“All right, old-timer,--good luck to ye!” called Big John. “We’ll git him, somehow.” Sid made the climb up to the cleft in the end of the wall for the last time. Once down through it, he secured the two lariats together and let down their combined length. To his delight they reached well into the top of the fir tree. Then he tied the upper end to a stout sapling growing near the ledge and tested it for strength. Taking the rope in his hands, he raised his voice in a loud _Whoopee!_ and began the descent. Distant shouts answered him, and then the bellow of rifles. They were making it hot for the Black Panther, Sid hoped, as he picked his way down from ledge to ledge. With the confidence born of the lariat in his grip, it was now easy climbing. A scramble down from one huge slab to the next below, often lowering himself vertically by the rope, brought him at last to where he could grasp the swaying top of the fir tree. Then, abandoning the friendly lariat, he climbed down rapidly, and with a mighty whoop of joy stood on firm soil once more--free! Then came the reaction--from all the strain and fatigue of the past three days. A delicious sense of ease, of victory and repose, crept over him as he retrieved his rifle and saddle and then rested indolently against the latter, waiting for Scotty and Big John to come down into the canyon. He had had his three-days’ trial, just like any Indian boy. There had been no starvation, no vision; but there had been plenty to test his nerve and courage and resourcefulness. He decided that he was more in love with the great wild outdoors than ever. His life would be here, that was sure, for to him it was happiness. Just what he would do was still somewhat indistinct, but there were lots of purposeful, worth-while activities to be carried on, wholly in the wilderness. Something practical, something with an object for those benighted children of the forest, the Indians, was as far as he could see for the present. It was perhaps an hour later when Ruler came in sight around a jutting cliff down the canyon, with the three pups trotting along just behind him. After them appeared the tossing heads of the ponies, the flash of sunlight on Big John’s silver-mounted chaps and the white glare of Scotty’s tall sombrero. As they caught sight of him, they burst into a gallop and waved their hats. “Well, how’s the Black Panther--did you get him?” laughed Sid indolently from his saddle as they rode up. “Naw,” growled Big John. “I climbs round whar I can sort of carrom him, like, with the thutty-thutty, an’ for every whang we hears him spit back,--growl fer whang, even-Steven--but it don’t interest him none. Then Scotty, here, he tears loose with that old Four-O-Five pursuader, like it hed a half stick of dynamite into it, an’ that’s jest a leetle too much fer kitty! He crep’ back into a hole in his cave an’ pulls the hole in atter him, like a tyrantula; an’ so we guv him up.”