"No," you said, and the dead bear purred and rubbed his head against your legs. Once, after you had killed and eaten him, he mewed and ran before you to his basket-cave; and there were five little bears, all blind and crying, and you took them home and tamed them by the kitchen fire.
But the bear was nothing to the Wild Man who lived next door. In the barn, close to your fence, he lay in wait for little girls and boys to eat them and drink their blood and gnaw their bones. Oh, you had seen him once yourself, as you peered through a knot-hole in the barn-side. He was sitting on an upturned water-pail, smoking a pipe and muttering.
You and Lizbeth stole out to look at him. Hand in hand you tiptoed across the clover prairie where the red Indians roved. You scanned the horizon, but there was not a feather or painted face in sight to-day—though they always came when you least expected them, popping up from the tall grass with wild, blood-curdling yells, and scalping you when you didn't watch out. Across the prairie, then, you went, silently, hand in hand. The sun fell warm and golden in the open. Birds were singing in the sky, unmindful of the lurking perils among the tall grass and beyond the fence. Back of you were home and Mother's arms, and in the pantry window, cooling, two juicy pies. Before you, across the clover, a great gray dungeon frowned upon you; within its walls a creature of blood and mystery waiting with hungry jaws. Hushed and timorous, you approached.
"Oh, I'm afraid," Lizbeth whimpered. Savagely you caught her arm.
"'Sh! He'll hear you," you hissed through chattering teeth. A cloud hid the sun, and the ominous shadow fell upon you as you crouched, trembling, on the edge of the raspberry wood.
"Sh!" you said. Under cover of the forest shade you crept with bated breath, on all-fours, stealthily. Oh, what was that? That awful sound, that hideous groan? From the barn it came, with a crunching of teeth and a rattle of chain. Lizbeth gave a little cry, seized you, and hid her face against your coat.
"'Sh!" you said. "That's him! Hear him!"
Through wood and prairie rang a piercing cry—
"Mother! I want my mother!"
And Lizbeth fled, wailing, across the plain. You followed—to cheer her.