The afternoon passed; the sun set off through the pines, a black-streaked, golden flare; twilight shortly changed to night. The trees looked spectral in the gloom, and the forest appeared to grow thicker. Wolves murmured, and there were wild cries of cat and owl. Lucy fell asleep on her horse. At last, sometime late in the night, when Creech lifted her from the saddle and laid her down, she stretched out on the soft mat of pine needles and knew no more.
She did not awaken until the afternoon of the next day. The site where Creech had made his final camp overlooked the wildest of all that wild upland country. The pines had scattered and trooped around a beautiful park of grass that ended abruptly upon bare rock. Yellow crags towered above the rim, and under them a yawning narrow gorge, overshadowed from above, blue in its depths, split the end of the great plateau and opened out sheer into the head of the canyon, which, according to Creech, stretched away through that wilderness of red stone and green clefts. When Lucy's fascinated gaze looked afar she was stunned at the vast, billowy, bare surfaces. Every green cleft was a short canyon running parallel with this central and longer one. The dips and breaks showed how all these canyons were connected. They led the gaze away, descending gradually to the dim purple of distance—the bare, rolling desert upland.
Lucy did nothing but gaze. She was unable to walk or eat that day. Creech hung around her with a remorse he apparently felt, yet could not put into words.
"Do you expect Joel to come up this big canyon?"
"I reckon I do—some day," replied Creech. "An' I wish he'd hurry."
"Does he know the way?"
"Nope. But he's good at findin' places. An' I told him to stick to the main canyon. Would you believe you could ride offer this rim, straight down thar fer fifty miles, an' never git off your hoss?"
"No, I wouldn't believe it possible."
"Wal, it's so. I've done it. An' I didn't want to come up thet way because I'd had to leave tracks."
"Do you think we're safe—from Cordts now?" she asked.