It was all good; too good to be true; too wild and beautiful and sublime, and filled to the brim with Nature’s plenty for any but very honest men to live there at all, thought Sid. A healthy, natural lassitude had come over the boys. Nature gives these periods, when she is in her mild and genial moods, for times of recuperation to her children. They are not wise who waste them, unheeding. Sid and Scotty sauntered down the ravine and then climbed a tall, round pinnacle of yellow rock, invited by the mists of immense distance that lay beyond it. On its brink they lay down, beside a stunted pinyon that had found a lodgment there. Below and before them stretched the vast gulf of the canyon, clear to its south rim twelve miles away. They had no wish to do anything but lie there and look. There are spectacles of Nature that man never tires of dreaming over, like the ocean and its ever-tumbling surf. This canyon is one of them. For a long time neither youth said a word. “It’s just the Canyon, yet,” said Sid, at length. “Wait till we get down _into_ it--then we’ll begin to appreciate it!” Early next morning Sid and Scotty turned out refreshed and ready to perform prodigies. The horses were saddled and the dogs unchained. Off through a high table-land of tall pines the horses galloped, with Ruler and the pups all over the timber, running in wide casts around the main course of the cavalcade. Down into the shallow gulches and across wooded promontories leaped and sprang the ponies. These ravines were the gentlest beginnings of that vast shore line which once rimmed the course of the Colorado. Each gulch sloped downward, to fade in long wooded ravines into the blue depths below. Always the great physical fact of the Canyon was there. You couldn’t get away from it, couldn’t forget it for a moment. Then Ruler gave tongue. It was a musical bellow, a houndy song that told the world he had found something. The pups dashed over at his call. Big John, on the fast, white mustang, clattered over and dismounted in a single leap. Ruler was already unraveling the trail, his long, ropy tail swinging in circles as he snuffed along, yelping at intervals as he ran. The party gathered around the track, while Niltci bent down with his face almost in it. A faint impression was there, in the leaves, large and round, but without any particular formation. “Cougar. Beeg!” pronounced the Navaho boy after a careful examination. “I told you they was lion-broke!” exulted Big John. “Them runs we had after the Black Panther spiled ’em for small stuff,--Ruler’s broke, anyway.” A ringing, resounding chime of hound voices rang up from the depths of the ravine below. All four of them were in that chorus, even Lee who was proving backward and slow in his development. “Ride, boys! They’ve started him!” whooped Colonel Colvin, vaulting into his saddle. He thundered off down the ravine, with Sid and Niltci hard after him.