"I suppose so," he responded; "but I don't know what the plans of the others are." "Mr. Strong is going to Meander in the morning," she told him; "and Horace Bentley is going with him, poor fellow, to look around, he says. William Bentley told me this evening that he would leave for home in a day or two, and Mrs. Reed and her charges are waiting to hear from a friend of June's who was in school with her--I think she is the Governor's daughter, or maybe he's an ex-governor--about a long-standing invitation to visit her in her summer home, which is near here, as they compute distances in Wyoming." "And Schaefer is leaving in the morning," reflected the doctor. "That leaves but you and me unaccounted for. Are you going on to Meander soon?" "Yes; I want to be there to file when my time comes." "I've thought of going over there to feel things out, too," Dr. Slavens went on. "This place will shrink in a few days like a piece of wet leather in the sun. They'll have nothing left of it but the stores, and no business to sustain them until the country around here is settled. That may be a long time yet. Still, there may be something around here for me. I'm going to look into the possibilities tomorrow. And we'll have at least another talk before we part?" "Many more, I hope," she said. Her answer presented an alluring lead for him to say more, but before he could speak, even if minded to do it, she went on: "This has been a pleasant experience, this camping in the clean, unused country, and it would be a sort of Persian poet existence if we could go on with it always; but of course we can't." "It isn't all summer and fair skies here," he reminded her, "any more than it is in--well, Persia. Twenty below in winter sometimes, Smith said. Do you remember?" "Yes," she sighed. "But it seems impossible." "You wouldn't believe this little river could turn into a wild and savage torrent, either, a few hundred yards along, if you had nothing to judge it by but this quiet stretch," he returned. "But listen to it down there, crashing against the rocks!" "There's no news of that rash man who went into the cañon for the newspaper?" Agnes asked. "He must have lodged in there somewhere; they haven't picked him up on the other side," he said, a thoughtful abstraction over him. "I hope you've given up the thought of trying to explore it?" "I haven't thought much about it lately," he replied; "but I'm of the same opinion. I believe the difficulties of the cañon are greatly exaggerated. In fact, as I told you before, the reward posted by that newspaper looks to me like easy money." "It wouldn't pay you if the reward were ten times as large," she declared with a little argumentative heat. "Perhaps not," said he, as if he had but a passing and shallow interest in the subject. Sitting there bareheaded to the wind, which was dropping down coldly from the far mountains, he seemed to be in a brooding humor.