Flinging off everything, they raced out to the rocky side of the point, and Sleuth heard them go plunging into the water, one after the other. With a shivering sigh, for the damp coldness of the earth had crept up through the ground-cloth and blankets and seemed to pierce his bones, Piper got upon his hands and knees, crawled to the bed of boughs just deserted, pulled the blankets of the others around him and again courted slumber. Hazily he heard the early risers return, rub down with coarse towels and get into their clothes. They were putting their rods and reels together when he drifted off for the first time into sound and peaceful sleep.
Rod and Phil made their way slowly along the lake shore toward the south, casting the flies as they went, at which feat Springer, having had more experience, was by far the most skilful.
“It’s the back-snap that does it, Rod,” he explained. “Don’t swing your whole arm so hard; use your wrist more. If you can get a good sharp back-snap and time the forward movement of your hand properly, you’ll catch on pup-pretty soon. You don’t want to cast out as hard as you bring the line back, for if you do you’ll snap the fly like a crack of a whip, and you may even snap it off. Watch me now.”
Rodney watched and saw his companion send the fly soaring far out on the water with a double movement of the wrist, sharp and then gentle, and scarcely any movement whatever of the shoulder.
“It sure looks right simple,” confessed the Texan. “I can do it fairly well with a short bit of line, but I get plenty balled up when I try to let it out and make a longer cast.”
Phil reeled in and gave a demonstration of the proper manner to whip a line out by repeated casts, drawing off more and more from the reel with the left hand and holding the slack until the proper moment to let it run. Indeed, as Grant had said, it seemed an extremely simple thing to do, and Rodney, being an apt pupil, soon began to get the knack of it, and was not discouraged, although he repeatedly made a failure right on the heels of a very praiseworthy effort.
“You’re getting it all right,” encouraged Springer. “You’re doing sus-splendidly.”
“There I go into a bush,” said Rod, as his fly caught in some shrubbery at a distance behind him.
“Never mind that. You’ll need pup-plenty of room at first, and you’ll keep forgetting every little while to make your back cast good and sharp and your forward cast easy. The two movements must be tut-timed just right, too.”
“It must be right good sport when there are fish to catch, but we don’t seem to get any bites.”