The brute started, uttered his sharp, bark-like cry, and then bolted away and vanished in the darkness, without offering to harm the man who lay helpless at his feet.
“Begorra! but he’s a gintleman, as Micky Dunn obsarved of the man that cracked his crown. That’s the sicind time he’s give me the go-by, and the nixt time he does it we’ll shake hands and swear we’re friends.”
“It beats thunder!” exclaimed old Stebbins, who was now prepared to believe Teddy’s account of his extraordinary meeting with this animal.
“It can’t be that he don’t eat men,” said Black Tom, “for Stumpy Sam said he see’d it chaw up one of their men.”
“I guess he don’t like Irishmen.”
“It’s meself that thinks he does,” retorted Teddy, “for he’s tr’ated me like a gintleman all the way through.”
“Ain’t yer going to climb up ag’in?” asked Tom.
“What’s the use, when it’s more comfortable here, as Micky McFee remarked when he was axed to come out of the gutter.”
The Irishman made no attempt to re-climb the tree, although he looked carefully about in every direction in quest of the dreaded creature.