Pritchard, she observed, had a weather-red face and high cheek-bones. He was smooth-shaved.[Pg 65] He wore no hat. But for his miraculously short-cut hair, his field-glasses, his suit of coarse Scotch wool, whose colors blended so well with the meadow upon which he crouched, he might have been an Indian. His head, the field-glasses, the hands which clasped them, moved—nothing else. [Pg 65] "Is it a bluff?" thought Gay. "Is he just posing, or is there something in it?" Half an hour passed—three quarters. Gay was pale and grimly smiling. Her legs had gone to sleep. But she would not give in. If an Englishman could fish so patiently, why, so could she. She was fighting her own private battle of Bunker Hill—of New Orleans. Pritchard lowered his glasses, handed them to Gay, and pointed up the brook and across, to where a triangular point of granite peered a few inches above the surface. Gay looked through the glasses, and Pritchard began to whisper in her ear: "Northwest of that point of rock, about two feet—keep looking just there, and I'll try to tell you what to see." "There's a fish feeding," she answered; "but he must be a baby, he just makes a bubble on the surface." [Pg 66] [Pg 66] "There are three types of insect floating over him," said Pritchard; "I don't know your American beasts by name, but there is a black, a brown, and a grayish spiderlike thing. He's taking the last. If you see one of the gray ones floating where he made his last bubble, watch it." Gay presently discerned such an insect so floating, and watched it. It passed within a few inches of where the feeding trout had last risen and disappeared, and a tiny ring gently marked the spot where it had been sucked under. Gay saw a black insect pass over the fatal spot unscathed, then browns; and then, once more, a gray, very tiny in the body but with longish legs, approached and was engulfed. "Now for the tackle box," Pritchard whispered. They withdrew from the margin of the brook, Gay in that curious ecstasy, half joy, half sorrow, induced by sleepy legs. She lurched and almost fell. Pritchard caught her. "Was the vigil too long?" he asked.
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