The Boy from the Valley Farm held his head high with pride. For had he not—on the self-same day—landed a big fat trout and seen a bear cub! That would certainly be something to tell at home, even for a backwoods boy! His mouth watered as he thought of the way his mother would broil his fish. But alas, for the best laid plans of mice and men! When he found the place where he had landed his catch, there was no fish there. Could it be that he had only dreamed he caught it? But no, here was its tail on the trampled ground. Someone had stolen it. But who? That was the question! Why, of course, the little Black Bear whom he had startled out of the underbrush! “The rascal!” exclaimed the Boy, half amused, half crest-fallen. Well, I only hope he needed it more than I did. “Now I suppose they will never believe me at home when I tell of my big catch.” He started whistling ruefully, as he set about mending his broken horsehair line, which had got badly tangled in the bushes. Then his eye fell on something that made him pause, wide-eyed. Being a backwoods boy, he was almost as keen at reading the signs about him as were the wood folk themselves—that is, so far as he was able! Of course his nose and ears were very much less sharp than theirs, but he had even better eyes than most of them. Here was evidence his eyes could not deny, though he reached out and felt of it to be sure. One fin of his stolen trout lay caught in the very top of a hazel bush. “Now, how on earth did that get there?” he asked himself. People who are much alone are very apt to talk to themselves. “If that cub ate the fish down here, where the ground is trampled, how did he come to drop the fin in a bush higher than his head?” [Illustration: “Oh you rascal!” shouted the boy, in delight —Page 89 ] Then a bright idea popped into his mind. “Why, of course, it must have dropped from above. A sly fellow like that wouldn’t have stopped to eat his fish down here. He’s carried it up in the top of some tree where he could feast in peace. I’ll bet it was this very tree I’m standing under—for how else could the fin have fallen on top of the bush?” He raised his eyes to peer into the green shadows of the tree-top. There, sure enough—so high that the Boy’s sharp eyes could barely make him out against the tree trunk, sat Twinkly Eyes astride a limb, and between his clever forepaws he held what must have been the last of the trout. “Oh, you rascal!” shouted the boy, in delight. “I’ll get you for that!” [Illustration: [Bear]] XXX A CLIMBING MATCH “You Scalawag!” the Boy kept laughing, as he stared at Twinkly Eyes, the little Black Bear, in the top of the beech tree. “So it was you who stole my fish?” But Twinkly Eyes said never a word. He just sat still, like a bump on a log, in the hope that the Boy might yet be deceived into thinking him only a blackened limb.