ounted and measured it.

"It's he!" he cried, and there was a thrill of excitement in his voice.
"Hadn't we better go on without the horses, Bruce?"

The mountaineer shook his head. But before he voiced an opinion he got down
from his horse and scanned the sides of the mountains ahead of them through
his long telescope. Langdon used his double-barrelled hunting glass. They
discovered nothing.

"He's still in the creek-bottom, an' he's probably three or four miles
ahead," said Bruce. "We'll ride on a couple o' miles an' find a place good
for the horses. The grass an' bushes will be dry then."

It was easy to follow Thor's course after this, for he had hung close to
the creek. Within three or four hundred yards of the great mass of boulders
where the grizzly had come upon the tan-faced cub was a small copse of
spruce in the heart of a grassy dip, and here the hunters stripped and
hobbled their horses. Twenty minutes later they had come up cautiously to
the soft carpet of sand where Thor and Muskwa had become acquainted. The
heavy rain had obliterated the cub's tiny footprints, but the sand was cut
up by the grizzly's tracks. The packer's teeth gleamed as he looked at
Langdon.

"He ain't very far," he whispered. "Shouldn't wonder if he spent the night
pretty close an' he's mooshing on just ahead of us."

He wet a finger and held it above his head to get the wind. He nodded
significantly.

"We'd better get up on the slopes," he said.

They made their way around the end of the boulders, holding their guns in
readiness, and headed for a small coulee that promised an easy ascent of
the first slope. At the mouth of this both paused again. Its bottom was
covered with sand, and in this sand were the tracks of another bear. Bruce
dropped on his knees.

"It's another grizzly," said Langdon.

"No, it ain't; it's a black," said Bruce. "Jimmy, can't I ever knock into
yo'r head the difference between a black an' a grizzly track? This is the
hind foot, an' the heel is round. If it was a grizzly it would be pointed.
An' it's too broad an' clubby f'r a grizzly, an' the claws are too long f'r
the length of the foot. It's a black as plain as the nose on yo'r face!"

"And going our way," said Langdon. "Come on!" Two hundred yards up the
coulee the bear had climbed out on the slope. Langdon and Bruce followed.
In the thick grass and hard shale of the first crest of the slope the
tracks were quickly lost, but the hunters were not m