So at last Terry brought him down into a creek-bed and the bottom on a steep-sided cañon. He merely said, "I'll take your word for it!" when she told him that this was the deep-cleft ravine which lay like a gash at the base of the sheer Drop Off Cliffs.
Yonder, perhaps a mile ahead and yet prominently asserting itself to their view because of a certain widening and straightening of the cañon here, a bold head of cliffs stood out like a monster carving in ebony. Up there, at the top of these cliffs, was the southern end of Drop Off Valley.
"And it is up those cliffs that we are going," Terry announced when, having drawn nearer, they stopped again to gaze upward. "There's a trail climbing straight up from the bed of the pass; a trail to go hand-and-foot style. Once on top we'll be among Barbee's herds, Barbee guessing nothing of our coming since he'll be busy watching the other ways in. And— Look!"
They were close together and she gripped his arm in her sudden amazement while she threw out one hand pointing. He heard her little gasp; he looked upward; an astonished ejaculation broke from his own lips. A breathless moment and already the thing, appearing from the black nothingness, silhouetted but a moment against the sky, was gone and he vaguely saw Terry's face turned toward him while they sought to find each other's eyes and know if each had seen what the other had glimpsed.
"It's impossible!" he muttered. "We are imagining things."
"Wait!" said Terry. "Maybe after all——"
They waited impatiently, their blood atingle. And in a very few moments there was, seeming absurd and impossible, a repetition of the vision which had so startled them: a black form at the head of the cliffs, the field of star-strewn sky back of it limning it into vivid distinctness—the ebon bulk of a steer moving straight out from the top of the precipice, straight out a half-dozen feet into nothingness of empty space, then slowly descending through the air, gone silently in the deeper shadows of the cañon below!
"Block and tackle!" muttered Steve abruptly. "A small steel cable. Two or three men up there; a man on horseback down below. And while Barbee and the boys guard the other end——"
"Blenham puts one across on us down here!" Terry finished it for him.
"Only here's where we put one over on Blenham," rejoined Steve hotly. He threw a cartridge into his rifle-barrel and spurred ahead of her. "You stay here, Terry. I——"