“‘Prehaps,’ said I, ‘friends’—getting wrathy—‘prehaps you want to call somebody a liar?’
“‘Oh, no!’ said they ‘we only heard such things as being _rather common_ of late, but we don’t believe one word of it; oh, no,’—and then they would ride off and laugh like so many hyenas over a dead nigger.
“It was too much, and I determined to catch that bar, go to Texas, or die,—and I made my preparations accordin’. I had the pack shut up and rested. I took my rifle to pieces, and iled it. I put caps in every pocket about my person, _for fear of the lining_. I then told my neighbours, that on Monday morning—naming the day—I would start _that bar_, and bring him home with me, or they might divide my settlement among them, the owner having disappeared. Well, stranger, on the morning previous to the great day of my hunting expedition, I went into the woods near my house, taking my gun and Bowie-knife along, just _from habit_, and there sitting down also from habit, what should I see, getting over my fence, but _the bar_! Yes, the old varmint was within a hundred yards of me, and the way he walked _over that fence_—stranger, he loomed up like a _black mist_, he seemed so large, and he walked right towards me. I raised myself, took deliberate aim, and fired. Instantly the varmint wheeled, gave a yell, and _walked through the fence_ like a falling tree would through a cobweb. I started after, but was tripped up by my inexpressibles, which, either from habit, or the excitement of the moment, were about my heels, and before I had really gathered myself up, I heard the old varmint groaning in a thicket near by, like a thousand sinners, and by the time I reached him he was a corpse. Stranger, it took five niggers and myself to put that carcass on a mule’s back, and old long-ears waddled under his load, as if he was foundered in every leg of his body, and with a common whopper of a bar, he would have trotted off, and enjoyed himself. ’Twould astonish you to know how big he was: I made a _bed-spread of his skin_, and the way it used to cover my bar-mattress, and leave several feet on each side to tuck up, would have delighted you. It was in fact a creation bar, and if it had lived in Samson’s time, and had met him, in a fair fight, it would have licked him in the twinkling of a dice-box. But, stranger, I never liked the way I hunted him, _and missed him_. There is something curious about it, I could never understand,—and I never was satisfied at his giving in so _easy at last_. Prehaps, he had heard of my preparations to hunt him the next day, so he jist come in, like Capt. Scott’s coon, to save his wind to grunt with in dying; but that ain’t likely. My private opinion is, that that bar was an _unhuntable bar, and died when his time come_.”