Bands of elk and antelope crossed his track at intervals; and at night, when he stopped to camp under a great pine-tree, when his fire was built, and his faithful horse and himself had feasted together upon the bag of roasted wheat he had brought along for sustenance, a band of deer, kindly eyed, graceful, and not afraid, came near him, attracted by the blaze and smoke, and circled around his bed at a respectful distance long after he had retired among his blankets upon a couch of evergreen boughs. “That’s right! Come close, my beauties!” he exclaimed, as a doe and her daughter came close enough to breathe in his face. “I wouldn’t shoot one of you for the world. Your confidence is not misplaced.” But when he put out his hand to fondle them, they bounded away as light as birds, only to approach again and paw the blankets with their nimble hoofs, and awaken him from his coveted sleep. Finally, to frighten them away, he fired his revolver into the air, and the entire herd scampered away into the darkness. “The gun is the wild animal’s master,” he said as he fell asleep, to be awakened again by the neighing of his tethered horse. The fire of pitch-pine was still burning, and a pair of eyes glowed near his face like coals. “This is no deer,” he thought, as he very cautiously clasped his “pepper-box” repeater. A heavy paw was placed upon his breast, and the hot breath of a bear came close enough to nauseate him. There was no time to lose. As a mountaineer, he knew the nature of his foe too well to await the inevitable embrace of Bruin. Little by little he moved his repeater, and, when the weight of the animal was wellnigh crushing him, he sent a bullet through his eye. But the danger was by no means past, as the beast, though wounded unto death, was yet alive, and furious with rage and pain. Just how he extricated himself from the peril of that eventful encounter, Joseph Ranger never knew, but he lived to narrate the adventure to children and grandchildren, and preserved to his dying day that long-outdated “pepper-box” revolver with which his great-grandchildren now delight to fire a volley in his honor on Washington’s Birthday and the Fourth of July. Once safely through the Cascade Mountains, Joseph found little to impede his progress. Some friendly Indians were encountered at the base of the Blue Mountains, who gave him a hearty meal of bear-meat and wapatoes, and supplied his weary horse with hay and oats. “Mika closh cumtux Wahnetta. Heap good Injun squaw! Ugh! Wake Mika potlatch chickimin! Hy-as closh muck-a-muck! Heap good. Cultus potlatch!” was the way in which his Indian host expressed his hospitality and refused compensation. And Joseph Ranger, acquainted with the jargon of many native tribes, further ingratiated himself in the Indian’s favor by presenting his squaw with a few gaudy trinkets such as an experienced borderer always carries when crossing an Indian country.