The banks all around the sink and as far as they could see along the gully that led into it, were thirty feet or more high, and quite unbroken. At no place could they see where the edge of the bank had been disturbed.
Tom got a spade from the pack horse, and Frank got a bar. They attacked the edge of the bank where, half way down, there was a little slope to the wall. The gravelly soil yielded rather easily to their digging, and they soon had the beginning of a path, down which the hardy ponies would venture.
Hesitation Kane went first, and then the other cowboys. The girls from the East were a bit timid; but every pony that descended made the path more easy. The animals were so well trained that all the riders had to do was to cling on and let their mounts have their own way.
"Now, you see, we're down here," said Tom. "But there ain't a pony in this bunch could climb up to the top, even by this path we made comin' down—no, sir! And yet that outlaw done it—or something."
They started down the gulch, looking for a good place to camp for the noon meal. Hesitation still led the pack horse, her line being hitched to his saddle-ring. They all kept a bright lookout on either hand for some possible path to the top of the bank by which the outlaw horse might have tried to get out of the gulch.
Suddenly Hesitation and his mount and the pack horse disappeared. The silent horse wrangler had taken to one side of a huge boulder while the others had passed on the other side. Had the pack horse not vented a frightened squeal the rest of the party might not have noticed so quickly the absence of the two beasts and Mr. Kane, for the latter did not utter a sound at first.
Walter jumped his horse for the place, and then shouted to the others to come. Behind the boulder was only a narrow path between it and a hole—a hole at least twenty feet across.
The sides of this hole were of loose gravel. The pack horse had made a misstep and had started to slide backwards down the gravel bank. The line snubbed to Kane's saddle was all that saved her from going to the bottom.
The horse wrangler could hold her, but that was about all. Frank arrived almost immediately and took a cast of his rope around the pack saddle. Then the two ponies—his own and Kane's—dragged the pack horse on to firm ground.
"'Nuther slip like that and that old pack mare would been in Kingdom Come," said Tom, peering down the funnel-shaped hole. "I say! you can't see the bottom of this here place."