ly detached a fly from his leader, hooked it into the proper
compartment of his fly-book, and hesitated over his selection of another
to take its place. Absorption was writ deep on his gross countenance,
and he recognized the intruder by the briefest of flickering glances and
the slightest of nods.

"Keep back from that hole, will yuh?" he muttered, jerking his head
toward the still pool. "I ain't tried it yet."

Good Indian was not particularly interested in his own fishing. The
sight of Baumberger, bulking there in the shade with his sagging cheeks
and sagging pipe, his flopping old hat and baggy canvas fishing-coat,
with his battered basket slung over his slouching shoulder and sagging
with the weight of his catch; the sloppy wrinkles of his high, rubber
boots shining blackly from recent immersion in the stream, caught his
errant attention, and stayed him for a few minutes to watch.

Loosely disreputable looked Lawyer Baumberger, from the snagged hole
in his hat-crown where a wisp of graying hair fluttered through, to the
toes of his ungainly, rubber-clad feet; loosely disreputable, but not
commonplace and not incompetent. Though his speech might be a slovenly
mumble, there was no purposeless fumbling of the fingers that chose a
fly and knotted it fast upon the leader. There was no bungling movement
of hand or foot when he laid his pipe upon the rock, tiptoed around the
corner, sent a mechanical glance upward toward the swaying branches of
an overhanging tree, pulled out his six feet of silk line with a sweep
of his arm, and with a delicate fillip, sent the fly skittering over the
glassy center of the pool.

Good Indian, looking at him, felt instinctively that a part, at least,
of the man's nature was nakedly revealed to him then. It seemed scarcely
fair to read the lust of him and the utter abandonment to the hazard of
the game. Pitiless he looked, with clenched teeth just showing
between the loose lips drawn back in a grin that was half-snarl,
half-involuntary contraction of muscles sympathetically tense.

That was when a shimmering thing slithered up, snapped at the fly, and
flashed away to the tune of singing reel and the dance of the swaying
rod. The man grew suddenly cruel and crafty and full of lust; and Good
Indian, watching him, was conscious of an inward shudder of repulsion.
He had fished all his life--had Good Indian--and had found joy in
the sport. And here was he inwardly condemning a sportsman who