ater and sand were flowing evenly over the apron he fell to
wishing he had a potato. How long had it been--he threw back his head to
calculate--how many weeks since he had looked a potato in the eye?
Ha!--not a bad joke at that. He wished he might have said that aloud to
some one. He never joked with Slim any more.

He frowned a little as he bent over the grizzly and crushed a small lump
between his thumb and finger. He wandered if there was clay coming into
the pay streak. Clay gathered up the "colors" it touched like so much
quicksilver. Dog-gone, if it wasn't one thing it was another. If the
tunnel wasn't caving in, he struck a bowlder, and if there wasn't a
bowlder there was----

"Bang! bang! Bang! bang!" Then a fusillade of shots. Bruce straightened
up in astonishment and stared at the mountainside.

"Boom! boom!" The shots were muffled. They were shooting in the canyon.
Who was it? What was it? Suddenly he understood. The _sheep_! _His_
sheep! They were killing Old Felix and the rest! Magnificent Old
Felix--the placid ewes--the frisking lamb! What a bombardment! That
wasn't sport; 'twas slaughter!

His dark skin reddened, and his eyes blazed in excitement. He flung the
dipper from him and started toward the cabin on a run. They were killing
tame sheep--sheep that he had taught to lose their fear of man. Then
his footsteps slackened and he felt half sick as he remembered that the
big-game season was open and he had no legal right to interfere.

Bruce had not seen a human face save Slim's since the end of May, and it
now was late in October, but he had no desire to meet the hunters and
hear them boast of their achievement. Heavy-hearted, he wondered which
ones they got.

The hunters must have come over the old trail of the Sheep-eater
Indians--the one which wound along the backbone of the ridge. Rough
going, that. They were camped up there, and they must have a big pack
outfit, he reasoned, to get so far from supplies at this season of the
year.

He tried to work again, but found himself upset.

"Dog-gone," he said finally. "I'll slip up the canyon and see what
they've done. They may have left a wounded sheep for the cougars to
finish--if they did I can pack it down."

Bruce climbed for an hour or more up the bowlder-choked canyon before his
experienced eye saw signs of the hunters in two furrows where a pair of
heels had plowed down a bank of dirt. The canyon, as he knew, ended
abruptly in a perpendicula