ed himself together and refused to die
out there in the brush. With his jaw hanging by shreds, his wind-pipe
severed and his left arm dangling useless, he crawled to his horse, got
into the saddle and rode to camp, whence his companions took him to the
Liebra ranch house. Romulo Pico was sure Searles would die before
morning, but he dressed the wounds with the simple skill of the
mountaineer who learns some things not taught in books, and tried to
make death as little painful as possible. Finding Searles not only
alive in the morning but obstinately determined not to submit to the
indignity of being killed by a bear, Pico hitched up a team to a ranch
wagon and sent him to Los Angeles, a two-days' journey, where the
surgeons consulted over him and proposed all sorts of interesting
operations by way of experiment upon a man who was sure to die anyway.

Searles was unable to tell the surgeons what he thought of their
schemes for wiring him together, but he indicated his dissent by
kicking one of them in the stomach. Then they called in a dentist as
an expert on broken jaws, after they had attended to the other damages,
and the dentist showed them how to remove the debris and where to patch
and sew, and they managed to get the shattered piece of human machinery
tinkered up in fairly good shape. The vitality and obstinacy of
Searles did the rest, and in a few weeks he was on his feet again and
planning prospecting trips to Death Valley, not The Valley of the
Shadow through which he had passed, but the grewsome desert of Southern
California where he found his fortune in borax.

CHAPTER VI.

WHEN GRIZZLIES RAN IN DROVES.

William Thurman, who owned a lumber mill on the Chowchilla mountain,
not far from the Mariposa grove of Big Trees, told this plain,
unadorned tale of an old-fashioned Grizzly bear hunt.

He was moved thereto by inspection of a Winchester express rifle,
carrying a half-inch ball, backed by 110 grains of powder, that was
shown to him by a hunter.

"If we had been armed with such rifles in early days," said Mr.
Thurman, "the Grizzly wouldn't have achieved his reputation for
vitality and staying powers in a fight. There is no doubt that he is a
very tough animal and a game fighter, but in the days when he made a
terrible name for himself he had to face no such weapons as that.

"I assisted in killing, in 1850, the first Grizzlies that were brought
into the town of Sonora. I had heard a great