“I’ll get that old sport, the king of all black bass, today,” he assured himself. “I’ll have him in less than an hour.”
He might have fulfilled this promise had it not been for a lurking shadow that, passing silently on before him, came to rest at last on a rocky ledge, above the second deep pool in Pounding Mill Creek.
Johnny had little interest in that second pool for the present. In fact that particular pool had a peculiar sort of horror for Johnny. A man had been drowned in that pool. He recalled the story with a chill. A group of foreign laborers, so the story went, had driven up the creek from the Gap. They had meant to dynamite this pool and get a mess of fish. Since this was against the law and since they found Zeb Page, a deputy sheriff, sitting on a near-by boulder, they had decided to take a swim. The pool was deep, all of twenty feet. Four of the foreigners could swim. The water was fine. They enjoyed it immensely.
They had all crawled out on the bank to sun themselves when one of their number, who had never known the delights of swimming, said, “That’s nothing. I can do that.” He dove in, clothes and all. He disappeared beneath the placid surface of the pool. Ten seconds elapsed, twenty, forty, a full moment, and he did not reappear.
Alarmed, his comrades dove for him. Ten minutes later they brought him to the top, dead. In each of his two coat pockets, they found a heavy revolver.
“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.
