted outright.

“I think the trail can’t be more than fifteen miles off,” said Thurstane, when he had found that his comrade still breathed. “One of us must push on to it and the other stay with Glover. Sweeny, I can track the country best. You must stay.”

For the first time in this long and suffering and perilous journey Sweeny’s courage failed him, and he looked as if he would like to shirk his duty.

“My lad, it is necessary,” continued the officer. “We can’t leave this man so. You have your gun. You can try to hunt. When he comes to, you must get him along, following the course you see me take. If I find help, I’ll save you. If not, I’ll come back and die with you.”

Sitting down by the side of the insensible Glover, Sweeny covered his face with two grimy hands which trembled a little. It was not till his officer had got some thirty feet away that he raised his head and looked after him. Then he called, in his usual quick, sharp, chattering way, “Liftinant, is this soldierin’?”

“Yes, my lad,” replied Thurstane with a sad, weary smile, thinking meantime of hardships past, “this is soldiering.”

“Thin I’ll do me dooty if I rot jest here,” declared the simple hero.

Thurstane came back, grasped Sweeny’s hand in silence, turned away to hide his shaken face, and commenced his anxious journey.

There were both terrible and beautiful thoughts in his soul as he pushed on into the desert. Would he find the trail? Would he encounter the rare chance of traders or emigrants? Would there be food and rest for him and rescue for his comrades? Would he meet Clara? This last idea gave him great courage; he struggled to keep it constantly in his mind; he needed to lean upon it.

By the time that he had marched ten miles he found that he was weaker than he had supposed. Weeks of wretched food and three days of almost complete starvation had taken the strength pretty much out of his stalwart frame. His breath was short; he stumbled over the slightest obstacles; occasionally he could not see clear. From time to time it struck him that he had been dreaming or else that his mind was beginning to wander. Things that he remembered and things that he hoped for seemed strangely present. He spoke to people who were hundreds of miles away; and, for the most part, he spoke to them pettishly or with downright anger; for in the main he felt more like a wretched, baited animal than a human being.

It was only when he called Clara to mind that this evil spirit was exorcised, and he ceased for a moment to resemble a hungry, jaded wolf. Then he would be for a while all sweetness, because he was for the while perfectly happy. In the next instant, by some hateful and irresistible magic, happiness and sweetness would be gone, and he could not even remember them nor remember _her_.

Meantime he struggled to command himself and pay attention to his route. He must do this, because his starving comrades lay behind him, and he must know how to lead men back to their rescue. Well, here he was; there were hills to the left; there was a mountain to the right; he would stop and fix it all in his memory.

He sat down beside a rock, leaned his back against it to steady his dizzy head, had a sensation of struggling with something invincible, and was gone.

CHAPTER XXXI.

Leaving Thurstane in the desert, we return to Clara in the desert. It will be remembered that she stood on the roof of the Casa Grande when her lover was swept oarless down the San Juan.

She was watching him; of course she was watching him; at the moment of the catastrophe she saw him; she felt sure also that he was looking at her. The boat began to fly down the current; then the two oarsmen fell to paddling violently; what did it mean? Far from guessing that the towline had snapped, she was not aware that there was one.

On went the boat; presently it whirled around helplessly; it was nearing the rocks of the rapid; there was evidently danger. Running to the edge of the roof, Clara saw a Mexican cattle-driver standing on the wall of the enclosure, and called to him, “What is the matter?”

“The lariats have broken,” he replied. “They are drifting.”

Clara uttered a little gasp of a shriek, and then did not seem to breathe again for a minute. She saw Thurstane led away in captivity by the savage torrent; she saw him rise up in the boat and wave her a farewell; she could not lift her hand to respond; she could only stand and stare. She had a look, and there was within her a sensation, as if her soul were starting out of her eyes. The whole calamity revealed itself to her at once and without mercy. There was no saving him and no going after him; he was being taken out of her sight; he was disappearing; he was gone. She leaned forward, trying to look around the bend of the river, and was balked by a monstrous, cruel advance of precipices. Then, when she realized that he had vanished, there was a long scream ending in unconsciousness.

When she came to herself everybody was talking of the calamity. Coronado, Aunt Maria, and others overflowed with babblings of regret, astonishment, explanations, and consolation. The lariats had broken. How could it have happened! How dreadful! etc.

“But he will land,” cried Clara, looking eagerly from face to face.

“Oh, certainly,” said Coronado. “Landings can be made. There are none visible, but doubtless they exist.”

“And then he will march back here?” she demanded.

“Not easily. I am afraid, my dear cousin, not very easily. There would be canons to turn, and long ones. Probably he would strike for the Moqui country.”

“Across the desert? No water!”

Coronado shrugged his shoulders as if to say that he could not help it.

“If we go back to-morrow,” she began again, “do you think we shall overtake them?”

“I think it very probable,” lied Coronado.

“And if we don’t overtake them, will they join us at the Moqui pueblos?”

“Yes, yes. I have little doubt of it.”

“When do you think we ought to start?”

“To-morrow morning.”

“Won’t that be too early?”

“Day after to-morrow then.”

“Won’t that be too late?”

