The trip was over. I had seen such things as I had never dreamed of. I had done things which I intended to relate at home. But I had caught no fish to amount to anything. On a Monday night I was to take the train East. On Sunday came great tales of the Flathead River. But I had only one more day. How was it possible?
It was possible. Everything is possible to those Westerners. I could put on my oldest clothes and fish the Flathead for twenty miles or so the following day under the guidance of one George Locke, celebrated trout-sleuth. Then, rod and fish and all, I could take the Great Northern Eastern Express at a station and start on my three days' journey home. I did it.
I can still see the faces of the people in that magnificent club car when a woman in riding-clothes, stained and torn, wearing an old sweater and a man's hat, and carrying a camera, a fishing-rod, and a cutthroat trout weighing three and a half pounds, invaded their bored and elegant privacy. The woman was burned to a deep cerise. She summoned the immaculate porter and held out the trout to him. He was very dubious about taking it. Thereupon the woman put on her most impressive manner and told him how she wished it placed on the ice and how the cook was to fix it and various other details.
It had been a day to live for. The Flathead River does not flow; it runs. It is a series of rapids, incredibly swift, with here and there a quiet pool. Attempts to picture the rapids as we ran them were abortive. We reeled and wallowed, careened and whirled. And always the fisherman-guide was calm, and the gentleman who engineered the party was calm, and I pretended to be calm.
At the foot of each rapids we fished. I was beginning to learn that twist of the wrist that sends out the line in curves, and drops the fly delicately on to the surface of the water.
As I learned, so that he did not close his eyes each time I raised my rod, George Locke told of the Easterner he had taken down the river some time before.
"He wanted a lesson in casting," he said. "And I worked over him pretty hard. I told him all I knew. Then, after I'd told him all I knew, and he'd had all the fun with me he wanted, he just stood up in the bow of the boat and put out ninety feet of line without turning a hair. Cast? He could have cast from a spool of thread."
In a boat behind us was a moving-picture man. For weeks he had always been just behind or just ahead. When the time came to leave the West, I missed that moving-picture man. He had come to be a part of the landscape. I can still see him trying to get past us down those rapids, going at lightning speed to gain some promontory where he could set up his weapon and catch our boat in case it upset or did anything else worth recording.