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Maynard gave a grunt of relief, but as his hand closed round it a tiny flutter passed through the fingerling; it gave a final gasp and was still. Knitting his brows in almost comical vexation, he hastened to restore it to the stream, holding it by the tail and striving to impart a life-like wriggle to its limpness. "Buck up, old thing!" he murmured encouragingly. "Oh, buck up!
When the moorland waters spouted and churned, cherry red from their springs in the peat, he deemed them a noble spectacle; when, as at present, Teign herself had shrunk to a mere silver thread, and the fingerling trout splashed and wriggled half out of water in the shallows, he freely criticised its scanty volume and meagre depths. Miller Lyddon welcomed the men very heartily.
Hardly had it hit the water before something grabbed it, and Charley drew forth a flopping fish. But it proved to be only a fingerling. In disgust Charley wet his hand and carefully unhooked the little fish. "Shows they're here, anyway," he said, as he tossed the little trout back into the stream. But if they were there, they were strangely shy in making their presence known.
Goodness knows I was tired enough, but I lay awake a while thinking what changes in our journalistic fortunes thirty days had brought us. Five weeks before, bearing dangerously dubious credentials, we had trailed afoot a suspicious squad at the tail of the German columns, liable to be halted and locked up any minute by any fingerling of a sublieutenant who might be so minded to so serve us.
I caught a small trout and did not know what fish it might be, till I saw the crimson spots on his side and remembered that the trout in books bore them, and then I threw him on the grass and danced a wild dance around him, a powwow as furious as a red Indian's scalp-dance, while he, poor little fingerling, jumped in the unkindly herb.
He was clad much like the artists, and it made the blood flush hot to her cheek as she thought he might be one. Young men sometimes fished the brook for the fingerling trout it contained. They were small but sweet, and the catching them with a fly was difficult work in a stream so overhung with tangles of vine and brier, so densely planted in the wider reaches with water hemlock and lesser weeds.
But the size of these in Loch Beg puzzles me, nor can one see how they breed, as breed they do: for twice or thrice I caught a fingerling, and threw him in again. No burn runs out of the loch, and, even in a flood, the feeder is so small, and its course so extremely steep, that one cannot imagine where the fish manage to spawn.
From the pier where we landed, a small boy, in a long black tunic belted in at his waist, was fishing; he hooked a little fingerling. At the first tentative tug on his line he set up a shrill clamor.
Soames jerked his rod and brought up a fingerling which he silently unhooked and threw back overboard. "Considering the thinness of the air where you came out, maybe half a cubic mile of it had to transpose into your time to let your ship come into this." He dropped the line overboard again. "Which means that there was an implosion of anywhere from a quarter to half a cubic mile of vacuum.
There were shot-guns in rows, their gray barrels looking like so many organ-pipes; sheaves of fishing-rods, from the four-ounce whisp of the brook-trout up to the rigid eighteen-ounce lance of the king-salmon and sea-bass; showcases of wicked revolvers, swelling by calibres into the thirty-eight and forty-four man-killers of the plainsmen and Arizona cavalry; hunting knives and dirks, and the slender steel whips of the fencers; files of Winchesters, sleeping quietly in their racks, waiting patiently for the signal to speak the one grim word they knew; swarms of artificial flies of every conceivable shade, brown, gray, black, gray-brown, gray-black, with here and there a brisk vermilion note; coils of line, from the thickness of a pencil, spun to hold the sullen plunges of a jew-fish off the Catalina Islands, down to the sea-green gossamers that a vigorous fingerling might snap; hooks, snells, guts, leaders, gaffs, cartridges, shells, and all the entrancing munitions of the sportsman, that savored of lonely canons, deer-licks, mountain streams, quail uplands, and the still reaches of inlet and marsh grounds, gray and cool in the early autumn dawn.
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