Wimperley's fish.
He leaned back, feeling a long forgotten youth trickle into his veins.
In front of him the stream dodged round great boulders and vanished
into the woods, flecked with foam from the falls whose wash came
tremulously through the wilderness. The sky overhead was translucent
with the half light of sunset and he felt a delicious languor stealing
over him. For three hours Stoughton, Riggs and he had fished to their
hearts' content, while Birch climbed a ridge and speculated what such a
forbidding country might reasonably be expected to bring forth. Close
by the stream, Fisette bent beside a small fire from which came odors
of fried bacon and fish that aroused in the Philadelphians a fierce and
gnawing hunger. Presently they sat on a mattress of cedar and ate one
of those suppers the memory of which passes not with the years. It was
Riggs who spoke first, lying back on the boughs, his head on his arm, a
new glow in his pale cheeks. He looked younger and rounder than he did
six hours previously, and, stretching luxuriously, he experienced the
sympathetic impulses that detach themselves from a full stomach.

"I suppose there's no way out of it?"

"None whatever," grunted Stoughton, who was lining his basket with moss
and objected to being thus recalled. "What the devil has this to do
with dividends?"

"Nothing, I admit, but why in thunder did we start this game anyway?
Why couldn't we just take things easy and go fishing. We've all got
enough."

Wimperley stretched his arms above his head in delicious fatigue.
"Keep away from second causes; this is no place for them. Four years
ago you were meant to go fishing to-day in this very stream. Why worry
about it?"

"I'm thinking about one R.F.C.," came back Riggs reflectively, "just
like the rest of you."

"Well," sounded the dry voice of Birch, "so am I. And all this is very
apropos. It illustrates the general condition of affairs, especially
that mess of trout you had on the moss a while ago. We're all trout,
we and the shareholders. You, Wimperley, are that five pounder. We
all rose to the fly of one R.F.C., and we were all landed in the back
woods. There are more trout in that stream, and, if we stand for it,
the fishing is still good, but I've got the sting of the fly still in
my gills. Also I'm thinking about one Henry Marsham."

Stoughton nodded sagely. "That's right, but if you liked fishing,
Birch, you wouldn't drag in shareholder