“It makes a fearful roar,” she remarked as they approached the place where the swift river, compressed into the flumelike passage which it had whetted out of the granite, tossed its white mane in the moonlight before plunging into the dark door of the cañon.
“I’ve been hearing yarns and traditions about that cañon ever since I came here,” he told her. “They say it’s a thousand feet deep in places.”
“June and I came over here this morning,” said Agnes, “along with Sergeant Schaefer. He said he didn’t believe that June could hike that far. I sat here on the rocks a long time watching it. I never saw so much mystery and terror in water before.”
She drew a little nearer to him as she spoke, and he put his hand on her shoulder in an unconscious movement of restraint as she leaned over among the black boulders and peered into the hissing current. 33
“Do you suppose anybody ever went in there?” she asked.
“They say the Indians know some way of getting through,” he replied, “but no white man ever went into the cañon and came out alive. The last one to try it was a representative of a Denver paper who came out here at the beginning of the registration. He went in there with his camera on his back after a story.”
“Poor fellow! Did he get through–at all?”
“They haven’t reported him on the other side yet. His paper offers a reward for the solution of the mystery of his disappearance, which is no mystery at all. He didn’t have the right kind of footgear, and he slipped. That’s all there is to it.”
He felt her shudder under his hand, which remained unaccountably on her warm shoulder after the need of restraint had passed.
“It’s a forbidding place by day,” said she, “and worse at night. Just think of the despair of that poor man when he felt himself falling down there in the dark!”