Then he turned his attention to the back of the high cave roof overhead whence came the odor. It shelved down behind the pueblo, and as he walked over to the inner walls, Sid could make out a black and dusty area in behind them, where the cave came down to the ledge floor. Here the shelf slabs were not three feet above the ledge floor, a slit of dense gloom, where water had once scoured out a soft stratum of rock. His eye gradually made out bones strewed on the soil under here, ribs, skulls, leg bones, all of sheep or deer; he could not say which. “Phew!” he muttered, drawing back to the fresh air. “It’s either a cougar or a bear den--it can’t be the latter, unless it’s some small black bear, for nothing but a fly could come through those spruces on the cliff. It _is_ a cat! Cougar--perhaps the Black Panther himself!--Why not?” he declared, with growing conviction. “I’ll just bet it was him, last night! He hunts around here, or did, until he found that stealing the Indians’ sheep was free, to him! Gosh, the beggar might be paying rent and taxes!” sniffed Sid. “Of all the nerve! He’s got a pretty soft thing--I’ll say!--until someone of us gets a shot at him, out here. And that’ll be me, I hope.” But then he remembered that he had not his rifle with him. Nothing but the little inadequate .32-20. The quicker he got back and came up here with that rifle, the better, for the Black Panther would be quite likely to revisit his lair, perhaps this very day. Sid climbed down by the pueblo trail he had first discovered and worked up through the spruces up the valley, confident that he would soon find a way out and speculating on how to get down from the plateau above into the chasm where his camp was. But the rim walls of the box canyon offered him little encouragement. Three hundred feet above him they towered, with bare, stratified and perpendicular walls after the lower slopes of talus ended. The large spruces in the valley contented themselves with a root hold in the wet soil in its ravine. Nowhere did they come near enough to the cliffs to be of any use in climbing out.