I don’t know whether we all jumped at once or not. All I know is that I got off the tree and it whacked me in the back of the head as it went on up and all four of us were on our backs in the weeds just in time to see the biggest carp I ever saw go sailing up into the air like a shot out of a cannon. I’ll bet the carp was the most surprised fish in the Mississippi Valley right then. There wasn’t any playing with him, as an angler does; one moment he was wondering where that nice bunch of worm bait came from and the next moment he was yanked out of the slough at about sixty miles an hour as that tree snapped up like a whip. There was enough strength in that tree to pull an ox out of the water, almost, and it spent it all on that one carp and all in one second, too. “Whoop!” was all Wampus had time to say, and then the tree and the pole at the top of it did what any tree and pole would have done in the same circumstances. They snapped that carp off the hook like a giant throwing a mud ball from the end of a switch. We saw the carp sail up and up, twice as high as the tree itself and come down and down, inland from the slough. I scrambled to my feet and Tad and Wampus and Skippy scrambled to their feet, and we made a rapid break for the direction the carp had taken. “Stop! Listen! Hear where it falls!” Jibby Jones shouted, but we were too excited for that. We rushed into the woods and began beating through the weeds and nettles and looking up into the trees, and Jibby had to join us. We hunted for an hour, I guess, and then we gave it up. It was time to go home, anyway. We went back to the slough to get our poles and things, and we got them and started home. The first house we came to was Wampus’s, because that is nearest to Orpheus Cadwallader’s cottage, which we had been almost back of, and when we got there Mr. and Mrs. Smale and Sue Smale were on the little front porch and Orpheus Cadwallader was standing at the foot of the porch steps with one foot on the bottom step and the biggest carp I ever saw was in his hands. It was a beauty. “Y-e-s, M-i-s-t-e-r S-m-a-l-e,” he was drawling in that slow, lazy way of his, “I always did think a carp was more of a land animal than most fish, and now I know it. This proves it. I’ve often seen carp wiggle across sand bars on their bellies, and I’ve often said I was sure they came up to my garden at night and ate the young vegetable tops, but now I know more than that. They climb trees, and I know they climb trees because this carp was in the maple alongside of my house, sitting in a crotch of a branch, eating maple leaves. There are some in its mouth now.” Sure enough, he showed us that there were leaves in the carp’s mouth. “But that doesn’t quite prove it climbs trees, does it?” asked Mr. Smale. “It might have got in the tree in some other way.”