Not long after this adventure, the blue-roan stood on a high ridge overlooking a valley. Out in that valley was the salt ground where great chinks of pure white rocksalt were placed, not only to satisfy the cravings of the salt-loving brutes, but to coax them out of the cedars into the open where the wilder ones could be captured. The roan was salt-hungry and, after a careful survey of the surroundings, started down the trail for the salt grounds. Away off to the left, and quite out of his sight, half a dozen cowboys were driving a bunch of cattle down a draw between two ridges. One of them rode up on top of the ridge to take a look over the country. Some distance below him, and well out into the valley, was a single animal. It took but a short look to satisfy the rider that it was the blue-roan. The boy was riding his best rope-horse that morning and, with a wave of his hat to his comrades, he loosened the reins on old "Greyback" and tore off down the valley toward the steer. He had not gone fifty yards before the roan saw he was pursued, and wheeling out of the trail in which he was traveling struck back towards the sheltering trees on a long swinging trot. A couple of miles' hard run, and the boy rode his horse out of a deep wash, to see, across another valley, the blue-roan hurrying majestically up the ridge, the sheltering trees but a few hundred yards away. He spurred his horse down the rocky side of the ridge, across a flat at the bottom, and up the steep side opposite, reaching the top just as the blue was passing. His horse was winded, but the boy "took a long chance" and drove after the animal with his rope down ready for a throw. For an instant the steer hesitated, then plunged off the ridge, down the steep side, just as the boy's rope dropped over his horns. It was a fearful risk to rope a steer such as this, with a badly winded horse; but tenfold more dangerous to do it just as the great animal was starting down the steep slope. The boy knew his only hope was to keep the steer from tightening the rope, for if that happened, no horse on earth could hold the weight of the brute at the end of it, plunging down hill as they were. "Turn the rope loose," you say? Oh no; he wasn't that kind of a cow puncher. Come what might, he meant to hang onto that steer to the bitter end. Half way down the hill was a lone piñon tree about twenty feet high, and true to his nature the steer headed for it. The rider realized his danger and tried to keep from straddling it with his rope, but, just as the roan reached the tree, instead of passing it on the same side with the horse, he dodged around it. This brought the horse and man on one side, the steer on the other; between them a fifty foot "Tom Horn" rope fastened firmly; one end to a twelve hundred-pound steer, the other, to a saddle cinched to a thousand-pound horse.