When she looked closer at the fish she saw that he was bleeding dirtily from the gills. She turned weakly sick and remorseful.
"I'm sorry!" she cried. "Oh, I'm so sorry! Please go back. Please! And I'll never fish again!" She dropped limply down to the ground and began to cry bitterly.
The fish was flopping his blind way back to the pond, when Donahue, with every appearance of studied intention, dropped a blundering foot upon the dragging line, and stood still contemplating affairs—thereby saving Jimmie's breakfast.
So Jimmie, getting sleepily down from the wagon to investigate the commotion, found his wife sitting disconsolate and soggy on the grass, her face streaked with muddy tears, the accomplished Donahue standing foolishly ruminative in the middle of the picture, and a very dirty fish fighting for liberty at the end of the line.
Jimmie hurried Augusta to the wagon for repairs, and took charge of the fish.
He cooked it and had to eat it all himself while Augusta sipped remorsefully at the milk and eggs which Jimmie hated.
Now if Augusta had known the reason why her bass had struck so quickly, and so viciously, at her baited hook she would have been much more disturbed and remorseful than she actually was.
The truth is that among river and brook fish the black bass is the only true and proper father of family. The males of the other brook tribes, once their young have been hatched, exhibit only the most casual and meandering attention toward their welfare. They seem to think that they have done enough when they have seen their offspring born in water. Let them swim, then, is their attitude.
The black bass is, on the extreme other hand, a most worried and fretsome pater familias. In the period while his young are dependent and helpless his responsibilities weigh upon him severely. He is worried by trifles, and even by non-existent things, and the business of being a new father is with him a matter of all-absorbing agitation.
Take a stout man, preferably somewhat bald, just under the line of forty, say, and consider him in the days when his first child has just come into the stages of breath holding and threatened spasms. Regard him as he tip-toes about the house in under-shirt and trousers and worried ferocity. Study him as he walks the floor through the hours of the night warding off imaginary dangers with agitated anger and gentle hearted ignorance. Cross this man at this time in anything that in the remotest way touches the future of his family and you will rouse a deadly enemy.