e patches closed up,
and soon extended as far as he could see. It was soft, affording
difficult travel. Slone crossed hundreds of deer tracks, and the trail
he was on eventually became a deer runway.

Presently, far down one of the aisles between the great pines Slone saw
what appeared to be a yellow cliff, far away. It puzzled him. And as he
went on he received the impression that the forest dropped out of sight
ahead. Then the trees grew thicker, obstructing his view. Presently the
trail became soggy and he had to help his horse. The mustang floundered
in the soft snow and earth. Cedars and pinyons appeared again, making
travel still more laborious.

All at once there came to Slone a strange consciousness of light and
wind and space and void. On the instant his horse halted with a snort.
Slone quickly looked up. Had he come to the end of the world? An abyss,
a canyon, yawned beneath him, beyond all comparison in its greatness.
His keen eye, educated to desert distance and dimension, swept down and
across, taking in the tremendous truth, before it staggered his
comprehension. But a second sweeping glance, slower, becoming
intoxicated with what it beheld, saw gigantic cliff-steps and yellow
slopes dotted with cedars, leading down to clefts filled with purple
smoke, and these led on and on to a ragged red world of rock, bare,
shining, bold, uplifted in mesa, dome, peak, and crag, clear and
strange in the morning light, still and sleeping like death.

This, then, was the great canyon, which had seemed like a hunter's
fable rather than truth. Slone's sight dimmed, blurring the spectacle,
and he found that his eyes had filled with tears. He wiped them away
and looked again and again, until he was confounded by the vastness and
the grandeur and the vague sadness of the scene. Nothing he had ever
looked at had affected him like this canyon, although the Stewarts had
tried to prepare him for it.

It was the horse-hunter's passion that reminded him of his pursuit. The
deer trail led down through a break in the wall. Only a few rods of it
could be seen. This trail was passable, even though choked with snow.
But the depth beyond this wall seemed to fascinate Slone and hold him
back, used as he was to desert trails. Then the clean mark of
Wildfire's hoof brought back the old thrill.

"This place fits you, Wildfire," muttered Slone, dismounting.

He started down, leading Nagger. The mustang followed. Slone kept to
the wall s