His dark skin reddened, and his eyes blazed in excitement. He flung the dipper from him and started toward the cabin on a run. They were killing tame sheep--sheep that he had taught to lose their fear of man. Then his footsteps slackened and he felt half sick as he remembered that the big-game season was open and he had no legal right to interfere.
Bruce had not seen a human face save Slim's since the end of May, and it now was late in October, but he had no desire to meet the hunters and hear them boast of their achievement. Heavy-hearted, he wondered which ones they got.
The hunters must have come over the old trail of the Sheep-eater Indians--the one which wound along the backbone of the ridge. Rough going, that. They were camped up there, and they must have a big pack outfit, he reasoned, to get so far from supplies at this season of the year.
He tried to work again, but found himself upset.
"Dog-gone," he said finally. "I'll slip up the cañon and see what they've done. They may have left a wounded sheep for the cougars to finish--if they did I can pack it down."
Bruce climbed for an hour or more up the bowlder-choked cañon before his experienced eye saw signs of the hunters in two furrows where a pair of heels had plowed down a bank of dirt. The cañon, as he knew, ended abruptly in a perpendicular wall, and he soon saw that the frightened sheep must have run headlong into the trap. He found the prints of their tiny, flying hoofs, the indentations where the sharp points had dug deep as they leaped. Empty shells, more shells--they must have been bum shots--and then a drop of blood upon a rock. The drops came thicker, a stream of blood, and then the slaughter pen. They had been shot down against the wall without a single chance for their lives. The entire band, save Old Felix, had been exterminated. Their limp and still-bleeding carcasses, riddled and torn by soft-nosed bullets, lay among the rocks. Wanton slaughter it was, without even the excuse of the necessity of meat, since only a yearling's hind quarters were gone. Not even the plea of killing for trophies could be offered, since the heads of the ewes were valueless.
Bruce straightened the neck of a ewe as she lay with her head doubled under her. It hurt him to see her so. He looked into her dull, glazed eyes which had been so soft and bright as they had followed him at work a little more than an hour before. He ran his hand over a sheep's white "blanket," now red with blood, and stood staring down into the innocent face of the diminutive lamb.