"I'll take either end of the bet you don't like," said Mr. Pritchard gravely. "If I land the three-pounder, you become the countess; if I don't, I pay you the amount of your dividends for the year. Is that better?"

"Much," smiled Gay; "because, with the bet in this form, there is practically no danger that either of us will lose anything. My dividends probably won't amount to a row of pins, and you most certainly will not land so big a fish."

Meanwhile they had entered the mouth of Placid Brook. The surface was dimpling—rings became, spread, merged in one another, and were not. The fish were feeding.

"Let us land in the meadow," said Mr. Pritchard, his brown eyes clear and sparkling, "and spy upon the enemy."

"Are you going to leave your rod and things in the boat?"

"For the present—until we have located our fish."

They landed, and he advanced upon the brook by a detour, stealthily, crouching, his field-glasses at attention. Once he turned and spoke to Gay in an authoritative whisper:

"Try not to show above the bushes."

Chapter VIII

*

The sun was warm on the meadow, and although the bushes along its margin were leafless, the meadow itself had a greenish look, and the feel of the air was such that Gay, upon whom silence and invisibility had been enjoined, longed to dance in full sight of the trout and to sing at the top of her voice: "Oh, that we two were Maying!" Instead, she crouched humbly and in silence at Pritchard's side, while he studied the dimpling brook through his powerful field-glasses.

Gay had never seen red Indians except in Buffalo Bill's show, where it is made worth their while to be very noisy. But she had read her Cooper and her Ballantyne,

"Ballantyne, the brave,
And Cooper of the wood and wave,"

and she knew of the early Christian patience with which they are supposed to go about the business of hunting and fishing.

Pritchard, she observed, had a weather-red face and high cheek-bones. He was smooth-shaved. He wore no hat. But for his miraculously short-cut hair, his field-glasses, his suit of coarse Scotch wool, whose colors blended so well with the meadow upon which he crouched, he might have been an Indian. His head, the field-glasses, the hands which clasped them, moved—nothing else.

"Is it a bluff?" thought Gay. "Is he just posing, or is there something in it?"

Half an hour passed—three quarters. Gay was pale and grimly smiling. Her legs had gone to sleep. But she would not give in. If an Englishman could fish so patiently, why, so could she. She was fighting her own private battle of Bunker Hill—of New Orleans.

Pritchard lowered his glasses, handed them to Gay, and pointed up the brook and across, to where a triangular point of granite peered a few inches above the surface. Gay looked through the glasses, and Pritchard began to whisper in her ear:

"Northwest of that point of rock, about two feet—keep looking just there, and I'll try to tell you what to see."