"Right alongside his wife, too!" Gowan thrust the goad deeper. "You'd think even that brand of skunk would have more decency. Not that his wife is any friend of mine, like she is yours. But for a man with such a wife and baby ... with Miss Chuckie! The--" Gowan ended with a string of oaths so virulent that even Ashton's half-mad anger was checked. "You may be--er--I fear that we--Perhaps it's not so bad as it appears!" he stammered. "_Bah!_" disgustedly sneered the puncher, and he strode on ahead, leaving Ashton torn between rage and doubt and terror of his own furious jealousy. The others continued to stand on a flat ledge that here formed the lip of the canyon. Genevieve was trembling with awed delight. Her husband and the girl appeared more calm, but they were drinking in the grandeur of the tremendous gorge below them with no less intense appreciation of its gloomy vastness. Upstream, to their left, the precipices jutted so far out from each wall of the canyon that they overlapped, a thousand or fifteen hundred feet from the top. But downstream the upper part of the chasm flared to a width that permitted the noonday sun to penetrate part way down through the blue-black shadows. "O-o-o-oh!" sighed Genevieve, for the tenth time, and she clung tighter than ever to the strong arm of her husband. "Isn't it fearfully, fearfully delightful? It makes the soles of my feet tingle to look at it!" "That tickly feeling!" exclaimed Isobel. "I often ride up here to the canyon, I do so love to feel that way! Only with me it's like ants crawling up and down my back." "O-o-o-oh!" again sighed Genevieve. "It--it so overpowers one!" "It's sure some canyon," admitted her husband. "That French artist Dore ought to have seen it." "If only we had a copy of Dante's Inferno to read here on the brink!" she whispered. "It always reminds me of Coleridge's poem," murmured Isobel, and she quoted in an awed whisper: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man, Down to the sunless sea. "Fortunately for us, this is a canyon, not a string of measureless caverns," said Blake. "It can be measured, one way or another. If I had a transit, I could calculate the depth at any point where the water shows--triangulate with a vertical angle. But it would cause a long delay to send on for a transit. We shall first try to chain down at that gulch break." Genevieve shrank back from the verge of the precipice and drew the others after her. "Dear!" she exclaimed, "I did not dream it was so fearful. One has to see to realize! You will not go down--promise me you will not go down!" "Now, now, little woman," reproached Blake. "What's become of my partner?" "But baby--? If you should leave him fatherless!"