“Doctor! _Doc_-tor! Did you leave Andy plenty of his little pills?” Poor Mary Temple! She was not gifted with the ability to look into the future for which she gave Madame Destrehan credit. Had she been able to she could have envisioned Dr. Shonto trudging wearily back to her and Andy six days later--alone. Half a mile up the clammy cañon from the camp Charmian and the doctor turned abruptly to the right and entered a steep branch cañon that tentacled from the larger one to the south. Their course was still due south, according to the bewhiskered deserter, and, as they carried a dependable compass, it was without misgivings that they abandoned landmarks which they knew and clambered upward into an unknown country. The branch cañon was rock-tenoned and perilously steep, though mercifully dry for a mile above its mouth. It was, said Charmian, the most outspoken cañon in its querulous complaints over their trespassing that they had as yet encountered. It seemed that nature had designed it as the closest attempt to an impossible approach to what was beyond as lay within her power. Into its V bottom she had in a fit of anger hurled immense boulders from the heights above. She had uptilted in her tantrum huge strata of leaflike stone whose edges were sharp as a butcher’s cleaver. Then, out to make a night of it, she had poured rubble from the size of an egg to that of a muskmelon down the reaching slopes, wildly mirthful as a miser raining his shekels from bags to glittering heaps on the table-top. These rubble slides were sometimes half a mile in length--nothing but a slanted sea of round, smooth stones of reddish hue, with not a grain of soil or one single gasping blade of vegetation. Across these slides the wanderers laboured heavily, for the stones, always eager to continue their interrupted rush into the cañon, gave under their feet like dough; often slid under them, carrying them along on the crest of a new slide; and, thus releasing the pressure, caused slides above them which threatened to swoop down and engulf them or mangle their arms and legs; threw them headlong on occasion; twisted their ankles; endangered every bone; made progress a nightmare of apprehensions by clutching their feet at every step, as when the dream-tortured victim tries to flee from some murderous phantom and terror palsies his legs. Once Shonto pitched headlong as the rubble sank under his feet like breaking ice. The break started a slide above him, which extended upward and upward to the lip of the cañon until their ears were filled with the deafening roar of a far-reaching avalanche. Large stones were pushed upward above the mass, and, released, came bounding down alone over the top of the sliding sea, gaining momentum at every leap, living devils of menace.