He had two pieces of luck on that trip. I had hooked my first trout and was busy trying to throw it in the boatman's face when it escaped. He caught me at the exact instant when the triumph of my face turned to a purple rage; and later on in the day he had the machine turned on me when I caught two trout on two flies at the same time. Incidentally, I slipped off the stone I was standing on at the same moment. He probably got that, too.
I caught twelve trout in as many minutes from that same rock and furnished the luncheon for the party. I took back loudly everything I had said against the fishing in Glacier Park. I ate more trout than anybody else, as was my privilege. If there were nothing else to it, I would still go back to the Montana Rockies for the fishing in the Flathead River.
At noon we stopped for luncheon. The trout was fried with bacon, and coffee was made. We ate on a little tongue of land around which the river brawled and rushed.
From the time we had left Lake McDermott we had seen no single human being. Mostly the river ran through tall canyons of its own cutting; always it looked dangerous. Generally, indeed, it was! But never once did the boatman lose control. It reminded me of the story Mark Twain told of the passenger who says to the pilot something like this:—
"I suppose you know where every hidden rock and sunken tree and sandbar is in this river?"
To which the pilot replies: "No, sir-ee. But I know where they ain't."
The train swung on into the summer twilight, past the ruins of old mining-towns, now nothing but names, past brawling streams and great deep woods.