A Fortnight of Folly. Maurice Thompson

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      “All the difference in the world,” he said; “the publisher would have to account to the author for all those thousands, don’t you see.”

      “But they have to account, anyhow,” replied Miss Moyne, with a perplexed smile.

      “Account!” exclaimed Ferris, contemptuously; “account! yes, they have to account.”

      “But they account to me,” Miss Moyne gently insisted.

      “Who are your publishers?” he demanded.

      “George Dunkirk & Co.,” was the answer.

      “Well,” said he, “I’ll wager you anything I can come within twenty of guessing the sales up to date of your book. It has sold just eleven hundred and forty copies.”

      She laughed merrily and betrayed the dangerous closeness of his guess by coloring a little.

      “Oh, its invariably just eleven hundred and forty copies, no matter what kind of a book it is, or what publisher has it,” he continued; “I’ve investigated and have settled the matter.”

      The historian was suddenly thoughtful, little Mrs. Philpot appeared to be making some abstruse calculation, Crane was silently gazing at the ground and Peck, with grim humor in his small eyes, remarked that eleven hundred and forty was a pretty high average upon the whole.

      Just at this point a figure appeared in the little roadway where it made its last turn lapsing from the wood toward the hotel. A rather tall, slender and angular young woman, bearing a red leather bag in one hand and a blue silk umbrella in the other, strode forward with the pace of a tragedienne. She wore a bright silk dress, leaf-green in color, and a black bonnet, of nearly the Salvation Army pattern, was set far back on her head, giving full play to a mass of short, fine, loosely tumbled yellow hair.

      She was very much out of breath from her walk up the mountain, but there was a plucky smile on her rather sallow face and an enterprising gleam in her light eyes.

      She walked right into the hotel, as if she had always lived there, and they heard her talking volubly to the servant as she was following him to a room.

      Everybody felt a waft of free Western air and knew that Hotel Helicon had received another interesting guest, original if not typical, with qualities that soon must make themselves respected in a degree.

      “Walked from the station?” Mrs. Philpot ventured, in querulous, though kindly interrogation.

      “Up the mountain?” Miss Moyne added, with a deprecatory inflection.

      “And carried that bag!” exclaimed all the rest.

V

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      Gaspard Dufour, whose accumulations of adipose tissue appeared to serve him a good turn, as he descended the steep, rocky ravine, hummed a droll tune which was broken at intervals by sundry missteps and down-sittings and side-wise bumps against the jutting crags. He perspired freely, mopping his brow meantime with a vast silk kerchief that hung loosely about his short neck.

      The wood grew denser as he descended and a damp, mouldy odor pervaded the spaces underneath the commingling boughs of the oaks, pines, cedars, and sassafras. Here and there a lizard scampered around a tree-hole or darted under the fallen leaves. Overhead certain shadowy flittings betrayed the presence of an occasional small bird, demurely going about its business of food-getting. The main elements of the surroundings, however, were gloom and silence. The breeze-currents astir in the valley and rippling over the gray peaks of Mt. Boab could not enter the leafy chambers of this wooded gorge. Heat of a peculiarly sultry sort seemed to be stored here, for as Dufour proceeded he began at length to gasp for breath, and it was with such relief as none but the suffocating can fully appreciate, that he emerged into an open space surrounded, almost, with butting limestone cliffs, but cut across by a noisy little stream that went bubbling down into the valley through a cleft bedecked with ferns and sprinkled with perennial dew from a succession of gentle cascades. The ideal trout-brook was this, so far as appearances could go. At the foot of each tiny water-fall was a swirling pool, semi-opaque, giving forth emerald flashes and silver glints, and bearing little cones of creamy foam round and round on its bosom. A thousand noises, every one a water-note, rising all along the line of the brook’s broken current, clashed together with an effect like that of hearing a far-off multitude applauding or some distant army rushing on a charge.

      So much out of breath and so deluged with perspiration was Dufour that he flung himself upon the ground beside the brook and lay there panting and mopping his face. Overhead the bit of sky was like turquoise, below a slender glimpse of the valley shone between the rock walls, like a sketch subdued almost to monochrome of crepuscular purple. A fitful breath of cool air fell into the place, fanning the man’s almost purple cheeks and forehead, while a wood-thrush, whose liquid voice might have been regarded as part of the water-tumult, sang in a thorn tree hard by.

      In a half-reclining attitude, Dufour gave himself over to the delicious effect of all this, indulging at the same time in the impolite and ridiculous, but quite Shakespearian, habit of soliloquizing.

      “Jingo!” he remarked, “Jingo! but isn’t this a daisy prospect for trout! If those pools aren’t full of the beauties, then there’s nothing in Waltonian lore and life isn’t worth living. Ha! Jingo! there went one clean above the water—a ten ouncer, at least!”

      He sprang at his rod as if to break it to pieces, and the facility with which he fitted the joints and the reel and run the line and tied the cast was really a wonder.

      “I knew they were here,” he muttered, “just as soon as I laid my eyes on the water. Who ever did see such another brook!”

      At the third cast of the fly, a brown hackle, by the way, up came a trout with a somersault and a misty gleam of royal purple and silver, attended by a spray of water and a short bubbling sound. Dufour struck deftly, hooking the beautiful fish very insecurely through the edge of the lower lip. Immediately the reel began to sing and the rod to quiver, while Dufour’s eyes glared almost savagely and his lips pursed with comical intensity.

      Round and round flew the trout, now rushing to the bottom of the pool, now whisking under a projecting ledge and anon flinging itself clean above the water and shaking itself convulsively.

      The angler was led hither and thither by his active prey, the exercise bedewing his face again with perspiration, whilst his feet felt the cool bath of water and the soothing embrace of tangled water-grass. The mere switch of a bamboo rod, bent almost into a loop, shook like a rush in a wind.

      Dufour was ill prepared to formulate a polite response when, at the height of his sport, a gentle but curiously earnest voice exclaimed:

      “Snatch ’im out, snatch ’im out, dog gone yer clumsy hide! Snatch ’im out, er I’ll do it for ye!”

      The trout must have heard, for as the angler turned to get a hasty glance at the stranger, up it leaped and by a desperate shake broke the snell.

      “Confound you!” cried Dufour, his face redder than ever. “Confound your meddlesome tongue, why didn’t you keep still till I landed him?”

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