“Hungry as sin,” John told himself at last; and his eyes became sober as he considered thoughtfully. There were other men about, as good fishermen as he, and not half so scrupulous. If they should come upon this pool on such a day——
He did a thing that might seem profanation to the fisherman who likes a goodly bag. He gathered brush and threw it into the pool; he piled it end to end and over and over; he found two small pines; dead in their places among their older brethren; and he pushed them from their rotting roots and dragged them to the brook and threw them in. When he was done the pool was a jungle, a wilderness of stubs and branches; a sure haven for trout, a spot almost impossible to fish successfully. While he watched, when his task was finished, he saw brown darting shadows in the stream as the trout shot back into the covert he had made; and he smiled with a certain satisfaction.
“They’ll have to fish for them now,” he told himself.
He decided to try and see whether a man might take a trout from the pool in its ambushed state. It meant an hour of waiting, a snagged hook or two, a temper-trying ordeal with mosquitoes and flies. But in the end he landed another fish, and was content. He went back through the swamp and up to the farm, well pleased.
Moving along the brook he saw other pools where smaller fish were lying; and that night he told Ruth what he had seen. “You can see all the trout you’re minded to, down there now,” he said.
The girl nodded unsmilingly. She had not yet learned to laugh again, since her sister’s death. They were a somber household, these three—Evered steadily silent, the girl sober and stern, John striving in his awkward fashion to win mirth from her and speech from Evered.
The early summer was to pass thus. And what was in Evered’s mind as the weeks dragged by no man could surely know. His eye was as hard as ever, his voice as harsh; yet to Ruth it seemed that new lines were forming in his cheeks, and his hair, that had been black as coal, she saw one afternoon was streaked with gray. Watching, thereafter, she marked how the white hairs increased in number. Once she spoke of it to John, constrainedly, for there was no such pleasant confidence between these two as there had been.
John nodded. “Yes,” he said, “he’s aging. He loved her, Ruth; loved her hard.”
Ruth made no comment, but there was no yielding in her eyes. She was in these days implacable; and Evered watched her now and then with something almost pleading in his gaze. He began to pay her small attentions, which came absurdly from the man. She tried to hate him for them.
Once John sought to comfort his father, spoke to him gently of the dead woman; and Evered cried out, as though to assure himself as well as silence John: “She was tricking me, John! Leaving me. With Semler, that very day.”