Nance loved the cañon. She liked to climb among its boulders, to whip its frequent pools for the trout that hung in their moving smoothness, to listen to the thousand voices that seemed always whispering and talking. They were made of fairy stuff and madness, these voices. If one sat still and listened long enough he could swear that they were real, that strange concourses discussed the secrets of the spheres. On the hottest days of summer the cañon was cool, for a wind drew always through it from its unknown head somewhere in the Deep Hearts themselves far to the north and east. Buckskin felt the mysterious influence of the soundful silence, pricking his ears, listening, holding his breath to let it out in snorts, and Nance laughed at his uneasiness. “Buckskin,” she said one day, as she lay stretched at length on a flat rock beside a boiling riffle, “you’re a bundle of nerves, a natural-born finder of fears. There isn’t a thing bigger or uglier than yourself in all the cañon—unless it’s a panther skulking up in the branches, and he wouldn’t come near for a fortune—though what could be fortune to a cougar, I wonder?” she went on to herself, smiling at the strip of sky that topped the frowning rimrock, “only a full belly, I guess—the murderer.” She lay a long time basking in the sun that shone straight down, for it was noon, revelling in the relaxation of her young body, long worked to the limit and frankly tired. She took her bread and bacon from a pocket and ate with the relish which only healthy youth can muster, clearing up the last crumb, drank from the stream, her face to the surface, and finally rose with a long breath of satisfaction. “You can stay here, you old fraid-cat,” she said to the pony, dropping his rein over his head, “it’s hard on your feet, anyway. Me—I’m going on up a ways.” Buckskin looked anxiously after her, but stayed where he was bid, as a well-trained horse should do, and the girl went on up the cañon, her fair head bare, her hands on her hips. She drank in the sombre beauty of the dull blue walls, hung to their towering rims with coruscation and prominence carved fantastically by the erosion of uncounted years—listened, lips apart the better to hear, to the deep blended monotone of the talking voices. She skirted great boulders fallen from above, waded a riffle here, leaped a narrow there, and always the great cut became rougher, wilder, more forbidding and mysterious. She stood for a long time beside a pool that lay, still-seeming and dark, behind a huge rock, but in whose shadowed depths she could see the swirling of white sand that marked its turmoil. The cañon widened here a bit, its floor strewn with jumbled boulders, its walls honeycombed with water-eaten caves.