“But they are for––him, aren’t they?” she asked.
“Biggest you no see. At bottom.”
That satisfied her, and she watched him silently while he found her rod, and reeled in the offending fly.
“Brown fly better now,” he said. “You ought see what trout eating before you try catch big ones.”
On this he drew a book of flies from his pocket, and replaced the gray hackle with a brown one. She questioned him eagerly, following this plain lead; and presently they were seated on the pile of driftwood, while he told her about the native trout and the rainbow and the California, of little brooks far up among the mountains where the trout were small but of a delicious flavor, of the time for flies and the time for worms, of famous catches he had made, of the way the Indians fished before the white man showed them patent rods and reels. By slow degrees Pete’s iron features softened, and he smiled at her, not with his lips, but with his eyes, which were the blackest, surely, in the world.
But Marion was not diverted from the questions that 69 were next her heart. With all her woman’s cunning of indirection, she brought the talk around to Philip Haig. Did he fish? Sometimes. Did he hunt? Much, when the deer came down from the heights with the first snows. Then––she could resist no longer.
“It must have been terrible––the accident,” she said, placing a finger on her cheek.
He looked at her strangely, while she held her breath.
“That no accident,” he said at last, after what seemed to her an interminable interval of suspense.
“No accident?” she repeated, trying not to appear too eager.