When the loiterer came over the second ridge into view of the booming chasm in the top of the plateau, he saw the others down near the brink. The baby had been laid on a soft bed of pine needles, and Blake was leading the ladies down to look over into the abyss, one on each arm.

Ashton’s chagrin flared into jealous hate. He felt certain that the girl was quite capable of strolling along the extreme edge of the precipice without a trace of giddiness. Yet now she was clinging to Blake even more closely than was Genevieve. There was more than apprehension in the clasp of her little brown hand on the engineer’s shoulder. Her cheek brushed his sleeve.

The anger of the onlooker was so intense that he did not see Gowan riding towards him from the left. The puncher dismounted and came forward, his cold gaze fixed on Ashton’s face.

“So you’re beginning to savvy it, too,” he remarked.

Ashton confronted him, vainly attempting to mask 255 his telltale look and color with a show of hauteur. “I never discuss personal matters with acquaintances of your stamp,” he said.

“That’s too bad,” coolly deplored Gowan. “Maybe you’ve heard the saying about cutting off your nose to spite your face.”

“What do you mean?”

“If you want to go it alone, I can’t stop you,” replied the puncher. “Needn’t think I’m sucking around you for any favors or friendship. If this was my range, I would run you off it so fast you’d reach Stockchute with your tongue hanging out like a dog’s. That’s how much I like you.”

“The feeling is fully reciprocated, I assure you,” rejoined Ashton.

“All right. Now what’re we going to do about him?––each play a lone hand, or make it pardners for this deal?”

“I––fail to understand,” hesitated Ashton.

“No, you don’t,” jeeringly contradicted the puncher. “It’s a three-cornered fight. You see it now, even if you have been too big a fool to see it before. We can settle ours after. But I’m free to own up to it that you’re a striped skunk if you won’t work with me first to get rid of him. Look at him now––and him married!”

Ashton’s flush deepened to purple. “Married!––yes, married!” he choked out. 256

“Right alongside his wife, too!” Gowan thrust the goad deeper. “You’d think even that brand of skunk would have more decency. Not that his wife is any friend of mine, like she is yours. But for a man with such a wife and baby ... with Miss Chuckie! The––”

Gowan ended with a string of oaths so virulent that even Ashton’s half-mad anger was checked.

“You may be––er––I fear that we––Perhaps it’s not so bad as it appears!” he stammered.

“Bah!” disgustedly sneered the puncher, and he strode on ahead, leaving Ashton torn between rage and doubt and terror of his own furious jealousy.

The others continued to stand on a flat ledge that here formed the lip of the caÑon. Genevieve was trembling with awed delight. Her husband and the girl appeared more calm, but they were drinking in the grandeur of the tremendous gorge below them with no less intense appreciation of its gloomy vastness.

Upstream, to their left, the precipices jutted so far out from each wall of the caÑon that they overlapped, a thousand or fifteen hundred feet from the top. But downstream the upper part of the chasm flared to a width that permitted the noonday sun to penetrate part way down through the blue-black shadows.

“O-o-o-oh!” sighed Genevieve, for the tenth time, and she clung tighter than ever to the strong arm of her husband. “Isn’t it fearfully, fearfully delightful? 257 It makes the soles of my feet tingle to look at it!”

“That tickly feeling!” exclaimed Isobel. “I often ride up here to the caÑon, I do so love to feel that way! Only with me it’s like ants crawling up and down my back.”

“O-o-o-oh!” again sighed Genevieve. “It––it so overpowers one!”

“It’s sure some caÑon,” admitted her husband. “That French artist DorÉ ought to have seen it.”

“If only we had a copy of Dante’s Inferno to read here on the brink!” she whispered.

“It always reminds me of Coleridge’s poem,” murmured Isobel, and she quoted in an awed whisper:

“Fortunately for us, this is a caÑon, not a string of measureless caverns,” said Blake. “It can be measured, one way or another. If I had a transit, I could calculate the depth at any point where the water shows––triangulate with a vertical angle. But it would cause a long delay to send on for a transit. We shall first try to chain down at that gulch break.”

Genevieve shrank back from the verge of the precipice and drew the others after her.

“Dear!” she exclaimed, “I did not dream it was 258 so fearful. One has to see to realize! You will not go down––promise me you will not go down!”

“Now, now, little woman,” reproached Blake. “What’s become of my partner?”

“But baby––? If you should leave him fatherless!”

“Better that than for him to have a father who is a quitter! Just wait, Sweetheart. That break looks much less overwhelming than these sheer cliffs. You know I shall not attempt anything foolhardy. If it is not possible to get down without too great risk, I shall give it up and send for a transit.”

“Oh, will you?” exclaimed Isobel, hardly less apprehensive than his wife. “Why not wait anyway until you can send for your transit?”

