“Doc, the tears would cum in my eyes, and the hot blood would come biling up from my heart, when I’d hobble out of a sundown and hear the boys tell, as they went by, of the sport they’d had that day, and how the bar fit ’fore he was killed, and how fat he war arter he was slayed. Long arter they was gone, and the whip-poor-will had eat up their voices, I would sit out there on the old stump, and think of the things that used to hold the biggest place in my mind when I was a boy, and p’raps sense I’ve bin a man. “I’d heard tell of distinction and fame, and people’s names never dying, and how Washington and Franklin, and Clay and Jackson, and a heap of political dicshunary-folks, would live when their big hearts had crumbled down to a rifle-charge of dust; and I begun, too, to think, Doc, what a pleasant thing it would be to know folks a million years off would talk of me like them, and it made me ’tarmine to ’stinguish myself, and have my name put in a book with a yaller kiver. I warn’t a genus, Doc, I nude that, nor I warn’t dicshunary; so I detarmined to strike out in a new track for glory, and ’title myself to be called the ‘bear-hunter of Ameriky.’ Doc, my heart jumpt up, and I belted my hunting-shirt tighter for fear it would lepe out when I fust spoke them words out loud. “‘The bar-hunter of Ameriky!’ Doc, you know whether I war ernin’ the name when I war ruined. There is not a child, white, black, Injun, or nigger, from the Arkansas line to Trinity, but what has heard of me, and I were happy when”—here a tremor of his voice and a tear glistening in the glare of the fire told the old fellow’s emotion—“when—but les take a drink—Doc, I found I was dying—I war gettin’ weaker and weaker—I nude your truck warn’t what I needed, or I’d sent for you. A bar-hunt war the medsin that my systum required, a fust-class bar-hunt, the music of the dogs, the fellers a screaming, the cane poppin’, the rifles crackin’, the bar growlin’, the fight hand to hand, slap goes his paw, and a dog’s-hide hangs on one cane and his body on another, the knife glistenin’ and then goin’ plump up to the handle in his heart! Oh! Doc, this was what I needed, and I swore, since death were huggin’ me, any how, I mite as well feel his last grip in a bar-hunt. “I seed the boys goin’ long one day, and haled them to wait awhile, as I believed I would go along too. I war frade if I kept out of a hunt much longer I wood get outen practis. They laughed at me, thinkin’ I war jokin’; for wat cood a sick, old, one-legged man do in a bar-hunt? how cood he get threw the swamp, and vines, and canes, and back-water? and s’pose he mist the bar, how war he to get outen the way?