Hour after hour passed, yet those vicious little brutes at the foot of the tree seemed as excited as when they first saw me, and I made up my mind that I was in for many hours of this odd imprisonment, because it was not reasonable to suppose the hogs would soon grow so hungry as to leave me free. But for the fact that Gyp was a dog who obeyed my every command, and had the good sense to understand that something serious had happened, I might have come to the end of my days there among the mesquite bushes, murdered by the peccaries I had counted on for pork. Fortunately father was about two miles down the river when he saw Gyp coming toward him apparently in great fright. At once he understood the situation to be extremely grave, else the dog would never have returned home without me. Seizing his rifle, for we on the banks of the Trinity took good care to go well armed even while working on the ranch, father ordered Gyp to lead the way to where he had left me. Half an hour before sunset he came so near that it was possible to hear the angry grunting of the peccaries, and understood in a twinkling what had happened. FATHER COMES TO THE RESCUE His first care was to lift Gyp into a pecan twenty or thirty yards away from where I was roosting, and there the dog struggled to hold himself in the crotch of a limb while father clambered up beside him. All this while the hogs which were holding me prisoner gave no heed to the noise made by father and Gyp, but continued their efforts to reach me by leaping up against the trunk of the tree until father opened fire, shouting to me as he sent a bullet among them:-- "Are you safe, lad? Have you been hurt?" "I am all right; but I have dropped my powder horn." Then father began firing as rapidly as the rifle could be reloaded. There were seventeen in the drove I came upon; three I had killed and two I had wounded, leaving twelve very much alive and very active. Father killed nine before the survivors decided that the time had come for them to beat a retreat, and when the last of the three trotted off, grunting and gnashing his teeth, I literally dropped from my perch in the pecan, as limp as though I had been ill for some time. So far as getting a supply of pork was concerned, to say nothing of the saving of my life, it was well father took a hand in the fight, for I, who knew nothing of the peculiarity of these wild hogs, would have allowed the meat to spoil. There is a gland on the back, filled with a certain disagreeable substance which will make its way through all the meat of the wild hog unless it is removed within a short time after the killing. Father's first act, even before waiting to congratulate me upon my escape, or to ask how I had happened to fall into such a predicament, was to remove these glands, and not until this work had been performed did he give any attention to me.