Gay flushed angrily.

"You shall not belittle anything American," she said. "It was a bet. I meant it. I stand by it. If you catch your big fish I marry you. And if I have to marry you, I will lead you such a dance—"

"You wouldn't have to," Pritchard put in gently, "you wouldn't have to lead me, I mean. If you and I were married, I'd just naturally dance—wouldn't I? When a man sorrows he weeps; when he rejoices he dances. It's all very simple and natural—"

He turned his face to the serene heavens, and, very gravely:

"Ah, Lord!" he said. "Vouchsafe to me, undeserving but hopeful, this day, a char—salmo fontinalis—to weigh a trifle over three pounds, for the sake of all that is best and sweetest in this best of all possible worlds."

If his face or voice had had a suspicion of irreverence, Gay would have laughed. Instead, she found that she wanted to cry and that her heart was beating unquietly.

Mr. Pritchard dismissed sentiment from his mind, and with loving hands began to take a powerful split-bamboo rod from its case.

Chapter IX

*

Gay's notion of scientific fishing might have been thus summed: Know just where to fish and use the lightest rod made. Her own trout-rod weighed two and a half ounces without the reel. Compared to it, Pritchard's was a coarse and heavy instrument. His weighed six ounces.

"You could land a salmon with that," said Gay scornfully.

"I have," said Pritchard. "It's a splendid rod. I doubt if you could break it."

"Doesn't give the fish much of a run for his money."

"But how about this, Miss Gay?"

He showed her a leader of finest water-blue catgut. It was nine feet long and tapered from the thickness of a human hair to that of a thread of spider-spinning. Gay's waning admiration glowed once more.

"That wouldn't hold a minnow," she said.

"We must see about that," he answered; "we must hope that it will hold a very large char."

He reeled off eighty or ninety feet of line, and began to grease it with a white tallow.

"What's that stuff?" Gay asked.

"Red-deer fat."

"What for?"

"To make the line float. We're fishing with a dry-fly, you know."

Gay noticed that the line was tapered from very heavy to very fine.

"Why is that?" she asked.

"It throws better—especially in a wind. The heavy part will carry a fly out into half a gale."

He reeled in the line and made his leader fast to it with a swift, running hitch, and to the line end of the leader he attached the fly which they had chosen. Upon this tiny and exquisite arrangement of fairy hook, gray silk, and feathers, he blew paraffin from a pocket atomizer that it might float and not become water-logged.

"Do we fish from the shore or the boat?" Gay asked.

"From this shore."

"You'll never reach there from this shore."

"Then I've misjudged the distance. Are you going to use the landing-net for me, in case it's necessary?"