Presently she came out upon a lower branch of the canyon, into a great red-walled space, with the river still a thousand feet below, and the cliffs towering as high above her.  The road led down along this rim where to the left all was open, across to the split and peaked wall opposite.  The river appeared to sweep round a bold, bulging corner a mile above.  It was a wide, swift, muddy, turbulent stream.  A great bar of sand stretched out from the shore.  Beyond it, through the mouth of an intersecting canyon, could be seen a clump of cottonwoods and willows that marked the home of the Creeches.  Lucy could not see the shore nearest her, as it was almost directly under her.  Besides, in this narrow road, on a spirited horse, she was not inclined to watch the scenery.  She hurried Sarchedon down and down, under the overhanging brows of rock, to where the rim sloped out and failed.  Here was a half-acre of sand, with a few scant willows, set down seemingly in a dent at the base of the giant, beetling cliffs.  The place was light, though the light seemed a kind of veiled red, and to Lucy always ghastly.  She could not have been joyous with that river moaning before her, even if it had been up on a level, in the clear and open day.  As a little girl eight years old she had conceived a terror and hatred of this huge, jagged rent so full of red haze and purple smoke and the thunder of rushing waters.  And she had never wholly outgrown it.  The joy of the sun and wind, the rapture in the boundless open, the sweetness in the sage—­these were not possible here.  Something mighty and ponderous, heavy as those colossal cliffs, weighted down her spirit.  The voice of the river drove out any dream.  Here was the incessant frowning presence of destructive forces of nature.  And the ford was associated with catastrophe—­to sheep, to horses and to men.

Lucy rode across the bar to the shore where the Indians were loading the sheep into an immense rude flatboat.  As the sheep were frightened, the loading was no easy task.  Their bleating could be heard above the roar of the river.  Bostil’s boatmen, Shugrue and Somers, stood knee-deep in the quicksand of the bar, and their efforts to keep free-footed were as strenuous as their handling of the sheep.  Presently the flock was all crowded on board, the Indians followed, and then the boatmen slid the unwieldy craft off the sand-bar.  Then, each manning a clumsy oar, they pulled up-stream.  Along shore were whirling, slow eddies, and there rowing was possible.  Out in that swift current it would have been folly to try to contend with it, let alone make progress.  The method of crossing was to row up along the shore as far as a great cape of rock jutting out, and there make into the current, and while drifting down pull hard to reach the landing opposite.  Heavily laden as the boat was, the chances were not wholly in favor of a successful crossing.