Business men always said “same,” but Junior didn’t like it, and besides, his father was a professional man, so he changed “same,” to “him.”
Of course it wasn’t much of a trick for me to land that four pound trout on a three ounce rod, because I am probly the best fisherman in any of the dozen or more fishing clubs I belong to.
Junior revised that to read:
Because I happen to have quite a little experience landing trout and salmon in some of the most important streams in the world, from the high Sierras to the Ural Mountains.
It would never do to make his father guilty of blowing—the unforgivable sin.
He thought that was all right for a beginning, but did not know how to follow it up. He wanted to put in something about the Andes, with a few stories of wild adventure and hairbreadth escapes, but although he read up on the Andes in the encyclopædia, as he did on all his father’s temporary habitats, he did not feel that the encyclopædia style suited his father’s vivid personality. In an old copy of the National Geographic Magazine he found a traveller’s description of adventures in that part of the world, and simply copied a page or two. It had to do with an amusing though extremely dangerous adventure with a python, which had treed one of the writer’s gun bearers—a narrow escape told as a joke—quite his father’s sort of thing; and no one would ever accuse Junior of inventing such a well-written narrative with such circumstantial local colour.
Blackie was properly impressed by the three thousand natives and one hundred experts, and he too, laughed aloud at the antics of the gun bearer. He told the other boys about it, as Junior meant him to do, and some of them wanted to read it too. They dropped in after study hour.
Junior, it seems, required urging, like an amateur vocalist who nevertheless has brought her music.
“Oh, shoot!” he said. “It doesn’t amount to anything. Just a letter from my father.”
“Why don’t you read it aloud?” suggested Blackie.