Jude,
Tige and Don lay panting at his feet. Plainly the Colonel appeared
vexed.

"Listen," he said, when we reined in.

We complied, but did not hear a sound.

"Frank's beyond there some place," continued Jones, "but I can't see
him, nor hear the hounds anymore. Don and Tige split again on deer
trails. Old Jude hung on the lion track, but I stopped her here.
There's something I can't figure. Moze held a beeline southwest, and he
yelled seldom. Sounder gradually stopped baying. Maybe Frank can tell
us something."

Jones's long drawn-out signal was answered from the direction he
expected, and after a little time, Frank's white horse shone out of the
gray-green of a ledge a mile away.

This drew my attention to our position. We were on a high ridge out in
the open, and I could see fifty miles of the shaggy slopes of Buckskin.
Southward the gray, ragged line seemed to stop suddenly, and beyond it
purple haze hung over a void I knew to be the canyon. And facing west,
I came, at last, to understand perfectly the meaning of the breaks in
the Siwash. They were nothing more than ravines that headed up on the
slopes and ran down, getting steeper and steeper, though scarcely
wider, to break into the canyon. Knife-crested ridges rolled westward,
wave on wave, like the billows of a sea. I appreciated that these
breaks were, at their sources, little washes easy to jump across, and
at their mouths a mile deep and impassable. Huge pine trees shaded
these gullies, to give way to the gray growth of stunted oak, which in
turn merged into the dark green of pinyon. A wonderful country for deer
and lions, it seemed to me, but impassable, all but impossible for a
hunter.

Frank soon appeared, brushing through the bending oaks, and Sounder
trotted along behind him.

"Where's Moze?" inquired Jones.

"The last I heard of Moze he was out of the brush, goin' across the
pinyon flat, right for the canyon. He had a hot trail."

"Well, we're certain of one thing; if it was a deer, he won't come back
soon, and if it was a lion, he'll tree it, lose the scent, and come
back. We've got to show the hounds a lion in a tree. They'd run a hot
trail, bump into a tree, and then be at fault. What was wrong with
Sounder?"

"I don't know. He came back to me."

"We can't trust him, or any of them yet. Still, maybe they're doing
better than we know."

The outcome of the chase, so favorably started was a disappointment,
which we all felt keenly. Aft