There it was standing before him—the same monster he had seen from his seat aboard the air ship. A full-grown grizzly, the “Mountain Charlie” of the California ranchers and hunters, a very giant of devilish ferocity and unafraid of anything that walked on two or four feet, monarch of the foothills and canyons of the mighty Rockies!
The grizzly growled again, this time with added vigor as if wanting the wretched invader of his hunting grounds to thoroughly understand he would put up with no trifling and that he must speedily “skip the ranch” unless he wished to be scattered around the whole neighborhood in pieces.
“Holy Smoke!”
That was as far as Perk got in starting to express his agitated feelings for the standing bear had made a movement that started him toward the campfire and the amazed aviator. Perhaps by this time Jack may have also awakened but Perk gave no heed to such a possibility. As the self-appointed guardian of the slumbering camp it was up to him to stand like a rock in its defense.
No right or left tackle on the gridiron ever made a more furious plunge in an effort to stop the hurtling progress of the enemy player carrying the pigskin toward the goal posts than Perk set in motion just then, urged on as with a goad by the necessity for clutching that firearm upon which he was depending so much.
He landed in a huddle, snatched at the gun, dropped it in his wild excitement, pawed around for what seemed a full agonized minute but which evidently lasted less than five seconds and finally found himself clutching the object of his mad groveling. Even then he got mixed a bit and was presenting the butt of the weapon toward the oncoming growling bear when, recognizing his mistake he managed to swing it around.
Another blunder just then might have cost him dear but Perk, now fully alive to the emergency cooled down sufficiently to move the little lever which would start the machine-gun to spitting out its discharges in one—two—three style as long as the belt of cartridges held out and he, Perk, refrained from shutting off the mechanism by which it was worked.
The bear was not twenty feet away when this hurricane of lead began to rain upon him with oft repeated thuds. His growls had been followed by the most dreadful roarings to which those near-by cliffs had ever echoed. He dropped down on all fours, shuffled this way and that, like a boy trying to evade the attacks of a swarm of maddened yellow jackets whose nest he had the temerity to strike with a club. But all without avail, since the now equally aroused Perk had only to switch the muzzle of his little cannon a trifle to continue bombarding him right along.
The gigantic beast rolled over this way and that, stroke to get upon his feet again, his bellows becoming less vociferous as his wounds increased with frightful rapidity. There could be no telling when Perk would ever have stopped firing only that a hand grasped his weapon and turned it upward toward the starry heavens while the voice of Jack roared in his ear:
“Hold hard, brother, you’ve got him shot full of holes as it is. What’s the use ruining his hide? Some day you’ll be proud to rest your feet on a rug made from a genuine old grizzly you potted all by yourself out here in the Rockies.”