"I must rig up my tackle and try the river to-morrow," said the General. "Are you strong enough to join me, Colonel Reynolds? Of course you will come down, Mr. Lapham?" "I am sorry," answered Reynolds, "but I fear my shoulder is too tender. I am quite anxious to get well, and to that end must heed my doctor's advice." "I will join you, General," said Lapham with eager readiness. "This morning's taste has made me ravenous for another round with the finny beauties." "What flies are best here?" inquired Reynolds, thinking of something else. "Oh, we use minnows," said Lapham, "though I have had success with a bob of deer-tail hairs and red feathers. The trout won't rise to a regular fly." "Up in the mountains I find the 'Doctor' and the brown hackle very killing," said Reynolds. "I have had rare sport in the smaller streams. The bass there are quite as game as brook trout." "The mountain fish are like the mountain crackers: game but not over wise," Lapham quickly responded, with an intonation meant as a guaranty of the originality of his humor. "Neither would be easily handled by a novice, I grant you," said Reynolds with a peculiar smile. Lapham laughed merrily. The retort pleased him better than his own venture. "I was up in the mountains last winter deer hunting," he said, "and there's one thing I can testify to in behalf of those crackers: they are very hospitable and obliging; they seem to think they can't do too much for one. But the women! It kept me in a state of chronic melancholy to see the poor things." "Their life is a lonely, dreary, hopeless one," replied Reynolds, "but they are good, and as true as steel." "Yes, no doubt they are good. I know they are kind, and all that. They asked me to smoke with them and called me sonny!" "Did you go when they called you?" the General asked, with the ready familiarity of old acquaintance. "Yes," said Lapham, "I recognize the fitness of the appellation." Reynolds was thinking of Milly White. She was, in his mind, unseparable from any idea of the mountains and their people. He felt an impulse to resent, as personal to her, every suggestion made at the expense of the mountaineers. He could see her now, standing by the little gate gazing down the crooked, stony road, patiently watching for his return. He strove to brush aside the reflections that began to crowd into his brain, and with the help of Lapham's skipping levity and the unusual volubility of General DeKay's talk, he at last succeeded in hiding his uneasiness and lack of sympathy with the quiet merriment of the occasion.