"You must be scared 'most to death," he continued after a pause. "Any time you can't find a chance to talk you shore are in a bad fix. I'm beginnin' to lose my temper. You make me plumb disgusted, you do. What th' devil do you think _I_ was doin' out here all night? Think anybody got past me to go down there for _you_ to shoot at? If there's anybody down there he come up from below an' crawled over you before you woke up." Suddenly he cocked his head on one side and listened as a low gurgle sounded in the canyon. "Cuss my fool hide!" he whispered. "Mebby he _did_ see something! Mebby somebody come _up_ th' trail, tryin' to get out of th' valley before daylight! Mebby it wasn't Ben at all that did th' shootin'! Hey, Ben; _Ben!_ For heaven's sake, _say_ something, _any_thing!" Gates, stung into a blinding rage which swept aside every thought of caution, did say something. Nature seemed to shrink from the stream of throbbing profanity which came shouting up out of the black canyon, whose granite walls flung it back and forth until the chasm reverberated with it. Harrison listened, entranced, his open mouth, refusing to shut, testifying to the great awe which held him spellbound. Never in all his sinful life had he heard such a masterpiece of invective, epithet, and profane invocation. The words seemed to be alive and writhing with venom; he almost could hear them crackle in the air. He heard himself called everything uncomplimentary which a frontier vocabulary saved for just such situations. He heard his ancestors described back to the time of Adam; sweeping up to the present, himself, his relatives, his ambitions, habits, and personal belongings were dissected by the man below. And then his future and the prophesied future abode of his spirit were probed and riddled and described by a furious, vitriolic tongue. His hair, eyes, ears, nose, gait, and manners were gathered up and torn apart for microscopic examination and the descriptions were shouted at the top of his companion's voice, which bellowed and boomed, rasped and coughed, screeched and shrilled down in the blackness forty feet below him. Then there fell a sudden calm, a silence which seemed doubly silent, unreal, because of the contrast. A convulsive, retching, strangling fit of coughing broke it, and then a hoarse, rasping voice asked mildly, anxiously, a mild question: "Is there anything I forgot?" Johnny, standing up behind the smaller bowlder that he might not lose a word or an inflection of the masterpiece, lost in admiration, forgetful of purpose and the situation, danced gleefully and gave a joyous shout: "Not a cussed thing!"