Here the traveling was good, considering what had been passed.  Once up out of the valley floor Slone saw Wildfire far ahead, high on the slope.  He did not appear to be limping, but he was not going fast.  Slone watched as he climbed.  What and where would be the end of this chase?

Sometimes Wildfire was plain in his sight for a moment, but usually he was hidden by rocks.  The slope was one great talus, a jumble of weathered rock, fallen from what appeared a mountain of red and yellow wall.  Here the heat of the sun fell upon him like fire.  The rocks were so hot Slone could not touch them with bare hand.  The close of the afternoon was approaching, and this slope was interminably long.  Still, it was not steep, and the trail was good.

At last from the height of slope Wildfire appeared, looking back and down.  Then he was gone.  Slone plodded upward.  Long before he reached that summit be heard the dull rumble of the river.  It grew to be a roar, yet it seemed distant.  Would the great desert river stop Wildfire in his flight?  Slone doubted it.  He surmounted the ridge, to find the canyon opening in a tremendous gap, and to see down, far down, a glittering, sun-blasted slope merging into a deep, black gulch where a red river swept and chafed and roared.

Somehow the river was what he had expected to see.  A force that had cut and ground this canyon could have been nothing but a river like that.  The trail led down, and Slone had no doubt that it crossed the river and led up out of the canyon.  He wanted to stay there and gaze endlessly and listen.  At length he began the descent.  As he proceeded it seemed that the roar of the river lessened.  He could not understand why this was so.  It took half an hour to reach the last level, a ghastly, black, and iron-ribbed canyon bed, with the river splitting it.  He had not had a glimpse of Wildfire on this side of the divide, but he found his tracks, and they led down off the last level, through a notch in the black bank of marble to a sand-bar and the river.

Wildfire had walked straight off the sand into the water.  Slone studied the river and shore.  The water ran slow, heavily, in sluggish eddies.  From far up the canyon came the roar of a rapid, and from below the roar of another, heavier and closer.  The river appeared tremendous, in ways Slone felt rather than realized, yet it was not swift.  Studying the black, rough wall of rock above him, he saw marks where the river had been sixty feet higher than where he stood on the sand.  It was low, then.  How lucky for him that he had gotten there before flood season!  He believed Wildfire had crossed easily, and he knew Nagger could make it.  Then he piled and tied his supplies and weapons high on the saddle, to keep them dry, and looked for a place to take to the water.