it.

"I remember the first pump-gun that came into these mountains. It was
a Henry sixteen-shooter, and it blew in along with a kid from Boston
who wanted to kill a bear. The young chap's uncle tried to convince
him that killing a California Grizzly was not as much fun as some folks
pretended, but the Boston boy couldn't be convinced, and so the uncle
hired me to go along and take care of him. Boston had a gun in a case,
and I told him to keep it there until we got to my bear pasture. The
rest of his outfit was 500 cartridges and a box of paper collars.

"When we got into camp over on the South Fork, Boston wanted to begin
the slaughter right away and opened up that gun case. I'd heard of the
repeating rifle, but had it put up for a Yankee lie, and when the boy
pulled out the gun I thought he had made a mistake and brought along
some scientific contrivance from his college. He told me it was a
Henry rifle and showed me how it worked, but I had no use for it.
While he stuffed his pump-gun I smoked and thought. 'Unless you go
slow, Mr. Larkin,' says I to myself, 'you'll get into plenty of
trouble. Here you are, mixed up with something that you don't sabe
pretty well. A rough canyon, two hound dogs and an able-bodied bear is
a combination that you can work, but when you throw in a college boy
and a gun that winds up like a clock and shoots till the cows come
home, the situation looks kind of misty.' I didn't think much of the
pump-gun, but for all I knew it might go off at both ends and paw up
everything by the roots, and I was tolerable sure that Boston would
wobble it around so's to take in a pretty consid'able scope of
outdoors. But I allowed I was old fashioned enough to circumvent a
Boston boy and his new gun, and concluded to go ahead.

"Next morning we put the dogs into Devil's Gulch, and by making a cut
over a spur we got about two miles below them and sat down to wait for
bear. The trees were so tall and so close together that you couldn't
see the tops and the sun never saw the ground. The canyon was narrow
and the sides were so steep that they tucked under at the bottom.
While we sat there I figured a bit on what was going to happen. There
was a light breeze, and presently I noticed something on the other side
of the canyon, about fifty yards away. The wind swayed some bushes
that grew around a charred stump, and from time to time the black end
of the stump showed up and then disappeared very muc