"Snook!" Sinth exclaimed, her face red with embarrassment as she heard him. She poked the fire with great energy, and added: "Let the fool laugh. I don't care if he did hear me."
A new impulse from the heart of nature entered the Migley breast. Father and son were seeking an opportunity to use their muscles. The son seized a girder above his head and began to chin it; the father went to work with an axe, and his enthusiasm fell in heavy blows upon a beech log.
Strong peered through the window at him and muttered the one contemptuous word, "W-woodpecker!"
A poor chopper in that part of the country was always classed with the woodpeckers.
Dinner over, the elder Migley opened his tin fishing-box and displayed an assortment of cheap flies and leaders.
"Well, captain," said the young man, as he turned to Strong, "if you'll show us where the trout live, we'll show you who they belong to." He passed judgment and bestowed rank upon a great many people, and most of his brevets, if he had been frank with them, would have put his life in peril.
"Pop" Migley touched a rib of the Emperor with his big, coercive thumb, shut one eye, and produced a kind of snore in his larynx.
The wit of his son had increased the cheerfulness of Mr. Migley. He began telling coarse tales, and continued until, as the Emperor would say, he had "emptied his reel." The man who talked too much always had a "big reel," in the thought of the Emperor, and "slack line" was the phrase he applied to empty words.
With everything ready for sport, they proceeded to the landing on Lost River and were soon seated in a long canoe.
"We'll t-try Dunmore's trout," said Strong as they left the shore.