r wall, and he soon saw that the frightened
sheep must have run headlong into the trap. He found the prints of their
tiny, flying hoofs, the indentations where the sharp points had dug deep
as they leaped. Empty shells, more shells--they must have been bum
shots--and then a drop of blood upon a rock. The drops came thicker, a
stream of blood, and then the slaughter pen. They had been shot down
against the wall without a single chance for their lives. The entire
band, save Old Felix, had been exterminated. Their limp and
still-bleeding carcasses, riddled and torn by soft-nosed bullets, lay
among the rocks. Wanton slaughter it was, without even the excuse of the
necessity of meat, since only a yearling's hind quarters were gone. Not
even the plea of killing for trophies could be offered, since the heads
of the ewes were valueless.

Bruce straightened the neck of a ewe as she lay with her head doubled
under her. It hurt him to see her so. He looked into her dull, glazed
eyes which had been so soft and bright as they had followed him at work
a little more than an hour before. He ran his hand over a sheep's white
"blanket," now red with blood, and stood staring down into the innocent
face of the diminutive lamb.

Then he raised his eyes in the direction in which he fancied the hunters
had gone. They shone black and vindictive through the mist of tears
which blinded him as he cried in a shaking voice:

"You butchers! You game hogs! I hope you starve and freeze back there in
the hills, as you deserve!"

A snow cloud, drab, thick, sagging ominously, moved slowly from the
northeast, and on a jutting point, sharply outlined against the sky,
motionless as the rock beneath him, stood Old Felix, splendid, solitary,
looking off across the sea of peaks in which he was alone.

III

"THE GAME BUTCHERS"

"Ain't this an awful world!" By this observation Uncle Bill Griswold,
standing on a narrow shelf of rock, with the sheep's hind quarters on
his back, meant merely to convey the opinion that there was a great deal
of it.

The panting sportsman did not answer. T. Victor Sprudell was looking for
some place to put his toe.

"There's a hundred square miles over there that I reckon there never was
a white man's foot on, and they say that the West has been went over
with a fine-tooth comb. Wouldn't it make you laugh?"

Mr. Sprudell looked far from laughter as, by placing a foot directly in
front of the other, he advanced a