going to take a beating on it that way, and I did; it was worth four hundred, even secondhand, and I finally got two-twenty-five. The worst part of it was giving up the Hardy rod the Judge had given me on my nineteenth birthday, but after taking it out of the case and looking at it once I handed it over and left.
I cashed his check the first thing Monday and waited. The grand jury convened that morning, and we sat through the long day wondering what would happen, but nothing did. It was quiet.
To get up the lake to where she was I’d have to go clear down to the south end and rent a boat and motor, now that I’d sold my own, but that was all right. I had it all figured out.
Tuesday morning I didn’t say anything to anybody. I just went. And that was the day that everything fell in.
Ten
I was at the store on the end of the lake by daybreak and rented a skiff and a big outboard. After buying a bucket of shiners from the man who ran the place, I rented one of his cane-pole fishing outfits and said I thought I’d go up the lake a way and see if I couldn’t catch a few white perch. He’d never seen me before, and merely grunted something and looked at me with the casual and almost contemptuous indifference with which fishing-camp proprietors regard all fishermen. By the time it was light enough to see, I was on my way. I wanted to try to get nearly halfway up before I had to duck in somewhere and wait for Shevlin to go by. He would be coming down with his catfish, headed for the store, and with all the turns in the channel he might be right on me before I saw him. I should be able to gauge it within a half hour, for I knew about what time he left.
But something went wrong. Either he had left earlier than usual or had tried to cut it too fine, tried to get too far up before I turned off into a slough and waited. Suddenly, I came around a bend in the channel and saw him up ahead, less than half a mile away. I looked wildly around, but there wasn’t anyplace I could hide. He would have seen me by this time, anyway.
The lake was a little less than a quarter mile wide here, with acres of big weed beds off to the left. I cut the motor and swung hard left into one of the openings through the pads, getting as far out of the main channel as possible, and when I had come to the end of it I dropped the square concrete block of an anchor and grabbed up the cane pole. Not even bothering to bait the hook with one of the shiners, I swung it out, and sat there staring intently at the cork float like all the fishermen in the world.
He came on past, looked toward me only once, very briefly, answered my wave with a curt gesture of his hand, and then was gone. It’s all right, I thought. Even if he saw me duck over here like that, he won’t know me. This is a different boat. Mine was painted green, while this one, like all the rental boats down there, was a dirty white with a number on the bow.
I sat there waiting, listening for the sound of his motor to die out down the lake. When it was gone completely I pulled in the anchor and started up again. All the rest of the way I kept a sharp eye out for other boats, praying I wouldn’t meet any fishermen, for I didn’t want anyone to see us as I was bringing her out. There were none. Now that he was gone, I had the whole swamp to myself.
I must have been more than halfway up when I met him, for it still wasn’t ten o’clock when I turned in at the entrance of the slough by his boat landing. Not bothering to hide the boat now, for I didn’t want to waste the time, I tied up at the landing and went up the trail, feeling that same suffocating excitement I always felt when I was coming nearer to her, and now there was added to it the knowledge that we would have to hurry. We had to be