shadier.  As we got higher up the air grew cooler.  I noted a change in the timber.  The trees grew larger, and other varieties appeared.  We crossed a roaring brook lined by thick, green brush, very pleasant to the eye, and bronze-gold ferns that were beautiful.  We passed oaks all green and yellow, and maple trees, wonderfully colored red and cerise.  Then still higher up I espied some silver spruces, most exquisite trees of the mountain forests.

During the latter half of the climb up to the rim I had to attend to the business of riding and walking.  The trail was rough, steep, and long.  Once Haught called my attention to a flat stone with a plain trail made by a turtle in ages past when that sandstone was wet, sedimentary deposit.  By and bye we reached the last slopes up to the mesa, green, with yellow crags and cliffs, and here and there blazing maples to remind me again that autumn was at hand.

At last we surmounted the rim, from which I saw a scene that defied words.  It was different from any I had seen before.  Black timber as far as eye could see!  Then I saw a vast bowl inclosed by dim mountain ranges, with a rolling floor of forested ridges, and dark lines I knew to be canyons.  For wild, rugged beauty I had not seen its equal.

[Illustration:  The Tonto basin]

When the pack train reached the rim we rode on, and now through a magnificent forest at eight thousand feet altitude.  Big white and black clouds obscured the sun.  A thunder shower caught us.  There was hail, and the dry smell of dust, and a little cold rain.  Romer would not put on his slicker.  Haught said the drought had been the worst he had seen in twenty years there.  Up in this odorous forestland I could not see where there had been lack of rain.  The forest appeared thick, grassy, gold and yellow and green and brown.  Thickets and swales of oaks and aspens were gorgeous in their autumn hues.  The silver spruces sent down long, graceful branches that had to be brushed aside or stooped under as we rode along.  Big gray squirrels with white tails and tufted ears ran up trees to perch on limbs and watch us go by; and other squirrels, much smaller and darker gray, frisked and chattered and scolded at a great rate.

[Illustration:  Listening for the hounds]

We passed little depressions that ran down into ravines, and these, Haught informed me, were the heads of canyons that sloped away from the rim, deepening and widening for miles.  The rim of the mesa was its highest point, except here and there a few elevations like Black Butte.  Geologically this mesa was an enormous fault, like the north rim of the Grand Canyon.  During the formation of the earth, or the hardening of the crust, there had been a crack or slip, so that one edge of the crust stood up sheer above the other.  We passed the heads of Leonard Canyon, Gentry, and Turkey Canyons, and at last, near time of sunset, headed down into beautifully colored, pine-sloped, aspen-thicketed Beaver Dam Canyon.