The next Tuesday morning Lee was not ready to try for the big fish again, although it was almost torture to stay away from the old treetops. He promised to be ready the next week, and he was. What he had done had surprised his mother, who knew that he had been saving every cent in the hope of going to college. He had sent away to a fishing-tackle house for their largest first-class silk line, and received one hundred yards of line that was tested to fifty pounds. He had sent to an electrical supply house for their smallest unwound copper wire, and had received a spool of it, almost hairlike in its fineness. Both purchases had been expensive for him. From "Old Injun Jake" Lee had learned the art of doing fine splicing and of braiding many strands. He unbraided the silk line for a considerable length, and weaving in one by one the copper wire lengths that he had cut from the spool, he joined the wire to the silk with a joint that would readily pass through a line-guide, and continued to braid till he had a six-foot, flexible copper leader that would sustain his own weight, united to his one hundred yards of line with a joint as strong as the line itself. Thus did he provide against the teeth of Old Muskie. Tuesday morning the boys were again fishing in Forest Lodge Cove at daybreak. Again Old Muskie struck, and unable to cut the line, rushed into the interlacing boughs of the submerged treetops. For a while the strain on the rod indicated that he was surging back and forth among the treetops, but soon the dead pull showed that the old warrior was no longer making a fight. Rowing in, the boys found the casting-bait fast on one of the limbs. When they got it loose and pulled it in, they found that one of the treble hooks was gone. Old Muskie in his rush had caught one of the hooks upon a branch and it had held, while the one that was in his mouth had pulled from the minnow, and the big savage of the lake was again at liberty. Lee made a change in his minnow before the next Tuesday morning. Instead of using the treble hooks that were fastened with screws into the sides of the minnow, he bored a hole in the body of the wooden bait, and using again his copper wire, passed it back and forth through the body of the minnow and through the eye of the treble hook on each side. He knew that no fish would break all these strands of copper wire, although he felt that Old Muskie might break the hooks. The next Tuesday morning Lee again hooked Old Muskie. Again the big fish got to the treetops, and again Lee felt the dead pull that meant that he had no longer a fighting fish to deal with. Reeling up as Carl paddled the boat toward shore, Lee found that Old Muskie had entangled the line among the branches, and getting a chance to use his great strength, had broken the heavy silk line. Lee was delighted to see that it had been broken above the point where he had spliced it to the copper leader. "What can you do about that?" asked Carl.