nty-five feet high and nearly as broad as it was
high; and its huge trunk grew so close to the wall of the canyon that
the ends of its great limbs on that side had been pressed tight up
against the rocks.

"Well, we are here at last!" Thure's face was flushed and his eyes were
sparkling with excitement. "Now, for the hidden entrance to Crooked Arm
Gulch!" and his eyes turned eagerly to the walls of the canyon.

The wall of the canyon near the tree, so far as their eyes could judge,
was a solid mass of cracked and seamed rocks, that sprang from the
bottom of the canyon almost straight upward for five hundred or more
feet. There did not appear to be break or opening of any kind, nor did
it look as if there ever had been such an opening.

For half an hour the two boys and Rex and Dill and Mr. Dickson searched
excitedly up and down the wall of the canyon near the tree, without one
of them finding the first sign of an entrance to the hidden gulch.

"Great Moses, but this is exasperating!" complained Thure, staring
indignantly at the blank walls of rock. "To be held up like this, when
almost at the entrance to the Cave of Gold! But we have got to find it,"
and the heat of his excitement having cooled down a little, he began a
more careful and systematic search of the face of the wall of rock.

"Found it?" yelled Ham, who at this moment came round the turn in the
canyon at the head of the remainder of the company.

"No," Dickson called back. "Not a sign of an opening anywhere in sight."

"I reckon this is where our trouble begins," Ham declared a few minutes
later, when he stood near the Big Tree and searched the precipitous side
of the wall of rock vainly with his keen eyes. "It shore don't look as
if there ever had ben any gulch entrance thar."

"Let us have another look at the map," suggested Mr. Conroyal, after all
had searched the face of the wall of rock in vain for some time.
"Possibly we have overlooked some little point of guidance on it."

Thure at once procured the map and handed it to his father; and all
crowded anxiously around him, as he seated himself on a rock and spread
the map out on his knees.

"This sure must be the right place," he declared, as he glanced down at
the map and then up and down the canyon; "for here is the Big Tree and
there," and he pointed to the white pillar, "is Lot's Wife, and that
slide down there must surely have been the Devil's Slide; and, if this
is the right place, then t