But his eyes now answered her look of gratefulness and adoration with what she thought was a reflection of her own chaste desire. So it came about that two other riders left Canyon Pass on this spring morning while the sun still lingered abed, and, crossing the West Fork an hour behind Andy McCann, unlike him chose the wagon-track to the summit of the canyon wall on that side of Runaway River. “Which way do we go, Dick? To Crescent City?” “South,” he returned, without looking at her. “We-ell. Lamberton is further but there’s a parson there, too. That’s another reason why I’ve come to hate Canyon Pass. It isn’t decent like other towns—or even up-to-date. It never had a church or a parson. It’s got everything else—saloons, gambling halls, honkytonks, stores, a bank, a hotel, a stamp mill, an express office, even a school, such as it is. But it’s heathen—plumb heathen, Dick.” He smiled at her then, rather a superior smile. “It’s not the only mining town that answers your description.” “I know it,” Nell rejoined. “But I want to see the other kind of towns. Mother Tubbs says Canyon Pass ain’t got no heart, and she’s right. She says she can’t even tell when Sunday comes, only that Sam always comes home drunk that day. This is Sunday, Dick. It’s a good day on which to begin a new life.” “Oh, life’s all right,” the gambler said easily. “Take it as you find it, Nell.” They came up into the sunlight on the rim of the canyon wall. Once on the level trail their horses broke into a canter. They could look down at certain points into the sink of the canyon where Runaway River foamed in its narrow channel. They spied Steve Siebert with his outfit traveling on the river trail. McCann, of course, they could not see, for the canyon wall on this side was almost sheer. Ahead, as they rode on, was the Overhang—that monstrous projection capping the scarp of the cliff, left ages ago when the canyon was roughed out by the glacial floods to threaten the pass below with utter extinction if its bulk ever fell. Parts of it had fallen some twenty years previous. This was the “big slide” which had for a time choked the river channel with soil and rubble and threatened to flood out Canyon Pass. The scar on the steep slope of the west wall down which that slide had fallen was now masked by a hardy growth of scrubby trees and brush. But the two old prospectors never passed the place, either going out of or returning to Canyon Pass, without keenly studying the scar.