"Hi! Hi!" yelled the Colonel.

No need was there to whip or spur those magnificent horses. They were
fresh; the course was open, and smooth as a racetrack, and the
impelling chorus of the hounds was in full blast. I gave Satan a loose
rein, and he stayed neck and neck with the bay. There was not a log,
nor a stone, nor a gully. The hollows grew wider and shallower as we
raced along, and presently disappeared altogether. The lion was running
straight from the canyon, and the certainty that he must sooner or
later take to a tree, brought from me a yell of irresistible wild joy.

"Hi! Hi! Hi!" answered Jones.

The whipping wind with its pine-scented fragrance, warm as the breath
of summer, was intoxicating as wine. The huge pines, too kingly for
close communion with their kind, made wide arches under which the
horses stretched out long and low, with supple, springy, powerful
strides. Frank's yell rang clear as a bell. We saw him curve to the
right, and took his yell as a signal for us to cut across. Then we
began to close in on him, and to hear more distinctly the baying of the
hounds.

"Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi!" bawled Jones, and his great trumpet voice rolled down
the forest glades.

"Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi!" I screeched, in wild recognition of the spirit of the
moment.

Fast as they were flying, the bay and the black responded to our cries,
and quickened, strained and lengthened under us till the trees sped by
in blurs.

There, plainly in sight ahead ran the hounds, Don leading, Sounder
next, and Moze not fifty yards, behind a desperately running lion.

There are all-satisfying moments of life. That chase through the open
forest, under the stately pines, with the wild, tawny quarry in plain
sight, and the glad staccato yelps of the hounds filling my ears and
swelling my heart, with the splendid action of my horse carrying me on
the wings of the wind, was glorious answer and fullness to the call and
hunger of a hunter's blood.

But as such moments must be, they were brief. The lion leaped
gracefully into the air, splintering the bark from a pine fifteen feet
up, and crouched on a limb. The hounds tore madly round the tree.

"Full-grown female," said Jones calmly, as we dismounted, "and she's
ours. We'll call her Kitty."

Kitty was a beautiful creature, long, slender, glossy, with white belly
and black-tipped ears and tail. She did not resemble the heavy,
grim-faced brute that always hung in the air of my dreams. A low,
b