"My dear child, what do you mean?" urged Aunt Maria, looking out of her
wagon. "Mr. Coronado, I'll ride there with you myself."

The result of the dialogue which ensued was that, after the train had
entered the gorge of the larger cañon, Coronado and Clara turned back and
wandered up the smaller one, followed at a distance by Texas Smith. In
twenty minutes they were separated from the wagons by a barrier of
sandstone several hundred feet high, and culminating in a sharp ridge or
frill of rocky points, not unlike the spiny back of a John Dory. The
scenery, although nothing new to Clara, was such as would be considered in
any other land amazing. Vast walls on either side, consisting mainly of
yellow sandstone, were variegated with white, bluish, and green shales,
with layers of gypsum of the party-colored marl series, with long lines of
white limestone so soft as to be nearly earth, and with red and green
foliated limestone mixed with blood-red shales. The two wanderers seemed
to be amid the landscapes of a Christmas drama as they rode between these
painted precipices toward a crimson, sunset.

It was a perfect solitude. There was not a breath of life besides their
own in this gorgeous valley of desolation. The ragged, crumbling
battlements, and the loftier points of harder rock, would not have
furnished subsistence for a goat or a mouse. Color was everywhere and life
nowhere: it was such a region as one might look for in the moon; it did
not seem to belong to an inhabited planet.

Before they had ridden half an hour the sun went down suddenly behind
serrated steeps, and almost immediately night hastened in with his
obscurities. Texas Smith, riding hundreds of yards in the rear and
concealing himself behind the turning points of the cañon, was obliged to
diminish his distance in order to keep them under his guard. Clara had