Valencia and Pancho and one other were straining to shift the gate of another pen.  It was awkward, since they must work from the top; for the adobe corral was as the jaws of a lion while the bear circled watchfully there, and the pen they were striving to open was no safer, with the big, black bull rolling bloodshot eyes at them from below.  He had been teased with clods of dirt and small stones flung at him.  He had shaken the very posts in their sockets with the impact of his huge body while he tried to reach his tormentors, until they desisted in the fear that he would break his horns off in his rage and so would cheat them of the sight of the good, red blood of the she-bear.  Now he was in a fine, fighting mood, and he had both horns with which to fight.  From his muzzle dribbled the froth of his anger, as he stiffened his great neck and rumbled a challenge to all the world.  Twice, when the gate moved an inch or two and creaked with straining, he came at it so viciously that it jammed again; indeed, it was the batterings of the bull that had made it so hard to open.

Valencia, catching a timbered crosspiece, gave it a lift and a heave.  The gate came suddenly free and slid back as they strained at the crosspiece.  The bull, from the far side of the pen where he had backed for another rush, shot clear through the opening and half-way across the adobe corral before he realized that he was free.

The bear, at pause in her circlings while she snuffed at the bars that now separated her from her cubs, whirled and lifted herself awkwardly upon her haunches, her narrow head thrust forward sinisterly as she faced this fresh annoyance.  Midway, the bull stopped with two or three stiff-legged jumps and glared at her, a little chagrined, perhaps, at the sudden transformation from human foe to this grizzled hill-giant whom instinct had taught him to fear.  In his calf-hood he had fled many times before the menace of grizzly, and perhaps he remembered.  At any rate he stiffened his forelegs, stopped short, and glared.

Up above, the breaths that had been held came in a shout together.  Everyone who saw the pause yelled to the bull to go on and prove his courage.  And the bull, when the first shock of surprise and distaste had passed, backed ominously, head lowered, tail switching in spasmodic jerks from side to side.  The bear stood a little straighter in her defiance; her head went forward an inch; beyond that she did not move, for her tactics were not to rush but to wait, and to put every ounce of her terrible strength into the meeting.

The neck of the bull swelled and curved, his eyeballs showed glassy.  His back humped; like a bowlder hurled down a mountain slope he made his rush, and nothing could swerve him.

The bear might have dodged, and sent him crashing against the wall.  Men hoped that she would, and so prolong the excitement.  But she did not.  She stood there and waited, her forepaws outspread as if for an embrace.