“‘I’ll have him now,’ said I, for I had found my caps in the _lining of my coat_—so, rolling a log into the lake, I paddled myself across to the island, just as the dogs had cornered the bar in a thicket. I rushed up and fired—at the same time the critter leaped over the dogs and came within three feet of me, running like mad; he jumped into the lake, and tried to mount the log I had just deserted, but every time he got half his body on it, it would roll over and send him under; the dogs, too, got around him, and pulled him about, and finally Bowie-knife clenched with him, and they sunk into the lake together. Stranger, about this time I was excited, and I stripped off my coat, drew my knife, and intended to have taken a part with Bowie-knife myself, when the bar rose to the surface. But the varmint staid under—Bowie-knife came up alone, more dead than alive, and with the pack came ashore. “‘Thank God!’ said I, ‘the old villain has got his deserts at last.’ “Determined to have the body, I cut a grape-vine for a rope, and dove down where I could see the bar in the water, fastened my queer rope to his leg, and fished him, with great difficulty, ashore. Stranger, may I be chawed to death by young alligators, if the thing I looked at wasn’t a _she-bar, and not the old critter after all_. The way matters got mixed on that island was onaccountably curious, and thinking of it made me more than ever convinced that I was hunting the devil himself. I went home that night and took to my bed—the thing was killing me. The entire team of Arkansaw in bar-hunting, acknowledged himself used up, and the fact sunk into my feelings like a snagged boat will in the Mississippi. I grew as cross as a bar with two cubs and a sore tail. The thing got out ’mong my neighbours, and I was asked how come on that individ-u-al that never lost a bar when once started? and if that same individ-u-al didn’t wear telescopes when he turned a she-bar, of ordinary size, into an old he one, a little larger than a horse? “‘Prehaps,’ said I, ‘friends’—getting wrathy—‘prehaps you want to call somebody a liar?’ “‘Oh, no!’ said they ‘we only heard such things as being _rather common_ of late, but we don’t believe one word of it; oh, no,’—and then they would ride off and laugh like so many hyenas over a dead nigger.