“Roast her whole, boys,—I could eat a rhinoc’ros raw!” gaped Big John. “We’ve been climbin’ since ten o’clock ’smornin’. Lucky I thought to take my rope down with me. We had to haul them dawgs up the chutes, one at a time.”
Sid and Niltci picked up the cougar skin and the whole party started for camp. An hour later a monumental mulligan, compounded of cougar chunks, spuds, onions, peas, tomatoes and macaroni, boiled in an eight-quart pail, was served. Big John and Scotty were still prodding into the bottom of it with their spoons when Sid and Niltci sat back utterly stuffed. The Colonel had long since departed for his lonely vigil near the buck carcass, awaiting the coming of the Yellow Grizzly.
They stretched out the cougar skin and measured it—nine feet two inches, with three feet six of tail—but could get nothing but uninterested grunts from those two, who still scooped in the mulligan pail for more. Then Scotty and Big John rolled over without a further word and fell sound asleep where they lay.
It was broad daylight when Sid awoke again, and the sun must have been ten o’clock high. The Colonel had not returned. Scotty and Big John slept heavily, for Nature had a lot of fixing up to do on them yet. Niltci was gone. Sid hoped that he had tracked his father to the rocky gulch, for he felt mighty uneasy about that great yellow bear of the fourteen-inch track, with only a lone hunter to face him. All he had ever read about the California Silver-Tip came to mind. The largest one ever measured weighed 1,150 pounds and was nine feet from nose to tail and over ten feet across the fore paws. That was as large as any Alaska brown bear, yet with the ferociousness and agility of the grizzly to back all that weight and strength. The Black Panther would be a mere kitten compared to this brute! The average Bengal tiger weighed 340 pounds and would go something over eleven feet; the largest cougar was under three hundred pounds. Even the Black Panther would not reach over three hundred, judging from the skin of the cat Scotty had killed. The Yellow Grizzly was three times as big as any of them, and quite as active and ferocious. He doubted whether the .35 was rifle enough to stop him.
Sid had about decided to take Scotty’s .405 and try to ride to the gulch to see what had happened, when he looked up, to see a Navaho Indian standing silently before him. The man’s face looked somehow familiar. Sid thought he recognized him as one of the bucks at the Fire Dance, as the red man held out a grimy envelope and proffered it with a bronzed and friendly smile.
Sid tore it open, although it was addressed to Colonel Colvin.
“Dear Colonel [it read]:
“All halleluiah has broken loose in wagon loads, here. I hate to send for the Agent, and perhaps get out a troop of soldiers, but I’ll have to do it if it gets much worse. The Indians have spirited old Neyani off somewhere, and I reckon they’ll make a sacrifice of him to appease Dsilyi in spite of all I can do for him. I found a wild story about the Black Panther having taken Niltci, the boy, when I got here. You had left for the Canyon, but the Panther came back only a few nights later and took another sheep from Neyani’s corral. You can understand how the Indians took that! They wanted to wipe out Neyani’s whole family. If I had dogs I’d track that confounded cougar and do away with him, somehow, but I can’t lay for him and shoot him here or my influence over these redskins would be gone forever. If you can break your hunt to come over here with the dogs I would be eternally grateful. Meet me in Canyon Cheyo, near the mouth of Monument Canyon, which is a good landmark. I’ll be there, and we’ll put something over on this superstitious bunch of redskins. I declare, I lose all patience with them sometimes!
“Yours in haste,
“J. F. Hinchman, Maj. U. S. A. Ret’d.”
Sid made up his mind at once. It was necessary to get rid of the Indian runner, first, so that their movements could be made unwatched by the Navaho. He went to his tent and tore a fly leaf out of a small leather notebook in his tent wall pocket. He wrote a brief message that they were coming, rolled it small, and slipped it into an empty rifle cartridge. Corking it with a bit of pine, he returned to hand it to the runner.