The sun was two hours high outside, but here between the towering walls the shadows were still blue and cold. The murmur of the stream seemed louder than usual, heard thus in the stillness of the early day. The mystery of the great cut was accentuated, its charm intensified a thousandfold to Nance. There was a strange excitement in everything, a sense of holiday and impending joy. Her face broke into smiles as helplessly as running water dimples, and when the two riding ahead turned from time to time to look back she was fair as “a garden of the Lord,” her bronze head shining bare in the blue light, her eyes as wide and clear as Sonny’s own. This was adventure to Nance—the first she had ever known, and its heady wine was stirring in her veins. She did not know why the tumbling stream sang a different song, or why the glow of light creeping down from the rimrock along the western wall seemed more golden than before. She only knew that where her heart had lain in her breast calm and content with her labor and her majestic environment of hills and river, there was now a strange surge and thrill which made her think of the stars that sang together at the morning of creation. Surely her treasured Book had something for each phase of human life—comfort for its sorrows, divine approval for its happiness. So she rode, smiling, her hands folded on her pommel, listening to Brand Fair’s easy speech, watching his shoulders moving lithely under the blue flannel shirt, comparing him to the men she knew and wondering again why he was not like them. They followed the stream sometimes, and again trotted across flat, hard, sandy spaces where the floor of the cañon widened, and passed now and again the mouths of smaller cuts diverging from the main one. “About two miles from here,” she told Fair, “we leave Blue Stone and take up Little Blue to the left. At its head lie Grey Spring and the Circle. We’ll make it about noon.” The sun was well down in the great gorge when they reached the opening of Little Blue, and in this smaller cañon which diverged sharply at right angles, its golden light flooded to the dry bottom. “Little Blue has no water to speak of,” said Nance, “only holes here and there—but they are funny places, deep and full, and they seem to come up from the bottom and go down somewhere under the sand. They have current, for if you throw anything in them it will drift about, slow, and finally go down and never come up.” “Subterranean flow,” said Fair, “I’ve seen other evidence of it in this country. Must have been volcanic sometime.” The gorge lifted and widened and presently they passed several of these strange pools, set mysteriously in the shelving floor. The towering walls fell away and they had the feeling of coming up into another world. Soil began to appear in place of the abundant blue sand, and trees and grass clothed the floor in ever increasing beauty.