“Wow! We can’t let him get away with that, Father!” chuckled Sid. “Shut your eyes and climb! Forget mother, forget your insurance, and all the rest of it—it’s the only way!—I’ll be right behind you.”
The Colonel groaned, whimsically, and started up. Niltci came down again by some incredible feat of legerdemain—as they looked back upon that climb afterwards—and gave him a strong lift over the worst places, and so they all reached the bottom of the fissure. It was dark and gloomy, and it curved around a bend above, so that they had no idea how it was all going to turn out—most likely in some sheer wall, thought Sid. But the only way to get over these things was to go ahead and do them, so they climbed up into it. Part of the time Niltci was straddling both walls of it; part of the climb crawling up vertical ledges higher than his head. The curve mercifully hid from them the frightful depths below, should anyone fall. It grew better, once around it, cutting deeper and deeper into the rim wall and becoming less and less vertical. Masses of pine roots fringed it overhead, and finally their feet found a narrow bottom of yellow, crumbled rocks, which led up in a steep slant to the forest above.
“Great work, Niltci! That’s mountaineering for you!” laughed the Colonel as they dropped panting on the forest duff. “I suppose you could visualize this whole water crack, having once seen the fissure in the rim wall, eh?”
Niltci grunted happily. He had no idea what that speech was all about, but evidently his adored Lord Colonel was pleased! Sid rejoined them, a moment later, and all sat and looked ruefully at their clothing. Their bleeding knees peeped through frayed and torn riding breeches, their buckskin gloves were out at the fingers; Sid had a scraped thigh, caked with blood; all the uppers of their cruiser moccasins gapped open in rent seams. Niltci, in his light cottons and buckskin leggings, seemed the least frazzled of the three, but his bare toes poked out from thin moccasins worn through on the rocks. It was half an hour before the Colonel sat up again.
“And now, where are we?” he queried, briskly. “We’ve got all the rest of the day, so we’ll find the horses and go hang up a buck for camp meat.”
They all rose and started off through the forest. A short walk through the high pines that covered the plateau brought the blue haze beyond, of the canyon again, and presently they came out on a rock pinnacle that commanded the whole prospect below. A sheer fall about a thousand feet lay below them. Beyond that smoky, purple depths showed beyond over the second rim.
“The place where we came down must lie to the west of here, boys,” declared the Colonel. “Big John and Scotty are somewhere down in this valley—they’ll be all day getting back! We’ll start west for another look-see.”
A second outlook from another point showed them the steep slope down which they had first come. Up in the ravine at the head of it would be the horses, for there they had first started the cougar. Soon they were in it and had remounted.
“Sore and tattered, but still in the game!” ejaculated the Colonel as he put spurs to the roan and led back up the ravine into the hinterland.
Back in here they found the huge flanks of Buckskin all cut up with rocky glades grown up with yellow pines, and gulches which led to high, walled canyons, all leading out to a discharge into the Grand Canyon, somewhere. Great pines grew heavily in the swales. It was a wonderful, rich, plentiful game country! Again and again Niltci grunted, to point down at deer tracks, wolf tracks, and the round hoof-prints of wild horses, and there seemed to be a cougar after every deer, judging from their frequent footprints!