“Well, I got back breath enough to say that I didn’t mean no harm, and I’d never heard tell o’ his Bill, and if he didn’t leggo o’ me he’d be sorry—you know the kind o’ oratory a youngster puts up in a case like that. I guess it didn’t skeer him none; but it gave him a chance to look me over some more. All of a sudden he says, ‘Boy, you watch sharp, and you won’t have to have nobody tell you about Old Man Freeman’s Bill. Now look!’
“Then he lets go my collar, and steps forward, and bends over the water, and pats it two-three times with his cupped hand. And there’s a swish and a swirl, and something comes shootin’ across the pool. And the something’s the biggest trout I’d ever see or ever dreamed of. Not that I made him out like print, as you might say—I couldn’t tell jest where he began or where he ended, but in between them p’ints was a mighty lot o’ concentrated trout. He whirled around the old man’s hand—playin’ tag with him, by jingo!—and then he shot back across the pool like a streak o’ fish lightnin’.
“I guess I gave a gasp like a fish out o’ water. ‘My eye, Mister,’ says I, ‘but he’s bigger’n I be!’
“Now, a joke’s like the measles; you never can tell how good it’s goin’ to take hold; sometimes it’s jest a flat failure like a case o’ mock measles. Then again it’s the real thing. That was the way with Old Man Freeman. Somehow I’d hit his funny bone, and hit it hard. He looked at me for a minute, his face creasin’ crosswise till I thought the skin’d crack. And then he hawhawed. Boys, I tell you, I never heard such a laugh before! It fair creaked, his laughin’ machinery was so rusty from lack o’ use! And he shook till I thought his old clothes’d drop off him. But that laugh did a lot. It made me and Old Man Freeman friends for life.”
“But didn’t he tell you how much his trout weighed?” Poke demanded.
Lon shook his head. “He didn’t; for he didn’t know. He didn’t have no more scales than a hornpout.”
“You mean the big trout didn’t?”
“I mean Old Man Freeman. He didn’t have many o’ what you’d call luxuries. Fact is, he lived like a hermit in a cabin beside the brook. He trapped some, and raised a few vegetables, and got along somehow. He’d no kith or kin, so far’s I ever heard of. And about his only interest in life was his Bill Trout. He’d sit beside the pool, and talk to that fish same’s if he was a human. And he fed him—oh, yes; Bill didn’t go hungry if Old Man Freeman did. Later on I found that if I wanted to be real popular, the way to do it was to bring along a couple o’ pound o’ liver for Bill Trout. And Bill seemed to understand a heap—for a fish. He’d let the old man pet him; and he got so he didn’t mind havin’ me around, though we never got what you’d call real familiar.”
“But you’re not giving us much light on how much a trout can weigh,” Sam objected, as Lon paused.
“Well, for one thing, I ain’t quite through with the story. Happened there was a long spell when I couldn’t go to see Old Man Freeman. I was down country, workin’. Must ’a’ been all of five-six years before I got out to the cabin. The old man didn’t know me fust off, I’d growed so. Fact is, he come at me mighty hostile with a shotgun; but when I’d persuaded him I was jest a small boy shot up a foot or two, he allowed I didn’t need no more shootin’, and was real glad to see me.