fterwards to a
circus man."

"Well, do lions always act the way this one did to-night?"

"I heard tell of a boy that was out with an old three dollar Winchester
22, and a dog that had lost a leg in a bear trap. Pretty soon he barked
'treed.' He had a lion up in a scrub oak. It came down fighting, so the
boy had to circle around trying to find a chance to shoot. Then it jumped
up into a pine tree and lay with its head over the limb looking down at
him. He shot at it, but I guess it didn't hit, for it ran again, and by
jings, it finally got clean away!"

"Don't they ever fight?" marveled Pedro.

"They'll fight a dog if they come down wounded, but the big cats are
mostly cowards."

"But bears are not?"

"Bears? No, nothing cowardly about them. They're more lazy'n anything
else."

CHAPTER XI

THE VALLEY OF TEN THOUSAND SMOKES

The next morning they had a good look around before deciding which way to
go. On one side pointed firs in patches on the canyon walls contrasted
with the snow in the ravines. There was a brook that divided, then
reunited in white strands, only to spread out into a smooth, glistening
sheet, golden in the sunlight, to join the green river.

The notches between two rounding, glacier-smoothed granite masses
disclosed distant peaks, snow-capped, their jagged ledges thrusting
through the mantling white, dazzling in the sunshine like a mirror,--now
gray under a hazing sky, now dappled under a passing shower cloud.

They finally decided to wind through the gap, and Pedro, Norris and Long
Lester started on with the burros, while Ace and Ted started fine-combing
the map beneath them for the elusive Mexicans. Very probably, they
thought, they had been hiding in some of the caves that honeycombed the
region, and sooner or later they would have to reappear. Their supplies
could not hold out forever.

All along the Western flank of the Sierra, (as both Norris and Long
Lester were able to assure them), from the McCloud River in the North to
the Kaweah,--a distance of at least 400 miles,--stretched a belt of
metamorphic limestone, reaching up to as high as 7,000 feet, and it was
fairly riddled with caves.

But again the day went by without success. Ace only squared his chin. Ted
offered to abdicate his observer's seat in favor of any one of the party,
but Pedro and Long Lester preferred terra firma, and even Norris found
more to interest him in the rocks beneath their feet.

Once a little s