So Saturday morning I got in enough wood for all day and it wasn't much, because it was summer and the kitchen wood was all I had to get in. Then I hunted up a new tin can, because when we get through fishing we always throw the old one into the Slough, because by that time the worms that are left are pretty; bad. Sometimes, if the can has been in the sun, they are even worse than that. So I got a new can and went around to the other side of the barn and the spade was there yet, from the last time I had dug worms, so I dug some more.
Just then Swatty came into the yard and he was ready to start. So my mother came to the back door with some sandwiches and things in a box, and I said:
“Aw! I don't want to carry a big box like that! Aw! I just want a couple of sandwiches in my pocket!”
“Georgie!” she said. “You take this box! You 'll be glad enough of everything that's in it!”
Me and Swatty went up over the hill and down past the Catlic church to South Riverbank and we stopped at the pump on the corner and had a good drink and cooled off our feet in the mud under the pump spout, because the sidewalks were hot.
The water in the Slough wasn't high and it wasn't low. Once the Slough ran through to the river at this end but now it was all filled in with sawdust from the sawmill, and a big conveyor blowpipe kept blowing more sawdust into the Slough from the mill, and all the surface of the Slough was floating sawdust. Then, a little further along, it was water-lily leaves. Then, further along, it was plain Slough for miles and miles and miles.
The water was three or four feet down from the top of the bank and the bank was covered with pretty good grass, and all along the Slough there was a path worn, because kids and fellows had fished in the Slough ever since there was a Riverbank, and before that the Indians had fished in it, I guess. Everywhere, close to the edge of the bank in the shade of the trees, there were places worn smooth-like an old chair seat--where fellows had sat and fished for years and years until they were regular fishing places. When you saw one of them you knew it was a good fishing place and that there was a bent root, all worn smooth and sometimes almost worn in two, part way down the bank, to rest your feet on.