ary shoes without thick soles and nails, and it seemed
well to speak of them in the past tense. They were split into ribbons
and hung on by the laces. His feet were cut and bruised.

On the way back to camp, we encountered Moze and Don coming out of the
break where we had started Sounder on the trail. The paws of both
hounds were yellow with dust, which proved they had been down under the
rim wall. Jones doubted not in the least that they had chased a lion.

Upon examination, this break proved to be one of the two which Clarke
used for trails to his wild horse corral in the canyon. According to
him, the distance separating them was five miles by the rim wall, and
less than half that in a straight line. Therefore, we made for the
point of the forest where it ended abruptly in the scrub oak. We got
into camp, a fatigued lot of men, horses and dogs. Jones appeared
particularly happy, and his first move, after dismounting, was to
stretch out the lion skin and measure it.

"Ten feet, three inches and a half!" he sang out.

"Shore it do beat hell!" exclaimed Jim in tones nearer to excitement
than any I had ever heard him use.

"Old Tom beats, by two inches, any cougar I ever saw," continued Jones.
"He must have weighed more than three hundred. We'll set about curing
the hide. Jim, stretch it well on a tree, and we'll take a hand in
peeling off the fat."

All of the party worked on the cougar skin that afternoon. The gristle
at the base of the neck, where it met the shoulders, was so tough and
thick we could not scrape it thin. Jones said this particular spot was
so well protected because in fighting, cougars were most likely to bite
and claw there. For that matter, the whole skin was tough, tougher than
leather; and when it dried, it pulled all the horseshoe nails out of
the pine tree upon which we had it stretched.

About time for the sun to set, I strolled along the rim wall to look
into the canyon. I was beginning to feel something of its character and
had growing impressions. Dark purple smoke veiled the clefts deep down
between the mesas. I walked along to where points of cliff ran out like
capes and peninsulas, all seamed, cracked, wrinkled, scarred and yellow
with age, with shattered, toppling ruins of rocks ready at a touch to
go thundering down. I could not resist the temptation to crawl out to
the farthest point, even though I shuddered over the yard-wide ridges;
and when once seated on a bare promontory, two