unded savage, with one long bound,
he sprung; and straightway there was a dying yell and the bang of a gun,
the bullet sent whistling away through the tree-tops. The dog had turned
the scale of battle.

This danger happily averted, Burl, finding it impossible to come near
enough to his antagonist "to lock legs or kick ankles," bethought him of
a stratagem by which, without much additional risk to himself, he might
end this long wrestle and gain a decided advantage. He would suffer
himself to be thrown. Once flat of his back on the ground--the ground,
where never by man of martial might had he yet been matched--he would
find it an easy matter, he doubted not, to bring the long, supple savage
underneath; and secure of this advantage, he should then have nothing to
do but to wind up his morning's work in the way that should please his
fancy best.

Accordingly, to play off his cunning device, he provoked his antagonist
to a push of unusual vigor; when, still within each other's arms, down
came the giant warriors, with an appalling squelch, to the ground--the
red above, the black below. But in a twinkling there was a Titanic
flounce, when behold, the black was above, the red below. Planting his
knee with crushing weight on the breast of his prostrate foe, the
Fighting Nigger felt for his knife with which to deal the final blow,
but found that in the struggle it had slipped from its sheath; and when
he would have seized and used the Indian's, that too was gone, lost in
like manner. Glancing round for some murderous stone or club, he spied
his ax, where it lay on the ground not three feet off to his right, and
tickling himself with the thought, with the lucky chance thus offered
of giving his work the finishing touch in tip-top style, he eagerly
reached out to gather it up; but before he could do so and regain his
perpendicular, the wary savage, snatching at his opportunity, gave in
his turn a Titanic flounce, which sent the already uplifted weapon with
a side-long fling into the air, and brought his foe the second time to
the earth. In a trice, however, the wheel of fortune had made another
turn, not only bringing the black again to the top, but both black and
red clean over the brink of the hill, whence, as elsewhere noticed, its
grassy slope sunk steeply but smoothly down to the edge of the river,
there ending in an overleaning bank twenty feet high.

Perceiving that he had lost his vantage-ground, upon the holding of
wh