Masseth thought for a moment, then pointed with his finger to the chasm.
"I don't believe any of us would be comfortable to-night," he said, "knowing that the lad was down there, when for all we know he may be dying of starvation and the loneliness of desolation, just within our reach. A bite to eat, whatever there is, and then an immediate start."
Gathered to the hasty and scanty supper, the cook found himself in a position of extreme discomfort, though no blame was attached to him. He had acted for the best and this result could not have been foreseen. Perhaps it was because his nerves were unusually upon the strain that he was the first to hear a sound along the chasm. He held up his hand to enjoin silence, and in a moment or two horses' hoofs and voices were heard. Then, looming unnaturally large in the last flush of twilight before the darkness fell, came two figures, one on a tall iron-gray horse, one on a mule, with a burro plodding along patiently behind.
A stentorian voice hailed them from the distance.
"Hey, there!" it said.
"Well?" called back Masseth.
The second of the oncomers answered, this time in a boy's voice.
"Oh, Mr. Masseth, have you been back long?"
"It's the boy," said the topographer solemnly, but with a note of joy in his voice, "and his life won't be laid at my door;" the soberness of words and tone revealing how keenly the fear of Roger's peril had been pressing on him.
When the two rode up the boy introduced his frontiersman friend to the chief of the party, the while he was being untied from the saddle, to which, in his still exhausted and stiffened state, he had been fastened. But introductions, however informal, did not stop the big Westerner from speaking his mind.