And male laziness answered comfortably:
"Let'er sleep, let'er sleep."
The sound that now broke off her half listening reverie was a short, plunking noise of something dropping into the little pond near which the wagon stood. Could it be that some boy on the hill at the other side was throwing stones into the pond.
She turned on her shoulder to watch the surface of the pond. Certainly there were the ripples spreading out in gentle waving circles from a centre at which something must have fallen into the pond. As her eye followed the waving circle toward the farther bank, right in the line of her vision there sprang straight out of the mirrored water a beautiful, tapering, black, silver and green body, that seemed to hang suspended an instant in a glistening arch and then dropped like a silver knife, without a splash, and was gone.
Augusta lay for a moment staring bewildered at the spot where the vision had disappeared.
Then she sprang for her dressing curtain and began to scuffle into her clothes. "If that fish would only wait!"
Jimmie had bought fish lines at a country store the other day and had rigged a pole after the manner that he had learned during boyhood summers in the country. Yesterday he had persisted in stopping to fish this stream lower down at a place that looked promising. And Augusta had jeered good-naturedly at him, and even Donahue had kicked, when the only result had been that they were all horridly bitten by great black flies.
Now yesterday's scepticism was forgotten. Jimmie should have fish for breakfast!—she knew how he sometimes loathed the milk and eggs that she forced upon him. But even this was an afterthought. She had seen her prey, and the fever of the hunt was tingling in her fingers as she tore the pole loose from its fastenings on the top of the wagon and grabbed a bit of pork rind for bait, jabbing it on to the hook as she ran down to the pond and around to the side where she had seen the bass.
Probably she expected him to be there waiting for her, for when she had looked sharply at the place where he had disappeared, and could see nothing, she did not know what to do.
She remembered that Jimmie had just dropped the bait to the surface and drawn it up again slowly, here and there at random without knowing whether there was a fish near or not. Obviously, Jimmie's way had been wrong, for he had caught nothing; and how could he expect to catch a fish if he didn't know where the fish was?