n: The Grizzly Chewed His Arm.]

The bear clawed and chawed, and Jim felt around for the wound he had
made first. When he found it he thrust the knife in and worked it
around in a very disquieting way. In the struggle the knife slipped
out of the hole several times, and once Jim lost it, but he
persistently searched for the hole when he recovered the knife and
prospected for the bear's vitals.

At last he worked the blade well into the Grizzly's interior and made
such havoc by turning it around that the brute gave up the fight and
rolled over dead, with Jim's mangled left arm in his jaws.

It was a tough fight and a close call and old Jim was laid up in his
cabin for many a day afterward.

CHAPTER XXII.

A DENFUL OF GRIZZLIES.

A man from San Gabriel Canyon came into Los Angeles and told bear
stories to the Professor and the Professor told them to other people.
The main point of the man's tale was that he had found a den inhabited
by two Grizzlies of great size and fierce aspect. He had seen the
bears and was mightily afraid of them, and he wanted somebody to go up
there and exterminate them so that he might work his mining claim
unmolested and unafraid. The Professor, being guileless and confiding,
believed the tale, and he tried to oblige the bear-haunted miner by
promoting an expedition of extermination. Seventeen men replied to his
overtures with the original remark that they "Hadn't lost any bears."
Since 1620 that has been the standard bear joke of the North American
continent, and its immortality proves that it was the funniest thing
that ever was said.

[Illustration: He Had Seen the Bears.]

At last the Professor found a man who did not know the joke, and that
man straightway consented to go to the rescue of the bear-beleaguered
denizen of San Gabriel Canyon. He and three others went into the
mountains with guns loaded for bear, which was an error of
judgment--they should have been loaded for the tellers of bear tales.
An expedition properly outfitted to hunt bear liars rather than bear
lairs could load a four-horse wagon with game in the San Gabriel Canyon.

Old Bill, who had lived in the canyon many years, sorrowfully admitted
that the canyon's reputation for harboring persons of unimpeachable
veracity was not what it should be. The man-who-was-afraid-of-bears
could not be depended upon to give bed-rock facts about bears, but he,
Old Bill, was a well of truth in that line and had some