Page:Jackson Gregory--joyous trouble maker.djvu/87

Rh out and ran something more placidly, here, to mark each marge, was a pigmy beach of sand and polished stones. Both above and below the rock walls drew in towards each other so that they were little more than a score of feet apart; here was a circular space three times a score of feet in diameter.

Steele followed the tracks he had made last night; later on he would obliterate them as he had no mind to leave them pointing out his cache to the first chance comer. After this he would come down a longer way, leaving no sign of his passing upon the granite blocks and slabs. In after times the spot to which he now was going would be known rather widely as Steele's Cache; he had found it, he had used it, he had kept it his secret and now he counted it in every sense his own.

A half dozen paces further and he left the sandy margin of the stream, beginning to climb again; his body pressed tight against the rock wall. Here, underfoot, was the natural semblance of a path, never wider than twelve inches, often barely allowing foothold. Upon the cañon's sides were occasional bushes, infrequently patches of brush driving hardy roots into soil filled fissures. By gripping a ledge above his head and drawing himself up, Steele came into one of these clumps of mountain brush, to his cache and its hidden door. Hidden because in the rocks there was but the small uneven opening masked by the bushes and further sealed years ago by a slab of stone he himself had dragged into place.

With a final sweeping glance which took in the widened, circular bed of the river and the opposite bank,