“About the size of house cats, that’s all.”
“Then what?”
“Oh, I put ’em into my shirt and tuk ’em home. I sold ’em afterwards to a circus man.”
“Well, do lions always act the way this one did to-night?”
“I heard tell of a boy that was out with an old three dollar Winchester 22, and a dog that had lost a leg in a bear trap. Pretty soon he barked ‘treed.’ He had a lion up in a scrub oak. It came down fighting, so the boy had to circle around trying to find a chance to shoot. Then it jumped up into a pine tree and lay with its head over the limb looking down at him. He shot at it, but I guess it didn’t hit, for it ran again, and by jings, it finally got clean away!”
“Don’t they ever fight?” marveled Pedro.
“They’ll fight a dog if they come down wounded, but the big cats are mostly cowards.”
“But bears are not?”
“Bears? No, nothing cowardly about them. They’re more lazy’n anything else.”