"I'm in favour of going on," said Healy, "though I don't know if we can do much after we get there, until daylight. I've got to find a certain rock, you see, and it may not be easy because, from what Lyman told me, the head of the cañon is nothing but a medley of rocks and boulders."
"A rock!" Larkin was hugging his knees and nodding across the fire at Healy. "That's it. Show me the rock and I'll show you somefing. Let's get there so's we can start first thing hin the morning."
"The ayes have it," said Stone.
It was about two miles to where the headwaters of Tonto Fork rose out of swampy ground at the base of the cliffs that ended the cañon. The place was an amphitheatre of rocky walls broken here and there with gaps down which in the rain rushed the storm waters from the mesa. These were beds of ancient streams and one of them was the dry creek of the placer mine. There were some half dozen of these coming in from north and south to join Tonto Fork. Trickles of water seeped out of moss and rank grasses to form, almost in the centre of the amphitheatre, a pool from which the creek emerged as a distinct waterway. And everywhere, out of the bog, out of the sand, were masses of rock in weird confusion, high-lighted by the moon, sending out dark, confusing shadows from the same source. Some seemed the last deposits of the melting glacier that had crumbled ages ago, some appeared deeper-rooted, while others were apparently balanced upon