Coronado nearly boiled over with rage. This girl was going to demand impossibilities of him, and impossibilities that he would not perform if he could. He must be here and he must be there; he must be quick enough and not a minute too quick; and all to save his rival from the pit which he had just dug for him. Turning his back on Clara, he paced the roof of the Casa in an excitement which he could not conceal, muttering, “I will do the best I can–the best I can.”

Presently the remembrance that he had at least gained one great triumph enabled him to recover his self-possession and his foxy cunning.

“My dear cousin,” he said gently, “you must not suppose that I am not greatly afflicted by this accident. I appreciate the high merit of Lieutenant Thurstane, and I grieve sincerely at his misfortune. What can I do? I will do the best I can for all. Trusting to your good sense, I will do whatever you say. But if you want my advice, here it is. We ought for our own sakes to leave here to-morrow; but for his sake we will wait a day. In that time he may rejoin us, or he may regain the Moqui trail. So we will set out, if you have no objection, on the morning of day after to-morrow, and push for the pueblos. When we do start, we must march, as you know, at our best speed.”

“Thank you, Coronado,” said Clara. “It is the best you can do.”

There were not five minutes during that day and the next that the girl did not look across the plain to the gorge of the dry canon, in the hope that she might see Thurstane approaching. At other times she gazed eagerly down the San Juan, although she knew that he could not stem the current. Her love and her sorrow were ready to believe in miracles. How is it possible, she often thought, that such a brief sweep of water should carry him so utterly away? In spite of her fear of vexing Coronado, she questioned him over and over as to the course of the stream and the nature of its banks, only to find that he knew next to nothing.

“It will be hard for him to return to us,” the man finally suggested, with an air of being driven unwillingly to admit it. “He may have to go on a long way down the river.”

The truth is that, not knowing whether the lost men could return easily or not, he was anxious to get away from their neighborhood.

Before the second day of this suspense was over, Aunt Maria had begun to make herself obnoxious. She hinted that Thurstane knew what he was about; that the river was his easiest road to his station; that, in short, he had deserted. Clara flamed up indignantly and replied, “I know him better.”

“Why, what has he got to do with us?” reasoned Aunt Maria. “He doesn’t belong to our party.”

“He has his men here. He wouldn’t leave his soldiers.”

“His men! They can take care of themselves. If they can’t, I should like to know what they are good for. I think it highly probable he went off of his own choice.”

“I think it highly probable you know nothing about it,” snapped Clara. “You are incapable of judging him.”

The girl was not just now herself. Her whole soul was concentrated in justifying, loving, and saving Thurstane; and her manner, instead of being serenely and almost lazily gentle, was unpleasantly excited. It was as if some charming alluvial valley should suddenly give forth the steam and lava of a volcano.

Finding no sympathy in Aunt Maria, and having little confidence in the good-will of Coronado, she looked about her for help. There was Sergeant Meyer; he had been Thurstane’s right-hand man; moreover, he looked trustworthy. She seized the first opportunity to beckon him up to her eerie on the roof of the Casa.

“Sergeant, I must speak with you privately,” she said at once, with the frankness of necessity.

The sergeant, a well-bred soldier, respectful to ladies, and especially to ladies who were the friends of officers, raised his forefinger to his cap and stood at attention.

“How came Lieutenant Thurstane to go down the river?” she asked.

“It was the lariat proke,” replied Meyer, in a whispering, flute-like voice which he had when addressing his superiors.

“Did it break, or was it cut?”

The sergeant raised his small, narrow, and rather piggish gray eyes to hers with a momentary expression of anxiety.

“I must pe gareful what I zay,” he answered, sinking his voice still lower. “We must poth pe gareful. I examined the lariat. I fear it was sawed. But we must not zay this.”

“Who sawed it?” demanded Clara with a gasp.

“It was no one in the poat,” replied Meyer diplomatically.

“Was it that man–that hunter–Smith?”

Another furtive glance between the sandy eyelashes expressed an uneasy astonishment; the sergeant evidently had a secret on his mind which he must not run any risk of disclosing.

“I do not zee how it was Schmidt” he fluted almost inaudibly. “He was watching the peasts at their basture.”

“Then who did saw it?”

“I do not know. I do not feel sure that it was sawed.”

Perceiving that, either from ignorance or caution, he would not say more on this point, Clara changed the subject and asked, “Can Lieutenant Thurstane go down the river safely?”

“I would like noting petter than to make the exbedition myself,” replied Meyer, once more diplomatic.

Now came a silence, the soldier waiting respectfully, the girl not knowing how much she might dare to say. Not that she doubted Meyer; on the contrary, she had a perfect confidence in him; how could she fail to trust one who had been trusted by Thurstane?

“Sergeant,” she at last whispered, “we must find him.”

“Yes, miss,” touching his cap as if he were taking an oath by it.

“And you,” she hesitated, “must protect _me_.”

“Yes, miss,” and the sergeant repeated his gesture of solemn affirmation.

“Perhaps I will say more some time.”

He saluted again, and seeing that she had nothing to add, retired quietly.

For two nights there was little sleep for Clara. She passed them in pondering Thurstane’s chances, or in listening for his returning footsteps. Yet when the train set out for the Moqui pueblos, she seemed as