Blake still lay unconscious. Ashton straightened out the twisted leg, and knelt to bathe the big white face with an end of the dripping garment. After a time the eyelids of the prostrate man fluttered and lifted, and the pale blue eyes stared upward with returning consciousness. "I'm here!" cried Ashton. "Do you see? You saved me!" "Colt's gone," muttered Blake. "But cartridges--fire." "You mean, fire the cartridges to let them know where we are? How can I do it without the revolver?" "No, build a fire," replied the engineer. He raised a heavy hand to point towards the high end of the barrier. "Driftwood up there. Bring it down. I'll light it." "Light it--how?" asked Ashton incredulously. "Get it," ordered Blake. Ashton hurried across the crest of the barrier to where it sloped up and merged in the precipice foot. The mass of rock that formed the barrier had fallen out of the face of the lower part of the canyon wall, leaving a great hollow in the rock. But above the hollow the upper precipices beetled out and rose sheer, on up the dizzy heights to the verge of the chasm. Contrasted with this awesome undermined wall, the broken, steeple-sloped precipices adjoining it on the upstream side looked hopefully scalable to Ashton. He marked out a line of shelves and crevices running far up to where the full sunlight smiled on the rock. But Blake had told him to fetch wood for a fire, that they might signal the watchers on the heights. He hastened up over the rocks to the heaps of logs and branches stranded on the high end of the barrier by the freshets. Every year the river, swollen by the spring rains, brimmed over the top of this natural dam. Yet not all the heaps lying on the ledges were driftwood. As Ashton approached, he was horrified to see that the largest and highest situated piles were nothing else than masses of bones. Drawn by a gruesome fascination, he climbed up to the nearest of the ghastly heaps. The loose ribs and vertebrae scattered down the slope seemed to him the size of human ribs and vertebrae. He shuddered as they crunched under his tread. Then he saw a skull with spiral-curved horns. He looked up the canyon wall, and understood. The high-heaped bones were the skeletons of sheep. In a flash, he remembered Isobel's account of Gowan, that first day up there on the top of the mesa. Not only had the puncher killed six men; he had, together with other violent men of the cattle ranges, driven thousands of sheep over into the canyon--and this was the place. Sick with horror and loathing, Ashton ran to snatch up an armful of the smaller driftwood and hurry back down to the center of the barrier. He found Blake lying white and still. But beside him were three cartridges from which the bullets had been worked out. At the terse command of the engineer, Ashton ground one of the older and drier pieces of wood to minute fragments on a rock.