wo herders and their collies, he
went back to the _cienega_. There was not much left of the musket, but
in front of where it had been was a pool of blood, and a
crimson-splashed trail led away from that spot across the flat and down
a brushy gulch.

Cautiously, rifle in hand, the superintendent followed the blood sign,
urging the unwilling dogs ahead and leading the more unwilling Basque
shepherds, who had no stomach for meetings with a wounded grizzly in
the brush. Half a mile from the _cienega_ the dogs stopped before a
thicket, bristled their backs and growled impatient remonstrance to the
superintendent's efforts to shove them into the brush with his foot.
In response to urgent encouragement, the collies, bracing back, barked
furiously at the thicket, while the herders edged away to climbable
trees, and the superintendent waited with tense nerves for the rush of
a wounded bear.

But nothing stirred in the thicket, no growl answered the dogs. Five
minutes, perhaps--it seemed like half an hour--the superintendent stood
there with rifle ready and cold drops beading his forehead. Then he
backed away, picked up a stone, and heaved it into the brush. Another
and still others he threw until he had thoroughly "shelled the woods"
without eliciting a sound or a movement. The silence gave the dogs
courage and slowly they pushed into the thicket with many haltings and
backward starts, and presently their barking changed in tone and told
the man that they had found something of which they were not afraid.
Then the superintendent pushed his way through the bushes and found the
bear dead. The big slug from the musket had entered his throat and
traversed him from stem, to stern, and spouting his life blood in
quarts he had gone half a mile before his amazing vitality ebbed clean
away and left him a huge heap of carrion.

It is the tradition of the mountain that the ursine shepherd was none
other than Old Clubfoot, and it is not worth while to dispute with the
faith of a man who follows sheep in the solitudes.

* * * * *

Like Phra the Phoenician, Old Clubfoot could not stay dead, and when
there was trouble afoot in the world, with tumult and fighting, no
grave was deep enough, no tomb massive enough to hold him. His next
recrudescence was in Old Tuolumne, where he forgot former experiences
with steel traps and set his foot into the jaws of one placed in his
way by vindictive cattlemen. Attached t