“This is nature’s work, Bart,” the Doctor said, as he paused to wipe his streaming face. “No former inhabitants ever made this. It is an earthquake-split, I should say.”
“But it might be easily made into a good path, sir,” replied Bart.
“It might be made, Bart, but not easily, and it would require a great deal of engineering to do it. How dark it grows! You see nothing hardly can grow down here except these mosses and little fungi.”
“Is it much farther, sir?” cried Bart.
“What! are you tired, my lad?”
“No, sir; not I. Only it seems as if we must be near the bottom of the canyon.”
“No, not yet,” said the Beaver in good English, and both the Doctor and Bart smiled, while the chief seemed pleased at his advance in the English tongue being noticed. “Long down—long down,” he said in continuation.
“The Beaver-with-Sharp-Teeth tells the English chief and the little boy English chief that it is far yet to the bottom of the way to the rushing river of the mountain,” said the interpreter, and the chief frowned at him angrily, while Bart felt as if he should like to kick him for calling him a “little boy English chief;” but the stoical Indian calmly and indifferently allowed the angry looks he received to pass, and followed the party down as they laboriously stepped from stone to stone.
“There’s a pretty good flush o’ water here in rainy times, master,” shouted Joses. “See how all the earth has been washed out. Shouldn’t wonder if you found gold here.”
“I ought to have thought of that, Joses,” replied the Doctor, as he proceeded to examine the crevices of the rock over which he was walking as well as he could for the gloom and obscurity of the place, and at the end of five minutes he uttered a cry of joy. “Here it is!” he exclaimed, holding up two or three rounded nodules of metal. “No; I am wrong,” he said. “This light deceives me; it is silver.”