then, as Frank so
felicitously expressed it, we were free to "ooze round an' see things."

I believe I had a sort of subconscious, selfish idea that some one
would steal the canyon away from me if I did not hurry to make it mine
forever; so I sneaked off, and sat under a pine growing on the very
rim. At first glance, I saw below me, seemingly miles away, a wild
chaos of red and buff mesas rising out of dark purple clefts. Beyond
these reared a long, irregular tableland, running south almost to the
extent of my vision, which I remembered Clarke had called Powell's
Plateau. I remembered, also, that he had said it was twenty miles
distant, was almost that many miles long, was connected to the mainland
of Buckskin Mountain by a very narrow wooded dip of land called the
Saddle, and that it practically shut us out of a view of the Grand
Canyon proper. If that was true, what, then, could be the name of the
canyon at my feet? Suddenly, as my gaze wandered from point to point,
it was attested by a dark, conical mountain, white-tipped, which rose
in the notch of the Saddle. What could it mean? Were there such things
as canyon mirages? Then the dim purple of its color told of its great
distance from me; and then its familiar shape told I had come into my
own again--I had found my old friend once more. For in all that plateau
there was only one snow-capped mountain--the San Francisco Peak; and
there, a hundred and fifty, perhaps two hundred miles away, far beyond
the Grand Canyon, it smiled brightly at me, as it had for days and days
across the desert.

Hearing Jones yelling for somebody or everybody, I jumped up to find a
procession heading for a point farther down the rim wall, where our
leader stood waving his arms. The excitement proved to have been caused
by cougar signs at the head of the trail where Clarke had started down.

"They're here, boys, they're here," Jones kept repeating, as he showed
us different tracks. "This sign is not so old. Boys, to-morrow we'll
get up a lion, sure as you're born. And if we do, and Sounder sees him,
then we've got a lion-dog! I'm afraid of Don. He has a fine nose; he
can run and fight, but he's been trained to deer, and maybe I can't
break him. Moze is still uncertain. If old Jude only hadn't been lamed!
She would be the best of the lot. But Sounder is our hope. I'm almost
ready to swear by him."

All this was too much for me, so I slipped off again to be alone, and
this time headed for