exclaim,

"We've struck it, Steve!"

"Struck what?"

"A regular canyon. See, the walls are almost perpendicular, and the
bottom comes down, from ledge to ledge, like a flight of stairs!"

Steve had been among mountains before, but he had never seen anything
precisely like that.

In some places the vast chasm before him was hardly more than a hundred
feet wide, while its walls of gray granite and glittering white quartz
rock arose in varying heights of from three hundred to five hundred
feet.

"Come on, Steve!"

"You won't find any game in here. A rabbit couldn't get enough to live
on among such rocks as these."

"Come right along! I want to get a look at the ledges up there.
There's no telling what we may stumble upon."

Steve's young eyes were fully occupied, as they pushed forward, with
the strange beauty and grandeur of the scenery above, beyond, and
behind him. The air was clear and almost cool, and there was plenty of
light in the shadiest nooks of the chasm.

"What torrents of water must pour down through here at some seasons of
the year," he was saying to himself, when his companion suddenly
stopped, with a sharp, "Hist! Look there!" and raised his rifle.

Steve looked.

Away up on the edge of the beetling white crag at their right, the
first "game" they had seen that day was calmly gazing down upon them.

A "big-horn antelope" has the best nerves in the world, and it is
nothing to him how high may be the precipice on the edge of which he is
standing. His head never gets dizzy, and his feet never slip, for he
was made to live in that kind of country, and feels entirely at home in
spots where no other living thing cares to follow him.

That was a splendid specimen of what the first settlers called the
"Rocky Mountain sheep," until they found that it was not a sheep at
all, but an "antelope." His strong, wide, curling horns were of the
largest size, and gave him an expression of dignity and wisdom as he
peered down upon the hunters who had intruded upon his solitudes. He
would have shown more wisdom by not looking at all, for in a moment
more the sharp crack of Murray's rifle awoke the echoes of the canyon,
and then, with a great bound, the big-horn came tumbling down among the
rocks, almost at Steve Harrison's feet.

"He's a little battered by his fall," said Murray, "that's a fact. But
he'll be just as good eating. Let's hoist him on that bowlder and go
ahead."

"He's as much as we