Before him stretched a short canyon with rounded stone floor bare of grass or sage or tree, and with curved, shelving walls.

A broad rippling stream flowed toward him, and at the back of the canyon waterfall burst from a wide rent in the cliff, and, bounding down in two green steps, spread into a long white sheet.
If Venters had not been indubitably certain that he had entered the right canyon his astonishment would not have been so great.

There had been no breaks in the walls, no side canyons entering this one where the rustlers' tracks and the cattle trail had guided him, and, therefore, he could not be wrong.

But here the canyon ended, and presumably the trails also.
"That cattle trail headed out of here," Venters kept saying to himself.
"It headed out.

Now what I want to know is how on earth did cattle ever get in here ?" If he could be sure of anything it was of the careful scrutiny he had given that cattle track, every hoofmark of which headed straight west.
He was now looking east at an immense round boxed corner of canyon down which tumbled a thin, white veil of water, scarcely twenty yards wide.
Somehow, somewhere, his calculations had gone wrong.