Their journey from Boston to Dalton, which was the name of the little town in which Curtis lived, was a pleasant though an uneventful one. The last fifty miles were made by stage-coach—a new way of traveling to the Southern boys, who, of course, wanted to ride on the top. About ten o’clock at night the stage drove into the village, and after stopping at the post-office to leave the mail, and at the principal hotels to drop some of its passengers, it kept on to Curtis’s home. Late as the hour was, they found the house filled with boys who had gathered there to welcome their friend who had been in a real battle since they last saw him, and to extend a cordial greeting to the comrades he had brought with him. They were introduced to the new-comers, one after the other, as members of The Rod and Gun Club, which, according to Curtis’s way of thinking, could boast of more skillful fishermen, and finer marksmen, both at the trap and on the range, than any other organization of like character in the State. There were nearly a score of them in all, and they seemed to be a jolly lot of fellows. Some of them had performed feats with the rod and gun that were worth boasting of, and as fast as Curtis found opportunity to do so, he pointed them out to his guests, and told what they had done to make themselves famous. That tall, slender, blue-eyed boy who stood over there in the corner, talking to Mr. Curtis, had won the club medal by breaking a hundred glass-balls in succession, when thrown from a revolving trap. He was ready to shoot against any boy in the country at single or double rises, and Curtis was going to try to induce Don Gordon to consent to a friendly trial of skill with him. That fellow over there on the sofa, who looked enough like Hopkins to be his brother, was the champion fisherman. He had been up in Canada with his father, and during the sixteen days he was there, he had caught more than eight hundred pounds of fish with one rod. They were all salmon. One of them weighed thirty-two pounds, and it took the young fisherman fifty minutes to bring him within reach of the gaff. The boy who was talking with Don Gordon was a rifle shot. He could shoot ten balls into the same hole at forty yards off-hand, and think nothing of it.
“I’ll just tell you what’s a fact,” said Egan, when he and the rest were getting ready to go to bed,“we’ve fallen among a lot of experts, and if we intend to keep up the good name of our section of the United States we’ve got to do some good work.”
The other boys thought so too, but they did not lose any sleep on account of it.
CHAPTER XVII.
CASTING THE FLY.
“Now, Curtis, bring on your moose.”
“Don’t be in a hurry. You don’t want to crowd all your sport into the first day, do you?”
“By no means. I expect to get a moose every day.”
“You mustn’t do it. It’s unlawful for one person to kill more than one moose, two caribou, and three deer in one season.”