THE SCARLET IBIS
THE SCARLET IBIS
THE SCARLET IBIS
The boy stopped sharply in the portage, and swung about and glanced inquiringly at Josef. Light as the sound was, quickly as the boy had heard it, Josef had heard first. He stood rooted in the path, a line of lean strength, in vague-colored clothes, his black locks tumbling from under his battered felt hat, a scarlet bandanna in the belt at his slim waist pricking the dim light with an explosion of color. His extraordinary eyes, very light blue, very large, with pupils dilated over the irises, as animals’ eyes dilate, snapped electrically; his glance searched the woods to this side and that.
The boy had been trained under Josef and knew his ways; he stood stock-still as the guide listened, as he sent that concentrated glance ahead into the confused masses of shadow and brightness and foliage and water of the Canadian forest. It flashed, that blue search-light, straight through tangled branchesand across bulks of emerald velvet, which were moss-covered bowlders; it went on deep into the inscrutable forest—Josef’s glance. And the boy knew that he was seeing things in those mysterious depths, and reading them as wild creatures see and read the woodland, as the boy himself, trained woodsman though he was, might never hope to do. With that, the tense pose relaxed, the wonderful eyes came back from their exploring and—gentle, friendly, shy—met the boy’s eyes. Josef smiled.
“M’sieur Jack hears the m’sieur talking?” he asked in French.
Used as he was to his guide, the boy was surprised. “What m’sieur? What do you mean, Josef?”
Josef waved a careless hand. “There is a m’sieur and a guide. The landing-net dropped, just now. It was that which one heard. They fish in the little river, around the next turn, at the Rémous des Jurons—Profanity Pool—one will see in a moment. The m’sieur,par exemple, is large—a heavy man.”
This in quick, disjointed sentences, as Josef talked—much the same way as he sprang from one rock to another in a river crossing, feeling his way, assuringhimself of a footing before he tried the next. Josef was shy even with his own young m’sieur, whom he had guided for seven years, since M’sieur Jack was a lad in knickerbockers. It was of his nature to talk in a hurrying low voice, in short phrases, meeting one’s glance with the gentleness of the brilliant, great, light eyes, guardedly, ready to spring back into the cave of his reserve as an alarmed wild creature might hide in its den. Yet he loved to show M’sieur Jack this gift of his, this almost second sight in the woods. It gratified him now when the boy spoke.
“How in thunder do you know all that?” he demanded. “I’m not so blamed slow, and yet I can’t hear any one talking.”
Josef held up his hand dramatically, very Frenchly. “Listen—écoutez!”
Jack listened, Josef smiling at him broadly, alert, vivid. The little river ran at their left, brown-pooled, foam-splashed, tumbling over rocks, blurring all sounds. Overhead, in the tall white birches, in the lower spruce-trees, the wind rustled, and brushed with a feathery music the edges of thetinkling water noises. It seemed, as one walked along the portage—the old, old Indian trail—all beautiful peace and stillness; but when one stopped to listen there was a whole orchestra of soft instruments playing, and any one sound was hard to disentangle. Jack threw his whole soul into the effort before he made out, through the talking water and the wind sounds, an intermittent note which he could place as a man’s speech some distance away.
“I hear it,” he cried out.
Josef smiled indulgently; he liked to teach woodcraft to his young m’sieur; also M’sieur Jack was a good scholar; there was no other m’sieur of the club, young or old, to whom he would give the bow of his canoe in going through a difficult rapids; he had done that with M’sieur Jack. Yes, and also M’sieur Jack could tell if a male or female beaver had gnawed the chips around a birch-trunk by the tooth-marks in the wood; Josef had taught him that. And M’sieur Jack was alsocapableto portage a canoe like a guide, tossing the heavy boat to his shoulders unaided and swinging off down a trail as silently, as swiftly as an Indian; and he could tie up apacqueton—andmake camp in a rain—and skin a moose; these things and others M’sieur Jack could do, and Josef was proud of him. But M’sieur Jack could not see into the woods like Josef and he was not as quick at hearing sounds—of that also Josef was proud. So he smiled and waited for the question sure to come. “What the dickens makes you think he’s a big man—un homme pesant?” asked Jack.
They were moving forward along the trail, Jack leading, and throwing his sentences in an undertone, as instinct teaches one to speak in the woods, over his shoulder to Josef. And for answer Josef flung out his muscular arm, in its faded blue calico sleeve, and pointed ahead. Jack stumbled on a root as he followed the pointing hand, and, recovering, caught sight of a tan-colored sweater far in front, even now barely in range of sight, hung on a tree by the path.
“It is not warm to-day,par exemple; a m’sieur who is not somewhat fat would not feel the walking in this portage—so as to take off that,” Josef reasoned softly, in jerks.
“Did you see that—away back there? Well,I’ll be—” staccatoed the lad, and Josef grinned with pleased vanity. “Josef, you’re a wizard,” the boy went on. “But never mind, my son, you’ll get fooled some time. I’ll bet he didn’t drop the landing-net. I’ll bet it was his leader-box or his cigarette-case. No landing-net.À bas, landing-nets! You’ll see!”
