"Hampered although he was, he battled it out fiercely--ay, heroically-- as six of our best hounds maimed for life, and one slain outright, testified.
"Heavens! how the fat man scrambled across the fence! he reached the spot, and, far too much excited to reload his piece and quietly blow out the fierce brute's brains, fell to belaboring him about the head with his gun-stock, shouting the while and yelling; so that the din of his tongue, mixed with the snarls and long howls of the mangled savage, and the fierce baying of the dogs, fairly alarmed me, as I said before, at a mile's distance.
"As it chanced, Timothy was on the road close by, with Peacock; I caught sight of him, mounted, and spurred on fiercely to the rescue; but when I reached the hill's brow, all was over. Tom, puffing and panting like a grampus in shoal water, covered--garments and face and hands--with lupine gore, had finished his huge enemy, after he had destroyed his gun, with what he called a stick, but what you and I, Frank, should term a fair-sized tree; and with his foot upon the brindled monster's neck was quaffing copious rapture from the neck of a quart bottle--once full, but now well nigh exhausted--of his appropriate and cherished beverage.* [*The facts and incidents of the lame wolf's death are strictly true, although they were not witnessed by the writer.] Thus fell the last wolf on the Hills of Warwick!
"There, I have finished my yarn, and in good time," cried Harry, "for here we are at the bridge, and in five minutes more we shall be at old Tom's door."
"A right good yarn!" said Forester; "and right well spun, upon my word."
"But is it a yarn?" asked A---, "or is it intended to be the truth?"
"Oh! the truth," laughed Frank, "the truth, as much as Archer can tell the truth; embellished, you understand, embellished!"
"The truth, strictly," answered Harry, quietly--"the truth not embellished. When I tell personal adventures, I am not in the habit of decorating them with falsehood."
"I had no idea," responded the Commodore, "that there had been any wolves here so recently."
"There are wolves here now," said Archer, "though they are scarce and wary. It was but last year that I rode down over the back-bone of the mountain, on the Pompton road, in the nighttime, and that on the third of July, and one fellow followed me along the road till I got quite down into the cultivated country."