"What's he look like?" I inquired, weakly.
"Big red fellow, with wide horns and white face. Branded with a Dollar Mark. He's at least twenty years old, and mean!"
My midnight visitor!
I sat down suddenly on a lumber pile. It was handy to have a lumber pile, for I felt limp all over. I told the ranger about chasing the old beast around with a broom. His eyes bulged out on stems.
Frequent appearances of "Dollar Mark" kept me from my daily tramps through the pines, and I spent more time on the Rim of the Canyon.
Strangely, the great yawning chasm itself held no fascination for me. I could appreciate its dizzy depths, its vastness, its marvelous color effects, and its weird contours. I could feel the immensity of it, and it repelled instead of attracted. I seemed to see its barrenness and desolation, the cruel deception of its poisonous springs, and its insurmountable walls. I could visualize its hapless victims wandering frantically about, trying to find the way out of some blind coulee, until, exhausted and thirst-crazed, they lay down to die under the sun's pitiless glare. Many skeletons, half buried in sand, have been found to tell of such tragedies.
It was only in the evenings, after the sun had gone down, that I could feel at ease with the Canyon. Then I loved to sit on the Rim and look down on the one living spot far below, where, almost a century ago, the Indians made their homes and raised their crops, watering the fields from the clear, cold spring that gushes out of the hillside. As the light faded, the soft mellow moon would swim into view, shrouding with tender light the stark, grim boulders. From the plateau, lost in the shadows, the harsh bray of wild burros, softened by distance, floated upward.
On a clear day I could see objects on the North Rim, thirteen miles away, and with a pair of strong field glasses I could bring the scene quite close. It looked like a fairyland over there, and I wanted to cross over and see what it was really like. White Mountain advanced the theory that if we were married we could go over there for our honeymoon! I had to give the matter careful consideration; but while I considered, the moon came up, and behind us in the Music Room someone began to play softly Schubert's "Serenade." I said, "All right. Next year we'll go!"
