“Don is makin’ him hump,” said Jim.

And that alone was enough to spur us on.  We would reward the noble hound if we had the staying power.  Don and his pack ran westward this time, and along a mile of the beaten trail put him up two more trees.  But these we could not see and judged only by the sound.

[Illustration:  A drink of cold granite water under the rim]

[Illustration:  Which is the Piute?]

“Look there!” cried Jim.  “Darn me if he ain’t comin’ right at us.”

It was true.  Ahead of us the lion appeared, loping wearily.  We stopped in our tracks undecided.  Jim drew his revolver.  Once or twice the lion disappeared behind stones and cedars.  When he sighted us he stopped, looked back, then again turning toward us, he left the trail to plunge down.  He had barely got out of sight when old Don came pattering along the trail; then Ranger leading the others.  Don did not even put his nose to the ground where the lion had switched, but leaped aside and went down.  Here the long section of slope between the lion’s runway and the second wall had been weathered and worn, racked and convulsed into deep ravines, with ridges between.  We climbed and fell and toiled on, always with the bay of the hounds in our ears.  We leaped fissures, we loosened avalanches, rolling them to crash and roar below, and send long, rumbling echoes out into the canyon.

A gorge in the yellow rock opened suddenly before us.  We stood at the constricted neck of one of the great splits in the second wall.  The side opposite was almost perpendicular, and formed of mass on mass of broken stones.  This was a weathered slope on a gigantic scale.  Points of cliffs jutted out; caves and cracks lined the wall.

“This is a rough place,” said Jim; “but a lion could get over the second wall here, an’ I believe a man could too.  The hounds seemed to be back further toward where the split narrows.”

Through densely massed cedars and thickets of prickly thorns we wormed our way to come out at the neck of the gorge.

“There ye are!” sang out Jim.  The hounds were all on a flat shelf some few feet below us, and on a sharp point of rock close by, but too far for the dogs to reach, crouched the lion.  He was gasping and frothing at the mouth.

“Shore if he’d only stay there—­” said Jim.

He loosened his lasso, and stationing himself just above the tired beast he prepared to cast down the loop.  The first throw failed of its purpose, but the rope hit the lion.  He got up painfully it seemed, and faced the dogs.  That way barred he turned to the cliff.  Almost opposite him a shelf leaned out.  He looked at it, then paced to and fro like a beast in a cage.

He looked again at the hounds, then up at us, all around, and finally concentrated his attention on the shelf; his long length sagged in the middle, he stretched low, his muscles gathered and strung, and he sprang like a tawny streak.