“Fix it so we have a fish dinner to-night, fellows!” Billy Button called out.
“If you’re wise you’ll not make up your mouth that way; then there’s no danger of being disappointed,” said George. “I never expect anything, and so I meet with pleasant surprises once in a while.”
Perhaps since the days of old Robinson Crusoe a more remarkable fishing party never started out than that one. The three boys had taken off shoes and socks, and rolled up their trousers above their knees. Straddling the log, Felix used his paddle, and, sure enough, the clumsy craft moved along fast enough to answer their desires.
Tom let out his line and trolled, while Josh began to cast with great animation, sending his trailing flies close to the shore, and drawing them toward him in fine style.
Presently he struck and managed to land a fair-sized bass. Then Tom caught a larger one on his imitation minnow. The fun began to wax furious, so that once both the anglers chanced to be busily engaged with fish they had hooked at the same time.
It was while this was going on, and their string had already reached respectable proportions, that the boys on the log heard a sound far away, up on the side of the mountain, which caused Josh to exclaim:
“That’s a pack of dogs yapping, and they’re hot on the track of some sort of game, too! It may be only a poor little cottontail, but we’ll soon know, for they’re heading straight in our direction. Whew! listen to the yelps they give!”
“There’s something in the lake over yonder, and coming this way, too!” exclaimed Felix “Can it be a muskrat, Tom, do you think, swimming on top of the water?”
“Not much it isn’t!” cried Josh from the bow of the novel craft; “it’s a deer I tell you, a stag with half-grown antlers, taking to the water to escape from the hounds.”