the rim appeared to wave in gentle swells, heavily timbered and thickly rock-strewn, with heads of canyons opening down to our right.  I saw deer tracks and turkey tracks, neither of which occasioned me any thrills now.  About the middle of the afternoon Edd bade us farewell and turned back.  We were sorry to see him go, but as all the country ahead of us was as unfamiliar to him as to us there seemed to be no urgent need of him.

We encountered a long, steep hill up which the teams, and our saddle horses combined, could not pull the wagon.  We unpacked it, and each of us, Romer included, loaded a bundle or box in front of his saddle, and took it up the hill.  Then the teams managed the wagon.  This incident happened four times in less than as many miles.  The team horses, having had a rest from hard labor, had softened, and this sudden return to strenuous pulling had made their shoulders sore.  They either could not or would not pull.  We covered less than ten miles that day, a very discouraging circumstance.  We camped in a pine grove close to the rim, a splendid site that under favorable circumstances would have been enjoyable.  At sunset R.C. and Nielsen and Romer saw a black bear down under the rim.  The incident was so wonderful for Romer that it brightened my spirits.  “A bear!  A big bear, Dad!...  I saw him!  He was alive!  He stood up—­like this—­wagging his head.  Oh!  I saw him!”

Our next day’s progress was no less than a nightmare.  Crawling along, unpacking and carrying, and packing again, we toiled up and down the interminable length of three almost impassable miles.  When night overtook us it was in a bad place to camp.  No grass, no water!  A cold gale blew out of the west.  It roared through the forest.  It blew everything loose away in the darkness.  It almost blew us away in our beds.  The stars appeared radiantly coldly white up in the vast blue windy vault of the sky.  A full moon soared majestically.  Shadows crossed the weird moon-blanched forest glades.

At daylight we were all up, cramped, stiff, half frozen, mostly silent.  The water left in the buckets was solid ice.  Suddenly some one discovered that Nielsen was missing.  The fact filled me with consternation and alarm.  He might have walked in his sleep and fallen over the rim.  What had become of him?  All his outfit lay scattered round in his bed.  In my bewilderment I imagined many things, even to the extreme that he might have left us in the lurch.  But when I got to that sad pass of mind I suddenly awakened as if out of an evil dream.  My worry, my hurry had obsessed me.  High time indeed was it for me to meet this situation as I had met other difficult ones.  To this end I went out away from camp, and forgot myself, my imagined possibilities, and thought of my present responsibility, and the issue at hand.  That instant I realized my injustice toward Nielsen, and reproached myself.

Upon my return to camp Nielsen was there, warming one hand over the camp-fire and holding a cup of coffee in the other.