r than
usual. It tasted of pine-woods and deep tangles of swamp-land, where all
the roots that a bear likes grow.

The train had left the low-lying lands far behind and was coming into the
foothills--those friendly steps by which tired feet climb to the
mountains above. It was rushing down a steep grade, traveling by its own
momentum, upon a rather precipitous pathway cut in a side hill, when
something happened. Perhaps it was a broken rail, or maybe a great
boulder had toppled down the mountainside and lay upon the track; but the
important thing was that suddenly, without a second's warning, the engine
bucked like a balky broncho, and after one or two mad plunges along the
roadbed, toppled over the bank and rolled into the gulley below. At the
first impact of the locomotive with the long train behind it, the freight
arched its back and writhed and twisted like a mighty serpent. Three of
the cars went over the bank still attached to the engine and the rest
piled up on one another or rolled down into the gulley, as fate willed.
There was crash upon crash and thunder upon thunder as the heavy cars
piled in a frightful heap. There was the groan of iron and steel being
bent and broken, and the crash and creak and crackle of breaking,
grinding car-floors.

When we add to this the roar of lions, the shrieking of horses, the
trumpeting of elephants, the snarling and snapping of wolves, jaguars,
hyenas and a chorus of other cries from the circus bedlam, the roar of
steam as it escaped through an open valve in the locomotive, and the
shriek of the whistle which blew continually, we can get some idea of the
wreck, as the gorgeous splendor of the barbaric show was piled in ruins.

It was such sights and sounds as these that greeted Black Bruin as he
squeezed through the battered, broken door of his cage into freedom. He
had felt himself rolling over and over. First he was upon the bottom of
his cage and then standing upon the inverted roof. Three times he bumped
from the top to the bottom and back again in rapid succession. What did
it mean? His van had never acted like this.

It was all so quick that he merely emitted a frightened bawl or two and
lay still, cowering in the corner of his cage. Then in some
unaccountable way he became aware that his cage-door was open. His back
was to it, but the wind that blew in upon him, was the wind of the woods
and the waters, and not the stifling, filtered wind of his prison.