Steve had been among mountains before, but he had never seen anything precisely like that.
In some places the vast chasm before him was hardly more than a hundred feet wide, while its walls of gray granite and glittering white quartz rock arose in varying heights of from three hundred to five hundred feet.
"Come on, Steve."
"You won't find any game in here. A rabbit couldn't get enough to live on among such rocks as these."
"Come right along. I want to get a look at the ledges up there. There's no telling what we may stumble upon."
Steve's young eyes were fully occupied, as they pushed forward, with the strange beauty and grandeur of the scenery above, beyond, and behind him. The air was clear and almost cool, and there was plenty of light in the shadiest nooks of the chasm.
"What torrents of water must pour down through here at some seasons of the year," he was saying to himself, when his companion suddenly stopped with a sharp,
"Hist! Look there!" and raised his rifle.
Steve looked. Away up on the edge of the beetling white crag at their right the first "game" they had seen that day was calmly gazing down upon them.
A "big-horn antelope" has the best nerves in the world, and it is nothing to him how high may be the precipice on the edge of which he is standing. His head never gets dizzy, and his feet never slip, for he was made to live in that kind of country, and feels entirely at home in spots where no other living thing cares to follow him.