Ten miles may be a long day’s travel for a wretched wool-plant, but it is little more than two hours for a Grizzly.  It is farther than eyesight, but it is well within nosesight, and Jack, feeling mutton-hungry, had not the least difficulty in following his prey.  His supper was a little later than usual, but his appetite was the better for that.  There was no alarm in camp, so Tampico had fallen asleep.  A growl from the dog awakened him.  He started up to behold the most appalling creature that he had ever seen or imagined, a monster Bear standing on his hind legs, and thirty feet high at least.  The dog fled in terror, but was valor itself compared with Pedro.  He was so frightened that he could not express the prayer that was in his breast:  “Blessed saints, let him have every sin-blackened sheep in the band, but spare your poor worshiper,” and he hid his head; so never learned that he saw, not a thirty-foot Bear thirty feet away, but a seven-foot Bear not far from the fire and casting a black thirty-foot shadow on the smooth rock behind.  And, helpless with fear, poor Pedro groveled in the dust.

[Illustration:  The thirty-foot bear]

When he looked up the giant Bear was gone.  There was a rushing of the sheep.  A small body of them scurried out of the canon into the night, and after them went an ordinary-sized Bear, undoubtedly a cub of the monster.

Pedro had been neglecting his prayers for some months back, but he afterward assured his father confessor that on this night he caught up on all arrears and had a goodly surplus before morning.  At sunrise he left his dog in charge of the flock and set out to seek the runaways, knowing, first, that there was little danger in the day-time, second, that some would escape.  The missing ones were a considerable number, raised to the second power indeed, for two more black ones were gone.  Strange to tell, they had not scattered, and Pedro trailed them a mile or more in the wilderness till he reached another very small box canon.  Here he found the missing flock perched in various places on boulders and rocky pinnacles as high up as they could get.  He was delighted and worked for half a minute on his bank surplus of prayers, but was sadly upset to find that nothing would induce the sheep to come down from the rocks or leave that canon.  One or two that he manoeuvered as far as the outlet sprang back in fear from something on the ground, which, on examination, he found—­yes, he swears to this—­to be the deep-worn, fresh-worn pathway of a Grizzly from one wall across to the other.  All the sheep were now back again beyond his reach.  Pedro began to fear for himself, so hastily returned to the main flock.  He was worse off than ever now.  The other Grizzly was a Bear of ordinary size and ate a sheep each night, but the new one, into whose range he had entered, was a monster, a Bear mountain, requiring forty or fifty sheep to a meal.  The sooner he was out of this the better.