Niltci came to and grabbed at the canteen, his eyes speaking volumes as he drank. Sid looked around. A glint of blue steel caught his eye. It was the Colonel’s .35--with its stock smashed off close behind the lever. Its magazine was empty, and he dared not move the Colonel again to take more cartridges from his belt. He ran over to the bear’s carcass, grabbed up his own Army .30, and raised it to the sky. “_Bang! Bang! Bang!--Bang!_” whipped out its sharp report. CHAPTER X THE DESERT’S FROWN “Stop him!--Nothing stopped him!” smiled the Colonel wanly from his bandages, as he eyed the huge skin of the Yellow Grizzly stretched between four poles and propped up where he could look at it and gloat over it. “Look at that skin--it’s a regular sieve!” The boys and Big John sat against trees around the small camp fire in front of the Colonel’s stretcher bed tent. It had been a strenuous two days. First there had been, for Sid, those anxious hours of waiting and signaling until at last Big John and Scotty had poked the noses of their ponies over the ridge. Then the long trail home, with two stretchers to carry, the bulk of which labor had fallen on Sid and Big John, while Scotty led the horses. And then a feverish night in camp, when both patients needed sitting up with and constant attention. This second day had been spent in skinning out the grizzly by Big John and Scotty, and in assiduous doctoring and splint-making by Sid. And now, as sunset came, the huge pelt had been set up for the Colonel to look at, and Sid had decided to let him talk. “Yes, sir, that was the nearest I ever came to getting my everlasting!” went on the Colonel. “With just two inches more reach he’d have taken out every rib in my body. It was in the dim light before dawn, boys, that I made him out, standing over the body of the deer. He picked that buck up like a mouse and started lumbering off with it. That gave me only a rear quartering shot, which is the very one to make him most angry and do the least immediate damage. But it was that or none, so I drew careful bead and fired. “That started the fun, men!” said the Colonel, laughing feebly, after a pause to get his breath. “He whirled about and started for me in leaps that were twenty feet to the jump. It was the cursed wind that did it. You know how it whirls and howls around Buckskin! Never the same any two minutes. Some one of those back currents sweeping down the mountain took my scent right to him. He didn’t want any better guide!