I sat there for an hour by my watch, though it seemed only a few minutes, and all that time my lion lay crouched on his crag and never moved.

I looked across the curve of the canyon to the purple breaks of the Siwash and the shaggy side of Buckskin Mountain and far beyond to where Kanab Canyon opened its dark mouth, and farther still to the Pink Cliffs of Utah, weird and dim in the distance.

Something swelled within my breast at the thought that for the time I was part of that wild scene.  The eye of an eagle soaring above would have placed me as well as my lion among the few living things in the range of his all-compassing vision.  Therefore, all was mine, not merely the lion—­for he was only the means to an end—­but the stupendous, unnameable thing beneath me, this chasm that hid mountains in the shades of its cliffs, and the granite tombs, some gleaming pale, passionless, others red and warm, painted by a master hand; and the wind-caves, dark-portaled under their mist curtains, and all that was deep and far off, unapproachable, unattainable, of beauty exceeding, dressed in ever-changing hues, was mine by right of presence, by right of the eye to see and the mind to keep.

“Waa-hoo!”

The cry lifted itself out of the depths.  I saw Jones on the ridge of cedars.

“All right here—­have you kept your line there?” he yelled.

“All’s well—­come along, come along,” I replied.

I watched them coming, and all the while my lion never moved.  The hounds reached the base of the cliff under me, but they could not find the lion, though they scented him, for they kept up a continual baying.  Jim got up to the shelf under me and said they had tied up the lion and left him below.  Jones toiled slowly up the slope.

“Some one ought to stay down there; he might jump,” I called in warning.

“That crag is forty feet high on this side,” he replied.

I clambered back over the uneven mass, let myself down between the boulders and crawled under a dark ridge, and finally with Jim catching my rifle and camera and then lending his shoulders, I reached the bench below.  Jones came puffing around a corner of the cliff, and soon all three of us with the hounds stood out on the rocky shelf with only a narrow space between us and the crouching lion.

Before we had a moment to speak, much less form a plan of attack, the lion rose, spat at us defiantly, and deliberately jumped off the crag.  We heard him strike with a frightful thud.

Surprise held us dumb.  To take the leap to the slope below seemed beyond any beast not endowed with wings.  We saw the lion bounding down the identical trail which the other lion had taken.  Jones came out of his momentary indecision.

“Hold the dogs!  Call them back!” he yelled hoarsely.  “They’ll kill the lion we tied!  They’ll kill him!”

The hounds had scattered off the bench here and there, everywhere, to come together on the trail below.  Already they were in full cry with the matchless Don at the fore.  Manifestly to call them back was an injustice, as well as impossible.  In ten seconds they were out of sight.