“‘Climb a little tree! Climb a little tree!’ yelled Davy Crockett from his perch in his two-foot-through oak.
“I wasn’t in no joyous frame of mind when a nine-foot grizzly was due in the next mail, but I just had to laugh at his advice when I sized up his layout. As I jumped to one side the bear slid past, trying awful hard to stop, and he was doing real well, too. As he turned I slipped on some of that green grass, and thought as how the Old Man would have to get another puncher.
“‘I ain’t never going to peter out with a tenderfoot looking on if I can help it!’ I said to myself, and I jerked loose my six-shooter, shooting offhand and some hasty. It was just a last hope, the kick of a dying man’s foot, but it fetched him, blamed if it didn’t! He went down in a heap and clawed about for a spell, but I put five more in him, and then sat down. Did you ever notice how long it takes a grizzly to die? I loaded my gun in a hurry, the sweat pouring down my face, for that was one of the times it ain’t no disgrace to be some scared, which I was.
“‘Is he dead?’ called Davy Crockett from his tree, hopeful-like and some anxious.
“‘He is,’ I said, ‘or, leastawise, he was.’
“Davy was a sight. He was all skinned up from his clinch with the tree, though how he used his face getting up is more than I can tell. And he was some white and unsteady. He had all the hunting he wanted, and he managed to say that he was glad he hadn’t come out alone, and that he reckoned I was right about his guns after all. So we took a last look at the bear and lit out for the ranch, where I told the boys to go out and drag our game home.”
Jim knocked the ashes from his pipe and began to fill it anew, acting as though the story was finished, but Bud knew him well, and he spoke up:
“Well, what then?” he asked.
“Oh, the hunter left for New York the very next day, and I skinned the bear and sent the pelt after him as a present. When I wrote out my quarterly report, the foreman not being back yet, I told the Old Man that if he had any more friends what wanted to go hunting to send them up to Frenchy McAllister on the Tin Cup. I was some sore at Frenchy for the way he had cleaned me out at poker.”
He threw the skin to the floor and began to undress.