ee, something I had not before appreciated. He had one hand hold,
which he could not use while recoiling the lasso, and his feet rested
upon a precariously frail-appearing, dead snag. He made eleven casts of
the lasso, all of which bothered Kitty, but did not catch her. The
twelfth caught her front paw. Jones jerked so quickly and hard that he
almost lost his balance, and he pulled the noose off. Patiently he
recoiled the lasso.

"That's what I want. If I can get her front paw she's ours. My idea is
to pull her off the limb, let her hang there, and then lasso her hind
legs."

Another cast, the unlucky thirteenth, settled the loop perfectly round
her neck. She chewed on the rope with her front teeth and appeared to
have difficulty in holding it.

"Easy! Easy! Ooze thet rope! Easy!" yelled the cowboy.

Cautiously Jones took up the slack and slowly tightened the nose, then
with a quick jerk, fastened it close round her neck.

We heralded this achievement with yells of triumph that made the forest
ring.

Our triumph was short-lived. Jones had hardly moved when the cougar
shot straight out into the air. The lasso caught on a branch, hauling
her up short, and there she hung in mid-air, writhing, struggling and
giving utterance to sounds terribly human. For several seconds she
swung, slowly descending, in which frenzied time I, with ruling passion
uppermost, endeavored to snap a picture of her.

The unintelligible commands Jones was yelling to Frank and me ceased
suddenly with a sharp crack of breaking wood. Then crash! Jones fell
out of the tree. The lasso streaked up, ran over the limb, while the
cougar dropped pell-mell into the bunch of waiting, howling dogs.

The next few moments it was impossible for me to distinguish what
actually transpired. A great flutter of leaves whirled round a swiftly
changing ball of brown and black and yellow, from which came a fiendish
clamor.

Then I saw Jones plunge down the ravine and bounce here and there in
mad efforts to catch the whipping lasso. He was roaring in a way that
made all his former yells merely whispers. Starting to run, I tripped
on a root, fell prone on my face into the ravine, and rolled over and
over until I brought up with a bump against a rock.

What a tableau rivited my gaze! It staggered me so I did not think of
my camera. I stood transfixed not fifteen feet from the cougar. She sat
on her haunches with body well drawn back by the taut lasso to which
Jon