But a fisherman is still a fisherman anywhere, and so he felt no surprise or resentment when the frail man at the end of the pier interrupted his vacuous serenity with the conventional inquiry: “Any luck?”
“Not much yet,” Simon said cheerfully. “How are you doing?”
The other reached down into the water and pulled up a string from which dangled four small but not contemptible fish.
“How’s that?”
“Not bad.”
Simon was inevitably interested — he would have liked to call it envious, but he was human too.
“I see you’re one of the fellows who’d rather do it the hard way,” said the little man sociably, lowering his catch back into its natural cooler. “I’m afraid I’d be a complete duffer at fly casting.” He picked up his rod and held up the line, exhibiting a couple of salmon eggs on the hook with a small sinker a cubit ahead of them. “But I suppose you’d despise this kind of fishing.”
“It seems to catch trout,” Simon conceded.
The little man made a clumsy roundhouse cast but managed to reach out about forty feet. He had sparse mousy hair and an eager bony face; somehow he made one think of a timid schoolteacher.
“There’s a bit of art to it, all the same,” he insisted apologetically. “A lot of people don’t catch anything, even with salmon eggs. They get nibbles, and lose their bait, but they don’t seem to be able to hook the fish. It used to happen to me, till I made a study of it. First, I decided you have to let your egg go to the bottom, and leave it there, so it lies pretty much naturally. There’s no use to keep hauling it in and throwing it out again. If there’s a trout anywhere around, he’ll find it. And if he’s hungry, he’ll take it.”
“I can’t argue — with the theory.”
“But he won’t usually gulp it, the way he might go for a fly. He knows it’s not going to run away. And I think it must taste better than a fly. Why shouldn’t he want to enjoy it? So he takes it in his mouth and swims a little way with it. That’s when most people go wrong. They feel a little tug and jerk their rod, and unless they’re lucky they snatch the egg right out of his lips, or pull the hook out of the egg, but they don’t snag him.”
“What do you do, Professor?”
“I’ve got a lot of extra line off the reel, see, like this, and I’m holding it in the tips of my fingers, just as lightly as I can, only just enough so’s the current won’t take it away, and I can feel a little pull if I get one, but not so tightly that he’ll feel a resistance and get suspicious — Look, something’s playing with it now!”
The monofilament was peeling slowly away from his poised fingertips. Two or three feet of it slipped off, and then the movement stopped. The little man lowered his thumb to grip the line again as lightly as a feather.
“Now, he’s really taking it well into his mouth. In a minute he’ll be ready to start swallowing, and then he’ll move on again to look for something else to eat... There he goes... Give him a little more to make sure...” The skinny fingers delicately released more line, then checked it gently. “Now we should have him.”
The handle began cranking, the rod tip nicked up and then bent, and the line sprang straight and taut from it for a second before a galvanized shimmer of silver erupted from an eddy downstream. In a very few seconds more the little man was hoisting his prize bodily onto the decking — it was not much over the legal minimum and couldn’t put up any appreciable struggle.
“But it’s a fish, isn’t it?” said the little man diffidently. “And I was lucky to be able to show you what I mean.”
“You must be a hell of a psychologist,” said the Saint.
“Well, I am about some things.”
The man added the trout to his string but did not put the string back in the water.
“Why don’t you take a turn here?” he said. “It’s a good spot.”
“Thanks, but you had it first.”
“No, really, I’m through. I’ve got all I want for supper, and it’s time I took them home and cleaned them and cooked them.”
He squeezed past the Saint quite decisively, and Simon took his place at the end of the pier and began working out line with false casts. The other stopped as he reached the bank, and out of the corner of an eye Simon saw him put down his rod and his string and squat down to rinse his hands in the river; then the Saint had to concentrate completely on keeping his back cast high and accurately grooved into a narrow gap between the trees behind him, a problem which the salmon-egg psychologist had not had with his spinning tackle. Simon would have been quite childishly delighted if some enchanted trout had risen as if on cue to his first cast and would have settled for any prompt action that would have entitled him to give a return lecture on technique, but by the time he had his fly drifting and sinking where he wanted it, the only audience he was immediately anxious to impress had gone.
About ten minutes and several casts later, on the swing-around, he tied into his best strike of the day. Having dared his luck by coming out with no landing net, he had to beach it after a brief but exhilarating tussle at the shore end of the pier. It was a rainbow which he estimated at almost two pounds — far from a boasting size, but big enough to dwarf anything the egg expert had to show.
After unhooking it and killing it cleanly, he squatted down again to rinse his hands, exactly as the little man had done. And it was as he turned back from this ablution that he saw the wallet.
It lay on the path just a half step off the pier, where anyone who was not purblind, leaving the pier, could hardly have missed it, or if he did could scarcely have failed to trip over it.
Simon Templar picked it up. Of course.
He looked inside it. Inevitably.
It contained remarkably little of the motley miscellanea which most men accumulate in their wallets. There was a driver’s license, an Auto Club card, and an insurance card, all bearing the name of Oliphant Quigg, with an address in San Francisco. The remaining contents were most monotonous, consisting of eleven identical pieces of paper currency, each with a face value of one hundred dollars.
One didn’t have to be a detective to assume that the name of Oliphant Quigg was the private affliction of the Saint’s newest acquaintance, and that the wallet had squeezed out of his hip-pocket when he washed his hands.
Simon Templar suddenly decided that he had done enough fishing for the day. Like Mr Quigg, he had plenty for his own dinner, and the others would keep better in the river than in his icebox, and it would soon be dark anyhow. And to the Saint, much as he might insist that he had retired, people who dropped wallets like that still promised one of the few sports that fascinated him more than fishing.
He stopped by the office to make an inquiry and was not disappointed.
“Yes, he’s staying here,” said the proprietor. “Number fourteen — the end cottage over that way.”
“I found something I think he dropped,” Simon said for explanation.
In the gathering dusk he walked over to the indicated cabin and knocked on the door. When Mr Quigg opened it, Simon was holding up the wallet in front of him. The little man looked blank at first, then appalled. His hand flew to his hip and came back empty and trembling.
“Gosh,” he gasped. “How ever could I — Do come in, won’t you?”
Simon did not need to have his arm twisted. And if the invitation had not been issued he would have doubted his own sanity.