“No, sir,” replied Arthur.  “My horse ran away with me; but I heard the fight, and I know that the dogs were all cut to pieces.  The bear was an awful monster—­as large as an ox; and such teeth and claws as he had!  I never saw the like in all my hunting.”

In a few moments, half a dozen herdsmen, all well armed, galloped up, one of them leading his employer’s horse.

“Vane,” said Mr. Harris, as he sprang into his saddle, “you will stop on your way home, and tell Mr. Winters, will you not?”

Arthur replied by putting spurs to his horse, and in a few moments he was standing in Mr. Winters’s court, spreading consternation among the people of the rancho.  Dick and Bob were there; but, unlike the rest of the herdsmen, they seemed to be but little affected by Arthur’s story.

“You’ll never see those boys again,” said the latter, winding up his narrative with a description of the bear by which they had been attacked.

“Now, don’t you be anyways oneasy,” replied Dick, hurrying off to saddle his horse.  “If it war a grizzly, he’s dead enough by this time, for I knowed them youngsters long afore you sot eyes on to ’em, an’ I know what they can do.  Didn’t I tell you, ’Squire,” he added, turning to Mr. Winters, who was pacing anxiously up and down the porch, “that Frank would come out all right when he war stampeded with them buffaler?  Wal, I tell you the same now.”

Arthur remained at the rancho until Uncle James and his herdsmen set out for the mountains, and then turned his face homeward.

It is a rule that seldom fails, that when one meets a braggadocio, he can put him down as a coward.  We have seen that it held good in Arthur’s case; for, although he had not caught the smallest glimpse of the animal in the bushes, he was so terrified that he had run his horse eight miles; and, while he was plunging his spurs into the gray’s sides at almost every jump, he imagined that the animal was running away with him.  He was so badly frightened that he did not pause to consider that he might have occasioned a great deal of unnecessary anxiety and alarm by the stories he had circulated.  He really believed that every word he had uttered was the truth; and he reached this conclusion by a process of reasoning perfectly satisfactory to himself.  He had heard the growls and snarls uttered by the animal in the bushes, when attacked by the dogs, and they were so appalling, that he felt safe in believing that they came from some terrible monster.  The conduct of the hounds, and of Johnny’s horse, confirmed this opinion.  Besides, Frank and Archie had pronounced the animal a grizzly, and Arthur was quite sure it was; for nothing else, except a lion or tiger, could have uttered such growls.  He had heard that grizzlies were very tenacious of life, and hard to whip, and, consequently, it followed, as a thing of course, that Frank and Archie, and the dogs, were utterly annihilated.

“I’m safe, thank goodness!” said Arthur, to himself.  “If those fellows were foolish enough to stay there and be clawed to pieces, that’s their lookout and not mine.  Johnny Harris insulted me by calling me a coward.  He may escape from the bear, and if he does, I shall think up a plan to punish him.”