e world to equal that. The
tranquillity of lesser spaces was not here manifest. Sound, movement,
life, seemed to have no fitness here. Ruin was there and desolation
and decay. The meaning of the ages was flung at him, and a man became
nothing. When he had gazed at the San Juan Canyon he had been appalled
at the nature of Joe Lake's Herculean task. He had lost hope, faith.
The thing was not possible. But when Shefford gazed at that sublime and
majestic wilderness, in which the Grand Canyon was only a dim line, he
strangely lost his terror and something else came to him from across the
shining spaces. If Nas Ta Bega led them safely down to the river, if
Joe Lake met them at the mouth of Nonnezoshe Boco, if they survived the
rapids of that terrible gorge, then Shefford would have to face his soul
and the meaning of this spirit that breathed on the wind.

He urged his mustang to the descent of the slope, and as he went down,
slowly drawing nearer to the other fugitives, his mind alternated
between this strange intimation of faith, this subtle uplift of hid
spirit, and the growing gloom and shadow in his love for Fay Larkin. Not
that he loved her less, but more! A possible God hovering near him,
like the Indian's spirit-step on the trail, made his soul the darker for
Fay's crime, and he saw with light, with deeper sadness, with sterner
truth.

More than once the Indian turned on his mustang to look up the slope
and the light flashed from his dark, somber face. Shefford instinctively
looked back himself, and then realized the unconscious motive of the
action. Deep within him there had been a premonition of certain pursuit,
and the Indian's reiterated backward glance had at length brought the
feeling upward. Thereafter, as they descended, Shefford gradually added
to his already wrought emotions a mounting anxiety.

No sign of a trail showed where the base of the slope rolled out to
meet the green plain. The earth was gravelly, with dark patches of heavy
silt, almost like cinders; and round, black rocks, flinty and glassy,
cracked away from the hoofs of the mustangs. There was a level bench a
mile wide, then a ravine, and then an ascent, and after that, rounded
ridge and ravine, one after the other, like huge swells of a monstrous
sea. Indian paint-brush vied in its scarlet hue with the deep magenta
of cactus. There was no sage. Soapweed and meager grass and a bunch of
cactus here and there lent the green to that barren; and