As soon as it grew daylight next morning the two fugitives, Jack Merrill and Coyote Pete, not to forget the one-eared mule, from the effects of whose stampede Pete was still limping, made a careful reconnaissance. From their lofty perch on a ledge of rock far up the caÑon they could see behind them a thin thread of distant blue smoke, which still marked the scene of the destruction of the treacherous old hermit's hut.

A few bluejays hopped about here and there, eying the intruders inquisitively, a badger rushed grunting and grumbling through some nearby scrub. Otherwise the caÑon, under a blinding blue sky, was still as a desert noon.

"Wa'al, all's quiet along the Potomac from the looks of things," commented Pete, "and now let's get down to the creek, and I'll wash off some of the dirt that one-eared Maud there plastered me with last night, and then we'll hit up that pocket chuck-wagon of yours."

"And after that?" asked Jack.

"Why, then, we'll keep right on going. Let's see, it was to-day that you was to have written home for money, wasn't it?"

"Yes," said Jack, with a sigh, thinking of Ralph, who, if he had only known it, was at that moment beyond Black Ramon's reach.

"Wa'al, now, if that Easterner can only stick out, we'll win home yet," gritted out Pete, "and be back with help by day after to-morrow."

"Now, then, you one-eared, cock-eyed imp of Satan, if you want a morning drink quit pulling back on that halter and come down to the creek," went on the cow-puncher, addressing the mule, which by common consent had been christened Maud.

The mule flopped her one ear wisely at Pete, and docilely allowed herself to be led to water. Both travelers drank and laved themselves, and then seated on a rock at the edge of the watercourse made a meal off the remnants of Jack's stock.

"Last of the grub, eh?" inquired Pete, as the final morsels vanished.

Jack nodded.

"Well, we'll have to tighten our belts a few notches then, I reckon," was all Pete said. It took more than the prospect of a little hunger ahead to alarm the old plainsman.

All at once his eyes fell on an object lying some distance up the creek. It reposed on the flat top of a rock and seemed to be a shallow metal basin of some sort.

"Hello!" exclaimed Pete, as he sighted it, "there's a clew to our neighbor of last night—the one who dug out so unsociable when Maud began cutting up."

"Cutting you up, I guess you mean," laughed Jack, gazing at Pete's scratched countenance, and a further facial decoration he carried in the shape of a big goose egg over one eye.

"Hum, I guess my style of beauty has been considerably damaged," grinned Pete, "and look at that one-eared demon will you, grinning at us as if she enjoyed it."

They both had to burst out laughing, forgetting their other troubles at the queer sidelong glance Maud bestowed on them. It was as if she said:

"Didn't I have a lark last night?"

"Say, Jack," said Pete suddenly, after an interval of looking about to see if any chance crumbs had been overlooked, "I'm going to have a look at that thing on the rock up there. It may give us a clew to our friend who lit out so unpremeditated."

"That washbowl, you mean?" asked Jack.

"Well, it ain't exactly a wash bowl. It's what prospectors use to wash out gold in. They take a handful of mud and some water from any creek they think looks good, and then they wash it about. Of course, the gold, being heaviest, sinks to the bottom and stays there after all the other stuff has been washed away."

An examination of the basin showed that it was an old one and much battered. On one side it bore scratched deep in its surface the initials J. H.

"Feller had quite a camp here," said Pete, looking about him. "Funny we didn't sight him when we first came up. Must have had three ponies, two to pack and one to ride."

"How can you tell that?" asked the boy.

"S'prised at you, a Western kid, asking such a question," grinned Pete, who was in high good spirits since they had apparently thrown off the Mexicans; "look at those hoofs."

"That's right," said Jack, after a short scrutiny, "there's one with only half a shoe on the off forefoot, one unshod on the hind hoofs——"

"That's one of the packers," put in Pete.

"And another the same way. Another packer," concluded Jack.

"You'll make a vaquero yet," approved Pete, "but come on, it's time for us to be up and getting. I only wish we hadn't scared J. H., whoever he is, out of ten years' growth, and we'd have been in the way of getting a hot breakfast."

"You wouldn't have wanted to have lighted a fire," cried Jack; "wouldn't the Mexicans have seen the smoke?"

"Wa'al, I guess you're right, kiddo," said Pete; "cold victuals are safe victuals in a fix like ours. Just the same, a slapjack and some frizzled bacon, with a cup of hot coffee, would appeal to yours truly right now."

"Don't talk of such things," laughed Jack; "we may be eating piÑon leaves by sundown."

"And that's no childish dream," agreed Pete. "Now, let's saddle up Maud and be on our way."

A few minutes later, with Pete's heels drumming a tattoo on her bony sides, Maud was once more ambling over the trail, her one ear moving backward and forward as if some sort of clockwork contrivance was in it.

