"As long as I stay here I must act like one of the community family and do my share. I wonder if they have any partnership rules about bears? What harm can she do? "She might trample the garden. She might steal the corn." Another chill shook the small visitor. "She has sneaked round the bear-traps. She has chosen the farthest-away field." He began to hope, "P'r'aps she won't go in the corn." There were sounds outside which told him that she was doing the very thing he feared. Doby silently crept up the ladder to the loft. He peered from its gable window. The bear was walking along in the moonlight, standing up straight on her hind legs like a person in a fur overcoat. Over the rail fence, which almost touched the corner of the cabin, she climbed exactly as his mother might have done. She went down one corn row and up the next, pulling open the husks with her forepaws and examining each ear of the green corn. If it were well filled out and milky, she picked it and piled it, one ear after another, on her arm as his mother might have held firewood. When she had a dozen she walked to the fence and started to climb out of the field. She was not forty feet from Doby. "Good," he thought. "Now she is going home." In getting over the fence, she dropped an ear of corn. This provoked her and she threw the whole armload on to the ground. Then she turned back for more. She could not have noticed Doby nor have suspected any harm, for she selected as much more corn. In the ear it is not easy to carry and she had the same luck with the second batch. As an ear slid out, she spitefully threw the rest away and turned into the field again. "Oh, the wicked, wasteful thing!" raged Doby. "If she does that many times there won't be half a crop left in this garden." He slipped down the ladder and stared at a gun hanging on forked sticks over the door. It was a queer gun; the latest-style rifle with cap and ball, which was destined to replace the ordinary flintlock then used by most frontiersmen. Traders on the river had explained the mechanism of this kind of gun to every passing emigrant. Doby thought: "I can remember every thing I've heard about that newfangled cap gun. Now is my chance to try it." It was loaded. Every pioneer kept firearms ready for instant use. Without a sound, Doby moved the table, put a stool on top of it and mounted to the rack. He could not lift the gun from its place. It was a huge weapon. Even his fifteen-year-old shoulders and his stocky legs were not equal to the task of getting it down. He began to sweat as he glanced round the room. "What shall I do?" His eyes caught a dark blotch of clothes hanging on the wall. "There are my best breeches. I know I look big in them. I reckon if I had them on I could handle the gun." In desperate haste he tore off his bed-gown. He girded himself in the manlier garments. He made a final trial--a supreme test of his muscle--and--b-o-o-s-t-e-d the rifle over the hooks!