The fun kept up furiously for half an hour more. Then the bass ceased biting almost as suddenly as they had commenced. Perhaps the fact that the clouds had broken, allowing the sun to shine again, had something to do with this change.
“We ought to be satisfied!” declared Andy, “after all that fun. I reckon we must have as many as twenty bass in the boat, running as high as three pounds, and enough to make a meal for two families.”
“Dandy fighters every one of ’em!” added Sim, “and I’ll remember this afternoon, I tell you, Ralph. This is a great little lake, and doesn’t seem to be fished to death, either.”
“No, the people down at Wyoming seem to prefer going to several other lakes and streams nearer at home,” the other explained. “Besides that, most of them are born trout fishermen. You know, some fellows pretend to look down on black bass as game fish.”
“Well, they don’t know what a fighter is, then, that’s all,” asserted Andy. “My stout rod bent nearly double many a time when they bore down. ’Course a bass doesn’t jump for a fly like a trout, just sucks it in; but once hooked I’ll match him against anything that wears fins and scales.”
They were now ready to quit and start for home. Ralph wanted to stop on the way and leave a portion of the catch with a poor widow who had a brood of children.
“We couldn’t begin to eat them all, you know,” he told the others. “I’m sportsman enough to stop taking fish when some one can’t use them. Mrs. Murphy has a hard time getting on with her family. We all like to give her a hand when we can. Many’s the string of fish I’ve left at her door, even when I had to go home without any myself. But, then, I’m not very fond of bass for eating, much as I love to feel them pull at the end of my line.”
“What was that you were saying about our going in to town tomorrow, Ralph?” asked Sim, when they were well on their way home.
“Why, there’s going to be a pretty fine entertainment, and I thought you’d like to hear that girl sing dad was telling you about. We believe she’s going to make her mark on the opera stage some of these days. So, if you’re agreeable, we’ll run in.”
It was decided that way, and not one of them dreamed how a strange Destiny was shaping her ends in beckoning them toward the town of Wyoming after nightfall, yet such really proved to be the case.