“Because I cannot triangulate the bottom within half a mile upstream from where the tunnel would have to be located. That roar and the wildness of the water wherever we can see it is proof that it is flowing down a heavy grade. At the point where I triangulated it might be above the level of Dry Mesa, and way below the mesa here at the tunnel site.”

“You could triangulate at the first place where the bottom can be seen, beyond here,” suggested Genevieve.

“Suppose it proved to be lower than Dry Mesa, wouldn’t that still leave us up in the air?” he asked. “Like this––” 259

He pulled out his notebook and drew a rough sketch.

“I see, Dear,” said his wife. “When do you plan to go down?”

“Tomorrow morning.”

“Can you wait until we come up from the ranch?”

“Yes. Mr. Knowles will no doubt be back by then. He can bring you out early.”

“We shall come early, anyway,” said Isobel.

“Of course!” added Genevieve. She drew a deep breath. “I shall see the place before you attempt to descend.”

Her husband nodded reassuringly and looked around to where Gowan and Ashton stood waiting, several yards from one another.

“About lunch time, isn’t it?” he remarked. “Mr. Gowan will wish to be starting soon to bring up his second load.”

At the suggestion, the ladies hastened to spread out their own lunch and the one brought by Blake. When called by Isobel, Gowan came forward to join the party, 260 with rather less than his usual reserve in his speech and manner.

Ashton was the last to seat himself on the springy cushion of brown pine needles, and he sat throughout the meal in moody silence. Blake and the ladies attributed this to the fatigue of working through the long hot morning while suffering from his unhealed wound. He repulsed the sympathetic attentions of the Blakes. But he could not long continue to resist the kindly concern of the girl. After lunch she made him lie down in the shade while she bathed his wound with a good part of the small supply of water remaining in the canteens.

Gowan had been asking questions about the work. Blake explained at some length why he considered it necessary not only to descend into the caÑon but to carry the line of levels down along the bed of the subterranean stream to this point opposite Dry Fork Gulch. When Isobel drew apart with Ashton the puncher did not look at them, though his eyes narrowed to slits and his mouth straightened.

“You shore have nerve to tackle it, Mr. Blake,” he commented. “Everything alive that I know of that’s ever gone down into Deep CaÑon hasn’t ever come up again, except it had wings.”

“We’ll prove that the rule has an exception,” replied Blake, smiling away the reawakened apprehension of his wife. 261

Gowan shook his head doubtfully, and strolled down the slope to peer into the caÑon. The level was directly in his path, set up firmly on its tripod, about six feet from the brink. The puncher stopped beside it to squint through the telescope.

“You’ll have one––peach of a time seeing anything through this contraption down there,” he remarked. “I can’t see even right here in the sun.”

“The telescope is out of focus,” explained Blake. “Turn that screw on the side.” Gowan twisted a protruding thumbscrew. “Not that––the one above it,” directed Blake.

“Can’t stop to fool now,” replied the puncher. “I’ve got to hustle along.”

He started hastily around between the level and the precipice. The toe of his boot struck hard against the iron toe of the outer tripod-leg. He stumbled and sprawled forward on his hands and knees. Behind him the instrument toppled over towards the brink.

Genevieve cried out in alarm at Gowan’s fall. Her husband sprang to the rescue––not of the puncher, but of the level. It had crashed down with its head to the chasm, and was sliding out over the brink. Blake barely caught it by the tip of one of the legs as it swung up for the plunge. He drew it back and set it up to see what damage had been done to the head. Gowan watched him, tight-lipped.

“This is luck!” exclaimed the engineer, after a 262 swift examination. “Nothing broken––only knocked out of adjustment. I can fix that in half an hour. She struck with the telescope turned sideways. You must have set the clamp screw.”

The puncher’s face darkened. “Wish the––infernal machine had gone plumb down to hell!” he growled. “It came near tripping me over the edge.”

“My apology,” said Blake. “I spraddled the tripod purposely to keep it from being upset.”

“Oh, Kid, you’ve hurt yourself,” called Isobel, as the puncher began to wrap a kerchief about his hand. “Come here and let me bandage it.”

“No,” he replied. “Two babies are enough for you to coddle at one time. I’ve got to hit out.”

He turned his back on Blake and hurried up to his horse. The engineer followed as far as the nearest tree, where he set up the instrument in the shade and began to adjust it.

“Good thing she has platinum crosshairs,” he said to Ashton. “A fall like that would have been certain to break the old-style spiderweb hairs.”

Ashton did not reply. He was absorbed in a murmured conversation with Isobel. Blake completed the adjustments of the level and stretched out beside his wife to play with his gurgling son. A half hour of this completed the two hours that he had set apart for the noon rest. He placed the baby back in his wife’s lap and stood up to stretch his powerful frame. 263

“How about it, Ashton?” he inquired. “Think you feel fit to rod this afternoon? Don’t hesitate to say no, if that’s the right answer. I expect my wife and Miss Chuckie, between them, can help me carry the line as far as the camp.”

