Half a dozen people, including the clerk were standing on the steps, watching the little cavalcade. As the mules filed by, somebody began to clap.
"What's the excitement, Frank?" demanded Nucky.
Frank turned in his saddle to smile at the boy. "Out in this country we admire physical nerve because we need a lot of it. And you're showing a good quality, old chap. Just sit easy now and when you want me to stop, yell."
Nucky was sitting very straight with his thin chest up, and he managed to maintain this posture as the trail turned down over the rim. Then he grasped the pommel in both hands.
It was a wonderful trail, carved with infinite patience and ingenuity out of the canyon wall. To Allen it was as safe and easy as a flight of stairs. Nucky, trembling in the saddle would have felt quite as comfortable standing on the topmost window ledge of the Flat Iron building, in New York. And, to Nucky, there was no trail! Only a narrow, corkscrew shelf, deep banked with snow into which the mules set their small feet gingerly. For many minutes, the boy saw only this trackless ledge, and the sickening blue depths below.
"I can never stand it!" he muttered. "I can never stand it! If this mule makes just one mis-step, I'm dead." He felt a little nauseated. "I can never stand it! 'Twould have been better if I'd just let 'em tease me. Hey, Frank!"
The guide looked back. The red spots were gone from Nucky's cheeks now.
"We got to go back! I can't get away with it!" cried the boy.
"It's impossible to turn here, Enoch! Look up, man! Look up! And just trust old Spoons! Are you cold? It was only eight above zero, when we left the top. But the snow'll disappear as we go down and when we reach the river it'll be summer. See that lone pine up on the rim to your right? They say an Indian girl jumped from the top of that because she bore a cross-eyed baby. Look up, Enoch, as we round this curve and see that streak of red in the wall. An Indian giant bled to death on the rim and his blood seeped through the solid rock to this point. Watch how the sky gets a deeper blue, the farther down we go. And now, Enoch look out, not down. You may come down Bright Angel a thousand times and never see the colors you see to-day. The snowfall has turned the world into a rainbow, by heck!"
Slowly, very slowly, Nucky turned his head and clinging to the pommel, he stared across the canyon. White of snow; sapphire of sky; black of sharp cut shadow. Mountains rising from the canyon floor thrust scarlet and yellow heads across his line of vision. Close to his left, as the trail curved, a wall of purest rose color lifted from a bank of snow that was as blue as Allen's eyes. Beyond and beyond and ever beyond, the vast orderliness of the multi-colored canyon strata melted into delicate white clouds that now revealed, now concealed the mountain tops.