dle cakes with maple syrup, and hot cocoa. I certainly did
not begin on an empty stomach what augured to be a hard day. Buck hung
around me this morning, and I subdued my generous impulses long enough
to be convinced that he had undergone a subtle change. Then I fed him.
Old Dan and Old Tom were witnesses of this procedure, which they
regarded with extreme disfavor. And the pups tried to pick a fight with
Buck.

By eight o'clock we were riding up the colored slopes, through the still
forest, with the sweet, fragrant, frosty air nipping at our noses. A
mile from camp we reached a notch in the rim that led down to Dude
Creek, and here Edd and Nielsen descended with the hounds. The rest of
us rode out to a point there to await developments. The sun had already
flooded the basin with golden light; the east slopes of canyon and rim
were dark in shade. I sat on a mat of pine needles near the rim, and
looked, and cared not for passage of time.

But I was not permitted to be left to sensorial dreams. Right under us
the hounds opened up, filling the canyon full of bellowing echoes. They
worked down. Slopes below us narrowed to promontories and along these we
kept our gaze. Suddenly Haught gave a jump, and rose, thumping to his
horse. "Saw a bar," he yelled. "Just got a glimpse of him crossin' an
open ridge. Come on." We mounted and chased Haught over the roughest
kind of rocky ground, to overtake him at the next point on the rim.
"Ride along, you fellars," he said, "an' each pick out a stand. Keep
ahead of the dogs an' look sharp."

Then it was in short order that I found myself alone, Copple, R.C. and
George Haught having got ahead of me. I kept to the rim. The hounds
could be heard plainly and also the encouraging yells of Nielsen and
Edd. Apparently the chase was working along under me, in the direction I
was going. The baying of the pack, the scent of pine, the ring of
iron-shod hoofs on stone, the sense of wild, broken, vast country, the
golden void beneath and the purple-ranged horizon--all these brought
vividly and thrillingly to mind my hunting days with Buffalo Jones along
the north rim of the Grand Canyon. I felt a pang, both for the past, and
for my friend and teacher, this last of the old plainsmen who had died
recently. In his last letter to me, written with a death-stricken hand,
he had talked of another hunt, of more adventure, of his cherished hope
to possess an island in the north Pacific, there to propagate w