The start had been parallel with the river and east toward Colorado. Without speaking, the young aviator followed this course a few moments and then, with a long turn, headed for the river. As the deep canyon of this shadowed itself beneath him, he relaxed.
“She’s all right, Mr. Cook. How do you feel?”
“Wouldn’t have missed it for all Mike took. Say,” he added with almost boyish enthusiasm, “why couldn’t I do this? Looks easy.”
“Every one’ll do it in a few years,” answered Roy. “I guess I won’t have my job very long.”
“You can have it as long as you like,” came the answer—punctuated with little gasps, for Roy was now making a sharper turn down the river, “maybe you’ll have more time to work it than I will.”
“What’s the program?” exclaimed Roy, interrupting him, for the aeroplane was now on a course down the river on the south bank, the town was already behind them, and the sun was fully above the horizon.
“Ain’t but one thing to do,” answered the passenger. “If you can, get right down over the river canyon. It’s gettin’ light now. Follow the river. You watch the machine, an’ I’ll look out below. If I see anything, I’ll whistle.”
Roy dropped the machine lower and laid a course immediately over the dark strip marking the depths of the San Juan. It was almost impossible to see the rushing water at the bottom of the rocky chasm, but the boy could hear it, and, as he steadied the swiftly flying machine, he recalled how Sink Weston had swept down this same stream years before.
Glancing at the country on each side of the river now and then, the boy saw, when the town of Bluff had disappeared from sight, nothing but sand and rock, distant pink-tipped mountain ranges and a turquoise sky, cloudless and dry. As Weston had described to him, very often the plains or deserts, which seemed to rise upward like the rim of a bowl toward the horizon, were cut with plateaus crowned with crumbled rock. But there were no trees, no animal life and only patches of grass here and there near the canyon brink.
As it grew lighter, the gray stream within the precipitous river walls began to turn into a yellow swirl of grease, foam-crested and spray-crowned, where the rushing current impinged on abutting rocks. They were sailing almost due west. To the north as the rose faded from the low-lying mountain spurs, the intervening stretches turned into the blare of the alkali desert of Utah. South of the river, the more rugged heights of the Arizona Mountains told of the unexplored wilderness of the Navajo Indian land.