Slowly the hours passed away, so slowly that the American thought his companion would die of exposure, for he was still suffering keenly from the blow his side had received, and never was dawn more welcome to man than when those two miserable mortals at last saw it blushing golden upon the trees far above them, followed by the glorious sun glinting upon the damp metallic-looking rocks, till the whole angry chasm was bathed in a tremulous reddening glow of lovely light and shade.
A weary way it seemed back to camp; indeed, it is doubtful in the extreme if Leigh would ever have reached it, had the pair not been met half-way by their anxious sable retainers, who did not in the least degree appreciate the honour of being left in unsupported possession of this great lone land; these men very soon had their masters under canvas, and after a steaming cup of coffee, stowed them away inside their blankets and left them to the undisturbed enjoyment of their well-earned repose.
For several days Leigh was in a high fever, consequent upon the dislocated rib, but this having been carefully put to rights by the skilful Kenyon, he rapidly mended, and their camp being fortunately placed in a healthy position, he was completely recovered at the end of a few weeks, and again ready and eager to betake himself to the search for his cousin.
With returning health, Leigh had betrayed an increased desire to extract precise information from Kenyon as to the why and wherefore of their present position, but all the satisfaction he could obtain from that worthy was a laconic assurance that so far they had made no mistakes, and that at that moment they were either very near their destination, or else were on the tail-end of a trail which had been blinded with consummate skill Kenyon had, he himself said, been very far from idle during Leigh’s illness, and had thoroughly exploited the district, and taken a number of photographs in the immediate vicinity; but he had come to the conclusion that nothing of practical utility could be accomplished until Leigh was fit to return with him to the pass and again take up the thread of search where they had dropped it, and he added that if naught of Richard Grenville was written on its silent walls, he would then be completely nonplussed.
Kenyon, as Leigh had long since learned, was no ordinary police detective; he was a shrewd and skilful tracker, a man born and brought up on the frontier of the Far West, and his experience had been dearly bought in many an Indian fight and foray before he gravitated to New York to try his hand at journalism as favoured by the New World.
A crack shot with the revolver, and no mean exponent of the beauties of the Winchester repeater, he was at all times a man to be feared by his foes, and to be looked up to by his friends, as a veritable tower of strength.
Of Leigh we need say little, beyond remarking that he was in the prime of manhood, was as strong as a bull, and had lost none of his skill with the rifle, whilst he had derived a new, and to his enemies a doubly dangerous energy, begotten of his loves and of his hates; to him it seemed that, could they but find his cousin Dick, nothing would be impossible with such heads and hearts as Grenville and Kenyon possessed, especially if he were himself there to take a third hand at the game.