The hunters must have come over the old trail of the Sheep-eater Indians--the one which wound along the backbone of the ridge. Rough going, that. They were camped up there, and they must have a big pack outfit, he reasoned, to get so far from supplies at this season of the year. He tried to work again, but found himself upset. "Dog-gone," he said finally. "I'll slip up the canyon and see what they've done. They may have left a wounded sheep for the cougars to finish--if they did I can pack it down." Bruce climbed for an hour or more up the bowlder-choked canyon before his experienced eye saw signs of the hunters in two furrows where a pair of heels had plowed down a bank of dirt. The canyon, as he knew, ended abruptly in a perpendicular wall, and he soon saw that the frightened sheep must have run headlong into the trap. He found the prints of their tiny, flying hoofs, the indentations where the sharp points had dug deep as they leaped. Empty shells, more shells--they must have been bum shots--and then a drop of blood upon a rock. The drops came thicker, a stream of blood, and then the slaughter pen. They had been shot down against the wall without a single chance for their lives. The entire band, save Old Felix, had been exterminated. Their limp and still-bleeding carcasses, riddled and torn by soft-nosed bullets, lay among the rocks. Wanton slaughter it was, without even the excuse of the necessity of meat, since only a yearling's hind quarters were gone. Not even the plea of killing for trophies could be offered, since the heads of the ewes were valueless. Bruce straightened the neck of a ewe as she lay with her head doubled under her. It hurt him to see her so. He looked into her dull, glazed eyes which had been so soft and bright as they had followed him at work a little more than an hour before. He ran his hand over a sheep's white "blanket," now red with blood, and stood staring down into the innocent face of the diminutive lamb. Then he raised his eyes in the direction in which he fancied the hunters had gone. They shone black and vindictive through the mist of tears which blinded him as he cried in a shaking voice: "You butchers! You game hogs! I hope you starve and freeze back there in the hills, as you deserve!" A snow cloud, drab, thick, sagging ominously, moved slowly from the northeast, and on a jutting point, sharply outlined against the sky, motionless as the rock beneath him, stood Old Felix, splendid, solitary, looking off across the sea of peaks in which he was alone. III "THE GAME BUTCHERS" "Ain't this an awful world!" By this observation Uncle Bill Griswold, standing on a narrow shelf of rock, with the sheep's hind quarters on his back, meant merely to convey the opinion that there was a great deal of it. The panting sportsman did not answer. T. Victor Sprudell was looking for some place to put his toe.