An eddy of foam, the shade of an over-hanging bowlder, then another upturned stump, (on these wind-swept mountain sides there were many such), and Ted’s spirits rose by degrees.
Meantime Pedro passed the rapids, climbed to a point well above, and selected a smooth green stretch of river for his operations. It had meant stiff going, and would mean more before he made his way back up the canyon wall, but something about their present crisis had challenged his reserves.
Pedro always used a spoon when he wasn’t fishing for pure sport. On this sunny stretch, so clear in the red glow of approaching sunset that the bottom was plainly visible, he could see the fat old patriarchs lazing the late afternoon away. But he was soon rousing them to find out what that little shining thing could be that darted so rapidly through their habitat,—that tiny bit of metallic white so unlike anything their jaded appetites had yet negotiated.
The bright silver blade, only a quarter inch in width, perhaps three times as long, spun against the current, cavorting along jerk by jerk, (with time between jerks for the scaly ones to think it over), soon began to get results. As the trout were all on the bottom resting till twilight should set in, Pedro craftily allowed the spinner to sink till it all but raked the bottom before beginning that tantalizing play.
Norris, too, tried a spinner, though he chose rapid water. There was one great beauty, green above and orange beneath, that baited his fancy. For some time he dangled the lure before he felt the heavy fish. Then a long rush, that sent his line whistling out like lightning, a moment’s quiet, followed by another rush, and he had landed a great beauty of a five-pounder with the hook hard fast in his jaws.
After that Norris returned to camp, where Ace and Ted were already jubilantly comparing notes. Long Lester came in with a bag of birds and rabbits.
Of course their catch had to be broiled. Pedro arrived in time to join them in “which will you have, or trout,”—for the game had been saved for breakfast. The boys ate with relish, though without salt, and later listened to Long Lester telling tales with his boots to the bon-fire, bronze faced, nonchalant. At 8,000 feet, the air grew noticeably cooler with the turning of the wind down-canyon, and the boys heaped down-wood liberally in a pyramid. The dry evergreens snapped in a shower of sparks as the full moon, silvering the snow-clad peaks, deepened the shadows under the trees.
On the fragrance of crushed fir boughs they finally slept, all thought of the morrow drowned in dreams.
Out of the painted sunsets and yellow sands of the Salton Sea, land of centipedes and cactus, blistering sun, and parching thirst, and all things cruel and ugly, had come Sanchez, a Mexican, with his son and an old man who had been his servant, to lay ties for the narrow gauge railway that was to zig-zag up the canyon walls for a lumber company. King’s Lumber Company had fired them for reasons that will appear. Suffice it now that all their blistering bitterness and parching hate had focused on these forests.
Rosa, alone on the Red Top fire outlook scaffold, had seen a pin-point of light the night before that she took for a camp-fire, but whose, she could not know.