“I can do it alone,” interposed the girl. “Let them both stay here and rest all afternoon.”

“No, Miss Chuckie. I can and shall do my work,” insisted Ashton, springing up with unexpected briskness for one who had appeared so fatigued. “It is you and Mrs. Blake who must stay here to rest––unless you wish to keep us company.”

“Might we not go to the new camp and put it in order?” suggested Genevieve.

“What if that outlaw should come sneaking back?” objected Ashton. “It seems to me you should keep with us.”

“He would not trouble us,” replied Isobel.

“Yet if he should? Anyway, Blake and I saw a wolf up here the other day.”

“A real wolf! Where?”

“Yes,” answered Blake. “Over in the ravine the other side of the head of Dry Fork Gulch.”

“He may attack you,” argued Ashton.

The girl laughed. “You’re still a tenderfoot to think a wolf wouldn’t know better than that. Wish he didn’t! It would mean the saving of a half dozen calves this winter.” She flashed out her long-barreled 264 automatic pistol and knocked a cone from the tree above Blake’s head with a swiftly aimed shot.

Blake caught the cone as it fell and looked at the bullet hole through its center. “Unless that was an accident, I should call it some shooting,” he remarked.

“Accident!” she called back. “Stand sideways and see what happens to your cigar.”

“No, thanks. I’ll take your word for it. Just lit this one, and I’ve only a few left. By by, Tommy! Don’t let the wolves eat mamma and the poor little cowlady!”

He picked up the level and started off at a swinging stride. Ashton followed several paces behind. His face was sullen and heavy, but in their merriment over Blake’s banter, the ladies failed to observe his expression.

They rested for a while longer. Then, after venturing down for another awed look into the abyss, they rode along, parallel with the stupendous rift, to the place selected for the new camp. As Gowan had brought up the tent in one of the first packs, the ladies pitched it on the level top of the ridge.

“This is real camping!” delightedly exclaimed Genevieve, as they set to gathering leafy twigs for bedding and dry branches for fuel. “How I wish we could stay all night!”

“We can, if you wish,” replied Isobel.

“Can we, really?” 265

“Our men often sleep out in the open, this time of year. We shall take the tent for ourselves. Won’t it be fun! But will Thomas be all right?”

“I can manage with what I have until tomorrow afternoon.”

“How long do you think they will be down in the caÑon?” the girl inquired.

Genevieve shuddered. “I wish I could tell! If only Tom finds that he cannot get down at all, how thankful I shall be!”

“And––Lafe!” murmured the girl.

“It is possible that they may be unable to do it in one day,” went on Genevieve apprehensively––“Down, down into those dreadful depths, and then along the river, all the way to where the tunnel is to be, and back again, and then up the awful cliffs! Surely they cannot finish in one day! Of course they will succeed––Tom can do anything, anything! Yet how I dread the very thought––!”

“We must prepare to stay right here on High Mesa until they do finish!” declared Isobel. “It will be impossible to go back to the ranch tomorrow if they are still in that frightful place! Kid will have to take the hawsses down to the waterhole. He shall go on home, and tomorrow morning fetch us cream and eggs and everything you need. They will have to be told at the ranch; and if Daddy has returned, he will come up to help and be with us.” 266

“You dear girl! The more I think of this terrible descent, the more I dread it. I feel a presentiment that––But I must try to be brave and not interfere with Tom’s work! It will be a great comfort to have your father with us.”

“Daddy will surely come if he has returned. Isn’t he kind and good? He couldn’t have done more to make me happy if he had been my own real father!”

Genevieve smiled into the girl’s glowing face. “Yes, dear. Yet I am far from surprised, since you are the daughter he wished to make happy. I was more surprised to have him tell me you were adopted. You have never said a word about it.”

“I––you see, I did not happen to,” confusedly murmured the girl.

“Chuckie Knowles is not your real name,” Genevieve gently reproached her.

“No, it is the pet name Daddy gave me. My real one is––Isobel.”

“Isobel––?”

“Yes. Daddy’s sister, in Denver, always calls me that. But here on the ranch––”

“Isobel––?” repeated Genevieve, with a rising inflection.

The color ebbed from the girl’s face, but she answered steadily: “Chuckie––Isobel––Knowles. I am Daddy’s daughter. I have no other father.”

“Is-o-bel––Is-o-bel,” Genevieve intoned the name 267 musically. “It has a beautiful sound. I had a friend at school––Isabella––but we always called her Belle.”

The girl suddenly faced away from her companion, and darted to meet Blake and Ashton, who were bringing the line of levels up over the ridge.