and led back along a thin sheet of rock that stood between the gorge
and the Valley. The floor of this cut or canyon, which was so narrow
that the laden burros had a "narrow squeak" to pass, as Pete said,
lifted sharply. It rose smoothly underfoot in the pitch darkness, for
the cut was roofed in the living rock five hundred feet above, and
climbed for a mile. It was a dead, flat place, without sound, for the
footsteps of the burros and the man fell dully on the soft and sliding
floor, and it seemed to have no acoustic properties.

At the end of the mile this snake-like split in the solid rock came
suddenly out into a broader, more steeply pitched canyon whose walls
went straight up to the open skies above. Here there were heaps and
piles and long slides of dead stone, weathered and powdered, that had
fallen from time to time from the parent walls. This in turn led up
and on to other breaks and splits and cuts, all open, all lifting to
the upper world, and all as blind and dangerous to follow as any
deathtrap that old Dame Nature ever devised. Here, at any crosscut,
any debouching canyon, a man might turn to his undoing, might travel on
and up and never reach those beckoning heights, seen clearly from some
blind pocket he had wandered into, might never find his way back to
the original canyon among the continuous cuts that met and crossed and
passed each other among the towering points and sheets.

But Old Pete knew where he was going. Not for nothing had he threaded
these passages for fifteen years. He knew the Canon Country for the
lower part better than any man in the Valley, if Courtrey be
excepted.

So this night he climbed and shouted to his burros and thought no more
of the sounding splits, for here the echoes raved, than he would have
thought of the open plains below.

He passed on and up to where a certain cut lay full, year after year,
of packed and hardened snow. For fifteen years Old Pete had visited
this cut, a deeper drop into the nether world of rock, and cut his
supplies from its surface. Every season he took what he needed,
leaving a widening circle at the edge from which he worked, where the
cut he traveled passed the mouth of the pent canyon, and every year the
snows, sifting from high above, leveled it again. There was no known
outlet for this glacier-like pack, no sliding chance, yet it was
always on a certain level--each summer seeming to lose just what it
gained in winter. It lay level at the