alk of the lion, as told in his tracks, came upon the
edge of a knoll where he had crouched to watch and wait. From this perch
he had made a magnificent spring--Slone estimating it to be forty
feet--but he had missed the stallion. There were Wildfire's tracks
again, slow and short, and then deep and sharp where in the impetus of
fright he had sprung out of reach. A second leap of the lion, and then
lessening bounds, and finally an abrupt turn from Wildfire's trail told
the futility of that stalk. Slone made certain that Wildfire was so keen
that as he grazed along he had kept to open ground.

Wildfire had run for a mile, then slowed down to a trot, and he had
circled to get back to the trail he had left. Slone believed the horse
was just so intelligent. At any rate, Wildfire struck the trail again,
and turned at right angles to follow it.

Here the forest floor appeared perfectly level. Patches of snow became
frequent, and larger as Slone went on. At length the patches closed up,
and soon extended as far as he could see. It was soft, affording
difficult travel. Slone crossed hundreds of deer tracks, and the trail
he was on evidently became a deer runway.

Presently, far down one of the aisles between the great pines Slone saw
what appeared to be a yellow cliff, far away. It puzzled him. And as he
went on he received the impression that the forest dropped out of sight
ahead. Then the trees grew thicker, obstructing his view. Presently the
trail became soggy and he had to help his horse. The mustang floundered
in the soft snow and earth. Cedars and pinyons appeared again, making
travel still more laborious.

All at once there came to Slone a strange consciousness of light and
wind and space and void. On the instant his horse halted with a snort.
Slone quickly looked up. Had he come to the end of the world? An abyss,
a canyon, yawned beneath him, beyond all comparison in its greatness. His
keen eye, educated to desert distance and dimension swept down and
across, taking in the tremendous truth, before it staggered his
comprehension. But a second sweeping glance, slower, becoming
intoxicated with what it beheld, saw gigantic cliff steppes and yellow
slopes dotted with cedars, leading down to clefts filled with purple
smoke, and these led on and on to a ragged red world of rock, bare,
shining, bold, uplifted in mesa, dome, peak, and crag, clear and strange
in the morning light, still and sleeping like death.

This, then