“By George!” said Wally, drawing a deep breath. “That was exciting, Jimmy!”
“Well, fishing isn’t,” responded Jim pulling up his hook in disgust, an example followed by the other boys. “What’ll we do?”
“I move,” said Wally, standing on one leg on the log, “that this meeting do adjourn from this dead tree. And I move a hearty vote of thanks to Mr. Jim Linton for spinning a good yarn. Thanks to be paid immediately. There’s mine, Jimmy!”
A resounding pat on the back startled Jim considerably, followed as it was by a second from Harry. The assaulted one fled along the log, and hurled mud furiously from the bank. The enemy followed closely, and shortly the painful spectacle might have been seen of a host lying flat on his face on the grass, while his guests, sitting on his back, bumped up and down to his extreme discomfort and the tune of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow!”
CHAPTER VII.
WHAT NORAH FOUND
Norah, meanwhile, had been feeling somewhat “out of things.” It was really more than human nature could be expected to bear that she should remain on the log with the three boys, while Jim told amazing yarns about her. Still it was decidedly lonesome in the jutting root of the old tree, looking fixedly at the water, in which placidly lay a float that had apparently forgotten that the first duty of a float is to bob.
Jim’s voice, murmuring along in his lengthy recital, came to her softly, and she could see from her perch the interested faces of the two others. It mingled drowsily with the dull drone of bees in the ti-tree behind her, and presently Norah, to her disgust, found that she was growing drowsy too.
“This won’t do!” she reflected, shaking herself. “If I go to sleep and tumble off this old root I’ll startle away all the fish in the creek.” She looked doubtfully at the still water, now and then rippled by the splash of a leaping fish. “No good when they jump like that,” said Norah to herself. “I guess I’ll go and explore.”
She wound up her line quickly, and flung her bait to the lazy inhabitants of the creek as a parting gift. Then, unnoticed by the boys, she scrambled out of the tree and climbed up the bank, getting her blue riding-skirt decidedly muddy—not that Norah’s free and independent soul had ever learned to tremble at the sight of muddy garments. She hid her fishing tackle in a stump, and made her way along the bank.
A little farther up she came across black Billy—a very cheerful aboriginal, seeing that he had managed to induce no less than nine blackfish to leave their watery bed.