Abington stood absolutely motionless with his head drooped forward, his narrowed eyes surveying with brief, darting glances his devastated camp. The small brown tent, lying in a tattered heap with slits crisscrossing one another in the balloon silk which was so light to carry--and so costly--received a second scrutiny. The camp supplies, which had been neatly piled just where he had unloaded them from the two burros that carried his own outfit, were strewn about in indescribable disorder, as if a drove of hogs had held carnival there for an hour or so. Because of the view it gave of the fantastic, red-sandstone crags across the valley, Abington had pitched his camp on a smooth hard ledge a few feet above the level with a cliff at his back and a spring of good water hidden away in a tiny cleft in the cañon at his right. It was a cool, sightly spot, free from bothersome ant hills or weedy growth that might harbor rattlesnakes or other venomous creatures. True to his word, Bill Jonathan camped apart from Abington. In this particular location he had chosen a cave half a mile up the cañon--and he had immediately set about walling up the entrance so that he must squeeze in between two rocks which he could move across the aperture at night. “Getting close to the range of that gosh-awful thing, professor,” he had explained. “Better hunt a hole yourself and crawl into it--’specially at night. And you want to keep your eyes peeled, and don’t go prowlin’ around without your gun or a knife or something.” Abington liked his little brown-silk tent, however, and he was not particularly impressed by the gosh-awfulness of the thing which Bill Jonathan could not even describe--he having failed to catch so much as a glimpse of it, as he had been forced to admit under Abington’s repeated questioning. Here was the ruin left by some animal, however, and Abington found himself completely at a loss as he circled the camp, going slowly and studying the wreckage foot by foot. On the ledge itself he did not expect to see any tracks. He walked therefore to the edge of the hard-pan and examined the softer gravel at the foot of the two-foot slope. There, cleanly outlined in a finer streak of red gravelly sand, he discovered the imprint of a pointed, cloven foot; a gigantic sheep, by the track, or possibly an elk, though elk were not known in that country. For some minutes he stood there looking for other tracks. When he found one, he whistled under his breath. From the length of the stride indicated by that second hoofprint he judged that this particular animal must be considerably larger than a caribou. “Gosh-awful” it certainly must be!