“Waa-hoo!” Emett’s signal, faint, far away, soaring but unmistakable, floated down to us.  Across the jutting capes separating the mouths of these canyons, high above them on the rim wall of the opposite side of the Bay, stood a giant white horse silhouetted against the white sky.  They made a brave picture, one most welcome to us.  We yelled in chorus:  “Three lions treed!  Three lions treed! come down—­hurry!”

A crash of rolling stones made us wheel.  Jude’s lion had jumped.  He ran straight down, drawing Sounder from his guard.  Jude went tearing after them.

“I’ll follow; you stay here.  Keep them up there, if you can!” yelled Jones.  Then in long strides he passed down out of sight among the trees and crags.

It had all happened so quickly that I could scarcely realize it.  The yelping of the hounds, the clattering of stones, grew fainter, telling me Jude and Sounder, with Jones, were going to the bottom of the Bay.

Both lions snarling at me brought me to a keen appreciation of the facts in the case.  Two full-grown lions to be kept treed without hounds, without a companion, without a gun.

“This is fine!  This is funny!” I cried, and for a moment I wanted to run.  But the same grim, deadly feeling that had taken me with Don around the narrow shelf now rose in me stronger and fiercer.  I pronounced one savage malediction upon myself for leaving my gun.  I could not go for it; I would have to make the best of my error, and in the wildness born of the moment I swore if the lions would stay treed for the hounds they would stay treed for me.

First I photographed them from different positions; then I took up my stand about on a level with them in an open place on the slope where they had me in plain sight.  I might have been fifty feet from them.  They showed no inclination to come down.

About this moment I heard hounds below, coming down from the left.  I called and called, but they passed on down the canyon bottom in the direction Jones had taken.

Presently a chorus of bays, emphasized by Jones’ yell, told me his lion had treed again.

“Waa-hoo!” rolled down from above.

I saw Emett farther to the left from the point where he had just appeared.

“Where—­can—­I—­get—­down?”

I surveyed the walls of the Bay.  Cliff on cliff, slide on slide, jumble, crag, and ruin, baffled my gaze.  But I finally picked out a path.

“Farther to the left,” I yelled, and waited.  He passed on, Don at his heels.

“There,” I yelled again, “stop there; let Don go down with your lasso, and come yourself.”

I watched him swing the hound down a wall, and pull the slip noose free.  Don slid to the edge of a slope, trotted to the right and left of crags, threaded the narrow places, and turned in the direction of the baying hounds.  He passed on the verge of precipices that made me tremble for him; but sure-footed as a goat, he went on safely down, to disappear far to my right.