146 THRILLING ADVENTURES. 



which he lived Cincinnati among the rest, with venison 

 and bear meat. He killed the last buffalo ever seen in Ken- 

 tucky. At the age of seventy-five, his bodily and mental 

 powers are unimpaired. He owns a farm in the rear of Cov- 

 ington Kentucky, and, at that age, as his day's work, splits 

 over one hundred rails. 



"Well," said this old veteran, after finishing his statistics 

 of Indian warfare, and in reply to other questions, "let me 

 tell you a story or two of bears and panthers. 



"I was living on a branch of Bigbone, called Panther Run, 

 from the circumstance to this day. It was the year after I 

 had been out with General Wayne. I had left home for a deer 

 hunt, with rifle, tomahawk, and butcher knife in my belt as 

 customary, and scouring about the woods, I come to a thick 

 piece of brush, a perfect thicket of hoop-poles. I discovered 

 some dreadful growling and scuffling was going on, by the 

 sound apparently within a hundred yards or so. I crept as 

 cautiously and silently as possible through the thicket, and 

 kept, on until I found myself within perhaps twenty steps of 

 two very large male panthers, who were making a desperate 

 fight, screaming, spitting and yelling like a couple of ram cats, 

 only much louder, as you may guess. At last one of them 

 seemed to have absolutely killed the other, for he lay quite 

 motionless. This is what I had been waiting for, and while 

 the other was swinging back and forwards over him in triumph, 

 I blazed away, but owing to that kind of motion, I shot him 

 through the bulge of the ribs, a little too far back to kill him 

 instantly. They are a very hard animal to kill, any how. 

 But he made one prodigious bound through the brush, and 

 cleared himself out of my sight, the ground where we were 

 being quite broken as well as sideling. I then walked up to 

 the other, mistrusting nothing, and was within a yard of him, 

 when he made one spring to his feet and fastened on my left 

 shoulder with his teeth and claws, where he inflicted several 

 deep wounds. I was uncommonly active as well as stout in 



