“I rushed forwards and cried to the lordly beast above, jest ready to spring: ‘Don’t harm Josiah! Devour me instead.’” (See page 303)
I knowed I would make a better meal for it; Josiah is lean and boney. But I won’t try to make myself out better than I am; I didn’t think of the lion’s digestion, and how Josiah would set on his stomach. My only thought wuz to save my pardner. And with a herculaneum effort I reached his side, and snatched him away jest as a shot rung out and the noble beast fell, his great, shaggy head restin’ on the balustrade, lookin’ down on the crowd below as if in questionin’ agony and contempt, as though his last thoughts wuz:
“Did you tear me away from my own free, beautiful, tropical forest for such a fate as this? Where is man’s boasted wisdom and power? I could have cared for myself, lived and died in happiness and safety, but civilized man has ruined and destroyed the wild beast.”
The rest of that seen is like a dream to me. I guess when the heavy dread and fear I had carried so long, wuz lifted from my brain, it made me light-headed. ’Tennyrate, it don’t seem as if I come fully to myself, till Josiah and I wuz takin’ leave at Bildad’s with tickets for Jonesville in our pockets.
The agony I had went through there, and my joy in his recovery wuz such, that I didn’t throw 306 Josiah’s waywardness in his face (not much of any). But if you’ll believe it—and I don’t spoze you will—he turned the tables ’round, and blamed me. That is often done by pardners of both sects, when they feel real guilty, to try to draw attention off their own misdoin’s, by findin’ fault with their pardners. It has been done time and agin, and I spoze will be, as long as man is man, and woman is woman.