But all too soon my progress was barred; once under the cliff I found only a gradual slope and many obstacles to go round or surmount.  Luck favored me, for I ran across a runway and keeping to it made better time.  I heard Don long before I tried to see him, and yelled at intervals to let him know I was coming.  A white bank of weathered stones led down to a clump of cedars from where Don’s bay came spurring me to greater efforts.  I flew down this bank, and through an opening saw the hound standing with fore feet against a cedar.  The branches over him swayed, and I saw an indistinct, tawny form move downward in the air.  Then succeeded the crash and rattle of stones.  Don left the tree and disappeared.

I dashed down, dodged under the cedars, threaded a maze of rocks, to find myself in a ravine with a bare, water-worn floor.  In patches of sand showed the fresh tracks of Don and the lion.  Running down this dry, clean bed was the easiest going I ever found in the canyon.  Every rod the course jumped in a fall from four to ten feet, often more, and these I slid down.  How I ever kept Don in hearing was a marvel, but still I did.

The lion evidently had no further intention of taking to a tree.  From the size of his track I concluded he was old and I feared every moment to hear the sounds of a fight.  Jones had said that nearly always in the case of one hound chasing an old lion, the lion would lie in wait for him and kill him.  And I was afraid for Don.

Down, down, down, we went, till the yellow rim above seemed a thin band of gold.  I saw that we were almost to the canyon proper, and I wondered what would happen when we reached it.  The dark shaded watercourse suddenly shot out into bright light and ended in a deep cove, with perpendicular walls fifty feet high.  I could see where a few rods farther on this cove opened into a huge, airy, colored canyon.

I called the hound, wondering if he had gone to the right or left of the cove.  His bay answered me coming from the cedars far to the right.  I turned with all the speed left in me, for I felt the chase nearing an end.  Tracks of hound and lion once more showed in the dust.  The slope was steep and stones I sent rolling cracked down below.  Soon I had a cliff above me and had to go slow and cautiously.  A misstep or slide would have precipitated me into the cove.

Almost before I knew what I was about, I stood gasping on the gigantic second wall of the canyon, with nothing but thin air under me, except, far below, faint and indistinct purple clefts, red ridges, dotted slopes, running down to merge in a dark, winding strip of water, that was the Rio Colorado.  A sullen murmur soared out of the abyss.

[Illustration:  Two lions in one tree]

[Illustration:  Jones, Emett, and the Navajo with the lions]

The coloring of my mood changed.  Never had the canyon struck me so terribly with its illimitable space, its dread depth, its unscalable cliffs, and particularly with the desolate, forbidding quality of its silence.