'I don't know; they were still as stones one moment and gone the next,' answered Snap.
'Bar! I reckon,' growled another cowboy; 'there always are bar about this forsaken camp.'
'You stay here till we come back, and if we aren't back by to-morrow noon make tracks for Rosebud,' shouted Atkins as he galloped off, leaving Snap alone in camp without an idea where Rosebud was or how he was ever going to get there.
However, as there was nothing to be done, he had a look first to see if his horse was all right, and then, being reassured upon that point, kicked the embers of the camp fire into a blaze, put the frying-pan, with some cold bacon in it, left over from supper, somewhere handy for breakfast, and lay down in his rugs. In five minutes he had forgotten his loneliness, and was in as sweet a sleep as innocence and hard work ever won for a weary mortal. It was almost dawn when he woke with a start, hearing his buckskin snorting and crashing about in the bushes close to him. As he jumped to his feet he heard the frying-pan rattle, and as he glanced in that direction he saw a huge, heavy beast slope off into the forest. I say 'slope' advisedly, although it is slang. What a bear does, I suppose, is to gallop, but that word gives you an idea of great speed, which would be wrong. If I had said 'canter,' the graceful pace of a lady's hack is at once conjured up before your mind's eye, and there is very little grace in Bruin's movements. He doesn't trot, and he only 'shuffles' when he is walking. If I had said 'roll,' which in some degree describes his action, the word would not have necessarily implied the use of feet at all, so I must stick, please, to 'slope,' as being the best word to express the smooth, quiet way which a bear has of conveying himself with a certain rapidity out of harm's way.
The light was very dim, as the time was that mysterious season between midnight and dawn, and Snap knew very little about rifles, but, being thoroughly English, without counting the cost he snatched up a Winchester repeating rifle, and proceeded to 'pump lead' at the vanishing bear as long as he could see him. Then all was still again, and remained so until two cheeky little 'robber-birds,' in coats of grey and black, came hopping round the dead embers with their heads on one side, complaining noisily that the upturned frying-pan was quite empty. Snap, too, was sorry for this, and wished that he had interrupted Bruin a little earlier in his midnight pilfering.
When the dawn had fully come, and the great red sun was climbing up into the heavens, the boy went to look at the bear's tracks. Later on, when he had learnt some of the secrets of wood-craft, those tracks would have been plain enough to him—a story written in large print, which he could easily read from his saddle. Now, groping about with his nose almost on the ground, he could not make much of them, and hardly knew the bear's tracks from his pony's. At last (and not very far from the camp fire) Snap came upon a great splash of blood. Even he (inexperienced though he was) understood this, and rightly concluded that the bear was hit. 'A deuced lucky fluke,' he said to himself honestly enough, as he went back to the fireside, his eyes brightening, as far away on the plain outside the clump of bull-pines he saw two of the cowboys cantering towards him. They were soon alongside and listened to his story, after which they went to look at the tracks.
'Wal,' said one, 'you've got the right sort o' grit, lad, but it's tarnation lucky for you that that bar as you shot at warn't the critter as stampeded them cows last night.'
'Why?' asked Snap.
'Why? wal,' replied the cowboy, 'them tracks is the tracks of a black bar, and they ain't of no account. The bar as stampeded them cattle last night was a grizzly, and if you'd happened to take it into your head to do a little rifle-shooting at him with that thing—wal! you wouldn't have been here this morning.'