“Why, then, I should lose the fish.”
“Not you. Ain’t he hooked? You do as I say, and then git back, and you can pull all out together.”
Dexter bestrode the branch, and worked himself along further and further till an ominous crack made him pause.
“Go on,” shouted the boy from the other side.
“He’ll think I’m a coward if I don’t,” said Dexter to himself, and he worked himself along for another three feet, with the silvery fish just before him, seeming to tempt him on.
“There, you can reach him now, can’t you?” cried the boy.
“Yes; I think I can reach him now,” said Dexter. “Wait till I get out my knife.”
It was not so easy to get out that knife, and to open it, as it would have been on land. The position was awkward; the branch dipped at a great slope now toward the water, and Dexter’s trousers were not only drawn half-way up his legs, but drawn so tightly by his attitude that he could hardly get his hand into his pocket.
It was done though at last, the thin bough in which the line was tangled seized by the left hand, while the right cut vigorously with the knife.
It would have been far easier to have disentangled the line, but Bob Dimsted was a learned fisher, and he had laid down the law. So Dexter cut and cut into the soft green wood till he got through the little bough all but one thin piece of succulent bark, dancing up and down the while over the deep water some fifteen feet from the bank.