And Jack kicked at a rotten stump and sent it crashing in slow ruin, as if the vitality in him were overflowing through his long legs. So the two, the boy born into a broad life which faced from babyhood the open door of opportunity, and the boy scarcely five years older, born to a narrow existence, walled about with a high, undoored wall of unending labor—these two swung on brotherly, through the peace and morning freshness of the forest, and in the levelling reality of nature were equals.
The river sang. One saw it—out of the corner of the eye as one walked—brown in the pools, white where it tumbled over the rocks; the rocks speckled it with their thousand gray hummocks; grasses grew on them; a kingfisher fled scolding across the water and on down-stream; in the trail—the portage—it was all shimmering misty greens, with white sharpranks of birch-trees; the wind murmured and blew against one’s face. Through such things the two stalwart lads walked on and were happy. The unconcerned gray stones of the rapids, which had looked exactly the same on the morning when Pharaoh’s daughter had found little Moses in the bulrushes, would look exactly the same, likely, two thousand years from now—for world-making is a long business and the Laurentian hills are the grandfathers of the planet, and stones reel off twenty centuries with small aging—these immemorial nobodies of an obscure little Canadian river had seen nothing pass by in their long, still lives blither or more alive than the two lads, gentleman and peasant, with their “morning faces” and their loping pace of athletes.
Around a turn they halted as by one brain order. Something moving. In Broadway a man in rapid motion is lost in a sea of men in rapid motion; in the woods a man lifts a slow finger and is so conspicuous that the mountains seem to shout a startled “Look!” The man at the edge of Profanity Pool leaned forward and lunged at his flies hangingtangled around his rod; he said “Damn!” The two boys, whom his movement had brought to a standstill, unseen, motionless in the shade of the narrow portage, shook with silent laughter.
With that Jack stepped forward, breaking a twig purposely, and came out on the rocks. The man looked up and saw him, a bright-faced, tall lad, claret and brown as to complexion, clean-limbed and strong as to build. Something in him drew a smile to the man’s face—it was not unlikely to be so.
“Bon jour,” Jack said with a haul at his cap, and stuffing it into his pocket further; and then “Good-morning, sir. Any luck?”
The man stared at him. “Didn’t you hear what I said?” he inquired.
And Jack, pausing one second, went off into a shout of deep laughter which set the mountain echoes ringing, and Josef, discreet in the background, stepped back a pace so that the strange m’sieur might not see him laughing also. When M’sieur Jack laughed it was impossible to keep as serious as one should.
Squatting in the shadows beyond the m’sieur wassomething shading off into rocks and foliage; a face stared over the bushes of the “thé sauvage”—the Indian tea shrub with its dim pink flowers. So hidden, so motionless was the man that Jack did not see him for the first instant—but Josef had seen him; there had been a brief half-nod of recognition on both sides before the messieurs had spoken. Jack caught sight of him.
“It is you, Adelard Martel?” he demanded; Jack was likely to know most of the guides in the club. “Why haven’t you got a big fish for your m’sieur? They are here,” he threw at him cheerfully.
But the man did not answer with a smile, as most people answered Jack Vance. The dark, furtive eyes shot a resentful glance at the large man who still struggled with his fishing-tackle. “M’sieur—is not lucky,” he brought out with the broad, soft accent of ahabitant, and looked down sulkily, displeased, and then flashed up an angry glance. “There was a big one—b’en gros—three minutes ago. He rose to the fly. One would have had him grabbed—poigné—in a second. Butv’là, M’sieur slipped and fell backward and knocked me the landing-net outof my hand, and the big one saved himself—se sauvait. Comme ça”—with a swift gesture of disgust.
“The landing-net?” The boy turned and looked at Josef and laughed, and Josef’s big light eyes flashed satisfaction.
The strange m’sieur broke in with a nod toward his guide. “Something wrong with that fellow,” he commented. “He seems angry that I can’t catch fish.”
Jack leaned over and swept in one of the curly, bobbing snells of the m’sieur’s leader as he answered. “May I help you?” he asked with friendliness of a brother craftsman. “It’s the dickens of a job to do this alone. Adelard ought”—and he stopped and shook his head fatherly at the sullen-faced guide. “He’s sore as a crab because you haven’t had luck,” he explained. “They’re all that way. It’s a personal question—if their messieurs are lucky, you see. He’ll be another question when you take a five-pounder.”
The big man lowered the butt of his rod suddenly, thereby mixing up all the whirls of catgut which Jack had skilfully untangled; he looked at the boywith a heart-broken expression; he looked as if he were going to cry.
“But I can’t,” he said sorrowfully. “I don’t know how to fish. And I want to so much. It’s my first vacation in six years, and I haven’t got but a week. I thought it was easy to fish, that anybody could do it. And I don’t know how to tie the leader on, and the reel falls out of the—the reel-plate or something. And if I touch the automatic spring it all snaps up before I can wink, and the leader runs down the rod through the rings and it’s the very devil. I hit a rock and broke a tip the first thing and had to put in another. It took me half an hour to put the stuff together and then that happened. And the flies tangle—all the time. And my guide despises me! I thought fishing was fun!”
The man’s voice was a wail in the last sentences. Something in the boy’s friendly youthfulness had made it possible to pour out this tale of woe where with another wayfarer the unlucky fisherman would have kept his bitter counsel. His instinct was not wrong. The thought shot into Jack’s mind that here was a poor man, probably not able to afford vacations,who had put his hard-earned money into one and was failing to get the good of it. Like a young knight to a maiden in distress the boy rushed to the rescue.