"Lot of waste of power there," observed the practical Pete. "Hitch that ear to a sewing machine or a corn sheller and you'd have any motor ever built beat a mile."

By a sort of mutual but unspoken agreement, neither of the two mentioned eating when the sun, by its height in the sky, showed that it was noon. Without a word, though, Jack, from his position behind the cantle, tightened up his belt a notch. Short rations were beginning to tell on him. Pete, however, seemed cheerful enough. He even hummed from time to time a few lines of that endless cow-puncher's song which begins:

Such good progress did they make, notwithstanding Maud's deliberate method of procedure, that by mid-afternoon they found themselves almost at the summit of the range, and in a narrow gorge formed by the closing in of the walls of the caÑon. They had been following a sort of trail, which had once—so Pete guessed—been an Indian way. It was, however, overgrown almost continuously with brush, and they had been compelled to turn out a dozen times in every hundred yards. Now suddenly the path came to a stop altogether at a spot where, for a distance of twenty feet or more, the side of the caÑon had slipped down. Nothing but a smooth shaly wall, impossible even for Maud's goatlike feet to attempt, lay between them and the resumption of the trail on the opposite side.

"Have to go around," decided Jack, who had dismounted and was surveying the break in the road.

"That means going back three miles at least," grumbled Pete. "Consarn the luck."

"Well, we can't go ahead."

"There's no such word as can't when you've gotter, son," rejoined Pete, gazing about him, while Maud philosophically cropped some patch grass that grew on the steep side of the trail.

"Let's see," mused Pete. "No, there wouldn't be no sense in trying to climb around it. Even this one-eared jackrabbit couldn't make it. Could you, Maud?"

The one ear shook vigorously.

"No, she's made up her mind she couldn't, and that ends it. Marry an old maid, argue with a school teacher, reason with a rattlesnake, but never try to persuade a mule of the error of her ways," said Pete solemnly.

"There's that old dead tree up there," said Jack suddenly, pointing to the steep shaly bank, where a big dead pine lay precariously balanced where the last washout that had destroyed the trail had left it.

"Well, what of it?"

"Why, it's long enough to bridge the gap and broad enough for Maud to get across on if we lead her."

"And if she'll go," said Pete. "Just the same I think your idea's a good one, Jack."

"Well, we can try it, anyhow. It wouldn't take more than a shove to dislodge that trunk, and the way it lies it ought to roll so that its two ends will catch on each end of the trail and connect them."

"By Jee-hos-o-phat, I think it'll work!" exclaimed Pete, warming up to the idea.

As he spoke he got off the mule, who for the last five minutes had had her one good ear and the stump of the other cocked forward, listening intently. Her nostrils and eyes were distended, and as Pete's feet touched the ground she gave a wild scramble in an attempt to climb the bank.

"Whoa, whoa, Maud! what's the matter with you, you one-eared locomotive on four legs," growled Pete.

"She's scared at something!" said Jack, with a worried look, gazing nervously about him.

"Yep, that's right. Wonder what it is."

"Ph-r-r-r-r!"

Maud snorted and plunged about furiously.

"Well, it ain't Mexicans, that's a cinch, for the wind is blowing up the trail," mused Pete, "and whatever she smells is coming down. Well, no use worrying about it. The sooner we get busy and get that log across, the sooner we'll be on our way. I'll just hitch old Maud to this tree, and then we'll get to work."

Maud, still prancing and snorting alarmedly, was tied to the tree in a few seconds. The two adventurers, bracing themselves at every step, started to climb up the shale toward the dead tree, which they wished to roll down the incline to connect the two ends of the broken trail.

"Now, I'll take that far end and you take this, and when I say so, we both shove, see?" said Pete. After some difficulty on the slippery foothold the shale afforded, they reached the log, which was nothing more or less than a huge pine trunk, sixty feet or more in length. Had it not been for the manner in which it had been caught on the pinnacle of two rocks at either end, they could not have hoped to move it. Balanced as it was, however, a touch set it rocking.

"Ready?" hailed Pete, after he had scrambled to his end of the log. He laid his hands on the fallen trunk and braced his feet and muscles for a mighty heave.

"All right!" hailed Jack, doing the same, when suddenly his expression of energy froze on his face, and he grew pale under his tan.

"Oh, Pete! oh!" screamed the boy, "look behind you!"

Pete, who stood with his back toward the upper end of the caÑon, faced around from his grip on the timber. As he did so he echoed Jack's cry of horror.

Standing at the opposite edge of the broken trail—not twenty feet from him—was a huge, gaunt grizzly.

As it gazed upon the prey on which it had[211]
[212] lumbered so unexpectedly, the horrible brute's little pig eyes blazed malevolently, and its huge fangs began to drip as if in anticipation of the feast to come.