“Boys, smoke him up,” I said, after the manner of Haught’s vernacular.  So while I reloaded R.C. and Nielsen began to shoot.  We had more fun out of it than the bear.  Evidently he located us.  Then he began to run, choosing the open slope by which he had come.  I got five more shots at him as he crossed this space, and the last bullet puffed up dust under him, making him take a header down the slope into the thicket.  Whereupon we all had a good laugh.  Nielsen appeared particularly pleased over his first shots at a real live bear.

“Say, why didn’t you think to ride round there?” queried R.C. thoughtfully.  “He didn’t see us.  He wasn’t scared.  In a few minutes you could have been on the rim of that slope right over him.  Got him sure!”

“R.C. why didn’t you think to tell me to do that?” I retorted.  “Why don’t we ever think the right thing before it is too late?”

“That’s our last chance this year—­I feel it in my bones,” declared R.C. mournfully.

His premonition turned out to be correct.  Upon our arrival at camp we heard some very disquieting news.  A neighbor of Haught’s had taken the trouble to ride up to inform us about the epidemic of influenza.  The strange disease was all over the country, in the cities, the villages, the cow-camps, the mines—­everywhere.  At first I thought Haught’s informant was exaggerating a mere rumor.  But when he told of the Indians dying on the reservations, and that in Flagstaff eighty people had succumbed in a few weeks—­then I was thoroughly alarmed.  Imperative was it indeed for me to make a decision at once.  I made it instantly.  We would break camp.  So I told the men.  Doyle was relieved and glad.  He wanted to get home to his family.  The Haughts, naturally, were sorry.  My decision once arrived at, the next thing was to consider which way to travel.  The long ten-day trip down into the basin, round by Payson, and up on the rim again, and so on to Flagstaff was not to be considered at all.  The roads by way of Winslow and Holbrook were long and bad.  Doyle wanted to attempt the old army road along the rim made by General Crook when he moved the captured Apaches to the reservation assigned to them.  No travel over this road for many years!  Haught looked dubious, but finally said we could chop our way through thickets, and haul the wagon empty up bad hills.  The matter of decision was left to me.  Decisions of such nature were not easy to make.  The responsibility was great, but as the hunt had been for me it seemed incumbent upon me to accept responsibility.  What made me hesitate at all was the fact that I had ridden five miles or more along the old Crook road.  I remembered.  I told Lee and I told Nielsen that we would find it tough going.  Lee laughed like a cowboy:  “We’ll go a-hummin’,” he said.  Nielsen shrugged his brawny shoulders.  What were obstacles to this man of the desert?  I realized that his look had decided me.

“All right, men, we’ll try the old Crook road,” I said.  “Pack what you can up to the wagon to-day, and to-morrow early we’ll break camp.”