smooth cliff, to find holding impossible. The slide
poured over a fall like so much water. He reached and caught a branch
of a pinyon, and lifting his feet up, hung on till the treacherous area
of moving stones had passed.

While I had been absorbed in his predicament, my avalanche augmented
itself by slide on slide, perhaps loosened by his; and before I knew
it, I was sailing down with ever-increasing momentum. The sensation was
distinctly pleasant, and a certain spirit, before restrained in me, at
last ran riot. The slide narrowed at the drop where Frank had jumped,
and the stones poured over in a stream. I jumped also, but having a
rifle in one hand, failed to hold, and plunged down into the slide
again. My feet were held this time, as in a vise. I kept myself upright
and waited. Fortunately, the jumble of loose stone slowed and stopped,
enabling me to crawl over to one side where there was comparatively
good footing. Below us, for fifty yards was a sheet of rough stone, as
bare as washed granite well could be. We slid down this in regular
schoolboy fashion, and had reached another restricted neck in the
fissure, when a sliding crash above warned us that the avalanches had
decided to move of their own free will. Only a fraction of a moment had
we to find footing along the yellow cliff, when, with a cracking roar,
the mass struck the slippery granite. If we had been on that slope, our
lives would not have been worth a grain of the dust flying in clouds
above us. Huge stones, that had formed the bottom of the slides, shot
ahead, and rolling, leaping, whizzed by us with frightful velocity, and
the remainder groaned and growled its way down, to thunder over the
second fall and die out in a distant rumble.

The hounds had hung back, and were not easily coaxed down to us. From
there on, down to the base of the gigantic cliff, we descended with
little difficulty.

"We might meet the old gray cat anywheres along here," said Frank.

The wall of yellow limestone had shelves, ledges, fissures and cracks,
any one of which might have concealed a lion. On these places I turned
dark, uneasy glances. It seemed to me events succeeded one another so
rapidly that I had no time to think, to examine, to prepare. We were
rushed from one sensation to another.

"Gee! look here," said Frank; "here's his tracks. Did you ever see the
like of that?"

Certainly I had never fixed my eyes on such enormous cat-tracks as
appeared in the yell