h like a bear's
head peeping out of the brush.

"Pretty soon the dogs made a row up the gulch, and as the howls and
yells and promiscuous uproar came nearer I knew they had started a bear
and made him get a wiggle on. Boston danced around in great
excitement, and when I pointed to the black stump he was ready to see
bears most anywhere. 'You take care of that,' says I, 'and I'll go and
see what ails the dogs.' He opened fire on the stump, and I dodged
from tree to tree up the gulch until I was out of range.

"I never was in a battle, but if they made any more noise at Bull Run
than Boston was making, I'm glad I wasn't there. I thought I was
running away from the biggest fight on record. It was what our
military authors call 'a continual roll of musketry.' But while
running away from one battle I piled into another and had all the fight
I needed on my hands. The dogs and two bears were mixed up in some
sort of disagreement about things in general, and I was in it, as the
Dude would say, with both feet and a crutch. We got some tangled, but
things came my way pretty soon, and when the bears were laid out I
stopped to listen. The fight was still going on down the canyon. The
boy is still holding his own, I thought; it would be a pity to spoil
such a battle. So I went on and dressed my bears, while the steady
roll of musketry thundered in the gulch. Then I had a wash in the
creek, had a smoke and sat down at the foot of a tree and fell asleep.
The last I heard was a monotonous uproar indicating that the forces
down the gulch were stubbornly holding their ground.

"I never did know how long I slept, but when I awoke all was quiet.
Perhaps it was the silence following the cessation of hostilities that
awakened me. I set out to find Boston, and groped my way down the
gulch through a cloud of smoke. Presently I came to the scene of the
fray. Where my hero had made his first and last stand was a stack of
empty shells and the pump-gun so hot that it had set the dry leaves
afire, but the bear hunter was gone. I yelled, but got no answer. I
looked for tracks up and down the canyon, but there were no tracks.
The kid had vanished.

"Then I climbed up the side of the canyon, high enough to see the tops
of trees that stood in the bottom of the gulch. Near the scene of
hostilities was a giant sugar pine, the top of which had been broken
off. Boston had shinned up that tree when his ammunition gave out, and
when I