sight in the underbrush, and the embarrassed dogs came near losing her. A few moments too late to get a shot, McCord came running to the woods at the point of her entrance. He examined the brush and listened a moment. "She's gone up stream," he said, "bound to make her hole at Coon's Den, 'f I don't git there fust." He returned to the prairie and ran breathlessly along the edge of the woods for the better part of a mile; then he dashed into the timber, and pushing through the brush until he reached a cliff, he clambered down and stood with his back to the head of a ravine tributary to the valley in which Broad Run flowed. He was breathless, and his flimsy lower garments had been almost torn off him by the violence of his exertion and the resistance of underbrush and rocks; in fact, raiment never seemed just in place on him; the vigorous form burst through it now on this side, and now on that. Hearing the dogs still below him, he knew that he had come in time to intercept the progress of the bear toward the heap of rocky debris at the head of the ravine. Once in these fastnesses, no skill of hunter or perseverance of dogs would have been sufficient to get her out. The bear was soon in sight, and Bob saw that the nearly exhausted dogs were taking greater risks than ever. Little Seizer was particularly venturesome, and was so much overcome with heat and fatigue, and so breathless with barking, that it was hard for him to get out of the way of the bear's retorts. "She'll smash that leetle ijiot the very nex' time, shore," muttered Bob with alarm; and though he knew the range to be a long one, he took aim and fired. Unluckily the infuriated Seizer gave the bear's heel a particularly savage bite, and at the very instant of Bob's pulling the trigger she turned on the little dog, and thus caused the ball to lodge in her right shoulder just as she was striking out with her left paw. She barely reached the dog, and failed to crush him with the full weight of her arm, but she lacerated his side and sent him howling out of the fray. Now, wounded and enraged, she recognized in the hunter her chief enemy; and, neglecting the dogs, she rushed up the ravine toward McCord. Bob poured a large charge of powder into his gun, and, taking a bullet from his pouch, he felt in his pocket for the patching. A moment he looked blankly at the oncoming bear and muttered "Gosh!" between his set teeth. There was not a patch in his pocket. He had put some pieces of patching there in the darkness of the morning before leaving home, without remembering that his pocket was bottomless. He stood between a wounded bear and her cubs, and there was no time for deliberation. He might evade the attack if he could succeed in getting up the cliff where he had come down, but in that case she would reach her hole and he would lose the battle. He promptly tore a piece from the ragged leg of his trousers, and, wrapping his ball in it, rammed it home.