“Now that’s just too darned bad,” he brought out heartily. “But you know, sir, it’s easy enough to set it all straight. Fishingisfun—almost the best fun going. I don’t want to butt in, but—you see I’ve been at this sort of thing all my days”—one thought involuntarily of Methuselah—“and I can’t help knowing the trick. I’m not a crack exactly, but—well, it’s second nature to me, and I’d simply love to show you if you wouldn’t think me fresh to offer.”
“Fresh!” the older man repeated. “If you would give me a few points I’d bless you. But you’re off on a trip yourself—I can’t take your time”—and the boy cut in there with joyful assurances, which there was no mistaking, as to his pleasure in helping.
“We’re just on a casual two days’ tramp, Josef and I,” he explained. “Nothing to do so’s you’d notice it. We left the canoe and the pack down at the lake and dashed up here for a fish or so.” By this he had the stranger’s rod in hand, a Leonardrod, the boy knew at a glance, about four ounces in weight, the last word in expense and perfection of rods. “Gosh, he blew himself!” was the inward comment Jack made. Josef was somehow present at the psychological distance from the butt as the boy held it in his hand, and while he set the reel more firmly into the plate and pushed the nickel ring down strongly Josef’s delicate, coarse finger-tips were untwisting the three bright flies from an extraordinarily thorough tangle. Adelard Martel watched sulkily out of the Indian tea-bushes; the large m’sieur watched, wondering. With that the lines were free, and Jack swung the butt about into Josef’s ready hand, and suddenly had the junction of leader and fish-line in his mouth and was chewing at it with energy.
“Tied wrong,” he commented thickly, and then had it out and drew the softened strings from their knot. “If you don’t mind, sir, I’ll show you how to put a leader into a snell.” He held the loop of transparent cord in his left hand and poised the green line above it. “Like this—down you go inside—up you go outside—across you go—then downoutside, up—and pull her tight. There you are!” He slid the cross-loop down, and with a jerk it was all undone. “Just as easy to take out as to put in, you see. Want to do it yourself, sir?” And the man, as enchanted as a small boy, fumbled a bit and learned the knot. “Now we’re off,” Jack announced, glancing backward to assure his recover, and sent a skilful line into Profanity Pool.
Perhaps no harder place to fish was in the club. The pool, a black hole in the river, was thirty odd feet long and varied in width from twenty to five feet, irregularly. At the right a large log stretched over the water lengthwise, and under its shadow lurked the big trout. Also under it were snags where, once hooked, the fish ran to hide, and catch the line about the wood, and tear loose. One must keep a fish away from this log at all hazards. Yet across from it were sharp rocks apt to cut fish-line.
“The hole is chock-full of Scyllas and Charybdises, all right,” Jack remarked, pointing out the geography to his pupil. “I reckon Profanity Pool isn’t a misnomer. Lots of cuss-words spilled into this water, they do say.”
He cast, varying his line, varying his direction, with easy skill, over the dark, wild water, all the time telling how and why.
“With the forearm, you know, sir. Don’t put your shoulder into it. And stop a second on your recover, when the line’s back of you. Don’t monkey with it too fast—give it time to straighten out; and don’t slap the water with the flies. That scares ’em. Let the tail-fly touch first, and just as it’s touching lift the tip of the rod a scrap—see!” He illustrated with finished delicacy. “Then it goes down softly. Hi!”
A liquid swash, a break of white foam, an upward snap of the wrist—a trout was on.
“That’s too blamed bad—I didn’t mean to take anything,” he murmured regretfully, but he played it all the same, and in three or four minutes Josef had landed it and held it up wordlessly—aSalmo fontinalisof a pound and a half, with scarlet fins and gold-and-silver-spotted stomach. The stranger was tingling with excitement.
“That’s something like!” he brought out, and then meekly, anxiously, “May I fish now?”
And Jack, smiling his old-young smile, put the rod into the man’s hand and held the hand carefully for a few trial casts. Then “Let her go,” he commanded, and the large m’sieur, trembling with eagerness, was fishing. Jack, standing by with his hands in his trousers pockets, his whole soul on the performance, criticised with frankness. “Now, that’s rotten, sir. Don’t recover that nervous way; that’s what tangles ’em. Just—sort of—rhythmic; back slow—pause—cast; lift the tip a scrap as you touch; just a shiver of the wrist does it. Now—tip up—don’t sag the line; draw the flies along, and wiggle ’em alluringly as they come; don’t let ’em go under—bad, bad! You can’t fool fish if you drown your flies. Oh, well—the tail-fly may sink a bit if you’re after big ones”—and so the illustrated lecture went on, Jack thoroughly enjoying himself in the rôle of instructor. “Ginger!” he brought out suddenly in an interval, “my brother would throw a fit if he saw me teaching fishing. He’s a shark at it, you know. He’s forgotten more than I ever knew. Josef”—turning on the guide—“M’sieur va s’amuser de moi en professeur de la pêche, n’est-ce pas?” And Josef,showing his teeth in a short grin, answered promptly, “Oui, M’sieur,” and attended to business.
