HIGH LIGHTS AND LOW LIGHTS
Grand Canyon Station, April 9.
We made a three o'clock start from Norris this morning and came all the way to the Canyon on the crust. Carr, one of the troopers accompanying me, took a fearful tumble on the winding hill that leads down to the Devil's Elbow, breaking his "gee-pole" and badly wrenching one of his ankles. A fierce thunder-storm overtook us about seven. The vivid flashes of the lightning produced a most striking effect in illuminating the inky clouds as they were blown across the snowy peaks. A flock of mountain sheep, driven from the upper spurs by the fury of the storm, crossed close to the road. I snapped a very unusual silhouette of them as they paused on the crest of a hill, with the blown storm-clouds in the background.
We reached the hotel before the storm was over. Bursting into the rear entrance, we were just in time to find Clark, the winter keeper, picking himself up from the middle of the floor, where he had been thrown after coming in contact with an electric current brought in on the telephone wire while he was tinkering with the receiver. The chap seems to be an inventive genius. He has, so the soldiers told me, dissected over a dozen clocks in an effort to secure the machinery for a model of an automobile sled he is working on. His last model was destroyed by his dog, which took the strangely acting thing for a bird or a rat and shook it to pieces before any one could interfere. A few days later the brute essayed to follow Clark on one of his wild slides down the side of the canyon to the brink of the falls, but lost his footing and went over into the scenery. The inventor considers this a propitious sign from heaven.
"For why should that dog go over the very first time he tried the slide after he did that destruction," he asked us, "if it wasn't because the Lord thought he stood in the way of good work? Now, with nothing to bother me, I shall build another model and reap my reward."
"But was the dog your only obstacle?" I asked.
"By no means," was the reply; "but all the others will be brushed away just as was the dog."
Hearken to that, oh ye of little faith! If faith will move mountains there surely ought to be no trouble about the movement of Clark's automobile sled.
Clark took me down the sidling snow-choked trail to the top of the falls this afternoon, saying that he wanted to show me how he did his famous "Devil's Slide." Utterly unable, in my comparative inexperience, to keep the road, I was about to beg off when Clark suggested that I remove my ski and ride the rest of the way by standing on the back of his. It was a hair-raising coast, but we made the brink without a spill. More important still—a point respecting which I had been most in doubt,—we stopped there.
Already considerably shaken in nerve, I tried to dissuade Clark from attempting his slide. Replying that the stunt was a part of his daily routine for keeping his wits on edge, he "corduroyed" off up the side of the canyon, which at that point has a slope of about forty-five degrees. When he was perhaps a hundred feet above my head, he laid hold of a sapling, swung quickly around, and shot full-tilt for the icy brink. I was sure he intended to kill himself, just as so many cracked inventors do. A sudden numbness seized me. The roar of the fall grew deafening, and I involuntarily closed my eyes. There was a thud and a crash, a shower of fine snow flew over me. Then the roar of the fall resumed.