They headed over, and presently the dim outlines of the horses showed up. Colonel Colvin greeted them delightedly and then explained briefly to Niltci his plan. The Indian boy agreed, submissively, and they all set off down into the canyon. A mile further they broke into a trot with Niltci hanging to the Colonel’s stirrup.
“Of course there’s plenty of good hunting, boys, all over this wonderful Arizona,” said the Colonel as they rode along. “All through the canyons of the pine belt south of Flagstaff there is deer and bear, and we could reach it by riding southwest from here. But I want you to see the Grand Canyon,—the big sight that no American should permit himself to miss,—and the way to get it all, and first-class big game hunting besides, is from that vast network of canyons and crags back of the north rim. It’s a desert ride, either way we decide to go, southwest to the pine belt or west to the Ferry. We’ll take the latter. It’s eighty miles from here and just one drink the whole way. Here’s where our oats-and-water scheme scintillates, for we can do it in three days, with good grain feed and water enough to keep the horses full of pep.”
As they debouched from Canyon Cheyo the pack train was halted to make these adjustments. All the pannier water cans were filled from the brook and a full bucket of oats taken out of them was fed to each horse. The rest was put in gunny sacks and the loads redistributed so that there was an extra cayuse for Niltci to ride. They fixed up an improvised saddle made of a tarp, a folded blanket and a cinch strap for him, and then all the spare stuff was cached. Bidding the running stream a last good-by, the train started climbing up a mighty ravine that led out to the vast desert plateau to the west.
Arrived at the head of it, a high mesa greeted them, stretching for miles to the northwest. Under its flanks the party rode, while the soft, cold desert wind sifted the desert sand in a faintly audible ticking around the horses’ feet. It was a tired and sleepy party that saw the sunrise, five hours later, with thirty miles of travel behind them. Bare desolation, and color, color, color, everywhere the eye roamed! Blue cliffs, red cliffs, yellow cliffs, black buttes; and, to the west, the enchanted walls of the ghostly White Mesa.
During the heat of the day the train halted under the shade of a rocky nest of bowlders as high as a house, and the horses were fed and watered and picketed out to nibble what sparse vegetation they could find. The four men spread out bed rolls, and, with the four dogs insisting on bunking in their midst, slept in an indescribable huddle, too tired to boot them off.
It was black night and cold when Sid awoke again. The others slept around him. A distant coyote raised his piercing cry, soft and plaintive in the vast solitude; the blurred forms of the horses dotted the little swale in front of their camp. Then came the false dawn of the moon, and Big John awoke and nudged Niltci, whom he had elected assistant horse wrangler, and they began silently to pack the animals.
The sight of them at work was too much for Sid; he awoke his father and Scotty, for at least they could attend to the saddle horses and help break camp. They were nearly ready to mount when an enormous red moon rose slowly over the mesas to the east. Higher and higher it soared, becoming smaller, rounder and more silvery as it quitted the haze over the desert. Then, in a splendor of white light, clear as daylight and pricking out the buttes in staring porcelain and inky shadows, the pack train headed west. It was all weirdly beautiful; color was there none, but of sharp contrast, of strangely rugged and distorted rock formations, of vague and ghostly desert distances there was such a play as to place one in imagination in some selenitic valley of the moon.
The afternoon of the third day found the pack train climbing down the frightful escarpments of a high red butte that abutted on the Colorado. There had been no adventure, no sandstorm, no thirst torture, no accident; but all were weary, the men silent, the dogs limping painfully, the horses plodding on persistently. A ringing whoop from Big John and the roar and rumble of waters announced the sighting of the famous Red River. Out of the gray ramparts of Cataract Canyon it swept, to flood past them in boiling riffles, majestic and purposeful in its headlong drive for the sea—the river that has more to show for its labors than any other river in the whole world.
Pistol shots brought ferrymen down to the opposite bank, to man the flatboat which crosses here by an overhead wire and trolley wheel tackle. Swiftly it came over, driven by the rapid current impinging on its sides. It was big enough to accommodate the whole party, and, paying the toll, the horses were ridden onto its capacious flat floor. The reluctant dogs were booted aboard and then the boat set out for its return trip across the Colorado. As the water boiled and swirled around its gunwales Sid looked downstream at the mighty chasm of black gneiss into which the river plunged with a dull and ceaseless boom like the thunder of a distant Niagara. He could not keep his eyes off it. From there on the canyon would become inconceivably grander and more majestic, one of the seven wonders of the world,—yet what was it, in the infinite program of Nature, but an inconsiderable trickle in an inconspicuous crevice on the enormous round globe which is our world? If this remnant of a stream was so awe-inspiring to man, what must it have been when that whole vast inland sea which reached clear up to Wyoming was flooding out through these same gates to the ocean! The very thought gave Sid a glimpse,—like a rift through the clouds at some mountain top,—of the unapproachable dignity of Nature. Man, at his best, is but a mere insult in her presence, an audacious, unspanked microbe, that has occupied and will occupy but a brief period in her cosmic processes, even when his whole history is told from start to finish.
A day was spent resting up at the ranch and giving the horses unlimited oats and water once more, and then they pushed southwest through a bare and sparse country to where Buckskin Mountain dominated the Kaibab Plateau, huge, gray and imposing in his nine thousand feet of snow-topped height. Once around its flanks they were in a fine country of tall western pine, with every ravine leading to the rocky buttes and parapets and pinnacles that overhung the enormous slopes of the Grand Canyon basin. Back in the pines a short distance from the rim they established camp. The boys’ little green five-by-six-foot wall tent was set up, with a pair of shears in front and its ridge rope run back to encircle the trunk of a pine three feet thick. The little tent was a wonder of a forest home, for its five pounds of weight. High enough to stand up in, it had a gauze window in the rear wall, with a flap to it which could be guyed out in fine weather and closed in when it stormed; it had a netting front door over a sill a foot high, and the cover flap of the front door was V-shaped, so that it formed a porch when held out horizontally by two upright poles, making a shady place to sit under and one sheltered from rain for a cooking space when needed.