“There’s a good-sized stream about a mile up,” he announced. “Let’s go and try it.”
“Oh, let’s!” cried Harry. “I never caught a trout.”
“You should have seen the one I caught,” said Chub. “It was a regular whopper. It was as long--”
“I’ve got a picture of it somewhere. I’ll find it.”
“Never mind it now,” said Roy gently. “Try to think of something else, Chub. You see, sir,” addressing the Doctor, “he’s a little bit--er--daffy on the subject of that fish. As a matter of fact, it weighed about ten ounces and--”
“Ten ounces!” howled Chub. “It weighed two pounds! Why, it was the biggest trout you ever saw! I thought first it was a salmon.”
“Suppose we see if we can find another,” said the Doctor with a smile. “I haven’t fished for trout in years. Could I borrow a line from some one?”
“Yes, sir: I’ve lots of them,” said Chub. “And an extra pole. And Dick has a pole Harry can use. Let’s take luncheon with us and make a day of it.”
They did. The stream, which evaded them for the better part of an hour, held plenty of small trout and the Doctor was as excited as a boy over his first catch. Harry didn’t make a good fisherman, for she was too impatient. But they had a good time, even when it drizzled for awhile, and ate their luncheon at noon huddled together in the lee of a big boulder. They returned to the boat in the middle of the afternoon with seventeen small trout. The sun came out soon afterward and made a glorious ending to the day. They fried the fish for supper and the Doctor, who pretended to have personally caught all the largest of the trout, declared that he had never tasted anything finer.
“We might try again some day,” he said tentatively.
The result was that the next morning they chugged four miles further up the river, crossed to the west bank and made a mooring in a particularly attractive little cove. The stream which they had come to fish in flowed into the cove under a wooden bridge, and a few hundred yards below was a small settlement consisting of a village store and a half-dozen houses. Between the road and the river was a small stretch of meadow on one side and a grove of trees on the other.
“What an ideal place!” exclaimed Harry, as she stepped ashore.
Strange to say, however, they appeared to have alighted in a locality quite bare of streams and lakes and nothing on the map looked enticing nearer than a good-sized lake half a day’s journey upstream and several miles back from the river. They held a council and decided to try their luck there, the Doctor declaring with enthusiasm that a lake like that ought to have plenty of black bass in it. Chub and Dick had never fished for bass, and that was enough incentive for them. The _Slow Poke_ was put at her best pace and they reached their destination that afternoon. After supper the Doctor regaled them with stories of bass fishing that made their hearts beat high in anticipation of the morrow’s sport.