Jerd knew the sorrel when he said
of him, "Wait till he smells the sage!"
Venters saddled and led him out of the oak thicket, and, leaping
astride, rode up the canyon, with Ring and Whitie trotting
behind. An old grass-grown trail followed the course of a shallow
wash where flowed a thin stream of water. The canyon was a
hundred rods wide, its yellow walls were perpendicular; it had
abundant sage and a scant growth of oak and pinon. For five miles
it held to a comparatively straight bearing, and then began a
heightening of rugged walls and a deepening of the floor. Beyond
this point of sudden change in the character of the canyon
Venters had never explored, and here was the real door to the
intricacies of Deception Pass.
He reined Wrangle to a walk, halted now and then to listen, and
then proceeded cautiously with shifting and alert gaze. The
canyon assumed proportions that dwarfed those of its first ten
miles. Venters rode on and on, not losing in the interest of his
wide surroundings any of his caution or keen search for tracks or
sight of living thing. If there ever had been a trail here, he
could not find it. He rode through sage and clumps of pinon trees
and grassy plots where long-petaled purple lilies bloomed. He
rode through a dark constriction of the pass no wider than the
lane in the grove at Cottonwoods. And he came out into a great
amphitheater into which jutted huge towering corners of a
confluences of intersecting canyons.
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