"So in a few minutes more we was all down there together in that basin. But while the crowd was prowlin' round, with young Hurley beggin' 'em to fix up some way of gettin' his brother's body out from under those jagged rocks and them all keepin' on tellin' him it looked to them like it was goin' to be an impossible job, I was doin' some prowlin' on my own hook. Inside of three minutes I'd run onto something else that set me to thinkin' harder than ever. Try guessin' what that was." "Was it--was it the fishing rod?" asked Chaney. The question popped out of him of its own accord. "Nope--you're gettin' warm though. It was something right close by. Say"--he raised his voice admiringly--"say, plantin' that busted bamboo pole there wasn't such a bad idea on your part. I've said that to myself often since then and I still say so. It showed you two had been there before the slide and it made it look like you'd been took by surprise when the big disturbance started. But the thing I'm speakin' about now wasn't anything you'd fixed up for a plant. It was something you must have overlooked in the excitement. Well, nobody could have blamed you much for that. It must have been pretty squally times down in that deep hole when the earth began to rock and the cliffs began to crumble. You bet! "Try to think of something besides the pole," he prompted. "Go on and try!" His prisoner, who was sitting up now, made a gesture to indicate that he still was entirely at a loss. "I'll give you a hint to help tip you off. What was you doin' just before the hell-raisin' broke loose?" "Well, my line got twisted in a sapling--" "No, no, before that even." "I--let's see? I--oh, by gosh!" It all came back to Chaney; the answer to the riddle that had pestered him that afternoon on the rim-rock nearly a year before. The thing that had made him hesitate, half persuaded to return. The same thing which subconsciously had fretted him through his sleeping on that first night of flight. It came back vividly--how his duplicate false upper plate had fallen out of his shirt pocket on the wet shale; how, absently, he had wondered why the plate should be in his pocket when properly it belonged in the canvas carryall which fitted under a flap of his ground-cloth; how he had picked it up and balanced it momentarily on a flat stone, not restoring it to his pocket for fear of another fall; how then he noticed a sizable trout nosing in out of deep water to the shallows and how, hoping to land him, he cast. And then the gut leader snagging and he turning to free it and then--the first astounding quiver underfoot. "Exactly," affirmed the deputy as though he read what rolled in Chaney's mind. "Your extry set of store teeth! There they was, settin' on a rock, smilin' at me as pleasant as you please and shinin' in the sunlight.