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,