Presently Joe’s head appeared again as he climbed upon a boulder close to the edge of the cliff and peered around him.  A sudden rattling of iron upon stone, a deep growl and a castanet clashing of teeth, and the Grizzly arose behind Joe Screech, towering far above him and swinging the trap from his paw.  Joe Screech had time for but one glance of terror, and as he jumped the bear swung trap, chain and clog in the air and reached for him with a mighty blow.  It was the fifty-pound steel trap that landed upon Joe’s head and sent him plunging over the cliff just as Wood’s Winchester began to bark.  As fast as the lever could be worked the bullets thudded into the Grizzly’s back even while Joe was pitching forward.

[Illustration:  The Bear Swung Trap, Chain and Clog.]

Old Clubfoot had ignored the trap and the clog in his eagerness to reach the man with his nearest paw, and the impetus of the stroke, aided by the momentum of the circling clog, threw him from his balance.  Probably a bullet in the back of the head had its effect also, for the huge bulk of the bear toppled forward and followed Joe Screech over the cliff.

Wood scrambled desperately through the thicket to the cliff and looked down into Hetch-Hetchey.  A thousand feet below, where the talus began to slope from the sheer cliff, dust was still floating, and stones were sliding down a fresh scar in the loose soil of the steep incline toward the forest at the foot.

* * * * *

In his old age, the big brindled bear grew weary of being killed and resurrected and longed for a quiet life.  Little, ordinary, no-account bears had personated him and got themselves killed under false pretenses from one end of the Sierra to the other, and some of them had been impudent enough to carry their imposture to the extent of placing step-ladders against his sign-board trees and recording their alleged height a yard or two above his mark.  That made him tired.  Moreover the gout in his bad foot troubled him more and more, and he ceased to get much satisfaction from rolling around on a “flat wheel” and scaring people with his tracks.  Wherefore Clubfoot deserted his old haunts and went down into a green valley, inhabited by bee-keepers and other peaceable folk, where he lived on locusts and honey and forgot the strenuous life.

All went well with the retired terror of the mountains for a long time.  The only fly in the ointment of his content was Jerky Johnson, who kept dogs and went pirooting around the hills with a gun, making much noise and scaring the wits out of coyotes and jack rabbits.  Old Clubfoot realized that his eyes were dimming and his hearing becoming impaired, and it annoyed him to be always on the alert, lest he should come across Jerky in the brush and step on him inadvertently.

Jerky’s ostensible occupation, from which his front name was derived, was killing deer and selling jerked venison, but if the greater part of his stock was not plain jerked beef, the cattle-men in that section were victims of strange hallucinations and harborers of nefarious suspicions.  Although Clubfoot was credited with large numbers of dead steers found on the ranges, he was conscious of his own innocence, due to some extent to the loss of most of his teeth, and he had better reason than the cow-men had for putting it up to Jerky.