“All right.  When I say go, jump and run as though you were scooting through hell with a keg of powder under your arm.”

Jeff and Jess crawled out on the limbs and swung by their hands for a moment, and at the word they dropped to the ground within ten feet of the bear and lit out like scared wolves.  They broke right through the burning brush, getting their hair singed as they went.  The bear started after them, but he was afraid to go through the fire, and while he was finding a way out of the circle of burning brush and timber, Jeff and Jess struck out down the mountain side, making about fifteen feet at a jump, and never stopped running until they got to the creek and out of the bear’s sight.

CHAPTER XVIII.

How old Pinto died.

This is an incredible bear story, but it is true.  George Gleason told it to a man who knew the bear so well that he thought the old Pinto Grizzly belonged to him and wore his brand, and as George is no bear hunter himself, but is a plain, ordinary, truthful person, there is not the slightest doubt that he related only the facts.  George said some of the facts were incredible before he started in.  He had never heard or read of such tenacity of life in any animal.  But there are precedents, even if George never heard of them.

The vitality of the California Grizzly is astonishing, as many a man has sorrowful reason to know, and the tenacity of the Old Pinto’s hold on life was remarkable, even among Grizzlies.  This Pinto was a famous bear.  His home was among the rocks and manzanita thickets of La Liebra Mountain, a limestone ridge southwest of Tehachepi that divides Gen. Beale’s two ranches, Los Alamos y Agua Caliente and La Liebra, and his range was from Tejon Pass to San Emigdio.  His regular occupation was killing Gen. Beale’s cattle, and the slopes of the hills and the cienegas around Castac Lake were strewn with the bleached bones of his prey.  For twenty years that solitary old bear had been monarch of all that Gen. Beale surveyed—­to paraphrase President Lincoln’s remark to Surveyor-General Beale himself—­and wrought such devastation on the ranch that for years there had been a standing reward for his hide.

Men who had lived in the mountains and knew the old Pinto’s infirmity of temper were wary about invading his domains, and not a vaquero could be induced to go afoot among the manzanita thickets of the limestone ridge.  The man who thought he owned the Pinto followed his trail for two months many years ago and learned many things about him; among others that the track of his hind foot measured fourteen inches in length and nine inches in width; that the hair on his head and shoulders was nearly white; that he could break a steer’s neck with a blow of his paw; that he feared neither man nor his works; that while he would invade a camp with leisurely indifference, he would not enter the stout oak-log traps constructed for his capture; and finally, that it would be suicide to meet him on the trail with anything less efficient than a Gatling gun.