The first hundred yards of that steep road cut out of the cliff appeared to be the worst.  It began to widen, with descents less precipitous.  Tips of trees rose level with her gaze, obstructing sight of the blue depths.  Then brush appeared on each side of the road.  Gradually Carley’s strain relaxed, and also the muscular contraction by which she had braced herself in the seat.  The horses began to trot again.  The wheels rattled.  The road wound around abrupt corners, and soon the green and red wall of the opposite side of the canyon loomed close.  Low roar of running water rose to Carley’s ears.  When at length she looked out instead of down she could see nothing but a mass of green foliage crossed by tree trunks and branches of brown and gray.  Then the vehicle bowled under dark cool shade, into a tunnel with mossy wet cliff on one side, and close-standing trees on the other.

“Reckon we’re all right now, onless we meet somebody comin’ up,” declared the driver.

Carley relaxed.  She drew a deep breath of relief.  She had her first faint intimation that perhaps her extensive experience of motor cars, express trains, transatlantic liners, and even a little of airplanes, did not range over the whole of adventurous life.  She was likely to meet something, entirely new and striking out here in the West.

The murmur of falling water sounded closer.  Presently Carley saw that the road turned at the notch in the canyon, and crossed a clear swift stream.  Here were huge mossy boulders, and red walls covered by lichens, and the air appeared dim and moist, and full of mellow, hollow roar.  Beyond this crossing the road descended the west side of the canyon, drawing away and higher from the creek.  Huge trees, the like of which Carley had never seen, began to stand majestically up out of the gorge, dwarfing the maples and white-spotted sycamores.  The driver called these great trees yellow pines.

At last the road led down from the steep slope to the floor of the canyon.  What from far above had appeared only a green timber-choked cleft proved from close relation to be a wide winding valley, tip and down, densely forested for the most part, yet having open glades and bisected from wall to wall by the creek.  Every quarter of a mile or so the road crossed the stream; and at these fords Carley again held on desperately and gazed out dubiously, for the creek was deep, swift, and full of bowlders.  Neither driver nor horses appeared to mind obstacles.  Carley was splashed and jolted not inconsiderably.  They passed through groves of oak trees, from which the creek manifestly derived its name; and under gleaming walls, cold, wet, gloomy, and silent; and between lines of solemn wide-spreading pines.  Carley saw deep, still green pools eddying under huge massed jumble of cliffs, and stretches of white water, and then, high above the treetops, a wild line of canyon rim, cold against the sky.  She felt shut in from