So much out of breath and so deluged with perspiration was Dufour that he flung himself upon the ground beside the brook and lay there panting and mopping his face. Overhead the bit of sky was like turquoise, below a slender glimpse of the valley shone between the rock walls, like a sketch subdued almost to monochrome of crepuscular purple. A fitful breath of cool air fell into the place, fanning the man’s almost purple cheeks and forehead, while a wood-thrush, whose liquid voice might have been regarded as part of the water-tumult, sang in a thorn tree hard by.
In a half-reclining attitude, Dufour gave himself over to the delicious effect of all this, indulging at the same time in the impolite and ridiculous, but quite Shakespearian, habit of soliloquizing.
“Jingo!” he remarked, “Jingo! but isn’t this a daisy prospect for trout! If those pools aren’t full of the beauties, then there’s nothing in Waltonian lore and life isn’t worth living. Ha! Jingo! there went one clean above the water—a ten ouncer, at least!”
He sprang at his rod as if to break it to pieces, and the facility with which he fitted the joints and the reel and run the line and tied the cast was really a wonder.
“I knew they were here,” he muttered, “just as soon as I laid my eyes on the water. Who ever did see such another brook!”
At the third cast of the fly, a brown hackle, by the way, up came a trout with a somersault and a misty gleam of royal purple and silver, attended by a spray of water and a short bubbling sound. Dufour struck deftly, hooking the beautiful fish very insecurely through the edge of the lower lip. Immediately the reel began to sing and the rod to quiver, while Dufour’s eyes glared almost savagely and his lips pursed with comical intensity.
Round and round flew the trout, now rushing to the bottom of the pool, now whisking under a projecting ledge and anon flinging itself clean above the water and shaking itself convulsively.
The angler was led hither and thither by his active prey, the exercise bedewing his face again with perspiration, whilst his feet felt the cool bath of water and the soothing embrace of tangled water-grass. The mere switch of a bamboo rod, bent almost into a loop, shook like a rush in a wind.
Dufour was ill prepared to formulate a polite response when, at the height of his sport, a gentle but curiously earnest voice exclaimed:
“Snatch ’im out, snatch ’im out, dog gone yer clumsy hide! Snatch ’im out, er I’ll do it for ye!”