Read Ebook: St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls Vol. 5 No 10 August 1878 Scribner's Illustrated by Various Dodge Mary Mapes Editor

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Ebook has 1624 lines and 79903 words, and 33 pages

"Me, too," said Jacob Isaac.

"Of course, you're hungry," said John. "Come along! Hold your two hands."

"Let's go look for sweet-Williams and blue-flags," Puss proposed to Elsie.

"No; if we go away, the boys will eat everything up. Just look at them! Did ever you see such eatists? You boys, stop eating all the lunch."

"Aint you girls getting 'ha'nted?'" Luke asked. "If you don't come soon, there wont be left for you."

"I believe that's so," said Puss confidentially to Elsie. "I reckon we'll have to take our share now, or not at all. We've got to eat in self-defense."

And so it came about that those five ridiculous children sat there, less than a mile on their journey, and less than an hour from their breakfast, and ate, ate, ate, till there was nothing of their lunch left except a half biscuit and a chicken neck. John, fertile in invention, proposed that they should go back home and get something more for dinner; but Puss said everybody would laugh at them, and Elsie thought they wouldn't be able to eat anything more that day, and, if they should be hungry, they could have a fish-fry.

"Aint no use totin' this yere basekit 'long no mawr," Jacob Isaac suggested. "I'll leave it hang in this yere sass'fras saplin'." When it was intimated that it would be needed for the remainder of the lunch, he said there wasn't any "'mainder." "What's lef' needn't pester you-all; I'll jis eat it."

Arrived at the water, the boys baited the hooks, at which the girls gave little shrieks, and hid their eyes, demanding to know of the boys how they would like to be treated as they were treating the worms.

"The poor creatures!" said Puss.

"So helpless!" added Elsie, peeping through her fingers at the boys. "Aren't the hooks ready yet?"

"Yours is," and Luke delivered a rod into her hands.

"And here's yours, Puss," John said. "Drop it in."

"Jupiter!" said John, growing impatient at the idle drifting of his cork. "I can't stand this, Elsie. You girls stop talking. You chatter like magpies; you scare the fish. Girls oughtn't ever to go fishing."

Elsie did not heed John's attack. Her eye was riveted on her bobbing cork; her cheeks were glowing with excitement; her heart was beating wildly. There was a pulling at her line.

"Keep quiet!" she called. "I've got a bite."

"You would have, if I could get at your arm," said John, who didn't believe she had a bite.

"I have, truly," she said, excitedly. "Look!"

All came tramping, crowding about her.

"I feel him pull," she said, eagerly.

"Well, get him out," said Luke.

"Shall I pull him or jerk him?" Elsie was nearly breathless.

"If I knew about his size, I could tell you," said Luke. "If he's big, give him a dignified pull; if he's a little chap, jerk him; no business to be little."

"Oh! I'm afraid it will hurt him," said Puss.

"Out with him!" said Luke.

"I'm afraid the line will break," said Elsie, all in a quiver.

"No, it wont," said John.

"The rod might snap," said Elsie.

"Here, let me take the rod," John proposed.

"No, no; I'm going to catch the fish myself," Elsie said, in vehement protest.

"Then jerk, sharp and strong," her brother said.

Elsie made ready; steadied her eager brain; planted her feet firmly; braced her muscles by her will; and then, with a shriek, threw up her rod, "as high as the sky," Puss said. There was a fleeting vision of a dripping white-bellied fish going skyward; and then a faint thud was heard.

"She's thrown it a half-mile, or less, in the bushes," said Luke.

"And there's her hook in the top of that tree," said John. "What gumps girls are when you take them out-of-doors!"

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.

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-stream a deep hole in the shade of some large trees. Just above it the creek tumbled and foamed over a rocky bed. John said to Luke: "It just empties the fish in here by the basketfuls. All we've got to do is to empty 'em out,"--and he knelt on the bank to fix his bait.

But Luke was not satisfied. "You'll never catch any fish there," said he. "The current's too swift." And off went he, to look for a likelier place.

Yet neither of the boys had better luck than when with the girls, and both soon went back to them. When Elsie's vivid account of the rescue had been given, the boys stared at Puss with a new interest, as though she had undergone some transformation in their brief absence.

Then somebody suggested that they must hurry up and catch something for dinner. So all five dropped hooks into the water, everybody pledged to silence, Fishing was now business; it meant dinner or no dinner.

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