The large m’sieur was learning fast. One saw that he had not missed a word of the boy’s lesson or the reason for any point of piscatorial finesse. He made mistakes certainly, and was awkward, as is any beginner at the wonderful world-old game, which has to get into the nerves and the blood before one plays it well ever. Yet he took hold as a trained mind takes hold of whatever problem, with a certain ability and sureness.
“I rather think you must do some things very well, sir,” Jack remarked encouragingly, after a bout of unflinching reprimand as to vicious tendencies of the scholar. “You caught that idea about not getting the line too close, at once. You must be used to doing things well.”
The stranger lifted his keen, clear blue eyes a second and shot a glance at the boy. “Possibly one thing,” he answered briefly, and cast again.
Half a dozen small trout lay on the rocks, strung on a forked willow branch, the vivid, pointed leaves crisp on one side of it, cut by the resentful Adelard,now charmed by the turn of events and eager to be included in them. But the big fish did not rise.
“Bad time of day,” Jack explained. “Hole’s fussed up, too. Have to let it get quiet before the sockdologers will take notice.” He turned to the older man with a certain brotherly manner of his, a manner which lacked in no point of respect, but was yet simply unconscious of any difference of age—a manner which made older men like the lad and like themselves better, too. “If I were you,” advised Jack, “I’d stop now and come back early to-morrow morning, by gray light, and have a try at them. Maybe you’d get an old he-one then.”
A short lecture followed on the taking down of rods, and the etiquette of winding a leader about one’s hat, so that the pull is always from the last fly.
“Where are you going now?” asked the large m’sieur as he and Adelard stood, theirbutinpacked, ready to move on.
Jack laughed and looked at Josef, who laughed also and shrugged his shoulders. “We don’t know exactly,” the boy said. “We’re just ‘loungin’ ’round and sufferin’,’ like Brer Fox. I rather think we’llramble up-stream and take the new trail the guardian cut last winter to Lac Creux. I’ve never been there. And then come back and put up our tent on your lake for the night, if you don’t mind, sir. It’s down there now, with the canoe, at the mouth of this little river,” and he stamped a boot caressingly into the brown water, as one pats an animal in speaking of it.
“Put up with me over-night,” suggested the m’sieur. “I’ve plenty of room; it would be a great pleasure. Then you needn’t bother with your tent or your kit.”
The clear eyes met the man’s with frank, pleased surprise; Jack never got used to the astonishing goodness of people in wanting him about. “Why, we’ll do that with bells on, if you’d really like us, sir,” he agreed heartily.
Ten minutes later the two lads were swinging again through the shifting mystery of the portage, following the narrowing river farther and farther up-stream, while the large m’sieur and Adelard, now in a pleasanter humor, progressed down-stream to the lake and the camp.
About six o’clock that evening the large m’sieur, whose name, incidentally, was Bradlee, spread a gray camp blanket on the pine-needles in front of his immense walled tent, and stretched it with care to the foot of a peculiarly luxurious stump—a stump of the right shape and angle and consistency to make a good back for a man to loll against. There is a large difference in the comfort of stumps. Mr. Bradlee sighed an unbroken sigh of satisfaction as he felt his weight settle rightly into curves of stump and of pine-needles and knew that his confidence in both had not betrayed him. It was the only manner of Morris-chair he had about, and it seemed of importance. He had been tramping all the afternoon, and he was tired and wanted luxury; he found it on the gray blanket, with his back against the spruce stump. Luxury, it is said, is a matter of contrast; this man’s scale of such things possibly began at a different point in New York; here in Canada, after a day’s heavy labor in portage and canoe, after coming back grimy and sweating and black-fly-bitten and footsore—after those things, a plunge in the lake and dry flannel clothes and a gray blanketand a stump realized luxury. So he sighed contentedly and shifted his leg to feel how comfortably the muscles ached in repose, as he drew his crowning happiness out of his pocket, that long brown happiness called a cigar. Yet he was conscious as he lit it, and pulled the first delicious puff, that he was still unsatisfied.
“I wish that cub would come,” Bradlee murmured half-aloud.
Behold, around the corner of the spruce point which guarded the bay, dark on the silvery water, a canoe shot forward, swift, silent. Bradlee with one long pull took his cigar from his mouth and held it as he watched. It was a picture to remember—the blue sky with pink and copper cotton-batting clouds; below that the band of dark woods, sunlight gone from them, crowding to the lake; below that the gray shimmer of water and the dark bulk of the canoe, and the double paddle flash of the stroke of the two powerful lads under which the canoe leaped toward him out of the hills. The indescribable intoxication of the Canadian mountain air was about him, immense, pervading; he heard the beat of thepaddles and the long swish of the water after each bound of the canoe; now Jack missed a stroke and shot his paddle high in the air in salute, but did not break the infinite quiet with a spoken word.
“Most boys would have howled their heads off at sight; this one respects the sanctuaries,” thought the man.
With that the springing boat was close and he got up and stood at the water’s edge and the bow crushed, with a soothing sound which canoe people know, up the wet sand. Jack arose, stretched his legs, and stepped out, tall and dirty and happy; bare-headed, bare-armed, the gray flannel shirt décolleté around his strong neck, his face streaked with mother earth, and with blood of murdered black flies, but bright with that peace which shines from faces which nature has smoothed for a while.
