The meal ended, we inquired for the post-office, and were directed to a ranch building across the Paria River, a small stream which entered from the north, not unlike the Fremont River in size and appearance.  Picking our way in the darkness, on boulders and planks which served as a crossing, we soon reached the building, set back from the river in the centre of the ranch.  A man named Johnson, with his family, had charge of the ranch and post-office as well.  Mail is brought by carrier from the south, a cross-country trip of 160 miles, through the Hopi and Navajo Indian Reservations.

Johnson informed us that an old-time friend named Dave Rust had waited here three or four days, hoping to see us arrive, but business matters had forced him to leave just the day before.  We were very sorry to have missed him.  Rust lived in the little Mormon town of Kanab, Utah, eighty miles north of the Grand Canyon opposite our home.  In addition to being a cattle man and rancher, he had superintended the construction of a cable crossing, or tramway, over the Colorado River, beside the mouth of Bright Angel Creek, not many miles from our home.  He also maintains a cozy camp at this place, for the accommodation of tourists and hunting parties, which he conducts up Bright Angel Creek and into the Kaibab Forest.  It was while returning from such a hunting trip that we first met Rust.  Many are the trips we have taken with him since then, Emery, with his wife and the baby, even, making the “crossing” and the eighty-mile horseback ride to his home in Kanab, while I had continued on through to Salt Lake City.  Rust had been the first to tell us of Galloway and his boating methods; and had given us a practical demonstration on the river.  Naturally there was no one we would have been more pleased to see at that place, than Rust.

In our mail we found a letter from him, stating, among other things, that he had camped the night before on the plateau, a few hundred feet above a certain big rapid, well known through this section as the Soap Creek Rapid.  This locality is credited with being the scene of the first fatality which overtook the Brown-Stanton expedition; Brown being upset and drowned in the next rapid which followed, after having portaged the Soap Creek Rapid.  Rust wrote also that there was a shore along the rapid, so there would be no difficulty in making the portage; and concluded by saying that he had a very impressive dream about us that night, the second of its kind since we had started on our journey.

We understood from this that he had certain misgivings about this rapid, and took his dream to be a sort of a warning.  Rust should have known us better.  With all the perversity of human nature that letter made me want to run that rapid if it were possible.  Why run the rapid, and get a moving picture as it was being done.  Then we could show Rust how well we had learned our lesson!  So I thought as we returned to the buildings near the dredge, but said nothing of what was in my mind to Emery, making the mental reservation that I would see the rapid first and decide afterwards.