"I had a little experience with Mitchon once," put in David, who had been listening, "and I found him white clear through."
"Mitchon's all right!" said Field.
"You bet!" affirmed the boy.
"Well," commented Roberts with a laugh, "that's a good enough epitaph for any man. Mitchon's a long way from being dead, and I guess no one's particularly anxious to start carving a tombstone, but at that, I guess he'd be satisfied with such a general opinion."
CHAPTER V.
PERIL IN THE GRAND CANYON
Excited and expectant travelers were many on the Santa Fé railroad, but Roger felt that he had never met a more enthusiastic group than those who dined at the long low mission-like hotel Fray Marcos at Williams, Ariz., waiting for the train to Grand Canyon. And of all these none had been more a-tingle with anticipation than the boy, as the train, passing by the station of Hopi—the very name recording that strange tribe of Arizona Indians—ran through Apex and began to slow up for the last stop.
Throughout the past two or three hours of the trip, all the passengers had been speaking of the great sights that awaited them, and guidebooks and photograph collections without number had been scanned, bringing interest to fever heat. But in spite of all this preparatory ardor, those who had visited the Grand Canyon before and those whose friends had done so, bore testimony to the universal belief that nothing, no estimate of the wonders of that land, however extravagant, could discount the reality.
It was a little after four o'clock on the afternoon of the last day in May as the train drew into the station, and guides met the passengers ready to conduct them direct to the brink of the Canyon that they might gain their first sight of it. Roger's very toes were aching with the desire to follow them, particularly as he was not on duty until the following day, but still he felt that he was on government service and that he ought to report for duty at the appointed place immediately on his arrival. Then, the boy argued, should there be no one to meet him, his time would be his own until the following morning, and he could enjoy the pleasures of sight-seeing without feeling that he had in any way been neglectful of the strictest interpretation of his orders. His trunk had been checked through, so Roger, refusing the solicitations of the guides, picked up the small hand-grip he had carried for the necessities of the journey and set his face resolutely to the hotel.
Turning to view the country about him, Roger was as much disappointed as amazed to find how flat and uninteresting it seemed. Indeed, there was nothing in the region to suggest that a canyon was anywhere in the vicinity. So far as he could see, on either side of the railroad track up which he had come was a level treeless prairie, and in the direction whither the tourists had gone, there was naught to be seen but this same slowly rising plateau, which, a little further on, seemed to be bounded by a slight rise. The boy knew that the Canyon must be on the other side of this eminence, but there was nothing to bespeak its presence, not a sign to awake the consciousness that a few hundred yards away lay a view of the greatest scenic wonder that any man had beheld, primitive and untouched as since the days that antediluvian monsters roamed the plains whereon he now was walking.