The Yeah. Welcome back everyone to 1001 one classic short stories and tales.

This is your host John Haggadorn.

It's been a while since we've done a Brett Hart story

and I've got a good one for you today called

an Alibaba of the Sierras. Enjoy. Johnny Starley found himself again late

for school. It was always happening. It seemed to be inevitable with the process of going to school at all,

and it was no fault of his. Something was always occurring. Some eccentricity of

nature or circumstance was invariably starting up in his daily path to the schoolroom.

He may not have been thinking of squirrels and yet the rarest and most evasive of that species

were always crossing his trail.

He may not have been hunting honey, and yet a wild bees nest and a hollow of an oak absolutely

obtruted itself before him.

He wasn't bird-catching, and yet there was a yellow hammer, always within stone's throw.

He had heard how grown men hunters always saw the most wonderful animals when they hadn't got a gun with them and it seemed to be his

lot to meet them in his restricted possibilities on the way to school. If nature

was thus capricious with his elders why should folk think it's strange if she was as mischievous with a small boy?

On this particular morning, Johnny had been beguiled by the unmistakable footprints,

so like his own, of a bears cub.

What chances he had of ever coming up with them, or what he would have done if he had?

He did not know.

He only knew that at the end of an hour and a half he found himself two miles

from the schoolhouse and from the position of the sun at least an hour too late for

...