Diana, in her worn corduroy habit, her soft hat pulled well over her great eyes, looked from Agnew to Enoch, smiled and did not reply.  Enoch waited impatiently without the door while she made a call on Milton.

“Diana!” he exclaimed, when she came out, “aren’t you going to talk to me even?  Do come down by the Ida and see if we can’t be rid of this horde of people for a while.”

“I’ve been wanting to see just how badly you’d treated the poor old boat,” said Diana, following Enoch toward the shore.

But Enoch had not the slightest intention of holding an inquest on the Ida.  In the shade of a gnarled cedar to which the boat was tied as a precaution against high water, he had placed a box.  Thither he led Diana.

“Do sit down, Diana, and let me sit here at your feet.  I’ll admit it should be unexpected joy enough just to find you here.  But I’m greedy.  I want you to myself, and I want to tell you a thousand things.”

“All right, Judge, begin,” returned Diana amiably, as she clasped her knee with both hands and smiled at him.  But Enoch could not begin, immediately.  Sitting in the sand with his back against the cedar he looked out at the Colorado flowing so placidly, at the pale gray green of the far canyon walls and a sense of all that the river signified to him, all that it had brought to him, all that it would mean to him to leave it and with it Diana,—­Diana who had been his other self since he was a lad of eighteen,—­made him speechless for a time.

Diana waited, patiently.  At last, Enoch turned to her, “All the things I want to say most, can’t be said, Diana!”

“Are you glad you took the trip down the river, Judge?”

“Glad!  Was Roland glad he made his adventure in search of the Dark Tower?”

“Yes, he was, only, Judge—­”

Enoch interrupted.  “Has our friendship grown less since we camped at the placer mine?”

Diana flushed slightly and went on, “Only, Enoch, surely the end of your adventure is not a Dark Tower ending!”

“Yes, it is, Diana!  It can never be any other.”  Enoch’s fingers trembled a little as he toyed with his pipe bowl.  Diana slowly looked away from him, her eyes fastening themselves on a buzzard that circled over the peaks across the river.  After a moment, she said, “Then you are going to shoot Brown?”

Enoch started a little.  “I’m not thinking of Brown just now.  I’m thinking of you and me.”

He paused again and again Diana waited until she felt the silence becoming too painful.  Then she said,

“Aren’t you going to tell me some of the details of your trip?”

“I want to, Diana, but hang it, words fail me!  It was as you warned me, an hourly struggle with death.  And we fought, I think, not because life was so unutterably sweet to any of us, but because there was such wonderful zest to the fighting.  The beauty of the Canyon, the awfulness of it, the unbelievable rapidity with which event piled on event.  Why, Diana, I feel as if I’d lived a lifetime since I first put foot on the Ida!  And the glory of the battle!  Diana, we were so puny, so insignificant, so stupid, and the Canyon was so colossal and so diabolically quick and clever!  What a fight!”