STRONG left camp with his pack and rifle and two bear-traps. He was nearing the dead buck when a shot stopped him, and a bullet cut through his left fore-arm. The deadly missile came no swifter than his understanding of it.

He dropped as if a death-blow had struck him, and, clinging to his rifle, crept in among the firs. He flung off the straps of his basket. He lay still a moment and then cautiously got to his knees. Blood was trickling down his hand, but he gave no heed to it. The ball had come from higher ground, towards which he had been walking. The man who had tried to kill him could not have stood more than two hundred feet away. Strong sat, rifle in hand, peering through the fir branches—alert as a panther waiting for its prey. Soon he caught a glimpse of his enemy fleeing between distant tree columns. The sight seemed to fill him with deadly anger.

He leaped to his feet, seized his pack-basket, and started swiftly in pursuit of him. He gained the summit of the high ground and saw a broad slash covered with berry bushes and sloping to the flats around Bushrod Creek. A trail cut through it from the edge of the woods near him.

He stopped and listened. He could hear the sound of retreating footsteps and could see briers moving some thirty rods down the slash. His heart had shaken off its rage. He was now the cunning, stealthy, determined hunter. He saw a dry, stag-headed pine in the edge of the briers near him and hurried up its shaft like a bear pressed by the dogs. On a dead limb, some thirty feet above ground, he halted and looked away. He could see nothing of his unknown foe.

Slowly Strong descended from the dead tree. He had just begun to feel the pain of his wound. Blood was dripping fast from it; he looked like a butcher in the midst of his task. He muttered as he began to roll his sleeve, "G-guess they do inten't' shove me out o' this c-country."

He blew as he looked at the wound.

"B-Business is p-prosperin'," he went on, as he held one end of a big red handkerchief between his teeth and wound it above the torn muscles and firmly knotted the ends.

"W-war!" he muttered, as he went to the near bushes and began to gather spiders' webs.

It is to be regretted that for a moment he forgot his promise to Socky and "boiled over" from the heat of his passion.

He sat on the ground and with his knife scraped away the blood clots.

"D-damn soft-nose bullet!" he muttered, with a serious look, smoothing, down the fibres of torn flesh.

He spread the webs upon his wound, and held them close awhile under his great palm. Soon he moistened a lot of tobacco and put it on the webs and held it there. After an hour or so the blood stopped. Then, gradually, he relieved the tension of his handkerchief, and by-and-by used it for a bandage on his wound.

He rose and shouldered his pack and began to search for the tracks of his enemy. He soon discovered those of the bear which had fled before him that morning.

"S-see here, Strong," he muttered, "th-this won't scurcely do. I arrest you, S. Strong, Esquire. Y-you're my prisoner. T-tryin' t' kill a man—you b-bloodthirsty devil! C-come with me. We'll hunt fer b-bears."

The Emperor had often addressed himself with severe and even copious condemnation, but this was the first time that he had ever taken S. Strong by the coat-collar and violently faced him about.

He could see clearly where the bear had broken through the wet briers on his way down to the flat country. It was a moment of peril, and he gave himself no time for argument. He hurried away in the trail of the bear. It lay before him, unmistakable as the wake of a boat, and would show where the animal was wont to cross the water below. He came soon to a great log lying from shore to shore of that inlet of Rainbow which was called Bushrod Creek. He could see tracks near the end of the log, and there, with a spruce pole for a lever, he set his traps in the sand so that, if the first were not sprung, the second would be sure to take hold. He covered the great, yawning, seven-toothed jaws of steel and fastened heavy clogs upon both trap chains. Then he took the piece of bacon from his pack and hung it on a branch above the traps.

Shrewdly the hunter had made his plan.

That bear would probably return to the dead buck, and the scent of the bacon would attract him to that particular crossing.

He tore two pages from his memorandum-book, and wrote this warning on each:

STOP TRAPS AHED

S. STRONG.

He fastened them to stakes and posted them on two sides of the point of danger.

It was then past eleven and too late for the long journey to Lost River camp. He decided to go to Henyon's on the Middle Branch and get the trapper to come and keep watch while he took Sinth and the children to Benson Falls.

On his way out of the slash he killed a deer, and dressed and hung him on a tree. Then he set out for the trail to Henyon's.

He had walked for an hour or so when his pace began to slacken.

"T-y-ty!" he whispered, stopping suddenly. "S. Strong, what's the m-matter? Yer all of a-tremble."

Strong felt sick and weary, and took off his pack and sat down to rest on a bed of leaves. Then he discovered that the handkerchief upon his arm was dripping wet. Again he stopped the blood by cording.

He lay back on the ground suffering with faintness and acute pain. Soon obeying the instinct of man and beast, which prompts one to hide his weakness and even his death-throes, he crept behind the top of a fallen tree.

His heart had been overstrained of late by worry and heavy toil. Now for the first time he could feel it laboring a little as if it missed the blood which had been dripping slowly but steadily from his arm. At last a day was come that had no pleasure in it—a day when the keepers of the house had begun to tremble.

Soon the warm sunlight fell through forest branches on the great body of Strong, who had lost command of himself and become the prisoner of sleep.

In the memorandum-book there is an entry without date in a script of unusual size. Those large letters were made slowly and with a trembling hand. It was probably written while he sat there in the lonely, autumn woods before giving up to his weakness. This is the entry:

"Theys days when I dont blieve God is over per-ticklar with a man bout swearin."

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