Even Murdock had to join in the laugh on the sheriff, at that one, but his was a pleasant laugh and he followed it up by clapping Ollie on the knee.
“Well, Sheriff, seeing that you’re not going to toss me into the hoosegow, how about getting started on some patrol work and bass casting combined. I’d like to hook into that big one I lost the other night up at Saltash Lake.”
“Gosh, so ’ud I like to hook into him,” said Ollie. “Great night for castin’, too, bein’ nice an’ warm an’ black an’ calm.”
“Well, let’s get going, then, Sheriff,” suggested the city man.
“Fine,” said Ollie. “I’ll jest step down an’ get my flivver.”
“No, we can use my bus,” said Murdock.
“All right. Drop me off to the courthouse so I can get me a line for this reel an’ that castin’ rod I bought me.”
“No need,” explained Murdock. “I’ve got a new spool of good hard braided line you can have, and you can use that one-piece bamboo rod I lent you the first time you tried plug casting. Save time that way. Come ahead.”
“Let’s go,” cried Ollie as he eagerly rose.
“Have a good time fishing, Sheriff,” said Bert. “Me, I’m going to mosey around the shores of Upper Saltash. Still a few big places unopened, around there, and you never can tell when this crook may hit this vicinity. There’s — there’s a total of twenty-seven hundred and fifty dollars in rewards for the capture of this criminal,” he added.
“Feller could buy a heap o’ tackle with that,” said Ollie, as he left the lobby.
II
As they reached the outlet of Saltash Lake, where the sheriff kept a rowboat, Ollie got out his knife, opened it and reached into his pocket for his pipe. When he brought out the ancient corncob, he cried: “My soul an’ body,” and looked worried.
“What’s the trouble?” asked Murdock.
“I… I… my reel! I thought I had it in that there pocket with my pipe! I could ’a’ swore I put her there ’afore I left the car, so’s to have my hands free to help you lug down the tackle. I… I—”
He stuck his knife and pipe back into his pocket and hurriedly started back to the car, parked perhaps a hundred feet away on the road.
“Jest a minute, Mr. Murdock,” he called over his shoulder. “Reckon I left that reel on the seat, seems as though.” Then, a moment later, he let out a whoop. “Yep, here she be, all right. I’d left her on the seat, like I said. Here I come, ready an’ rarin’ to give them bass all Sal Brookes an’ the devil.”
“Well, let’s get your line spooled onto your reel, first,” laughed the city man.
“Gosh, I do seem to be all excited up tonight, don’t I?” Ollie said with an abashed grin. “You got to excuse a feller, that’s all. This night castin’ for bass has got me behavin’ like a two-year-ol’ at the business.”
When they stepped into the boat after he had rigged up his tackle, however, Ollie became the cool fisherman that he was.
It was an ideal night for plug casting for bass. It was very dark, there was no moon up as yet, and the surface of Saltash Lake looked like a sheet of black onyx. For the end of June in this county in northern Maine, too, it was extremely warm. On such nights bass are hungry and ready to strike. Now, off in the shallows where the tanlacs grow in sandy bottom, they could be heard breaking water.
Murdock had insisted on taking the first turn at the oars, while Ollie took his place standing up in the stern. It was, in this case, virtually the bow, for Murdock was pushing the boat forward with the oars, so that the sheriff, facing the direction in which they were moving, could more comfortably cast toward the shore.
Plug casting for bass, as Murdock had frequently stated in the lobby of the Derby House, was one of the most difficult as well as the greatest sport in the world. It is hard enough, in daylight, to cast from the reel a wooden or metal lure for a distance of fifty, seventy-five, a hundred feet or more; when it is dark, and the shore line is barely distinguishable, the feat becomes infinitely harder.
Murdock had not exaggerated, however, when he had also said that Ollie Bascomb had become an expert from the start. Now, with the city man pushing him along some seventy feet from the shore, the sheriff was not getting a single backlash, not once overshooting his mark and getting the hooks on his lure entangled in the tree branches that spread out over the water. It was, apparently, born in the man. He had spent all his life handling fishing tackle and firearms, and he handled them with that indefinable something that causes even a casual onlooker instinctively to sense that the rod or gun are almost part of him.
“Dammit, man, but you’re good,” Murdock finally said, after he had pointed out a log in the darkness and suggested that Ollie cast close up to it. “Eighty feet away if it’s a foot, that log, and you spanked that plug within two inches of it.”
“Aw… aw, I had a good teacher to fu’st show me the ropes, remember,” said Ollie, with genuine feeling.
“You sure know your stuff,” said Murdock, admiringly. “You—”
Chung!
That, as Murdock had said, was about the only way that you could describe the sound made by a bass hitting a top-water plug on a calm and black night.
“I got him,” cried Ollie, as the placid surface of the lake broke into foam close to the log where the sheriff had cast his lure. “He’ll go four pound or better,” added Ollie, as the white belly of a bass could be detected, through the blackness, in an arching leap into the air.
“Hold him,” said Murdock.
“Cal’late to,” said Ollie.
The sheriff, for the next seven or eight minutes, played his quarry with the supreme skill of a master. The bass dived, broke water, rushed inward, ran this way and that, tried every trick he knew. Ollie, however, stood there in the boat as coolly as he always did when handling one of his brook trout on a two-ounce rod, meeting every attack and ruse of his finned adversary.
During his fight with the bass, Ollie kept up a steady stream of conversation. It was close to eleven o’clock now, he said, and as he saw three of the four camp lights on the lake go out, within the space of a few moments, he opined that those folks were missing a lot of fun by going to bed when they might be out fishing. The only light left, across the bay, was Mr. Gansvoort’s. Stayed up late, he did, fussing with his coins. Stayed up most of the night, sometimes. Nice feller, Gansvoort. He and Ollie were good friends. He—
But the sheriff broke off, as he was about to explain something, and said:
“Net him, Mr. Murdock. Got him tuckered out now, I have.”
The strength of the game bronze-back had finally surrendered to the strength of split bamboo and braided silk and human hands. After a last leap into the air, when he landed, he lay supine on the surface, over on his side, fins barely moving.
“Put it under him gentle, Mr. Murdock,” said Ollie, as Murdock slipped his net in the water and moved it toward the fish. “There. Now. Lift him easy!… Hi, that’s the ticket!… My soul an’ body, but he’s a beaut’, ain’t he?”
The city fisherman had deftly netted the fish and brought him into the bottom of the boat.
Ollie, as deftly, had disentangled the hooks from the mesh of the net and very carefully removed the barbs from the tough cartilage of the upper jaw of his vanquished opponent. For a second or two, he held the bass up for his own loving inspection, and then he slid him softly back into the water.
“There you go, ol’ boy,” he said. “Thanks for a whoppin’ good fight. Meet you ag’in some time, perhaps mebbe. I—”
“You’ll stick your hands up into the air, that’s what you’ll do now,” came from Murdock, all the geniality gone from his voice.