“Along came the black bear, wounded, growling and as mad as tarnation. And up went the rifle, and I fired. Down went the critter on his side; he gave a couple of kicks and was dead.”
“Quite an experience,” said Mr. Burr. “Suppose you had, in your hurry, loaded your rifle improperly and it had missed fire. What would you have done?”
“Run,” said Crockett, promptly; “run as fast as my legs could carry me. A wounded bear is no kind of a beast to stand and reason with.”
“What did you do with him after you got him?” asked Ned Chandler.
“Well, as he was all of six hundred pounds, I couldn’t do much myself. So I got back to my cabin as quick as I could, got some friends and some horses, and we started out to find the carcass. I’d blazed the way with my tomahawk, and we hadn’t much trouble in coming to the place. Then we dressed the critter, loaded the meat on the horses’ backs and took it home.”
The genial hunter told many quaint and stirring tales of his experiences in the Indian wars, in the deep forests of the southwest, and of the wild and dangerous animals with which those forests were overrun. The lawless character who is always to be found on the outskirts of civilization also came into his conversation.
“Wherever you go in the southwest country, you run across him,” said Colonel Crockett. “He’s to be found in every settlement, in every camp, traveling every trail. He’s always armed, he’s usually got courage, he never fails to cause trouble.”
“I’ve met that sort of fellow myself,” nodded the planter, Burr. “He’s to be avoided.”
But Crockett shook his head.
“Not always,” said he. “The fact that people give him the width of the trail in passing is one of the things that encourages him to go even further than he’d gone before. That kind of a fellow should always be shown his proper place. He should be opposed when he makes a move to interfere with the rights of others.”