Scarcely were we asleep, it seemed to me, before Curly awakened Cress and myself, growling immediately at our heads. Rising in our blankets, guns in hand, and listening intently, we could hear on the hillside above us what sounded like the movements of a bear. Whatever it might be, it was approaching. Not a word had been spoken, and Curly's growls were so low we had no idea any of the others had been roused. So we sat on the alert for perhaps fifteen minutes, when the sounds above us began receding, and we lay down again. But just as we were passing back into dreamland, Curly again startled us with a sharper, fiercer note that meant trouble at hand. As we rose to a sitting posture, in the dim moonlight we could plainly see a dark crouching figure twenty yards below, which advanced a step or two, stopped as if to listen, and again advanced and stopped. What it was we could not make out. At first I thought it must be a bear, but presently I felt sure I caught the glimmer of a gun barrel, and nudged Cress with my elbow. We were in the act of raising our rifles to down it, whatever it might be, when Thornton sang out, "Hold on, boys; that's old Tomas!" And, indeed, so it proved. All had been awakened at the first alarm, and Thornton had seen Tomas roll from his blankets into the bottom of the east channel, and crawl away on the scout for the cause of Curly's uneasiness that so nearly had cost him his life. He had been so intent for movement on the hillsides he had not noticed us watching him. The next morning we were moving by dawn, Tomas, Cress, and myself in the lead, the others trailing along one hundred or two hundred yards behind us. For half a mile the gorge widened, as most mountain gorges do near their heads, into beautiful grassy slopes rising steeply before us, thickly timbered with post oak. Then, issuing from the timber, we saw it was a blind canon we were in, a _cul de sac_, with no pass through the crest of the range. Before us rose a very nearly perpendicular wall for probably six hundred feet, up which the old trail zigzagged, climbing from ledge to ledge, so steep that when, later, we were fetching our horses up it, one of the pack horses lost its balance and fell fifty feet, crippling it so badly we had to kill it. The cliff face, about three hundred yards in width, and flanked to right and left by the walls of the canon, was entirely bare of trees, but thickly strewn with boulders. From an enemy on the top of the two flanking walls, climbers up the cliff face could get no shelter whatever. Thus it was important that our advance should reach the summit as quickly as possible. So, up the three of us scrambled, about thirty yards apart, disregarding the trail.