North of Hot Springs the road was tolerably clear for several miles, and the Comet leaped along it at top speed. When near the end of the good going, the road forked, a branch entering a gap in the right-hand wall and climbing steeply toward the top.
Matt's heart gave a bound.
"Here's where I take the divide!" he muttered, swerving the Comet into the opening and giving it every ounce of power for the climb. "Now for Potter's Gap and Sheriff Burke."
Up and up went the trail, twisting back and forth in long horseshoe curves. But for those curves, no wagon could ever have scaled that frightful ascent. In places the road had seemingly been blasted out of a sheer wall, and it was so narrow that a wagon would have had to rub against the cliff-face in order to keep the opposite wheels from slipping over the dizzy brink.
Matt's view of the cañon and of the surrounding hills opened as he ascended. He had not much time for the view, however, for when he was not peering at the trail, or catching a look at the face of his watch, he was studying the speedometer. It was after four o'clock, and he was making barely four miles an hour!
Higher and higher he climbed, coming steadily nearer to the top of the divide. A light breeze fanned his face, and all around him he could see mountain peaks pushing upward into the clear blue sky. Only the chug-chug of his laboring motor-cycle broke the stillness. Probably never before, since time began, had those hills echoed with the puffing of a steel horse.
At last the climbing trail dipped into a level tangent just below the top of the mountain. After a straight-away run of a hundred yards, it coiled serpentlike around the mountain's crest.
On Matt's left was a broken granite wall running vertically to the top of the peak; on his right was a chasm, falling hundreds of feet into a gloomy gulch. Between the chasm and the wall ran the ribbon of road, eroded in places by wind and weather until it had a perceptible slant outward.
A skidding of the wheels, the relaxation for an instant of a cool, steady grip on the handlebars, or a sudden attack of dizziness would have hurled the young courier into eternity.
In that hazardous place speed was not to be thought of. "Slow and sure" had to be Matt's motto. He finished the tangent and began rounding the curve. In no place on that fearsome bend was the road visible for more than a dozen feet ahead.