“But it is impossible!” he exclaimed, in astonishment.  “Your uncle said so.”

“Coming down, but not going up,” she returned, with a laugh.  “I found it, and no one knows it but myself.”

He glanced up at the towering cliff; its nearly perpendicular flanks were seamed with fissures, some clefts deeply set with stunted growths of thorn and “scrub,” but still sheer and forbidding, and then glanced back at her incredulously.  “I will show you,” she said, answering his look with a smile of triumph.  “I haven’t tramped over this whole valley for nothing!  But wait until we reach the river bank.  They must think that we’ve gone through the canyon.”

“They?

“Yes—­any one who is watching us,” said the girl dryly.

A few steps further on brought them to the buckeye thicket, which extended to the river bank and mouth of the canyon.  The girl lingered for a moment ostentatiously before it, and then, saying “Come,” suddenly turned at right angles into the thicket.  Brice followed, and the next moment they were hidden by its friendly screen from the valley.  On the other side rose the mountain wall, leaving a narrow trail before them.  It was composed of the rocky debris and fallen trees of the cliff, from which buckeyes and larches were now springing.  It was uneven, irregular, and slowly ascending; but the young girl led the way with the free footstep of a mountaineer, and yet a grace that was akin to delicacy.  Nor could he fail to notice that, after the Western girl’s fashion, she was shod more elegantly and lightly than was consistent with the rude and rustic surroundings.  It was the same slim shoe-print which had guided him that morning.  Presently she stopped, and seemed to be gazing curiously at the cliff side.  Brice followed the direction of her eyes.  On a protruding bush at the edge of one of the wooded clefts of the mountain flank something was hanging, and in the freshening southerly wind was flapping heavily, like a raven’s wing, or as if still saturated with the last night’s rain.  “That’s mighty queer!” said Flo, gazing intently at the unsightly and incongruous attachment to the shrub, which had a vague, weird suggestion.  “It wasn’t there yesterday.”

“It looks like a man’s coat,” remarked Brice uneasily.

“Whew!” said the girl.  “Then somebody has come down who won’t go up again!  There’s a lot of fresh rocks and brush here, too.  What’s that?” She was pointing to a spot some yards before them where there had been a recent precipitation of debris and uprooted shrubs.  But mingled with it lay a mass of rags strangely akin to the tattered remnant that flagged from the bush a hundred feet above them.  The girl suddenly uttered a sharp feminine cry of mingled horror and disgust,—­the first weakness of sex she had shown,—­and, recoiling, grasped Brice’s arm.  “Don’t go there!  Come away!”