He stopped before a crack twice the width of his palm, through which the dawn wind came blowing gratefully in his face. Directly across from him, but fifty feet lower and separated by a hundred-foot chasm, a broad ridge extended out into the valley; and as he looked two bighorn sheep came trotting up a faint trail and disappeared among the higher crags. “That’s where the shooting took place,” Abington told himself. “Wonder if Bill’s been hunting? Took my rifle. Have to give it back. Well--at least I can see daylight!” The lazy clouds above the valley blossomed suddenly into radiant hues. The gaunt hills blushed and the cañons all seemed bathed in crimson and yellow flames. As through the narrow window of a belfry tower, Abington gazed down on a world of magnificent peaks and crags flaunting their bold reds and yellow beneath a redder sunrise. For the moment the scene held him, then he turned back to the problem of finding a way out; for although a glimpse of the outside world was heartening, he could not squeeze through an eight-inch split in the rock. There must be some other exit. He turned away from the window and went on. The passage took another twist and he entered a roughly outlined room into which the daylight seeped through several fissures between the shattered blocks of sandstone; high overhead most of them were, although two or three were low enough to serve as narrow windows. A square boulder, the top hollowed in the shape of a rounded trough, stood in the center of the chamber. Otherwise the room was empty, unless the intricate mass of carved symbols might be classed as furnishings, for the walls were covered with them. Abington’s spirits rose, though he paid little attention to the writings. To him they proved, as did the boulder which he recognized as a sacrificial altar, that this was a chamber much used by the ancients. Since the route by which he had entered could not be called a thoroughfare, there would be another way out, possibly several. Within two minutes he had found the passage, and something else. There on the rock floor which slanted down from the chamber on the side opposite the one by which he had entered, was a cigarette stub; it was one of the oval kind he himself always smoked. He stooped and picked it up, his black eyebrows lifted in surprise. “Never reached this point yesterday--h’m! Bill not only borrowed my gun and went hunting last night, but did a little exploring on his own account. Looking for me, perhaps. No, Bill was scouting around for himself. H’m! Growing surly and quarrelsome, pretending a distrust he can’t actually feel, hoping I’d give him an excuse to turn on me. Wonder, now, if Bill didn’t raid his own cave and hide the stuff!