Sid unbuckled his belt and slipped it off. It was a home-made affair, merely an empty cocoa tin with two holes punched in its upper rim and a small bale wire packed inside with the grub. It held a half pint of water when filled. Out of it Sid took a package of coffee, lumps of sugar, a paraffin paper package of bacon slices, a small tin box of salt, and a cube of dried soup powder. The cover of the tin had a tack hole in one end, so that it would make a small frying pan by tacking the tin to the end of a stick. With a small fire going he soon had coffee brewing in the can and four slices of bacon were crisped in the cover. Then washing down a spoonful of pinole, he was ready for further adventures. He was packing up the emergency kit and drowning the remnants of his fire with water carried from the brook, when to his surprise the soft duff under his feet gave way with a crackling of rotten twigs, and, before he could right himself, his boot was jammed down in a cleft of mossy bowlders whose humpy forms showed irregularly under the needle floor of the cove. Sid had spent considerable effort the night before in trying to find a level place to sleep on between those hummocks, wondering in a vague way how they came to be there. Laughing gayly at his own clumsiness, he now tugged his foot loose from the cleft and then peered down to see what might be in the hole, for nothing is insignificant to the woodsman. Down in the rubble of needles was—water! Quite a little pool of it. Evidently all the interstices between the hummocks were filled with it.
Sid watched the glistening surface for some time, for all the day was his, and he had no appointment with anything or anybody. Gradually a loose needle detached itself from the ring of them about the hole and floated slowly toward the brook! Sid’s interest at once arose mightily. He had assumed that this water was merely a backup from the brook, but that needle said, No! More of them detached and followed the pioneer across the water hole in the cleft.
Out of such small beginnings do great things grow, in the woods! There was evidently a current between the hummocks, flowing toward the brook. If so, where did it come from? Sid asked himself. A spring, back in the depths of the cove, most likely. He explored the little dent in which he had camped, carefully. The broken and jagged strata of the walls had met here, jammed together by some prehistoric movement of the earth’s crust. It was not the real plateau wall. The trees had taken advantage of the jumble of interlocking slabs, for a giant fir had effected a lodgment in the fissure, filled as it was with pockets of soil that had accumulated there.
Sid eyed it with thrills of adventure and discovery running through him like wine. There was no spring! The water came from farther back—somewhere! He raced back and crossed the brook, climbing the stratified walls of the canyon as high as he could. Squatting on a ledge, he peered upward to where the walls of the canyon towered into the cloudless blue far overhead. His eye followed the symmetrical column of the giant fir. The edges of the cove met and interlocked behind it, and for a considerable distance above its topmost spire. Then appeared a narrow cleft, a sort of fat man’s misery, extending to the top, and through it showed a thin seam of sky blue. The cove was a mere wall then, and something lay behind it—a blocked canyon perhaps.
On fire with adventure, Sid eyed it speculatively, seeking a way to climb up to that cleft. Every ruin in the main canyon was known, and had been explored and rifled of its relics by ethnologists and tourists. Two or three centuries ago they had been inhabited by tribes of pueblo Indians, but when the Navaho, the Dene (deer hunters), as they called themselves, came down from the Far North they had attacked these villages and driven out all the pueblos in their neighborhood. How the Navaho got down, from the neighborhood of Great Slave Lake where their kinsmen, the Dene, still live,—through the Blackfeet, the Shoshones, the Cheyennes and the Utes,—was a whole mystery in itself, but here they were, and had been since the times of the Spaniard. It accounted for the deserted state of all the cliff dwellings in the San Juan and Chaco Valley and Canyon Cheyo regions.
Suppose, then, there should be a box canyon in back of that cleft that no white man had ever yet explored! thought Sid, as he searched the ledgy walls of the cove before him. “Lost Canyon!—and I discovered it! What a start in ethnology for me!—Gee-roo!” he crowed to himself happily, “there’s water coming from in behind there, somewhere!”
He climbed down and cached his saddle and rifle, on general principles. Pinto would not likely be molested, for the Black Panther would not hunt in the daytime. The pony would be perfectly content with the grass and water, which he had not ceased to sample since getting over his scare of the night before. Picketing him out with the full length of lariat, Sid swarmed up the fir, for he had noted where a ledge could be reached by climbing out on one of its higher branches. Once on the ledge he looked down, and some idea of his undertaking began to dawn on him. It was a fearsome climb, up above! He was already seventy feet above the floor of the canyon and the beginning of the cleft was still at least a hundred feet above him. Luckily no slippery moss grew on the ledges up here!
It became more and more awful as he ascended from ledge to ledge. There were some that jutted out so that he climbed over them like a house eave, with his body hanging out in space and a frightful fall yawning below him if he failed to make it. And, all the time, the sense of vertical rise grew more and more uncomfortable. If only you could get some slope inward,—something less like a stone ladder of huge slabs!
After a time he grew used to the sense of height. The thing resolved itself into the immediate problem of getting over the next ledge above. They all shelved back—just a little—that was some comfort! But above him they came out again, in an enormous pediment, one of Nature’s own cornices, big as a whole Parthenon. Sid looked up, despairingly. If the cleft did not begin before that thing started out from the cliff wall, he was beaten! And he had no idea how he was ever coming down those ledges again, either!
But his route, planned out from below, turned out to be feasible. The narrow cleft started from the flat floor of a ledge twenty feet above him. He made it, with the help of some young spruces growing out of crevices in the rock. He had learned to depend on these, as they were firmly anchored by their twinelike roots. Sid at last stood on the ledge, looked down into the void below with a sigh of relief, and then looked up through the cleft with renewed hope.