"But the next second down I went, flat and breathless, struck full on the side by his huge paw. I managed to give a last rip, as wild as you please, with my knife. 'It's all up surely with me this time,' I recollect saying to myself, in a very dim sort of fashion. I lay there unconscious, bleeding from twenty wounds, and utterly in my enemy's clutches.
"How long this state of affairs lasted I've no means of telling. About half an hour, maybe. But it appeared to me that I had been dead and buried a week when gradually I began to feel myself a living man. After a few seconds more, in which everything seemed black and spinning around me, I was able to keep my eyes open a bit.
"'Well, I'm not killed yet, I guess,' thinks I, 'after all, unless there's a Rocky Mountains in t'other world as well as in this one.' Just then I felt the blood on my hands and neck. 'Good gracious! that bear!' I thought in a jiffey. I propped myself up weakly on my elbow, and gave a very cautious glance first on one side, then on the other—and lo! there a couple of paces off lay a pile of fur without motion or sound. The bear it was. My very last blow had saved my life by penetrating exactly to his heart, and over he must have plumped just at the minute I did.
"How I stanched my wounds and gashes and contrived to join my brother Julius and the rest of the party I can't detain you to describe here. Enough to say that I did, with both my pelts too, though the bear's was badly gashed, of course. If, however, you've a mind to come into the house yonder, I'll give you one of the biggest bear's claws that you ever saw in your life, and you can have a breastpin for your little girl made out of it."
"CLEAR THE TRACK!"—From the Painting by J. C. Brown.