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