Almost without breathing we waited. Nearer and nearer the sound came, until a man showed up around the bend. He was wading right in the stream and flopping a fish-pole back and forth in the most ridiculous way you ever saw. He’d snap his line ahead till it touched the water and then snap it back and then snap it ahead again. Just like cracking a whip it was.
“Acts crazy,” I says to Mark.
“Crazy nothin’,” he says. “That’s the way you c-c-cast a fly. He’s trout-f-f-fishin’.”
“Oh,” says I, and watched him, more interested than ever. I’d heard about fly-casting, but somehow I hadn’t expected to see anybody actually doing it. The man was maybe a hundred yards off, but we could see he had funny boots on that came way up under his shoulders. There was a little net hanging from his belt, and a basket with a cover over his shoulder. Pretty soon I heard Mark grunt surprised-like.
“What’s matter?” I asked him.
“Know who he is?” Mark asked.
I looked close. The sun came through a place in the trees and shone right on his face, and I recognized the man. It wasn’t anybody in the world but the Mr. Collins that helped us pull Mark out of the wreck.
“It was him the t-t-telegraft was for,” Mark says to himself.
In five minutes Collins was almost in front of us. The water was to his waist, and he was wading slow. All of a sudden he stopped and pulled his pole up into the air. About thirty feet ahead of him something splashed in the water, and I could see his pole was bent way over.
“He’s g-g-got one,” Mark says, excited.