ound.

"Go it, Don, old boy!" I yelled, wild with delight.

A crushing step on the stones told me Jones had arrived.

"Hi! Hi! Hi!" roared he.

I thought then that if the lioness did not cover thirty feet at every
jump I was not in a condition to judge distance. She ran away from Don
as if he had been tied and reached the thicket below a hundred yards
ahead of him. And when Don leaving his brave pack far up the slide
entered the thicket the lioness came out on the other side and bounded
up the bare slope of yellow shale.

"Shoot ahead of her! Head her off! Turn her back!" cried Jones.

With the word I threw forward the Remington and let drive. Following
the bellow of the rifle, so loud in that thin air, a sharp, harsh
report cracked up from below. A puff of yellow dust rose in front of
the lioness. I was in line, but too far ahead. I fired again. The
steel jacketed bullet hit a stone and spitefully whined away into the
canyon. I tried once more. This time I struck close to the lioness.
Disconcerted by a cloud of dust rising before her very eyes she
wheeled and ran back.

We had forgotten Don and suddenly he darted out of the thicket,
straight up the slide. Always, in every chase, we were afraid the
great hound would run to meet his death. We knew it was coming
sometime. When the lioness saw him and stopped, both Jones and I felt
that this was to be the end of Don.

"Shoot her! Shoot her!" cried Jones. "She'll kill him! She'll kill
him!"

As I knelt on the rock I had a hard contraction of my throat, and
then all my muscles set tight and rigid. I pulled the trigger of my
automatic once, twice. It was wonderful how closely the two bullets
followed each other, as we could tell by the almost simultaneous
puffs of dust rising from under the beast's nose. She must have been
showered and stung with gravel, for she bounded off to the left and
disappeared in the cedars. I had missed, but the shots had served to a
better end than if I had killed her.

As Don raced up the ground where a moment before a battle and probably
death had awaited him, the other hounds burst from the thicket. With
that, a golden form seemed to stand out from the green of the cedar,
to move and to rise.

"She's treed! She's treed!" shouted Jones. "Go down and keep her there
while I follow."

From the back of the promontory where I met the main wall, I let
myself down a niche, foot here and there, a hand hard on the soft
stone, braced knee a