“Glad to see you, young man; hope you have an appetite,” spoke Bradlee cordially, and felt the place all at once illumined by a buoyant presence.
“HaveI?” responded Jack. “Just you watch me, sir.”
Shortly, on the sand by the lake-edge, under a wide-branched pine-tree, the table was spread, with trout still sizzling in the frying-pan and flapjacks and maple sugar and thin fried potatoes and other delicacies of camp, which Adelard and his confrère, Louis, brought in relays, laughing joyfully at the enormous hunger of the young m’sieur. Then, while the guides ate their dinner, while the night settled down like some mammoth bird into its nest over the lonely miles of mountains and the quiet stretch of lake, the man and the boy sat by the bubbling birch fire and “smelled wood smoke at twilight,” and talked fishing. Jack was very great at expounding, and it was seldom he had such a chance; he made the most of it. The older man listened as to the Law and Gospel; it was a memorable evening. The Bradlee fishing-tackle was had out and looked over.
“You’ve got some splendid things,” Jack announced in his uncompromising young voice, and regretted to himself the unnecessary extravagance of a poor man. “But the trouble is, there’s a lot that’s—excuse me for saying it—trash. I reckon you justwent to a shop and bought what they told you, didn’t you?”
“Exactly.”
“Too bad.” Jack’s wise head shook sorrowfully. “Wish I could have been along. I could have saved you hunks of money. An automatic reel’s a crime, too, you know. Not sportsmanlike. However—you’ll know, yourself, next time.”
“Thanks to you,” said Bradlee humbly.
“Oh, gee, no,” protested Jack. “You’ll just learn, doing it. Let’s see about that cast for to-morrow morning. Now, I’d admire to have a Parmachene Belle—that’s good in these waters.”
The fine, big, new fly-book was opened, and the man flapped a thick leaf or two and nervously drew out a brown fly. Jack had been teaching him the names.
“Oh no!” the boy threw at him. “That’s a Reuben Wood. Hard to remember till you get used to them, isn’t it, though? Here is your Parmachene—see, with the white and red feathers? Put her on for a hand-fly, wouldn’t you, sir?”
Bradlee obeyed with pathetic promptness, fumblinga bit, but getting fly and snell together ultimately.
“That’s—all—right!” approved the boy. “Now—let’s see. A Silver Doctor—this fellow? Don’t you think? I’ve had great luck with that fly. It’s a pretty decent fly.” The owner of the fly-book took his orders and annexed the Silver Doctor to the leader.
“Now—tail-fly. That’s important. Let—me—see.”
But the willing horse suddenly took the bit in his mouth. Bradlee pointed out a patch of scarlet with his forefinger. “I want that one,” he stated.
The boy laughed. “The Scarlet Ibis?” he inquired, like a kind but pitying father. “That wouldn’t do, I’m afraid. That’s too—crude, you see. That’s good for very dark days and very wild waters, where no one has ever fished, and they’re not educated. I’m afraid they’d know better than a Scarlet Ibis at Profanity Pool.”
But the man, so docile up to now, acquired a setness about the mouth. “I want the Scarlet Ibis. I like the name of it, and red is the color I like, and I have an idea it will bring me luck.”
There was something in the large m’sieur, when he spoke in this way, which made one see that he was accustomed to manage things; this was different from the meek scholar of the kindergarten class in fishing. Jack yielded at once and with cordiality.
“Of course, if you’ve got a hunch,” he agreed with his young-elderly benevolence. “Maybe it will bring you luck.”
And the large m’sieur, smiling inwardly, felt that he had been allowed the Scarlet Ibis by an indulgent superior, yet liked the lad no less.
When the thick mists that had blanketed the lake all night were blowing in streamers along the shore and curving to the alders in the damp morning wind; when the forest was a black mass below, but dividing above into spires of spruce-trees under the mystical glow which fast loosed the night-bound shadows; when the grasses in the little beaver meadows were stiff with cold, wet silver, the man and the boy, leaving the guides in camp, started up-stream to Profanity Pool. It was hard to follow the portage at first, so dark it was; a hush was through the woods; no breeze stirred here away from the lake;no little beast rustled; no bird fluttered; the underworld was fast asleep. One felt like a knight of Arthur adventuring into a Merlin-guarded forest.
Even when the two fishermen reached the pool it was dark enough to make the footing uncertain as one crossed from rock to rock, to the sand-bar where the Indian tea-bushes grew, their small old-rose-colored blossoms frosted with dew, and over them in the dim light the same mysterious stillness, as if the night’s sleep were not yet ended. Also it was very cold; the chill crept through sweaters and flannel shirts, through flesh and blood and into the bones and the marrow, as they sat down to put the rod together. Instinctively they spoke in low voices, not to waken the drowsy forest. Then arrows of sunlight shot and caught in the tops of the spruces and crept ever downward. One could see the quiet pool now, and the dark, wet log lying lengthwise, and the brown water; not a stir of life on that level surface, yet under it the great trout must be waking.
The large m’sieur, casting, with his whole heart in his forearm, suddenly was aware of a small tentative resistance somewhere on the leader threadinga shimmering way across the pool. Like an electric connection his wrist thrilled in response and the delicate mechanism answered again with a light jerk.
