“Oh, take him along, Diana!  He’ll be crying in a minute,” sniffed Curly.  “Jonas, you’ll stay and give us a feed, won’t you?”

“I got to look out for the boss,” Jonas spoke anxiously.

A shout went up.  “Jonas, old boy,” said Enoch, “you stay in camp to-day and er—­look over my clothes.”

“I will, boss,” with intense relief, “and I’ll make you a stew out of those rabbits nobody’ll forget in a hurry.”

Mack and Curly hurried off to the river’s edge.  Na-che and Jonas went into the cave.  Enoch looked at Diana.  She was standing by the breakfast fire slender and straight in her brown corduroy riding suit, her wide, intelligent eyes studying Enoch’s face.  There was a glow of crimson in the cream of her cheeks, for the morning air held frost in its touch.

“May I go with you?” repeated Enoch.  “I’ll be very good!”

Diana did not reply at first.  Moonlight and firelight had not permitted her before to read clearly the story of suffering that was in Enoch’s face.  During breakfast he had been laughing and chatting constantly.  But now, as he stood before her, she was appalled by what she saw in the rugged face.  There were two straight, deep lines between his brows.  The lines from nostril to lip corner were doubly pronounced.  The thin, sensitive lips were compressed.  The clear, kindly blue eyes were contracted as if Enoch were enduring actual physical pain.  Tall and powerful, his dark red hair tossed back from his forehead, his look of trouble did not detract from the peculiar forcefulness of his personality.

“If you hesitate so long,” he said, “I shall—­”

Diana laughed.  “Begin to cry, as Curly said?  Oh, don’t do that!  I shall be very happy to have you with me, but before we start, I think I shall develop some of the films I exposed on the way over.  A ten o’clock start will be early enough, won’t it?  I have a developing machine with me.  It may not take me even until ten.”

Enoch nodded.  “How does the work go?” he asked eagerly.  “Did you attend the ceremony Na-che sent word to you about?”

“Yes!  Out of a hundred exposures I made there, I think I got one fairly satisfactory picture.”  Diana sighed.  “After all, the camera tells the story no better than words, and words are futile.  Look!  What medium could one use to tell the world of that?”

She swept her arm to embrace the view before them.  The tiny sandy beach was on a curve of the river so sharp that above and below them the rushing waters seemed to drive into blind canyon walls.  To the right, the Canyon on both sides was so sheer, the river bed so narrow that nothing but sky was to be seen above and beyond.  But to the left, the south canyon wall terraced back at perhaps a thousand feet in a series of magnificent strata, yellow, purple and crimson.  Still south of this, lifted great weathered buttes and mesas, fortifications of the gods against time itself.  The morning sun had not yet reached the camp, but it shone warm and vivid on the peaks to the south, burning through the drifting mists from the river, in colors that thrilled the heart like music.