"
"My cracky! 'twas lucky for me that you had game blood in you, which
showed up," exclaimed Joe, catching the boy's arm in a friendly grip,
with an odd respect in his touch, which marked the admission of young
Farrar into the brotherhood of hunters. "I hadn't a charge left, an' not
even my hunting-knife. Lots o' city swells 'u'd have been plumb scared
before a growler like that,"--touching Bruin's carcass with his
foot,--"even if they had a small arsenal to back 'em up. They'd have
dropped rifle and cartridges, and hugged the nearest trunk. I've seen
fellers do it scores o' times, bless ye! after they came out here rigged
up in sporting-book style, talking fire about hunting bears and moose.
But that was all the fire there was to 'em."
Yet Neal's triumph over the poor brute, which had raced well for its
life, was not without a faint twinge of pain; and he was too manly to
look on this as a weakness. A sportsman he might be, of the sort who can
shoot straight when necessity demands it, but never of that class who
prowl through the forests with fingers tingling to pull the trigger,
dreading to lose a chance of "letting blood" from any slim-legged moose
or velvet-nosed buck which may run their way.
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