Pistol shots brought ferrymen down to the opposite bank, to man the flatboat which crosses here by an overhead wire and trolley wheel tackle. Swiftly it came over, driven by the rapid current impinging on its sides. It was big enough to accommodate the whole party, and, paying the toll, the horses were ridden onto its capacious flat floor. The reluctant dogs were booted aboard and then the boat set out for its return trip across the Colorado. As the water boiled and swirled around its gunwales Sid looked downstream at the mighty chasm of black gneiss into which the river plunged with a dull and ceaseless boom like the thunder of a distant Niagara. He could not keep his eyes off it. From there on the canyon would become inconceivably grander and more majestic, one of the seven wonders of the world,--yet what was it, in the infinite program of Nature, but an inconsiderable trickle in an inconspicuous crevice on the enormous round globe which is our world? If this remnant of a stream was so awe-inspiring to man, what must it have been when that whole vast inland sea which reached clear up to Wyoming was flooding out through these same gates to the ocean! The very thought gave Sid a glimpse,--like a rift through the clouds at some mountain top,--of the unapproachable dignity of Nature. Man, at his best, is but a mere insult in her presence, an audacious, unspanked microbe, that has occupied and will occupy but a brief period in her cosmic processes, even when his whole history is told from start to finish. A day was spent resting up at the ranch and giving the horses unlimited oats and water once more, and then they pushed southwest through a bare and sparse country to where Buckskin Mountain dominated the Kaibab Plateau, huge, gray and imposing in his nine thousand feet of snow-topped height. Once around its flanks they were in a fine country of tall western pine, with every ravine leading to the rocky buttes and parapets and pinnacles that overhung the enormous slopes of the Grand Canyon basin. Back in the pines a short distance from the rim they established camp. The boys’ little green five-by-six-foot wall tent was set up, with a pair of shears in front and its ridge rope run back to encircle the trunk of a pine three feet thick. The little tent was a wonder of a forest home, for its five pounds of weight. High enough to stand up in, it had a gauze window in the rear wall, with a flap to it which could be guyed out in fine weather and closed in when it stormed; it had a netting front door over a sill a foot high, and the cover flap of the front door was V-shaped, so that it formed a porch when held out horizontally by two upright poles, making a shady place to sit under and one sheltered from rain for a cooking space when needed.