Chapter IX

After the death of Mary Evered the days slipped away, and June passed to July, and July to August. Gardens prospered; the hay ripened in the fields; summer was busy with the land. But winter is never far away in these northern hills; and once in July and twice in August the men of the farms awoke in early morning to find frost faintly lying, so that there were blackened leaves in the gardens, and the beans had once to be replanted. Customary hazards of their arduous life.

The trout left quick water and moved into the deep pools; and a careful fisherman, not scorning the humble worm, might strip a pool if he were murderously inclined. The summer was dry; and as the brooks fell low and lower little fingerlings were left gasping and flopping upon the gravel of the shallows here and there. Nick Westley, the game warden for the district, and a Fraternity man, went about with dip net and pail, bailing penned trout from tiny shallows and carrying them to the larger pools where they might have a chance for life. Some of the more ardent fishermen imitated him; and some took advantage of the trout’s extremity to bring home catches they could never have made in normal times.

John Evered loved fishing; and he knew the little brook along the hither border of Whitcher Swamp, below the farm, as well as he knew his own hand. But this year had been busy; he found no opportunity to try the stream until the first week of July. One morning then, with steel rod and tiny hooks, and a can of bait at his belt, he struck down through the woodlot, past the spring where Mary had been killed, into the timber below, and so came to the wall that was the border of his father’s farm, and crossed into the swamp.

Whitcher Swamp is on the whole no pleasant place for a stroll; yet it has its charms for the wild things, and for this reason John loved it. Where he struck the marshy ground it was relatively easy going; and he took a way he knew and came to the brook and moved along it a little ways to a certain broad and open pool.

He thought the brook was lower than he had ever seen it at this season; and once he knelt and felt the water, and found it warm. He smiled at this with a certain gratification for the pool he sought was a spring hole, water bubbling up through pin gravel in the brook’s very bed, and the trout would be there to dwell in that cooler stream. When he came near the place, screened behind alders so that he could not be seen, he uttered an exclamation, and became as still as the trees about him while he watched.

There were trout in the pool, a very swarm of them, lying close on the yellow gravel bottom. The water, clear as crystal, was no more than three feet deep; and he could see them ever so plainly. Big fat fish, monsters, if one considered the brook in which he found them. He judged them all to be over nine inches, several above a foot, one perhaps fourteen inches long; and his eyes were shining. They were so utterly beautiful, every line of their graceful bodies, and every dappled spot upon their backs and sides as clear as though he held them in his hands.

He rigged line and hook, nicked a long worm upon the point, and without so much as shaking an alder branch thrust his rod through and swung the baited hook and dropped it lightly in the very center of the pool, full fifteen feet from shore. Then he swung upward with a strong steady movement, for he had seen a great trout strike as the worm touched the water, had seen the chewing jaws of the fish mouthing its titbit. And as he swung, the gleaming body came into the air, through an arc above his head, into the brush behind him, where he dropped on his knees beside it and gave it merciful death with the haft of his heavy knife, and dropped it into his basket.

Fly fishermen will laugh with a certain scorn; or they will call John Evered a murderer. Nevertheless, it is none so easy to take trout even in this crude fashion of his. A shadow on the water, a stirring of the bushes, a too-heavy tread along the bank--and they are gone. Nor must they be hurried. The capture of one fish alarms the rest; the capture of two disturbs them; the taking of three too quickly will send them flying every whither.

John, after his first fish, filled and lighted his pipe, then caught a second; and after another interval, a third--fat, heavy trout, all of them; as much as three people would care to eat; and John was not minded to kill more than he could use. He covered the three with wet moss in his basket, and then he crept back through the alders and lay for a long time watching the trout in the pool, absorbing the beauty of their lines, watching how they held themselves motionless with faintest quivers of fin, watching how they fed.

A twelve-inch trout rose and struck at a leaf upon the pool’s surface, and John told himself, “They’re hungry.” He laughed a little, and got an inch-long twig and tied it to the end of his line in place of hook. This he cast out upon the pool, moving it to and fro erratically. Presently a trout swirled up and took it under, and spat it out before John could twitch the fish to the surface. John laughed aloud, and cast again. He stayed there for a long hour at this sport, and when the trout sulked he teased them with bits of leaf or grass. Once he caught a cricket and noosed it lightly and dropped it on the water. When the fish took it down John waited for an instant, then tugged and swung the trout half a dozen feet into the air before he could disgorge the bait.

“Hungry as sin,” John told himself at last; and his eyes became sober as he considered thoughtfully. There were other men about, as good fishermen as he, and not half so scrupulous. If they should come upon this pool on such a day----

He did a thing that might seem profanation to the fisherman who likes a goodly bag. He gathered brush and threw it into the pool; he piled it end to end and over and over; he found two small pines; dead in their places among their older brethren; and he pushed them from their rotting roots and dragged them to the brook and threw them in. When he was done the pool was a jungle, a wilderness of stubs and branches; a sure haven for trout, a spot almost impossible to fish successfully. While he watched, when his task was finished, he saw brown darting shadows in the stream as the trout shot back into the covert he had made; and he smiled with a certain satisfaction.

“They’ll have to fish for them now,” he told himself.

He decided to try and see whether a man might take a trout from the pool in its ambushed state. It meant an hour of waiting, a snagged hook or two, a temper-trying ordeal with mosquitoes and flies. But in the end he landed another fish, and was content. He went back through the swamp and up to the farm, well pleased.

Moving along the brook he saw other pools where smaller fish were lying; and that night he told Ruth what he had seen. “You can see all the trout you’re minded to, down there now,” he said.

The girl nodded unsmilingly. She had not yet learned to laugh again, since her sister’s death. They were a somber household, these three--Evered steadily silent, the girl sober and stern, John striving in his awkward fashion to win mirth from her and speech from Evered.

The early summer was to pass thus. And what was in Evered’s mind as the weeks dragged by no man could surely know. His eye was as hard as ever, his voice as harsh; yet to Ruth it seemed that new lines were forming in his cheeks, and his hair, that had been black as coal, she saw one afternoon was streaked with gray. Watching, thereafter, she marked how the white hairs increased in number. Once she spoke of it to John, constrainedly, for there was no such pleasant confidence between these two as there had been.

John nodded. “Yes,” he said, “he’s aging. He loved her, Ruth; loved her hard.”

Ruth made no comment, but there was no yielding in her eyes. She was in these days implacable; and Evered watched her now and then with something almost pleading in his gaze. He began to pay her small attentions, which came absurdly from the man. She tried to hate him for them.

Once John sought to comfort his father, spoke to him gently of the dead woman; and Evered cried out, as though to assure himself as well as silence John: “She was tricking me, John! Leaving me. With Semler, that very day.”

He would not let John reply, silenced him with a fierce oath and flung away. It might have been guessed that his belief in his wife’s treachery was like an anchor to which Evered’s racked soul clung; as though he found comfort and solace in the ugly thought, a justifying consolation.