“Are you sure your head doesn’t ache?  This elevation plays the mischief with some people.  My mother has taken to her berth with ice on her temples.”

“Headache!  No, indeed.  This air is too delicious.  I feel as though I could dance all the way from here to the Black Canyon.”

“You don’t look as if your head ached, or anything,” said Mr. Wade, staring at Clover admiringly.  Her cheeks were pink with excitement, her eyes full of light and exhilaration.

“Oh dear! we are beginning to go down,” she cried, watching one of the beautiful peaks of the Sangre de Cristos as it dipped out of sight.  “I think I could find it in my heart to cry, if it were not that to-morrow we are coming up again.”

So down, down, down they went.  Dusk slowly gathered about them; and the white-gloved butler set the little tables, and brought in broiled chicken and grilled salmon and salad and hot rolls and peaches, and they were all very hungry.  And Clover did not cry, but fell to work on her supper with an excellent appetite, quite unconscious that they were speeding through another wonderful gorge without seeing one of its beauties.  Then the car was detached from the train; and when she awoke next morning they were at the little station called Cimmaro, at the head of the famous Black Canyon, with three hours to spare before the train from Utah should arrive to take them back to St. Helen’s.

Early as it was, the small settlement was awake.  Lights glanced from the eating-house, where cooks were preparing breakfast for the “through” passengers, and smokes curled from the chimneys.  Close to the car was a large brick structure which seemed to be a sort of hotel for locomotives.  A number of the enormous creatures had evidently passed the night there, and just waked up.  Clover now watched their antics with great amusement from her window as their engineers ran them in and out, rubbed them down like horses, and fed them with oil and coal, while they snorted and backed and sidled a good deal as real horses do.  Clover could not at all understand what all these manoeuvres were for,—­they seemed only designed to show the paces of the iron steeds, and what they were good for.

“Miss Clover,” whispered a voice outside her curtains, “I’ve got hold of a hand-car and a couple of men; and don’t you want to take a spin down the canyon and see the view with no smoke to spoil it?  Just you and me and Miss Chase.  She says she’ll go if you will.  Hurry, and don’t make a noise.  We won’t wake the others.”

Of course Clover wanted to.  She finished her dressing at top-speed, hurried on her hat and jacket, stole softly out to where the others awaited her, and in five minutes they were smoothly running down the gorge, over high trestle-work bridges and round sharp curves which made her draw her breath a little faster.  There was no danger, the men who managed the hand-car assured them; it was a couple of hours yet before the next train came in; there was plenty of time to go three or four miles down and return.