“What is it?” asked his companions in a breath.
“We’d better be getting away from here, fellows,” replied Dick, so excited that he could scarcely speak plainly. “There’s the old rascal himself.”
“Who? Where? You don’t mean Old Davy!”
The boys had talked bravely enough about meeting this dreaded monster; but now that they were close upon him, their courage began to ooze out at the ends of their fingers, and the faces they turned toward Dick were a good deal paler than usual.
“Yes, I do mean Old Davy. Don’t you see him sitting there at the foot of that mammoth oak?”
The boys looked through the trees in the direction Dick pointed, and, sure enough, there was the grizzly, scarcely more than a hundred yards distant. There could be no mistake as to his identity, for there was the bald spot on his forehead as plain as daylight. They had got themselves into a nice scrape.
That was the first thought that passed through Frank’s mind, and the next was that he would never again have a word to say about Marmion’s courage. He had never been more astonished in his life, than he was when he witnessed the actions of his favorite. The hero of a score of hard-fought battles, the dog that had been at the killing of half a dozen bears, and never once hesitated to attack the largest of them—Marmion the infallible, upon discovering Old Davy, uttered one howl of terror, and faced about and fled for dear life. The hounds followed close at his heels, and such a scrambling to get out of harm’s way Frank had never seen before. They were out of sight in an instant.
The boys had prepared themselves to see something frightful when they came within sight of Old Davy, and they were not disappointed. He was even larger and uglier than their imaginations had pictured him. He sat on his haunches at the root of a huge oak, swinging his head slowly, from side to side, and apparently unconscious of the presence of the young hunters.
“Well, fellows,” said Frank, who was the coolest one in the party, “we’ve found the old villain, and now what are we going to do with him?”
“Let’s shoot at him and run,” suggested Archie.