canyon would be no wider than the stream that incised it, but the
upper portion would have been smoothed into grassy parks or lakelets on
each tread of a giant stairway to the summit of the range.

Rounded water-worn pebbles and cobblestones among a mass of angular
bowlders, left behind by glacier streams, together with an occasional
striated pebble, were "sermons in stones" to the geologist.

"Hey, Ted," his chum had challenged him that day, "did you ever see a
pirate?"

"Don't know as I did," admitted the ranch boy.

"Then I'll show you one. Climb in," and he prepared to search once more
for the Mexicans.

"Show me one! You speak as if they kept them in museums."

"This pirate will be a river. A river pirate,--I mean a pirate river! If
I could find the divide just North of Muah Mountain I'd show you where
streams are being captured this minute. Cottonwood Creek has already
captured one of the tributaries of Mulkey Creek, I hear, and diverted it
into an eastward flow, and further captures are likely to be pulled off
any time. Isn't it a scandal?"

"I say, Ace," protested his chum, "I've swallowed a lot since we started
on this trip, but I'm not so gullible as you seem to think."

"Look here, old kid," said Ace seriously. "It's a fact. Along a divide, a
stream flowing one way will divert one flowing the other way into its own
channel."

They found a pirate river,--but still no trace of the incendiaries.
However, that merely determined the Senator's son the more.

That night Norris told them the long promised tale of his Alaskan trip.

"Nothing like the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes has ever been seen by the
eye of man," he declared. "If we could take all the other volcanic
regions of the world to-day and set them down side by side, they would
present less of a spectacle, except, of course, at the time of a
dangerous eruption. There has been nothing like it in the memory of
man,--though geologists can read from the rocks that such conditions must
have existed in past ages. The Mt. Katmai eruption of 1912, one of the
most dangerous in history, first attracted attention to this region, and
the National Geographic Society has since sent various expeditions to
Alaska. It was that way that the Valley came to be discovered, in 1916.

"I happened to be a member of the last expedition."

"Honestly!" the boys exclaimed.

"Yes, and I tell you, boys, when I first looked through Katmai Pass, it
just looked as if the