The Senator’s son had a dry fly outfit that was his treasure. Ted used the crudest kind of hook and line for bait casting. The subject was one of keen rivalry between them.
“Dad always prayed: ‘May the East wind never blow,’ when we went fishing down in Maine,” dogmatized Ace.
“Well, Pop was born in Illinois, and he used to say, ‘When the wind is in the South, it blows your bait into a fish’s mouth.’”
“Huh! That may be poetry, but we don’t have much of any wind out here except the west wind. And if we wait for a cloudy day in this neck o’ the world, we’ll wait till September.”
“All the same,” insisted Ted, “trout do bite best when it rains, because, don’t you see, the big fellows lie on the bottom, just gobbling up the worms the rain washes down to them.”
“They won’t rise to a fly in the rain.”
“Well, I dunno anything about dry flies, though I sh’d think they couldn’t see the fly up on the surface, with the water all r’iled the way it gets in a storm.”
“No more can they when the sun glares.”
“Well, then, you better choose the shady spots. I don’t see sign n’r symptom of even a wind cloud to-day.”—And yet, even as he gazed argumentatively at the horizon, a pink-white bank of cumulus began drifting into view in the niche between two distant peaks.
“Gosh! It’s sunset already,” exclaimed Ted.