Now it began to look as if the boys would never get out of the cave alive. The bear was between them and the entrance, so they could not run away from him. Alex felt for his automatic, but remembered that he had left it on board the Rambler.
Don managed to elude the claws of the bear as the rush came, but all the time he was being crowded into a corner from which there would be no escape. He, too, reached for his automatic, but did not find it.
He found something quite as useful, however, as the result showed, in the form of an electric flashlight! As the bear advanced the boy opened the sliding switch and turned the round eye of light full into his face. Then he advanced, shouting wildly.
Bruin’s small eyes flinched under the strong flame. He threw up his nose, sniffed at the intangible thing which cut such a path of fire in his quarters, and began backing out. Don followed him, still shouting.
The bear stopped for an instant to give Teddy, now rising from the floor, a box on the ear and backed out of the cave. At that moment Clay and Case, who had heard the shouting, appeared on the deck of the motor boat with weapons in their hands.
“Shoot him!” Alex cried out to them. “Shoot the big stiff! He’s injured Teddy. Give him a couple of bullets!”
Both boys fired and the bear went down. Vital spots had been, in both cases, reached by the bullets, and the big fellow moved only in convulsive struggles after he dropped on the smooth rock in front of the cavern.
“It seems a pity!” Case said, standing over the fallen giant with his still smoking revolver in his hand. “The poor old chap had just as good a right to life as any of us. I’m sorry I shot him!”
“I guess you didn’t see him slamming Teddy around, and backing Don up into a corner!” Alex cried. “Only for the searchlight, there would have been a dead boy instead of a dead bear—perhaps two dead boys!”
“How is Teddy?” Clay called out.