It was a little after four o'clock on the afternoon of the last day in May as the train drew into the station, and guides met the passengers ready to conduct them direct to the brink of the Canyon that they might gain their first sight of it. Roger's very toes were aching with the desire to follow them, particularly as he was not on duty until the following day, but still he felt that he was on government service and that he ought to report for duty at the appointed place immediately on his arrival. Then, the boy argued, should there be no one to meet him, his time would be his own until the following morning, and he could enjoy the pleasures of sight-seeing without feeling that he had in any way been neglectful of the strictest interpretation of his orders. His trunk had been checked through, so Roger, refusing the solicitations of the guides, picked up the small hand-grip he had carried for the necessities of the journey and set his face resolutely to the hotel. Turning to view the country about him, Roger was as much disappointed as amazed to find how flat and uninteresting it seemed. Indeed, there was nothing in the region to suggest that a canyon was anywhere in the vicinity. So far as he could see, on either side of the railroad track up which he had come was a level treeless prairie, and in the direction whither the tourists had gone, there was naught to be seen but this same slowly rising plateau, which, a little further on, seemed to be bounded by a slight rise. The boy knew that the Canyon must be on the other side of this eminence, but there was nothing to bespeak its presence, not a sign to awake the consciousness that a few hundred yards away lay a view of the greatest scenic wonder that any man had beheld, primitive and untouched as since the days that antediluvian monsters roamed the plains whereon he now was walking. When he arrived at the hotel, Roger walked straight to the desk. "Is Mr. Masseth here?" he asked the clerk. The latter, a being largely characterized by shirt front, gestured the boy to a slightly built man, sitting in the rotunda of the hotel reading a newspaper with an intensity of concentration which Roger immediately conceived to be typical of the man. He turned instantly at the boy's approach, however. "Mr. Masseth?" queried the lad. The reader rose with a quick though courteous motion of assent. "I was told to give this letter to you," the boy continued. "I understand it contains my instructions to report to you. My name is Roger Doughty." "I am extremely pleased," said the older man with a slight foreign timbre in his voice, "to be able to welcome you. I felt assured, from what Mr. Herold said when he wrote to me, that you would be here to-day, as he suggested that I should find you punctual. It is of the greatest service never to lose a minute, unless indeed, it be taken for a rest."