stranger went on.

Many a man has spent a thousand dollars in efforts to capture some
wild thing and felt it worth the cost--for a time. Then he is willing
to sell it for half cost, then for quarter, and at length he ends by
giving it away. The stranger was vastly pleased with his comical Bear
cubs at first, and valued them proportionately; but each day they
seemed more troublesome and less amusing, so that when, a week later,
at the Bell-Cross Ranch, he was offered a horse for the pair, he
readily closed, and their days of hamper-travel were over.

The owner of the ranch was neither mild, refined, nor patient. Jack,
good-natured as he was, partly grasped these facts as he found himself
taken from the pannier, but when it came to getting cranky little Jill
out of the basket and into a collar, there ensued a scene so
unpleasant that no collar was needed. The ranchman wore his hand in a
sling for two weeks, and Jacky at his chain's end paced the ranch-yard
alone.

V. THE RIVER HELD IN THE FOOTHILLS

There was little of pleasant interest in the next eighteen months of
Jack's career. His share of the globe was a twenty-foot circle around
a pole in the yard. The blue hills of the offing, the nearer pine
grove, and even the ranch-house itself were fixed stars, far away and
sending merely faint suggestions of their splendors to his not very
bright eyes. Even the horses and men were outside his little sphere
and related to him about as much as comets are to the earth. The very
tricks that had made him valued were being forgotten as Jack grew up
in chains.

At first a butter-firkin had made him an ample den, but he rapidly
passed through the various stages--butter-firkin, nail-keg,
flour-barrel, oil-barrel--and had now to be graded as a good average
hogshead Bear, though he was far from filling that big round wooden
cavern that formed his latest den.

The ranch hotel lay just where the foothills of the Sierras with their
groves of live oaks were sloping into the golden plains of the
Sacramento. Nature had showered on it every wonderful gift in her lap.
A foreground rich with flowers, luxuriant in fruit, shade and sun, dry
pastures, rushing rivers, and murmuring rills, were here. Great trees
were variants of the view, and the high Sierras to the east overtopped
the wondrous plumy forests of their pines with blocks of sculptured
blue. Back of the house was a noble river of water from the hills,
fouled and chained by