“No, I wasn’t thinking of him,” Bumpus declared; “but then there might be a few elephants or rhinoceroses, or camels, or something else hanging around these diggings, waiting to get acquainted. I don’t like meetin’ up with ’em so sudden like. Whiff! bang! and then good-bye! Why, it ain’t decent to treat a feller that way without bein’ introduced first.”
“And to think that the sly old critter was up there all the time we kept talkin’ and carryin’ on down here?” said Davy Jones, who had come out of the affair with only a skinned knee, owing to striking up against some wood on the floor, when he threw himself wildly to one side at sight of the descending bear.
“What d’ye think ever started him movin’?” asked Bumpus.
“Smoke do it,” replied Eli. “The ole bear, he lies quiet, not knowin’ what to make o’ us comin’ in here, whar he’s expectin’ to take up his winter quarters. But purty soon thet smoke it begins to smart his eyes. Bears don’t like smoke, any more’n any animile does. So gettin’ frightened arter a while, he starts down the ladder, misses his grip, an’ lands in a heap on the floor. If I’d be’n able tuh git hold o’ a gun I’d a guv him his pill; but I guess it’d be’n dangerous work shootin’ in here, with so many ’raound.”
“Will we ever run across him again?” remarked Step Hen, as he felt all over his body, to ascertain how many scratches or bruises had resulted from the rather hurried way in which he took his recent departure. “I don’t mind being fired from a cannon,” he continued, as several twinges of pain told him he had not come through the ordeal entirely unscathed; “but I draw the line at being made a football by a scared bear. Wonder he didn’t break every rib I have. As ’tis, I wouldn’t be much s’prised if a dozen or so were fractured.”
“Well, we’ll make you a strait jacket to-morrow, and keep you in a plaster cast the rest of the trip,” declared Giraffe; chuckling in rare good humor, because, for once at least, he had not been caught up in the little whirl.
“Like fun you will,” grumbled Step Hen, getting Bumpus to rub his back for him, on promise of returning the favor in kind.
“But I think somebody ought to go up and look that loft over,” suggested Davy Jones. “How do we know but what it’s just full of bears right now. ’Tain’t the nicest thing to think such a load’s goin’ to drop down on your head any old time. He might upset my coffee when I get to drinkin’, too.”
So, to quiet the boys, Jim climbed up, taking the little electric torch along with him. Upon his reporting that all was clear some of the others also ascended, to see where the bear had been sleeping at the time of their arrival.
“Now, if there was only a couple of nice jolly little cubs around, we’d have heaps of fun playing with ’em,” Bumpus suggested, as he too examined the loft, and saw where the bear had been making a soft sleeping place out of dead leaves that must have drifted in through a hole at the end of the roof, but much too small to let the big beast go out that way.