第15章 III(4)

The beauty,the darling,the daisy,my Salmon Bahadur,weighed twelve pounds,and I had been seven-and-thirty minutes bringing him to bank!He had been lightly hooked on the angle of the right jaw,and the hook had not wearied him.That hour I sat among princes and crowned heads greater than them all.Below the bank we heard California scuffling with his salmon and swearing Spanish oaths.Portland and I assisted at the capture,and the fish dragged the spring balance out by the roots.It was only constructed to weigh up to fifteen pounds.We stretched the three fish on the grass--the eleven and a half,the twelve and fifteen pounder--and we gave an oath that all who came after should merely be weighed and put back again.

How shall I tell the glories of that day so that you may be interested?Again and again did California and I prance down that reach to the little bay,each with a salmon in tow,and land him in the shallows.Then Portland took my rod and caught some ten-pounders,and my spoon was carried away by an unknown leviathan.Each fish,for the merits of the three that had died so gamely,was hastily hooked on the balance and flung back.

Portland recorded the weight in a pocket-book,for he was a real-estate man.Each fish fought for all he was worth,and none more savagely than the smallest,a game little six-pounder.At the end of six hours we added up the list.Read it.Total:

Sixteen fish;aggregate weight,one hundred and forty pounds.

The score in detail runs something like this--it is only interesting to those concerned:fifteen,eleven and a half,twelve,ten,nine and three quarters,eight,and so forth;as Ihave said,nothing under six pounds,and three ten-pounders.

Very solemnly and thankfully we put up our rods--it was glory enough for all time--and returned weeping in each other's arms,weeping tears of pure joy,to that simple,bare-legged family in the packing-case house by the water-side.

The old farmer recollected days and nights of fierce warfare with the Indians "way back in the fifties,"when every ripple of the Columbia River and her tributaries hid covert danger.God had dowered him with a queer,crooked gift of expression and a fierce anxiety for the welfare of his two little sons--tanned and reserved children,who attended school daily and spoke good English in a strange tongue.

His wife was an austere woman,who had once been kindly,and perhaps handsome.

Very many years of toil had taken the elasticity out of step and voice.She looked for nothing better than everlasting work--the chafing detail of housework--and then a grave somewhere up the hill among the blackberries and the pines.

But in her grim way she sympathized with her eldest daughter,a small and silent maiden of eighteen,who had thoughts very far from the meals she tended and the pans she scoured.

We stumbled into the household at a crisis,and there was a deal of downright humanity in that same.A bad,wicked dress-maker had promised the maiden a dress in time for a to-morrow's rail-way journey,and though the barefooted Georgy,who stood in very wholesome awe of his sister,had scoured the woods on a pony in search,that dress never arrived.So,with sorrow in her heart and a hundred Sister-Anne glances up the road,she waited upon the strangers and,I doubt not,cursed them for the wants that stood between her and her need for tears.It was a genuine little tragedy.The mother,in a heavy,passionless voice,rebuked her impatience,yet sat up far into the night,bowed over a heap of sewing for the daughter's benefit.

These things I beheld in the long marigold-scented twilight and whispering night,loafing round the little house with California,who un-folded himself like a lotus to the moon,or in the little boarded bunk that was our bedroom,swap-ping tales with Portland and the old man.

Most of the yarns began in this way:--"Red Larry was a bull-puncher back of Lone County,Montana,"or "There was a man riding the trail met a jack-rabbit sitting in a cactus,"or "'Bout the time of the San Diego land boom,a woman from Monterey,"etc.

You can try to piece out for yourselves what sort of stories they were.