a surer shot, Bruin tore out the bud and, with the cabbage in his mouth, dropped from the top of the tree to the ground, alighting on its fore shoulder.  Dick didn’t know that this was the way bears in that country usually came down a tree when in a hurry, and supposed the bear had met with an accident and was killed.  He changed his mind the next instant when the creature came racing toward him.  Dick and the bear were about ten feet apart when they saw one another.  The bear had to turn quickly to keep from running over Dick, and Dick had trouble to keep from punching the bear in the ribs with his rifle when he fired at it.

No one was hurt on this first round and the bear thought it had escaped and so did the boy.  Dick churned a cartridge from the magazine to the barrel of his rifle and watched closely the undergrowth through which the bear was running, hoping for another shot.  Just as the splashing in the marsh grew indistinct and Dick realized that his last chance had gone, he got one glimpse of the bear as it sprang upon a log that lay across its path.  Dick threw his rifle to his shoulder with the quick motion of the sportsman who takes a woodcock on the wing, and fired.  The bear, which was distant more than a hundred yards, disappeared and it seemed to the boy scarcely worth while to follow it.  It was only the notion to look for the mark of his bullet on some tree near the log that induced him to wallow through the swamp to where he had last seen the bear.  To his amazement he found a piece of bone and some fresh blood on the log.  He had no thought now of abandoning the trail.  He followed it through swamp and jungle, sometimes losing it where the ground was hard or where it crossed the path of an alligator.  Often when he became fearful that he had lost the trail a smear of blood on root or leaf told him that he was on the track.  From former hunts and the study of Ned’s maps, he knew the general lay of the land, but he stopped often and noted his course, for he meant to follow that trail and camp on it if necessary until he lost it finally or found the bear.  The animal seemed to know all the bad stretches of marsh and thorny bits of jungle and, as the hours passed and night drew near, without his getting a sight of his quarry, he consoled himself with the thought of what Mr. Streeter had told him: 

“A man is never lost in the swamp so long as he knows where he is himself.”

Dick knew he wouldn’t starve.  There were always birds to be shot, alligators which he could kill with a club, and palmetto cabbage which he could dig out with his knife.  He had his matches in a watertight box, a little bag of salt in his pocket, the swamp water was fresh, and what more could a hunter-boy ask for?  He felt so cheerful that he began to whistle, which brought him bad luck, for he stumbled over a root which caught both feet and threw him head-down into a deep pool of mud.  He was half strangled before he got out and was looking down shudderingly into the morass out of which he had crawled, when he missed his rifle and knew he had got to get back into the mudhole.  It was so deep that he laid a branch across it to cling to, before venturing in.  A big moccasin crawled from under a root beside the pool of mud as Dick stepped in it and the boy shut his teeth tight as he forced himself to wallow through the slimy, snaky mass from which his flesh recoiled.