At sunrise he resumed his course, walking amid picturesque scenery—on the right the sparkling sea, on the left glorious pine-clad mountains.
Late in the afternoon Paul, who had followed the post-road, reached a point where it entered a magnificent forest. As this wild-wood was just the sort of place where banditti might be expected to lurk, Paul's first impulse was to turn aside, and to take the more circuitous way along the sea-beach.
"You fear!" a secret voice seemed to whisper: and the reproach decided his route. Not even in his own eyes would he be a coward.
This choice of a road was but a small matter, one might think; yet it was to form the turning-point of his life.
He walked forward at a quick pace, and, with an eye to a challenge from some outlaw of the forest, he kept his hand constantly upon the butt of his revolver.
He did not meet with a bandit, however, but with a bear—the first he had ever seen in a wild, free state.
The creature came shambling from the wood on one side of the road a few yards in front of him, and there it stood, with its eyes fixed upon the wayfarer, as if questioning the right of man to invade these solitudes.
"An adventure at last!" murmured Paul, tingling with excitement. "Ursus Styriacus from his size. Now to emulate Hereward the Wake."
As previously stated Paul was an excellent shot, and inasmuch as his revolver was six-chambered he had little fear as to the result of the encounter.
The killing of a bear is the easiest thing in the world, at least according to the theory set forth by a hunter whom Paul had met the previous evening at the hostelry.