sant
camp on the bank of the river and swinging out into the current we
headed for the gorge.

Then in a moment we were swallowed up between its jaws as a fly goes
into the mouth of a lion. We were enured to dangers and terrible
hazards, these we were prepared to meet, nor did we encounter anything
equal to the flood of the week before. In that the Colorado had done its
worst.

But it was the sombreness and the gloom of that granite gorge that
overwhelmed us. It seemed as I have said, as though the river as it
plunged and roared downward between the dark and narrow walls, was
carrying us down into some nether and long-forgotten hell.

We could see little of the glorious upper canyon that was on either side
of the gorge whose walls rose perpendicularly above us for fifteen
hundred feet.

"One good thing about it," said Tom, "when we get through with this we
are through for certain."

"It won't take us long if we keep up this gait," I said, as we swept
downward like an express train, and the walls going by as fences do when
you look out from a car window. We ran into one terrible rapid where the
river was lashed into a mass of foam from wall to wall.

The waves poured over into our boat nearly swamping us. We pulled out of
it alive and the worst was over.

At last, at last, our war worn, battered boat drifted out into the broad
sunny reaches of the Colorado. Behind us was the gloom of the
labyrinthine, rock bound prison with the gnashing river within it
rushing ever downward, eager to escape.

We were glad, glad to have come through our terrific experiences alive
and though we were weather beaten, well and uninjured.

"Thank Heaven!" exclaimed Jim, as he steered down the broad unhampered
river.

So after some time of quiet journeying we came to the end of our trip.
We found a pleasant camping place near a cove where we anchored our
faithful boat. How splendidly it had carried us through.

Battered and beaten though it was, still perfectly seaworthy, or to be
more exact, riverworthy. It had been our home so many weeks that it
seemed to be a part of our lives, and we had a real affection for it,
like one has for a faithful dog who has been one's companion through
trials and dangers.

One evening we sat around the campfire, underneath the cottonwood trees
with the slow moving Colorado in the foreground. We had been talking of
home, both in Kansas and York State and also of our old friend the
captain, when Ji