“How did it end?” Thad remarked, straining his eyes to look ahead.
“Say, wouldn’t it be just great now,” Giraffe broke out with, “if we’d just come up with Bumpus asquattin’ in the crotch of a tree, all his ammunition fired away, and that old bear sittin’ on his haunches below, awaitin’ for him to come down?”
“I’d just like to see it,” said Step Hen, making a suggestive gesture with his gun. “I’d try to drive a few dum-dum bullets into his hulking old carcase.”
“But perhaps Bumpus mightn’t be so smart about getting up in a tree, when a wounded bear was charging him,” Giraffe ventured to remark.
All of them had a painful recollection of that other episode, when Bumpus, rashly discharged his ten-bore Marlin at the monster, and would have been caught trying to climb a tree, only for the help he received from one of his comrades.
“But Bumpus doesn’t make the same mistake twice, I notice,” said Thad, firmly; “and if he fired at this bear, I’m pretty sure he first of all had a tree picked out that he could climb, all right.”
“I warrant you he did, Thad,” Giraffe added.
They were all of them only too eager to believe the best. The very thought of Bumpus, after all the good work he had been doing, meeting such a dreadful fate as being torn to pieces by a bear, was something they tried to banish from their minds as incredible.
Nevertheless, in spite of all this outward display of confidence, they continued to cast eager glances ahead as they pushed on.
Giraffe about this time remembered that there were others also interested in the fate of the lone scout.