oors!"

All went into the bushes to look for the astonished fish. They looked,
and looked, and looked; listened for its beating and flopping against
the ground.

After a while, Luke said he thought it must be one of the climbing fish
described by Agassiz, and that it had gone up a tree.

"I mos' found it twice't; but it was a frog an' a lizar', 'stead uv the
fish," said Jacob Isaac.

To this day, it remains a mystery where Elsie's fish went to.

Jacob Isaac climbed the tree to rescue Elsie's hook and line, while the
other boys went down the stream to find a cat-fish hole that they had
heard of.

"Don't pull at the line that way," Puss said to the thrasher in the
tree-top; "you'll break it. There, the hook is caught on that twig. You
must go out on the limb and unhitch it."

"Lim' hangs over the watto," Jacob Isaac said; but he crawled out on it,
and reached for the hook.

Then Elsie shrieked, for crashing through the branches came Jacob Isaac,
and splashed back-foremost into the water. Then there was confusion.
Jacob called to the girls to help him; they called to the boys to help;
the boys, ignorant of the accident, shouted back that they were going on
to where they could have quiet, and went tramping away. Then Elsie tried
to tell Jacob Isaac how to swim, while Puss Leek darted off to where the
horses were tethered. She mounted the one she had ridden--a gentle
thing, aged eighteen. Then she came crashing through the bushes and
brush, clucking and jerking the bridle, dashed down the bank, and
plunged into the stream.

[Illustration: "HE KNELT ON THE BANK TO FIX HIS BAIT."]

Elsie held her breath at the sight. The water rose to the flanks, but
Puss kept her head steady, sat her saddle coolly, and, when Jacob Isaac
appeared, put out a resolute hand, and got hold of his
jacket,--speaking, meanwhile, a soothing word to the horse, which was
now drinking. She got the boy's head above water.

"I'll hold on to you; and you must hold on to the stirrup and to the
horse's mane," she said.

Jacob Isaac, without a word, got hold as directed. Puss held on with a
good grip, as she had promised, and the careful old horse pawed through
the water to the bank--only a few yards distant, by the way.

"Thankee, Miss Puss," is what Jacob Isaac said, as he stretched himself
on a log to dry.

"Puss, you're a hero," is what Elsie said, adding immediately: "Those
hateful boys! Great protectors they are!"

John had found up-st