"Guess he doesn't amount to a great deal."
"He's rich enough, and he's fond of hunting, but there isn't a great deal of fight in him. He wouldn't make a good Lipan."
The circumstances of Steve's capture were evidently not very creditable to some of those who were concerned in it, and Murray's tone, in speaking of the "uncle" who had brought him out into the Texas plains to lose him so easily, was bitterly contemptuous.
At that moment they were entering the mouth of the gap, and Murray suddenly dropped all other subjects to exclaim,
"We've struck it, Steve!"
"Struck what?"
"A regular cañon. See, the walls are almost perpendicular, and the bottom comes down, from ledge to ledge, like a flight of stairs!"
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!"