not thirty yards
from him.

"Shoot! shoot, boy!" screamed Joe. "Or give me your rifle. I haven't got
a charge left!"

For half a minute Farrar shook all over as with ague. His nostrils felt
choked. His mouth was wide open in his efforts to breathe. His heart
pounded like a sledge-hammer. With that mumbling brute advancing upon
him, he felt as if he couldn't fire so as to hit a haystack or a flock
of hens at a barn-door.

Then, suddenly, he was cool again, seeing and hearing with extraordinary
clearness. The ignominious alternative of giving his rifle to Joe
produced a revulsion. His fingers were on the trigger, his left hand
firmly gripped the barrel of his Winchester; he brought it to his
shoulder.

"Aim low! Try to hit him in the front of the neck where it joins the
body," said Joe, in tones sharp as a razor, which cut his meaning into
Neal's brain.

Bruin was only fifteen yards away when Farrar's rifle cracked
once--twice--sending out its messengers of death.

There was a last terrible growl, a plunge, and a thud which seemed to
shake the ground under Neal's feet. As the smoke of his shots cleared
away, Joe beheld him leaning on his rifle, with a face which in the
moonlight looked white as chalk, and the bear lying where it had fallen
headlong towards him. It made a desperate struggle to regain its feet,
then rolled on its side, dead.

One bullet had pierced the spot which Joe mentioned, and had passed
through the region of the heart.

CHAPTER XIII.

"THE SKIN IS YOURS."

A regular war-dance was performed about the slain marauder by the young
Sinclairs and Dol Farrar, when these laggards in the chase reached the
spot where he fell. The firebrands had all died out before the enemy
turned; but in the white moon-radiance the bear was seen to be a big
one, with an uncommonly fine skin.

Neal took no part in the triumphal capers. He still leaned upon his
rifle, his breath coming in gusty puffs through his nostrils and mouth.
Not alone the desperate sensations of those moments when he had faced
the gnashing, mumbling brute, but the unexpected success of his first
shot at big game, had unhinged him. By his endurance in the chase, by
the pluck with which he stood up to the bear, above all, by his being
able, as Joe phrased it, to "take a sure pull on the beast at a
paralyzing moment," he had eternally justified his right to the title of
sportsman in the eyes of the natives. The guides, Joe and Eb, wer