The man stared at him. “Didn’t you hear what I said?” he inquired.
And Jack, pausing one second, went off into a shout of deep laughter which set the mountain echoes ringing, and Josef, discreet in the background, stepped back a pace so that the strange m’sieur might not see him laughing also. When M’sieur Jack laughed it was impossible to keep as serious as one should.
Squatting in the shadows beyond the m’sieur was something shading off into rocks and foliage; a face stared over the bushes of the “thé sauvage”—the Indian tea shrub with its dim pink flowers. So hidden, so motionless was the man that Jack did not see him for the first instant—but Josef had seen him; there had been a brief half-nod of recognition on both sides before the messieurs had spoken. Jack caught sight of him.
“It is you, Adelard Martel?” he demanded; Jack was likely to know most of the guides in the club. “Why haven’t you got a big fish for your m’sieur? They are here,” he threw at him cheerfully.
But the man did not answer with a smile, as most people answered Jack Vance. The dark, furtive eyes shot a resentful glance at the large man who still struggled with his fishing-tackle. “M’sieur—is not lucky,” he brought out with the broad, soft accent of a habitant, and looked down sulkily, displeased, and then flashed up an angry glance. “There was a big one—b’en gros—three minutes ago. He rose to the fly. One would have had him grabbed—poigné—in a second. But v’là, M’sieur slipped and fell backward and knocked me the landing-net out of my hand, and the big one saved himself—se sauvait. Comme ça”—with a swift gesture of disgust.
“The landing-net?” The boy turned and looked at Josef and laughed, and Josef’s big light eyes flashed satisfaction.
The strange m’sieur broke in with a nod toward his guide. “Something wrong with that fellow,” he commented. “He seems angry that I can’t catch fish.”
Jack leaned over and swept in one of the curly, bobbing snells of the m’sieur’s leader as he answered. “May I help you?” he asked with friendliness of a brother craftsman. “It’s the dickens of a job to do this alone. Adelard ought”—and he stopped and shook his head fatherly at the sullen-faced guide. “He’s sore as a crab because you haven’t had luck,” he explained. “They’re all that way. It’s a personal question—if their messieurs are lucky, you see. He’ll be another question when you take a five-pounder.”
The big man lowered the butt of his rod suddenly, thereby mixing up all the whirls of catgut which Jack had skilfully untangled; he looked at the boy with a heart-broken expression; he looked as if he were going to cry.
“But I can’t,” he said sorrowfully. “I don’t know how to fish. And I want to so much. It’s my first vacation in six years, and I haven’t got but a week. I thought it was easy to fish, that anybody could do it. And I don’t know how to tie the leader on, and the reel falls out of the—the reel-plate or something. And if I touch the automatic spring it all snaps up before I can wink, and the leader runs down the rod through the rings and it’s the very devil. I hit a rock and broke a tip the first thing and had to put in another. It took me half an hour to put the stuff together and then that happened. And the flies tangle—all the time. And my guide despises me! I thought fishing was fun!”