a winding, ragged, blue line, looping back upon itself, and then winding away again, growing wider and bluer.  This line was the San Juan Canyon.  Where was Joe Lake at that moment?  Had he embarked yet on the river—­ did that blue line, so faint, so deceiving, hold him and the boat?  Almost it was impossible to believe.  Shefford followed the blue line all its length, a hundred miles, he fancied, down toward the west where it joined a dark, purple, shadowy cleft.  And this was the Grand Canyon of the Colorado.  Shefford’s eye swept along with that winding mark, farther and farther to the west, round to the left, until the cleft, growing larger and coming closer, losing its deception, was seen to be a wild and winding canyon.  Still farther to the left, as he swung in fascinated gaze, it split the wonderful wall—­a vast plateau now with great red peaks and yellow mesas.  The canyon was full of purple smoke.  It turned, it gaped, it lost itself and showed again in that chaos of a million cliffs.  And then farther on it became again a cleft, a purple line, at last to fail entirely in deceiving distance.

Shefford imagined there was no scene in all the world to equal that.  The tranquillity of lesser spaces was not here manifest.  Sound, movement, life, seemed to have no fitness here.  Ruin was there and desolation and decay.  The meaning of the ages was flung at him, and a man became nothing.  When he had gazed at the San Juan Canyon he had been appalled at the nature of Joe Lake’s Herculean task.  He had lost hope, faith.  The thing was not possible.  But when Shefford gazed at that sublime and majestic wilderness, in which the Grand Canyon was only a dim line, he strangely lost his terror and something else came to him from across the shining spaces.  If Nas Ta Bega led them safely down to the river, if Joe Lake met them at the mouth of Nonnezoshe Boco, if they survived the rapids of that terrible gorge, then Shefford would have to face his soul and the meaning of this spirit that breathed on the wind.

He urged his mustang to the descent of the slope, and as he went down, slowly drawing nearer to the other fugitives, his mind alternated between this strange intimation of faith, this subtle uplift of hid spirit, and the growing gloom and shadow in his love for Fay Larkin.  Not that he loved her less, but more!  A possible God hovering near him, like the Indian’s spirit-step on the trail, made his soul the darker for Fay’s crime, and he saw with light, with deeper sadness, with sterner truth.

More than once the Indian turned on his mustang to look up the slope and the light flashed from his dark, somber face.  Shefford instinctively looked back himself, and then realized the unconscious motive of the action.  Deep within him there had been a premonition of certain pursuit, and the Indian’s reiterated backward glance had at length brought the feeling upward.  Thereafter, as they descended, Shefford gradually added to his already wrought emotions a mounting anxiety.