With the coming of morning they made ready to eat a hasty breakfast. After this was over Frank found himself compelled to discharge the guide.
"We've concluded to do without your services, John Henry," he said, as the man stood ready to start forth on the way along the canyon, heading East.
"Me? Let me go? What for?" stammered the fellow; turning red and then white as a consciousness of his guilt broke upon him.
"Here's what we promised to pay you for the week," continued Frank. "We want no hard feelings about it. Never mind why we let you go. You can think what you like. But next time you hire out to a party, John Henry, be careful how you let anybody hand you over a few dollars to make you turn against your friends."
The man tried to speak, and his voice failed him. They left him standing there, holding the bills Frank had thrust into his hand, and looking "too cheap for anything," as Bob said. Perhaps he feared that the boys might tell what they knew about him, and in this way destroy his usefulness as a canyon guide ever afterwards.
"Good riddance to bad rubbish!" declared Bob, after they had gone on half a mile, and on looking back saw John Henry still standing there as if hardly knowing whether to be sorry, or glad over having received full pay for a week after only working a single day.
"And here we are cut loose from everybody, and going it on our own hook," laughed Frank. "But it would be foolish for us to think of doing without a guide if so be we can find one. We'll ask every party we meet, and perhaps in that way we can strike the right man."
During the morning they came upon several parties making the rounds of the Wonderland along the beaten channels. Sometimes women were in the company, for the strange sights that awaited the bold spirit capable of enduring ordinary fatigue tempted others besides men to undertake one of the trips.
Just at noon the two boys came upon a lone Chinaman sitting at a little fire he had kindled, cooking a fish, evidently pulled from the river by means of a hook and line.