“I always said,” old Uncle Joe Creech always exclaimed after telling this story, “that totin’ pistol guns would keep a good man down. And that to my notion mighty nigh proves hit plumb fer sarton.”
“And folks do say,” he would add with a lowered voice and shifting eyes, “that this here foreigner can be heard on a still night in the dark of the moon, a shootin’ off of them there pistol guns. But then shucks!” he would squirt tobacco juice at a crack in the floor. “Shucks! How could he an’ him drowned and dead?”
Sure enough, how could he? All the same, Johnny never dropped his bait in that deep pool. He always had a shivery feeling that it might catch on something soft and that if he hauled in hard enough, he’d bring a dead body to the top. Pure fancy, he knew this to be, but anyway there were enough other pools to be fished in. Why not pass this one up? He meant to pass it up on this day, as on all others, but fate had decreed otherwise.
Quite forgetting the deep pool that lay just beyond the last clump of mountain laurel, Johnny happily dropped his first wriggling soft craw into the shadowy waters of the pool next to that one where, more than once, a grand and glorious old black bass had eluded him.
“I’ll get him,” he whispered. “Get him for sure.”
But would he? He waited. Lurking in the shadows, he watched the dry line sink down, inch by inch. Then, with a soundless parting of the lips, he saw the line begin shooting away.
“Bass,” he whispered. “Big old black bass.”
The bass he knew, would run a yard, two, three yards, then pause. Should he give the line a quick jerk then, setting the hook? Or, as many wise anglers advised, should he wait for the second run?
The line ceased playing out. Old bass had paused. “Now,” Johnny whispered. “Now? Or—” He gave a quick jerk. He had him. His heart leaped. He began reeling in.
Then his hopes fell, only a little fellow. It must be. No real pull at all. Nor was he mistaken. Close to the surface there appeared a beautiful young bass, perhaps nine inches long, the kind those mountain natives call “green pearch.” With a deft snap of his line, Johnny switched him off, then watched him as, for a moment, stunned by the suddenness of it all, he stood quite still in the water. Johnny’s thoughts were all admiration. How beautiful he was, like the things a Chinaman does in green lacquer.