What an opportunity to watch Don!  I wondered how soon he would catch the scent of the trail.  He led the pack as usual and kept to a leisurely dog—­trot.  When within twenty yards of the fallen log, he stopped for an instant and held up his head, though without exhibiting any suspicion or uneasiness.

The wind blew strong at our backs, a circumstance that probably kept Don so long in ignorance of the trail.  A few yards further on, however, he stopped and raised his fine head.  He lowered it and trotted on only to stop again.  His easy air of satisfaction with the morning suddenly vanished.  His savage hunting instinct awakened through some channel to raise the short yellow hair on his neck and shoulders and make it stand stiff.  He stood undecided with warily shifting nose, then jumped forward with a yelp.  Another jump brought another sharp cry from him.  Sounder, close behind, echoed the yelp.  Jude began to whine.  Then Don, with a wild howl, leaped ten feet to alight on the lion trail and to break into wonderfully rapid flight.  The seven other hounds, bunched in a black and yellow group, tore after him filling the forest with their wild uproar.

Emett’s horse bounded as I have seen a great racer leave the post, and his desert brothers, loving wild bursts of speed, needing no spur, kept their noses even with his flanks.  The soft snow, not too deep, rather facilitated than impeded this wild movement, and the open forest was like a highway.

So we rode, bending low in the saddle, keen eyes alert for branches, vaulting the white—­blanketed logs, and swerving as we split to pass the pines.  The mist from the melting snow moistened our faces, and the rushing air cooled them with fresh, soft sensation.  There were moments when we rode abreast and others when we sailed single file, with white ground receding, vanishing behind us.

My feeling was one of glorious excitation in the swift, smooth flight and a grim assurance of soon seeing the old lion.  But I hoped we would not rout him too soon from under a windfall, or a thicket where he had dragged a deer, because the race was too splendid a thing to cut short.  Through my mind whirled with inconceivable rapidity the great lion chases on which we had ridden the year before.  And this was another chase, only more stirring, more beautiful, because it was the nature of the thing to grow always with experience.

Don slipped out of sight among the pines.  The others strung along the trail, glinted across the sunlit patches.  The black pup was neck and neck with Ranger.  Sounder ran at their heels, leading the other pups.  Moze dashed on doggedly ahead of Jude.

But for us to keep to the open forest, close to the hounds, was not in the nature of a lion chase.  Old Sultan’s trail turned due west when he began to go down the little hollows and their intervening ridges.  We lost ground.  The pack left us behind.  The slope of the plateau became decided.  We rode out of the pines to find the snow failing in the open.  Water ran in little gullies and glistened on the sagebrush.  A half mile further down the snow had gone.  We came upon the hounds running at fault, except Sounder, and he had given up.