"Down at Catalina they'll tell you, if you ask 'em, that I'm the man that ketched the biggest tuna that ever come out of that ocean. It took me fourteen hours and forty-five minutes to land him, and during that time he towed me and an eighteen-foot boat, and the fellow I had along for boatman, over forty-four miles--I measured it afterward to be sure--and the friction of the reel spinning round wore my line down till it wasn't no thicker in places than a cobweb. But tunas ain't my regular specialty--trouts and basses are my special favorites; and up in the mountains is where I mostly do my fishing. "I'm just sort of hanging round now waiting for the snow to move out so's I can go up there and start fishing. "Well, sirs, it's funny, ain't it, the way luck will run fishing? Oncet when I was living up there I fished stiddy, day in and day out, for two seasons and never got a bite that you could rightly call a bite. And then all of a sudden one afternoon the luck switched and in exactly forty-five minutes by the watch--by this here very watch I'm carrying now in my pocket--I ketched seventy-two of them big old black basses out of one hole; and they averaged five pounds apiece!" We looked at one another silently. A total of seventy-two five-pound bass in three-quarters of an hour seemed a little too much to be taken as a first dose from a strange practitioner. And it was hard to believe they had all been basses; if only for the sake of variety there should have been at least one barytone. We felt that we needed time for reflection--and digestion. Evidently realizing this, one of our number undertook to throw himself into the breach. As I recollect, this volunteer was the fat coffin drummer from Des Moines who had the round, smooth face and the round, bald head, and wore the fuzzy green hat with the bow at the back. I think he wore the bow there purposely--it simplified matters so when you were trying to decide which side of his head his face grew on. He heaved a pensive sigh out of his system and remarked upon the clearness of the air in these parts. "You're right there, mister," broke in the button-nosed man, snapping him up instantly. "The air is tolerable clear here today; but you oughter to see the air up in the mountains! Why, it's so clear up there it would make this here hill-country air look like a fog. I remember oncet I was browsing along a cliff up in that country, toting my fishpole, and I happened to look over the bluff--just so--and down below I saw a hole in the creek that was just crawling with them big trouts--steel-head trouts and rainbow trouts. I could see the spots on their sides and their fins waving, and their gills working up and down.