“Steady,” spoke Jack’s deep, authoritative voice. “Something’s after it—don’t jerk. It’s a big one. Recover—don’t get flustered—slow. That’s a peach. Draw the fly slowly—it’s dark yet—let the tail-fly go under a little—not too quick—he’s after it—let him take hold.Strike!”
With an appalling suddenness Bradlee was aware of a mighty pull of unseen live strength applied to the gossamer structure of his rod and line, and his wrist flew up antiphonally with a good will which luckily did not break everything concerned. The fish had taken the fly under water, as a big one will; he was on—Bradlee had hooked him. But there was small time to dwell on that point, for the fight had begun without preliminaries. Straight for the log ran the invisible streak of force, and Jack cried out in horror:
“Keep him away—don’t let him get under.”
The large m’sieur’s lips curled back from his teeth, and his eyes gleamed savagely, as he lifted the tipand held the struggling fish on the very edge of the danger zone. The boy, following every pulse-throb, murmured “Good work,” and with that there was a sound as of a mighty garment ripping and the trout was off headlong to the foot of the pool.
“Give him line—quick,” the boy thundered.
And Bradlee, lowering the rod a bit, let the line run out—and behold the trout turned suddenly in his tracks and rushed back. Only luck saved him on that manœuvre; before Jack had cried breathlessly “Reel up,” the man had the tip lifted and his finger on the spring—for he was learning fast—and the line was snapping back in handfuls—yet there was slack for at least two seconds and it was pure chance that the fish did not shake loose. There was a space of quiet after this—dangerous quiet. The big trout was “sulking.” Somewhere down in the bottom he lay, planning fight in his cloudy fish brain, and it was equally dangerous to let him go on and to stir him up. He might be burrowing under a rock with a sharp edge which would cut the leader; he might rise at an inopportune touch and get free with one unexpected effort; everything was dangerous.
“Just wait,” Jack advised. Two minutes of masterly inactivity and then, out of patience, enraged, the enemy rose to the top and flung himself this way and that, tearing, rushing, shaking his head from side to side in a very hopeful effort to shake out the fly. Fisherman’s luck certainly carried the large m’sieur through that peril, for the most expert rodsman can do little but hold on to his tackle in such tornadoes. The fit wore past, however, and was succeeded by a determined attempt, in a series of rushes, to get under the big log. Jack stood close at Bradlee’s side and counselled him through the sharpness of this battle, and Bradlee’s keen mind bent to the execution of his orders with all there was in it. Add to this that the trout was uncommonly well hooked inside the throat, and one sees that the event was not impossible. The time came at length when it was evident that the prey was tiring. The rushes were shorter and executed with less vim, and the great back came up to the surface at times and flopped over limply.
“Gee!” commented Jack, “it’s the best fight I’ve seen in moons. He’s a sockdologer, sure Mike! Allof four pounds, sir—look at him—did you see him then?”
With that there was a sharp revival of energy and a dash to the end of the pool, and a double back, repeating the manœuvre with which operations had begun. The last ten minutes of playing a fish have a peculiar danger in the relaxing effort of the fisherman. Not only does the creature struggle less vigorously and so throw one off guard, but the strain has told and one is tired, and then, often, comes an unexpected strong rush which proves successful—the fish is gone.
The large m’sieur, ignorant of what to expect, did not presume, did not relax, and was not taken off his guard. The boy glanced at the set face many times with benignant approval, as the man, silent, intent, fought the flagging fight as earnestly, as watchfully, as at its beginning.
“Them’s um,” Jack indorsed proceedings, as the big fish flopped listlessly at the surface, and the fisherman yet held his line delicately taut, yet led the live weight at its end this way and that. “Them’s um. Don’t take your eye off him or he’ll fool you yet,”and finished with a manner of squeal: “Holy mackerel, but he’s a he-one—I’ll bet he’s close on five.”
At which premature gloating the trout rose for one last fling and shook his mighty head and slashed with his tail and threw his strong, flexible body in a hundred directions at once, whipping the brown water into foam. The boy, crouching with the landing-net at the water’s edge, followed the infinitely quick scintillations with his eyes; the man, lifting, lowering his rod, keeping the line not too tight, not too loose, followed them, as mere human muscles might, with his playing wrist; with that the long, shining body, brown and gold and silver and pink and scarlet and spotted, stopped struggling, floated limply half out of water, and the large m’sieur, flushed, anxious, drew him slowly inshore. Jack, with the net deep in the pool four feet to the right of the defeated king of it, waited till he was close—yet not too close—till a clock in his brain sounded the psychological second, and then—swoop; the net rushed through the brown water, deep under the trout and up with a sure curve. There was a mad flopping and struggling, but the big fellow wasin the meshes and Jack lifted him up, both fists gripping the handle of the heavy-weighted net, and held him so at arm’s length high in air.
“Gosh!” said Jack.
The large m’sieur did not say anything, but he lowered the butt of his rod with hands that shook, and brought out a sigh that appeared to wander up in stages from his boots. His face radiated a solemn happiness several flights farther down than words; his eyes were glued to the landing-net with its freight of glory. He sat down on the rocks with his boots casually trailing in the water and sighed profoundly again.
“I caught him,” he stated.
