“How about our esteemed friend, the squatter?” said Arthur.
“Oh, he can’t trouble me,” answered Joe, who was already preparing to act upon Roy’s suggestion. “His shanty is away off there somewhere, while the perch hole lies a mile or more in the opposite direction. There is a wide and deep river between the two, and how is Matt going to cross it without a boat? I am of Roy’s opinion that he was driven away from here long ago.”
While Joe was talking in this way he had taken the canvas canoe from his chest, and now under his skillful hands my old friend was fast assuming his usual symmetrical proportions. In less than ten minutes he was floating gracefully alongside the skiff.
“Come on, Fly-rod,” said he, “and I will show you what a canvas canoe can do when he is managed by some one who understands his business. You never took a ride with me, did you?”
No, I never had, and if the truth must be told, I never wanted to take a second ride with him. He may have been “the boss boat” on the rapids, as he often boasted, but he was a very unfortunate craft all the same, and before the day was over I had reason to believe that Joe would have seen more sport during his two weeks’ outing if he had left the canoe safe in his room at Mount Airy. I came back to the skiff, but he didn’t.
CHAPTER XVI.
AN EXPLOIT AND A SURPRISE.
AS I could not comply with my friend’s invitation to “come on”, I was obliged to wait until Joe had exchanged his heavy boots for the buckskin moccasins he always wore whenever he went anywhere with the canoe. This being done, we pushed away from the skiff, and moved leisurely up the pond toward the perch hole, Joe whistling merrily as he plied the paddle. I do not think he was quite so light-hearted when he came back.
Half an hour’s paddling sufficed to bring us to our destination. If I hadn’t heard Joe say that the perch hole was located in the mouth of a creek, I should not have known it, for it looked to me more like an arm of the pond which set back into the land. When I was taken from my case, after the anchor had been dropped overboard, I took note of the fact that one could not see more than twenty or thirty feet up the creek, a high wooded point limiting the range of vision in that direction. I didn’t know at the time why I observed this, but I thought of it afterward.
Joe made his first cast with a scarlet ibis, and the result was surprising to both of us. The fish that took the lure did not give much of a bite—I have known a half-pound trout to seize the bait with more vim than he did—but when Joe fastened the hook with a scientific twist of his wrist, I couldn’t have doubled up quicker if he had caught a log.
“Scotland’s a burning! what’s that?” exclaimed Joe, speaking so rapidly that the words seemed to come out all at once. “I declare, it’s a bass,” he added a moment later, as the green and bronze side of the beautiful captive could be seen for an instant just under the surface of the water. “I wish he was at the bottom of the pond, for he’ll break my rod and I’ll have no more fishing this trip.”