Both bears howled together, rattled their claws and gnashed their teeth, and, with a loud snarling, bounded towards the hapless captain. Mechanically, he drew his knife, but, on scrambling to his feet, experienced a fear so inexpressibly appalling that he forgot his determination to resist to the inevitable death, and leaped away in a mad scamper.
Accustomed to riding, he was not a good pedestrian; his winter garments were unsuitable, and he was no longer blessed with youth. Besides, to get over such ragged ground, and among tough, thorny, scrubby conifera, was impossible for one in blind haste. He could tell by their breathing that the two bears were nearing him, bound for bound. He had lost his knife, and his revolver having been torn out of his belt by a briar too, he was absolutely at the mercy—an unknown element—of his pursuers. He dared not turn his head; in hunters' phraseology, he felt them ruffle his hair with their breath; and, in truth, Old Ephraim and his spouse were not a dozen steps off. His own hair stood up, spite of a cold perspiration, for he felt that he was irremediably lost. In two or three minutes, say five at most, he would become that not unique subject of a well-worn Western epitaph—granting that he was left in buriable tatters—Unknown man gobbled up by grizzly.
He was stopped by the inability to make a further move; both bears reared up, and the least towered a head and shoulders above him. He was, by the force of education, striving to recall a prayer, when a human hand unexpectedly clutched him by the collar and dashed him down, crying in a voice most energetic:
"Lay down, you fool, and give a man a chance to shoot, will you not?"
As the captain again was buried in the snow, two rapid reports of a gun extinguished in their reverberations the growls of the grizzlies. Then arose a couple of painful lamentations from their hoarse throats, and, as Kidd lifted his head, he beheld with stupefied eyes a man disdainfully pursuing the bears and keeping them "on their run" with panic by pelting them with snowballs and splinters of ice till they disappeared over a mound and into some crevice, where the chaser deemed it good sense not to follow further.
"What is this all?" the gold grabber demanded, sitting up, still half dazed and wholly incredulous, and speaking Spanish, as one in dire straits always uses the mother tongue.
"Talk English," responded the other, returning rapidly and recharging his double-barrelled gun, according to hunters' rules, never to carry unloaded firearms in a dangerous country. "And don't talk to me of the courage of the grizzly any more. Are you alive? I mean, are you not wounded?"
"I am not sure how I am," returned the chief of the gold seekers, standing with difficulty, and staring at his rescuer.
It was Ranald Dearborn, clad as a regular hunter; but his face was not burnt and weather beaten yet, like a veteran's, and he had an elegant and almost dandified air, which his recent conduct belied.
He laughed as the captain brushed himself down, and "tried" all his joints, doubtingly.