Sid gave a grimace of dismay as he watched the moon sailing steadily upward high over the canyon rim. It meant hours more of this waking and dozing before he could wear the night through. To-morrow his father and their party would come into the main canyon; then or never would be the time to get in contact with them. He was puzzling over practical ways to do this--when out of the dead silence of the night a sudden scream, like a woman in agony, rent the stillness. Sid fumbled hastily in the browse for his revolver and then leaped to his feet. He knew that cry! It was the hunting call of the cougar, during his night prowlings. Evidently the four-footed sharer of his canyon was coming, returning to his lair! As Sid watched the rim, a movement in the dark bushes caught his eye. They parted; and out on a tall pinnacle butte stepped the form of a great cat. Great, and black as night was he, as Sid watched him, his heart pounding so that he could hear its beats through his open mouth. He was--he _must_ be--black! That couldn’t be a trick of the moonlight, for the moon was on the opposite side of the canyon, to the east, and it played full on the sleek body of the cougar. “The Black Panther of the Navaho!--and he’s come!” whispered Sid to himself, hardly breathing. “Well, what am I going to do about it--let him come down here?” he asked himself, after an indecisive period of shivering with excitement and cold. Like some bronze Fremiet statue, the Black Panther stood silent in the moonlight, his long lithe body sloping away behind in graceful curves. Only the tip of his black tail twitched slightly. Then his superb head moved, and there was a flash of green from his eyes as the moonlight caught some gleam of the fire burning in their fuming depths. He uttered a low, hoarse mew, and his fangs bared as his nose caught some taint unfamiliar to him wafted up from the canyon below. “Gee--I can’t let him come down here!” gasped Sid. “What shall I do?--Attack’s _always_ the best defense!” He raised the revolver and caught the panther through his sights. To what a midget creature had he shrunk, high up there on the cliffs! The front sight nearly covered him; all the rest of him was included between the horns of the U on his rear bar.