“I’ll go and talk with the others,” said Shonto abruptly, and swung away up the cañon. It was a difficult situation. No one wanted to leave a middle-aged woman alone in that wild cañon, with a vast, rugged wilderness between her and the comforts of life. But Mary remained tyrannically obdurate, so they decided that they would think the matter over during the two or three days which it would take Andy and Shirttail Henry to go for more provisions and return. Early next morning the two set off on the back trail. The doctor busied himself at making a more or less permanent camp for Mary, provided they decided in the end to accept her ultimatum. Charmian spent hours at bringing her diary up to date. Mary, though in pain and obliged to move about with caution, feigned a limp and kept busy in order to deceive Charmian. The afternoon of the third day of Henry and Andy’s absence brought boredom to all three. The sky still was clear as crystal, with no suggestion of clouds; and down in the cañon it was warm while the sun remained overhead. Mary was confined to camp, of course, but she insisted that Charmian and Shonto go on a short trip of exploration either up or down the gorge. The pair set off about two o’clock. The cañon floor was a mass of nigger-head boulders, through which snaked the rushing green creek. The walls were all but perpendicular in places and of a height close to two hundred and fifty feet. Few trees grew near the floor of the cañon, but there were numberless entanglements of driftwood from which to draw upon for fuel. The birds were singing their praise of the comforting sunlight. Delicate ferns, unmolested by the frost, waved their green fronds above stones set in the cañon walls, their stems upreared from soft, vari-coloured mossbanks as lustrous and yielding as Oriental rugs and sparkling with diamonds of dew. A pensive languor pervaded the cañon, a sort of armistice between the mellow sun warmth and the gorge’s lifelong heritage of clammy coldness. It made these human beings moody. The warmth was the gipsy warmth of early springtime, when the smells of earth are sweetest, as, deep down within the soil, the sleepy seeds begin to rub their eyes and stretch in their great awakening to a short life of ceaseless struggles. The pair were moody because they realized that it was not spring, that the half-hearted promise of the sun was altogether insincere. And while they were susceptible to the indolence of this tantalizing afternoon, the false warmth stirred their blood and kindled their imaginations to deeds of high emprise and thoughts of life as it ought to be, but never is. They were filled with vague feelings of unrest; they spoke but little and dreamed ambitious girlish and boyish dreams. “Let’s sit down,” said Charmian, when they were a mile or more from camp.