“Sure,” agreed Jack. “You took him, that’s as certain as the Pyramids. What’s more, you did it in style. The way you played that fish, sir, was good enough for anybody. You may not have experience,” Jack allowed candidly, “but I’ll be hanged if you haven’t got promise. You’re a wonder, sir—a plain wonder.”
By now Jack was squatting before the net, laid on a flat stone; his hunting-knife was out of the leather-fringedcaribou-skin sheath on his hip, and he had it in his right hand, the dull side of the blade down, while with his left he gathered the net tighter around the still flopping great trout. The wet, dull nose, the staring eyes were uppermost. Jack gave a sharp rap on the back of the neck two or three times repeated, and the king of Profanity Pool, with a long shiver, was still. Then with big-handed dexterity he drew back the meshes and pulled him out, a splendid, shining creature twenty-two inches long.
The large m’sieur, watching the boy’s expert work, made a sudden movement. “What fly is he on?” he threw at Jack.
Jack, carefully withdrawing the net from its twists and double twists around the tail, around the leader and the flies, bent swiftly, examining. There was the Parmachene Belle, tied in a yard or two of wet net-meshes; there was the Silver Doctor, having run in a half-second a complicated course through a system of the same and caught itself in the snell of the Parmachene. That was all. The lad gave a whoop that set echoes ringing in the dark hills about Profanity Pool and the gully of the little river.
“Gosh!” shouted Jack, while the large m’sieur grinned triumphantly, “it’s the Scarlet Ibis!”
Three months later, on a day in November, a tall young man in good clothes, with a clean face and a hat, swung along a street up-town in New York City. The setting and the costume were changed, yet a person who might have met the bare-headed, gray-shirted, earth-streaked woodsman and his guide in the Canadian forest in August might still have known this correct city character as Jack Vance. The freedom of the woods had not yet left his buoyant heels, nor the breeziness of the hills his physiognomy; by these signs he was the same. But his mind was working harder than it had on that morning when he and Josef had found the large m’sieur fishing by Profanity Pool; his eyes were absent-minded and intense; if one might have listened to his thoughts as his long pace lifted them and him over the pavement, it might be that some such sentence as this would have come to the light:
“Now how in thunder am I to tell if that’s interstate commerce or if it isn’t?” Jack was thinking.
With the same whole-heartedness that he had put into his fishing, into his woodcraft, the boy had now flung himself into the study of the law at that hot-house for starting the delicate green sprouts which are to grow into trees of justice, the Harvard Law School. He was in New York for what he would have described as a “bat” of some days, yet his work fermented in his brain in his holiday. He was finding law, as one mostly finds things done with all one’s might, a joy and delight. Yet for all the fun of it he was badly puzzled just now, and anxious as well as eager. After exhausting the sources of information he needed more light.
“If I only knew a man who had a practical hold on it,” his mind went on, throwing out tentacles to search for help, “an older man—a clever man, a man who—” he stopped short; a brain tentacle had touched something in the dimness. Why had there come to him in a flash the familiar atmosphere of the woods, of fishing, of Josef and the little river and—in a flash again he had arrived. “Profanity Pool! The large m’sieur—Mr. Bradlee! He said he was a railroad man—he said I was to call him up and lunchwith him; he said if ever he could help me about anything he’d do it—by the sign of the Scarlet Ibis. Ginger! I’m glad I thought of him. The very chap!”
He dashed into a drug-store and rushed to the telephone-booth. Here he was—Bradlee—W. R. H.—that was the man. Wall Street—yes. And he took down the receiver and gave a number. It was a bit roundabout getting Mr. Bradlee. It seemed that the approach to him was guarded by an army of clerks and secretaries.
“He must think he’s mighty precious,” Jack complained to himself.
One must send a name—“Mr. Vance,” Jack said simply. So that when at last a voice out of the long wire was speaking, the words “Yes—this is Mr. Bradlee,” came with impersonal iciness. But Jack was not given to being snubbed; his theory of the friendliness of mankind prevented that, along with other discomforts. “Oh, hello, Mr. Bradlee,” he threw back eagerly. “I hope I’m not butting into business. This is Jack Vance.”
“Who?” The chilly tone was a bit impatient.
“Jack Vance—of the Montagnard Club—we went fishing—don’t you remember—?”
The identification was cut short by a shout at the other end of the telephone in which there was no iciness or impatience at all. “Oh—Jack Vance—why, Great Scott, boy, it’s you, is it? I’m delighted to hear your voice. I was thinking about you yesterday and of how you fell down on the fly question. The Scarlet Ibis was crude, was it? What have you got to say about that now?”
Jack’s great pealing laughter went down the telephone wires in response. “You certainly pasted me on that, sir,” he agreed cheerfully, and then, “I want to know if I can bother you with a question or two about railroads,” he began, and explained the situation briefly. He had been assigned to argue a case in one of the moot courts—the mock trials of the students—of the law school; it was his first case; he wanted to win it “the worst way”; he was at a standstill about a railroad question; he needed the point of view of a practical experience.
“You’re a railroad man, aren’t you, sir?” Jack asked.
There was a second’s hesitation at the other end of the wire, and the answer came as if the speaker were smiling. “Well, yes—I’m called that.” And Mr. Bradlee’s friendly voice went on: “Tell you what, my son—we can’t discuss law over the telephone. Will you come down to lunch to-morrow at the Lawyers’ Club?”
