He says you know how he came to feel as he does about Brown and Fowler.  However that may be, it certainly is the dirtiest story I ever heard one man tell on others and, dying though he was, I begged Curly to let me tear the paper up and let the story go into the grave with him.  But he held me to my promise, so I’m sending it to you, with this apology for contaminating either of us with the dope.  Poor old Curly!  He was a man who’d been a little embittered by some early trouble, but he was a good scout, for all that.

“We all missed you and Jonas,—­don’t forget Jonas!—­very much, after you left.  Milton said half a dozen times that when he gets in shape to go on with the work in the spring, he was going to try to persuade you to finish the trip with us.  So say we all!  With best wishes, sincerely yours, C. L. Harden.”

After Enoch had finished Harden’s letter he replaced it in its envelope slowly and dropped it into the desk drawer.  Next, as slowly, he picked up the bulkier envelope and placed it on edge on the mantel under the Moran painting.  Then he began to walk the floor.

He knew that, in that dingy envelope, lay the whip by which he could drive Brown to public apology.  As far as fearing any publicity with which Brown could retaliate, Enoch felt immune.  He believed that he had sounded the uttermost depths of humiliation.  And at first he gloated over the thought that now Brown could be made to suffer as he had suffered.  He would give the story to the newspapers, exactly as it had come to him.  And what a setting!  Curly shot from ambush, by creatures, it was highly probable, who were ignorantly actuated by Brown’s own crooked Mexican policy.  Curly flinging, with his dying hands, the boomerang that was to strike Brown down.  That incidentally it would pull Fowler down, moved Enoch little.  Fowler too would be hoist by his own petard.

For a long hour Enoch paced the floor.  Then he came to a sudden pause before the mantel and turned on the light above the painting of Bright Angel trail.  Outside the room sounded the clatter of Washington’s streets.  Enoch did not hear it.  Once more a passionate, sullen boy, he was clinging to his mule on the twisting trail.  Once more swept over him the horror of the Canyon and of human beings that had tortured the soul of the boy, Enoch, on that first visit into the Canyon’s depths.  The sweat started to his forehead and, as he stared, he grasped the mantel with both hands.  Then he picked up the envelope.  His hand shook as he inserted a finger under the flap, lifting his eyes as he did so, once more to the painting.

He paused.  Unearthly calm, drifting mists, colors too ephemeral, too subtle for words—­drawn in the Canyon!

The lift of the Ida under his knees, the eager welter of the whirlpool, the sting of the icy Colorado dragging him under, the flash of Diana’s face and his winning fight with death.