line with false casts and dropped it thirty feet away in a pocket at the edge of the pads. It lay cocked up jauntily on the surface with its white hair wings erect, perfectly still like some big green-and-white insect trying to make up its mind what to do next. I twitched the line and the face dipped down and gurgled with a bubbling sound and little rings spread outward from it toward the pads. I twitched it again, quite gently, then the water bulged upward and swallowed it. I raised the rod tip and felt the weight that meant the hook was in, then he came out of the water glinting green and bronze in the early light and shaking his head to throw the hook. Bugs aren’t so easy to sling as big plugs, however, for there isn’t the leverage, and when he went down he still had it. He didn’t like it a bit, and made a run for the pads, but I managed to get him turned in time, and began taking in line as he came nearer. He jumped twice more, tiring himself, and in a little while I had him close up to the boat. I was reaching for the net when he saw me and was off again, making the reel sing. The next time he came in he was about done for and lay weakly on his side as I slipped the net under him, I lifted, and he flapped in the net in the bottom of the boat, a beauty that would go three pounds. Slipping the hook out, I lifted him over the side into the water. He lay quietly, then flipped his tail and swam out.
I missed a few strikes, and then quit feeding. Going over to the trot line, I ran along it, pulling hand over hand along the line. There were three catfish on it, one small one that would be just the right size for breakfast, and two others of two or three pounds each. I was wondering if I would be able to keep them alive until I went home, when I heard an outboard motor suddenly break the silence of the lake. It surprised me, for I hadn’t thought there was anyone else up here. I looked up and saw it coming around the bend, three or four hundred yards distant. It was coming fast, and as it approached I saw it was a big skiff probably sixteen feet, with only one man in it, and that he apparently had no intention of stopping to swap fish stories. As he came abreast I waved. He looked at me once, lifted a hand in a gesture that was almost curt, and went past. Then his motor sputtered and died. I had started to row back to camp when it quit on him, and I watched the boat drift along on its momentum for a little way and then come to rest. He was looking at the motor. I turned and started over. “Trouble?” I called out.
I could see him shake his head. “Just out of gas.” As I came up alongside I saw the motor was a big Johnson with a lot of power. He was filling the tank from one of those Army surplus jeep cans, and I looked at him, wondering if he might be anyone I knew. He glanced up briefly and went on pouring gasoline. I didn’t know him, but for just a fraction of a second I had that feeling there was something familiar about his face; then it was gone. Maybe I just ran into him on the street sometime in town, I thought.
He didn’t look as if he lived in town, though, or even went there very often. His face was deeply tanned, almost black from the sun, and the dark and graying hair was long above the ears and growing down his neck into the collar of the sweaty blue shirt. It was the lean, bony face of a man somewhere in his forties, with haze-gray eyes faintly bloodshot, as if he had not slept, and full of an infinite sad tiredness like those of a man who has been looking for too long at something he doesn’t like. The face was tired, too, and intelligent, but completely expressionless, and it was frosted along the jaws and chin with a beard stubble that was grayer than his hair. He wore a floppy straw hat and faded overalls