When within a few hundred yards of the lone cabin, suddenly there was a crashing, grinding sound, a terrific roar, a rumbling, and the earth seemed shaken violently as the whole face of the mighty cliff came crushing down into the valley, sending up showers of splintered rocks and clouds of dust that were blinding and appalling! Back from the scene of danger fled the frightened horses, the rider showing no desire to check their flight until a spot of safety was reached. Then, half a mile from the fallen cliff, he paused, his face white, his whole form quivering, while his horses stood trembling with terror. "My God! the cliff has fallen upon my home, and my unfortunate comrade lies buried beneath a mountain of rocks. We mined too far beneath the cliff, thus causing a cave-in. "A few minutes more and I would also have shared poor Langley's fate; but a strange destiny it is that protects me from death--a strange one indeed! He is gone, and I alone am now the Hermit of the Grand Canyon, a Croesus in wealth of gold, yet a fugitive from my fellow men. What a fate is mine, and how will it all end, I wonder?" Thus musing the hermit-miner sat upon his own horse listening to the echoes rumbling through the Grand Canyon, growing fainter and fainter, like a retreating army fighting off its pursuing foes. An hour passed before the unnerved man felt able to seek a camp for the night, so great had been the shock of the falling cliff, and the fate he had felt had overtaken his comrade. At last he rode on up the canyon once more, determined to seek a spot he knew well where he could camp, a couple of miles above his destroyed home. He passed the pile of rocks, heaped far up the cliff from which they had fallen, looking upon them as the sepulcher of his companion. "Poor Lucas Langley! He, too, had his sorrows, and his secrets, which drove him, like me, to seek a retreat far from mankind, and become a hunted man. Alas! what has the future in store for me?" With a sigh he rode on up the valley, his way now guided by the moonlight alone, and at last turned into another canyon, for the Grand Canyon has hundreds of others branching off from it, some of them penetrating for miles back into the mountains. He had gone up this canyon for a few hundred yards, and was just about to halt, and go into camp upon the banks of a small stream, when his eyes caught sight of a light ahead. "Ah! what does that mean?" he ejaculated in surprise. Hardly had he spoken when from up the canyon came the deep voice of a dog barking, his scent telling him of a human presence near. "Ah! Savage is not dead then, and, after all, Lucas Langley may have escaped." The horseman rode quickly on toward the light. The barking of the dog continued, but it was not a note of warning but of welcome, and as the horseman drew rein by a camp-fire a huge brute sprang up and greeted him with every manifestation of delight, while a man came forward from the shadows of the trees and cried: