unging over the cliff
just as Wood's Winchester began to bark. As fast as the lever could be
worked the bullets thudded into the Grizzly's back even while Joe was
pitching forward.

[Illustration: The Bear Swung Trap, Chain and Clog.]

Old Clubfoot had ignored the trap and the clog in his eagerness to
reach the man with his nearest paw, and the impetus of the stroke,
aided by the momentum of the circling clog, threw him from his balance.
Probably a bullet in the back of the head had its effect also, for the
huge bulk of the bear toppled forward and followed Joe Screech over the
cliff.

Wood scrambled desperately through the thicket to the cliff and looked
down into Hetch-Hetchey. A thousand feet below, where the talus began
to slope from the sheer cliff, dust was still floating, and stones were
sliding down a fresh scar in the loose soil of the steep incline toward
the forest at the foot.

* * * * *

In his old age, the big brindled bear grew weary of being killed and
resurrected and longed for a quiet life. Little, ordinary, no-account
bears had personated him and got themselves killed under false
pretenses from one end of the Sierra to the other, and some of them had
been impudent enough to carry their imposture to the extent of placing
step-ladders against his sign-board trees and recording their alleged
height a yard or two above his mark. That made him tired. Moreover
the gout in his bad foot troubled him more and more, and he ceased to
get much satisfaction from rolling around on a "flat wheel" and scaring
people with his tracks. Wherefore Clubfoot deserted his old haunts and
went down into a green valley, inhabited by bee-keepers and other
peaceable folk, where he lived on locusts and honey and forgot the
strenuous life.

All went well with the retired terror of the mountains for a long time.
The only fly in the ointment of his content was Jerky Johnson, who kept
dogs and went pirooting around the hills with a gun, making much noise
and scaring the wits out of coyotes and jack rabbits. Old Clubfoot
realized that his eyes were dimming and his hearing becoming impaired,
and it annoyed him to be always on the alert, lest he should come
across Jerky in the brush and step on him inadvertently.

Jerky's ostensible occupation, from which his front name was derived,
was killing deer and selling jerked venison, but if the greater part of
his stock was not plain jerked beef, the cattle-