As he flung the door wide open, he heard the rasping of the lynx's claws on the boards behind him. He dashed outside, threw both flat-irons wildly at his pursuer, and jumped as far as he could to one side. The lynx kept straight on, headed for the woods a few rods away. Jacques had found his gun at last. He took a flying shot in the moonlight, hitting a tree at least a rod at the lynx's right. Then the two went inside, enlivened the fire, and dressed as hastily as possible. "Consumption is bad, ver' bad for Canadians," said Jacques, a half-hour later, picking his words with care. Ray grinned, but made no reply. "Night air is good; but Ah don' lak dese--dese beeg microbes eet bring in." SOLOMON'S GROUCH: THE STORY OF A BEAR By Franklin W. Calkins A pet grizzly bear had been for a number of years a feature at Hartranft's. As a puny infant, barely able to crawl, Solomon, as he was solemnly dubbed, was brought in off the Teton Mountains, and as milk was scarcer than money at the horse-ranch, he was aristocratically fed on malted milk. On this expensive diet the cub throve amazingly. Good feeding was continued after his weaning from the rubber nipple, and at the end of three years Solomon had grown to be a fat wooly monster. He was kept chained to a post in the warm season, and had an enclosed stall in a big barn for his winter quarters. Ordinarily he was good-natured, but he was a rough and not altogether safe playfellow. The near-by bawling of cattle always aroused in him ebullitions of rage. "Solomon's got an awful grouch agin any noise bigger than what he can make hisself," was the saying of the ranch hands. When Joe Hartranft's sister, Mrs. Murray, and her two boys, Rufe and Perry, came to the ranch to spend the month of June, Solomon was promptly hustled into his stall in the barn. It was thought best to have no boys fooling round the grizzly. This would undoubtedly have been the safest disposition, but for an oversight of the "stable boss." A big Percheron had been kept loose in a closed stall adjoining Solomon's, and one day, when the bear's voice was raised in remonstrance against his shrill neighing, he had turned his heels loose against the partition which separated them. His fierce battery had loosened two boards four or five feet above the floor. And the cracks he made had gone unnoted, or at least the mending had been neglected. A few days after the visitors came, a fine shorthorn cow with a new calf was turned into the barn for the day. Men and work-horses were at work at the alfalfa-cutting, and the bear and cow and calf were sole occupants of the barn when Rufe and Perry mounted an outside ladder and entered its loft.