Presently she did come back. She ran in hurriedly, and her face was flushed. "Here is a very bad piece of business," she said. "That man's bear has eaten the tire off one of your wheels!"
"What!" I exclaimed, and my heart bounded within me. Here, perhaps, was the solution of all my troubles. If by any happy chance my bicycle had been damaged, of course I could not go on.
"Come and see," she said, and, following her through the back hall door, we entered a large, enclosed yard. Not far from the house was a shed, and in front of this lay my bicycle on its side in an apparently disabled condition. An Italian, greatly agitated, was standing by it. He was hatless, and his tangled black hair hung over his swarthy face. At the other end of the yard was a whitish-brown bear, not very large, and chained to a post.
I approached my bicycle, earnestly hoping that the bear had been attempting to ride it, but I found that he had been trying to do something very different. He had torn the pneumatic tire from one of the wheels, and nearly the whole of it was lying scattered about in little bits upon the ground.
"How did this happen?" I said to the Italian, feeling very much inclined to give him a dollar for the good offices of the beast.
The man began immediately to pour out an explanation upon me. His English was as badly broken as the torn parts of my tire, but I had no trouble in understanding. The bear had got loose in the night. He had pulled up a little post to which he had been chained. The man had not known it was such a weak post. The bear was never muzzled at night. He had gone about looking for something to eat. He was very fond of India-rubber—or, as the man called it, "Injer-rub." He always ate up India-rubber shoes wherever he could find them. He would eat them off a man's feet if the man should be asleep. He liked the taste of Injer-rub. He did not swallow it. He dropped it all about in little bits.
But We Were Not Alone
Then the man sprang towards me and seized the injured wheel. "See!" he exclaimed. "He eat your Injer-rub, but he no break your machine!"