“Why, I’d simply love to do it, thank you,” Jack agreed joyfully.
“Good. One o’clock. Come to my office. Possibly I may find—somebody who will help me advise you. We’ve got to win that case if it takes a leg—it’s a sort of Scarlet Ibis case, I consider, you see.” And with light-hearted laughter again at both ends of the wire the telephone was hung up.
Promptly at one next day a tall young man of fresh color was handed along with distinguished courtesy from one to another of such an array of officials as guards the valuable time of magnates in great offices.
“Gee!” remarked Jack casually as he landed at last in the private office and the very presence of Mr. Bradlee. “Gee, this is ‘some’ different fromAdelard Martel and the tent, isn’t it, Mr. Bradlee?”
On the wall of the office, in a frame behind a bulging glass, hung one of the ugliest and one of the most satisfactory personal possessions which earth affords, a trophy trout set up by experts. Its weight, five and three-quarters pounds, was marked clearly in a corner, above the date, August 7, 19—. Hooked in the grim black mouth gleamed a red fly. This work of art was examined, criticised, and appreciated by the visitor before he took his way with his host through the swarming life of down-town to the great Equitable Building, which held the famous club restaurant.
Three men were waiting in the reading-room as the two went in, three grizzled, important personages, who rose up and greeted Jack’s large m’sieur as one entitled to consideration.
“I want to present Mr. Vance to you,” said Bradlee. “Mr. Howell—Judge Carroll—Mr. Fitzhugh.”
And Jack, gripping the hands held out with his friendly, bone-breaking hand-clasp, failed to see the wonder at his youth on the men’s faces, for the wonderin his own mind that the large m’sieur had found him worthy to meet these bully old chaps, who were quite evidently somebodys. Somebodys—who? He wondered further. Shortly he found out.
“I asked you three here,” Bradlee began, waving a comprehensive oyster-fork, “to meet Mr. Vance, for a purpose.”
A bar of red crept up the clear brown of the boy’s cheeks. He had not realized that these dignified persons had come to meet him! He would have described himself as “rattled.”
Bradlee went on: “It will advance the purpose if I mention who you all are. Jack, Mr. Howell is the president of the I. S. I. & O. Z. D.; Judge Carroll, whom I luckily caught in town for the day, is on the Interstate Commerce Commission; and Mr. Fitzhugh is general counsel of four railways in the West and South. If anybody knows what you want to find out, these gentlemen do.”
“Holy mackerel!” said Jack simply, and flushed scarlet having said it, and murmured etiquettically something about “Certainly am mighty grateful.” But the four, at the awe in the tone, at the untrammelledexpletive, at something winning and indescribable in the lad’s embarrassment, broke into sudden laughter, and Bradlee, well pleased, knew that the charm which he had felt in the youngster was working. With that he was telling, what most men like to hear, a fish story—the story of the Scarlet Ibis. Plenty of raps for his autocratic ways the boy got as the large m’sieur told the tale, and once or twice the deep-toned young laughter rang out in a shout which made people all over the dining-room turn and stare and smile. Jack did not see that, but the elder men saw, and laughed too, and loved the boy for it, as older men do love youth and unconsciousness and joy of living.
“So you see,” Mr. Bradlee finished, “Izaak Walton Vance slipped up on the fly and the humble scholar guessed right. But the lad gave me the best time I’ve had for twenty years, bar none, and he taught me how to fish—I consider that worth anywhere from ten to forty million. So I’m his debtor to a large amount, and I want you three gentlemen to help me to pay an instalment on my debt. I want you to help the boy win his case in his moot courtup at the Harvard Law School. That’s what you’re here for.”
“Speaking for myself, it will be a pleasure if I can help Mr. Vance,” Fitzhugh enunciated with elaborate Southern courtesy. “And speaking for people in general, they certainly are likely to do what Billion Bradlee asks.”
The lad swung about and flashed a startled look at his host. “Are you—” he began and stopped.
Bradlee frowned slightly. “You’ve heard my nickname, I see,” he said. “You didn’t place me before?”
“Place you—well, I just didn’t, sir,” Jack smiled broadly. “You know, I thought you were so darned extravagant about that Leonard rod.” And Bradlee smiled too, pleased with the comrade-like confidence. He laid a fatherly hand on Jack’s arm.
“State the situation now, Izaak Walton,” he commanded.
So Jack, stammering a bit at first, forgetting himself soon, and, launching out into a perfectly regardless wealth of law language which flowed quaintly from his young mouth, set forth his case. There was a small railroad, it appeared, running twelve miles,from Skaneateles to Skaneateles Junction, wholly within the State. At Skaneateles Junction the road joins the New York Central. A train was made up at Skaneateles, consisting of engine, tender, caboose, four local freight cars, and one freight car billed through to Chicago, via New York Central and Lake Shore. A brakeman on this train was injured between Skaneateles and Skaneateles Junction by the negligence of the railroad company, but also because of his own negligence.
“You see,” finished Jack, addressing the great railway magnates and the interstate commerce commissioner as man to man, “the question to be settled is whether that small road is engaged in interstate commerce, so that the brakeman may recover in an action against it in spite of his contributory negligence.”