“A grizzly, by the living Jingo!  Shot through the heart.”

It was true.  The strange shape lit up by the flaring torches seemed more vague, unearthly, and awkward in its dying throes, yet the small shut eyes, the feeble nose, the ponderous shoulders, and half-human foot armed with powerful claws were unmistakable.  The men turned by a common impulse and peered into the remote recesses of the wood again.

“Hi, Mister! come and pick up your game.  Hallo there!”

The challenge fell unheeded on the empty woods.

“And yet,” said he whom the woman had called the sheriff, “he can’t be far off.  It was a close shot, and the bear hez dropped in his tracks.  Why, wot’s this sticking in his claws?”

The two men bent over the animal.  “Why, it’s sugar, brown sugar—­look!” There was no mistake.  The huge beast’s fore paws and muzzle were streaked with the unromantic household provision, and heightened the absurd contrast of its incongruous members.  The woman, apparently indifferent, had taken that opportunity to partly free one of her wrists.

“If we hadn’t been cavorting round this yer spot for the last half hour, I’d swear there was a shanty not a hundred yards away,” said the sheriff.

The other man, without replying, remounted his horse instantly.

“If there is, and it’s inhabited by a gentleman that kin make centre shots like that in the dark, and don’t care to explain how, I reckon I won’t disturb him.”

The sheriff was apparently of the same opinion, for he followed his companion’s example, and once more led the way.  The spurs tinkled, the torches danced, and the cavalcade slowly reentered the gloom.  In another moment it had disappeared.

The wood sank again into repose, this time disturbed by neither shape nor sound.  What lower forms of life might have crept close to its roots were hidden in the ferns, or passed with deadened tread over the bark-strewn floor.  Towards morning a coolness like dew fell from above, with here and there a dropping twig or nut, or the crepitant awakening and stretching-out of cramped and weary branches.  Later a dull, lurid dawn, not unlike the last evening’s sunset, filled the aisles.  This faded again, and a clear gray light, in which every object stood out in sharp distinctness, took its place.  Morning was waiting outside in all its brilliant, youthful coloring, but only entered as the matured and sobered day.

Seen in that stronger light, the monstrous tree near which the dead bear lay revealed its age in its denuded and scarred trunk, and showed in its base a deep cavity, a foot or two from the ground, partly hidden by hanging strips of bark which had fallen across it.  Suddenly one of these strips was pushed aside, and a young man leaped lightly down.