a regular gulch, we shall have to go
back with our horses and waggon and try some other way."

"Well, come along and let's see," said Bart; and once more they climbed
on for quite half-an-hour, when they emerged from the trees on to a
rugged piece of open rocky plain, with scattered pines gnarled and
twisted and swept bare by the mighty winds, and as far as eye could
reach nothing but one vast, well-watered plain.

"Told you so," said Joses; "now we shall either have to keep up here in
the mountain or go down among the Injuns again, just as the master
likes."

"Let's come and sit down near the edge here and rest," said Bart, who
was fascinated by the beauty of the scene, and, going right out upon a
jutting promontory of stone, they could look to right and left at the
great wall of rock that spread as far as they could see. In places it
seemed to go sheer down to the plain, in others it was broken into
ledges by slips and falls of rock; but everywhere it seemed to shut the
great plain in from the west, and Bart fully realised that they would
have to find some great rift or gulch by which to descend, if their
journey was to be continued in this direction.

"How far is it down to the plain?" said Bart, after he had been feasting
his eyes for some time.

"Four to five thousand feet," said Joses. "Can't tell for certain.
Chap would fall a long way before he found bottom, and then he'd bounce
off, and go on again and again. I don't think the mountain sheep would
jump here."

As they sat resting and inhaling the fresh breeze that blew over the
widespreading plain, Bart could not help noticing the remains of a grand
old pine that had once grown right at the edge of the stupendous
precipice, but had gradually been storm-beaten and split in its old age
till the trunk and a few jagged branches only remained.

One of these projected from its stunted trunk close down by the roots,
and seemed thrust out at right angles over the precipice in a way that
somehow seemed to tempt Bart.

He turned his eyes from it again and again, but that branch fascinated
him, and he found himself considering how dangerous it would be, and yet
how delightful, to climb right out on that branch till it bent and bent,
and would bear him no further, and then sitting astride, dance up and
down in mid air, right over the awful depths below.

So strange was the attraction that Bart found his hands wet with
perspiration, and a peculiar feeling of h