After a wile the old devil’s baby of a bull laid down, for he’d lost a purty smart chance of blood, and what doz one of the b’ys do, but gits a-straddle on his back. The way he riz up warn’t slow, and off he sot as if the prairie were afire behind him. I’ve a notion the b’y never rode so sharp a rail before as that bull’s hump. The old Injun the b’y belonged to wur as white as a lump of chalk for fear his b’y would be killed, and he bangs away at the bull and hits him in the belly, for he wur afraid of breaking the by’s leg if he squinted at the heart. That maid the cretur as ugly as a copperhead in July, and he takes arter the old hero like a whole team of thunderbolts. “Run! run, father!” screeches the young varmint to the old one, “or I’ll be down on ye like a falling star,” and I begun to see the old one was in danger pretty considerably much. So I sung out to the b’y to raze his leg, cause it kivered the critter’s heart, and I wish I may be shot if he didn’t do it as cool as if I held the breech of the rifle at him and not the muzzle, but that’s the nature of an Injun. Bang goes old Kill-devil and down comes old bull-beef; but the b’y couldn’t walk for a week, and he kyind of thort he’d never ride bairbacked on a buffalo agin, without he seed some special ’casion. XXV. COLONEL CROCKETT’S ADVENTURE WITH A GRIZZLY BEAR. You may say what you please, and be hanged to you, Mr. Stranger, about your hannycondy, the great terrificacious sarpint of Seelon, in South Ameriky, and your rale Bengal tiger from Afriky. Both on ’em heated to a white heat, and welded into one, would be no part of a priming to a grizzly bear of the Rocky Mountains. He’d chaw up your roonosseros, and your lion, and your tiger, as small as cut tobacco, for breakfast, and pick his teeth with the bones. The cretur’s rale grit, and don’t mind fire no more than sugar plums, and none of your wild beastesses can say that for themselves. I’ve killed one or two on ’em myself, which ar not a thing many suckers can boast on, tho’ they are pretty good at scalping Injuns. I was delightfully skeered by the fust I ever saw—no, that ar a lie, tho’ I say it myself: Davy Crockett was never skeered by anything but a female woman; but it ar a fact that I war tetotaciously consarned for my life.