slid down
and lit out for the brush. Ari swears that the bear understood him.
Bears have a heap of sabe, but I'm inclined to think that it was Ari's
stentorian roar that scared him away."

"That's one of Art's fairy tales," said Joe. "Let Ari tell it, and he
has had more bear fights and killed more Grizzlies than anybody, but
the fact is that his brother-in-law, Jim Freer, did all the killing.
You never heard of Ari going bear hunting without Jim. When they'd
find any bears Ari would go up a tree and Jim would stand his ground
and do up the bear. Jim never gets excited in a scrimmage, and he's a
dead shot. He'll stand in his tracks and wait for a bear, and when the
brute gets near him he'll raise his rifle as steadily as though he were
at a turkey shoot and put the bullet in the exact spot every time. If
that had been the piebald Grizzly of the Piru that treed Art, he
wouldn't have scared him out of the tree."

"What's the piebald Grizzly?" inquired Dad in an incredulous tone. "I
never heard of no such bear as that."

"Oh, you needn't think I'm lying. I wouldn't lie about bears."

"How about deer?"

"Well, that's different. I never knew a hunter or any chap that likes
a gun and a tramp in the mountains who wouldn't lie about a deer except
Jim Bowers. He doesn't lie worth a cent. Why Bowers will go out after
venison, come back without a darned thing, and then tell how many deer
he shot at and missed. I've known him to miss a sleeping deer at
thirty yards and come into camp and tell all about it. When I do a
thing like that I come back and lie about it. I swear I haven't seen a
deer all day long."

"If you told the truth," said Dad, "we'd hear nothing but deer
stories--the missing kind--all night."

"That's all right, but I'm telling about bears now. This bear I speak
of is a big Grizzly that some people call Old Clubfoot. Jim Freer
knows him better than anybody, I reckon. Jim got caught in a mountain
fire over on the Frazier one day, and he had to hunt for water pretty
lively. He found a pool about five yards across down in a gully, and
he jumped in there and laid down in the water. He hadn't more than got
settled when the big piebald bear came tearing along ahead of the fire
and plunged into the same pool. It was no time to be particular about
bedfellows, and the bear lay right down alongside of Jim in the water.
They laid there pretty near half an hour as sociable as old maids at a
tea part