“Why,” he said, “a trout is the crudest beast there is. Look at it trying to swallow this poor little hopper that it thought tumbled into the water by accident. It just loves to eat its stuff alive. And it isn’t particular. It would just as lief eat its own children. Now you take that one there, and say he was ten thousand times as big as he is, and you were coming along here and your foot slipped and Mr. Trout was lying behind this rock here—hungry. Say! What a mouthful you’d make, pink dress and all—he’d have you swallowed in a second, and then he’d sneak back behind the rock there, wiping his mouth, and hoping your little sister or somebody would be along in a minute and fall in too.”
“Ugh!—Why, what horrible little monsters! Let me catch one.”
And so she fished under his direction. They lurked together in the shadows of rocks, while he showed her how to flicker the bait in the current, here holding her hand on the rod, again supporting her while she leaned out to cast around a boulder, each feeling the other’s breathless caution and looking deep into each other’s eyes through seconds of tense silence.
Such as they were, these were the only results of the lesson; results that left them in easy friendliness toward each other. For the fish were not deceived by her. He would point out some pool where very probably a hungry trout was lying in wait with his head to the current, and she would try to skim the lure over it. More than once she saw the fish dart toward it, but never did she quite convince them. Oftener she saw them flit up-stream in fright, like flashes of gray lightning. Yet at length she felt she had learned all that could be taught of the art, and that further failure would mean merely a lack of appetite or spirit in the fish. So she went on alone, while Follett stopped to clean the dozen trout he had caught.
While she was in sight he watched her, the figure bending lithe as the rod she held, moving lightly, now a long, now a short step, half kneeling to throw the bait into an eddy; then off again with determined strides to the next likely pool. When he could no longer see her, he fell to work on his fish, scouring their slime off in the dry sand.
When she returned, she found him on his back, his hat off, his arms flung out above his head, fast asleep. She sat near by on a smooth rock at the water’s edge and waited—without impatience, for this was the first time she had been free to look at him quite as she wished to. She studied him closely now. He seemed to her like some young power of that far strange eastern land. She thought of something she had heard him say about Dandy: “He’s game and fearless and almighty prompt,—but he’s kind and gentle too.” She was pleased to think it described the master as well as the horse. And she was glad they had been such fine playmates the whole day long. When the shadow moved off his face and left it in the slanting rays of the sun, she broke off a spruce bough and propped it against the rock to shield him.
And then she sighed, for they could be playmates only in forgetfulness. He was a Gentile, and by that token wicked and lost; unless—and in that moment she flushed, feeling the warmth of a high purpose.
She would save him. He was worth saving, from his crown of yellow hair to the high heels of his Mexican boots. Strong, clean, gentle, and—she hesitated for a word—interesting—he must be brought into the Kingdom, and she would do it. She looked up again and met his wide-open eyes.
They both laughed. “I sat up with your pa last night,” he said, ashamed of having slept. “We had some business to palaver about.”
He had tied the fish into a bundle with aspen leaves and damp moss around them, and now they went back down the stream. In the flush of her new rôle as missionary she allowed herself to feel a secret motherly tenderness for his immortal soul, letting him help her by hand or arm over places where she knew she could have gone much better alone.