's shop like the
crowd waiting at a theatre for Patti tickets. Men far down the line
shouted to Dodge not to sell the meat in big pieces, but to save slices
for them. The meat sold for $1 a pound. Everybody got a slice, and we
got $500 for our three bears.

"One of our crowd was so elated over the profits of bear-hunting that
he started out alone the next day to get more Grizzly meat. He didn't
come back, and the boys who went out to look for him found his body,
covered up with leaves and dirt, in the edge of a clump of brush. His
skull had been smashed by a blow from a Grizzly's paw."

CHAPTER VII.

THE ADVENTURES OF PIKE.

Pike was one of the oldest of Yosemite guides and altogether the
quaintest of the many queer old fellows who drifted into the valley in
early days and there were stranded for life. He had another name, no
doubt, but nobody knew or cared what it might be, and he seemed to have
forgotten it himself. "Pike" fitted him, served all the purposes for
which names were invented, was easy to pronounce, and therefore was all
the name he needed. Pike was tall, round-shouldered, lop-sided,
slouchy, good-natured, illiterate, garrulous, frankly vain of the
little scraps of botanical nomenclature he had picked up and as lazy
and unacquainted with soap as an Indian.

Pike dearly loved bears and bear stories. When there were no tourists
about to whom he could tell bear stories, he would go into the woods
and have adventures with bears and stock up with stories for the next
season. Pike never had to kill a bear to get a story out of him. He
brought in no bear skins, pointed out no bullet holes, exhibited no
scars and told no blood-curdling tales of furious combat and
hair-breadth escapes. Pike and the bears appeared to have an
understanding that there was room enough in the woods for both and that
his hunting was all in the way of innocent amusement and recreation, to
be spiced now and then with a practical joke.

"Black bears and brown bears are peaceable folks," Pike used to say in
his Californianized-Missourian vernacular. "There's nothing mean about
'em and they don't go around with chips on their shoulders. I
generally get along with them slick as grease and they never try to
jump me when I haven't got a gun. Why, sir, I can just talk a brown
bear out of the trail, even when he thinks he owns it. I did one night
in the valley. I was going from Barnard's up to the Stoneman when I
ran