f the Redclay Creek
fishing for 'tailers'. I'd been getting on all right with the housemaid
at the 'Royal'--she used to have plates of pudding and hot pie for me on
the big gridiron arrangement over the kitchen range; and after the third
tuck-out I thought it was good enough to do a bit of a bear-up in that
direction. She mentioned one day, yarning, that she liked a stroll by
the creek sometimes in the cool of the evening. I thought she'd be off
that day, so I said I'd go for a fish after I'd knocked off. I thought
I might get a bite. Anyway, I didn't catch Lizzie--tell you about that
some other time.

"It was Sunday. I'd been fishing for Lizzie about an hour when I saw a
skirt on the bank out of the tail of my eye--and thought I'd got a bite,
sure. But I was had. It was Miss Wilson strolling along the bank in the
sunset, all by her pretty self. She was a slight girl, not very tall,
with reddish frizzled hair, grey eyes, and small, pretty features. She
spoke as if she had more brains than the average, and had been better
educated. Jack Drew was the only young man in Redclay she could talk to,
or who could talk to a girl like her; and that was the whole trouble in
a nutshell. The newspaper office was next to the bank, and I'd seen her
hand cups of tea and cocoa over the fence to his office window more than
once, and sometimes they yarned for a while.

"She said, 'Good morning, Mr. Mitchell.'

"I said, 'Good morning, Miss.'

"There's some girls I can't talk to like I'd talk to other girls. She
asked me if I'd caught any fish, and I said, 'No, Miss.' She asked me if
it wasn't me down there fishing with Mr. Drew the other evening, and I
said, 'Yes--it was me.' Then presently she asked me straight if he
was fishing down the creek that afternoon? I guessed they'd been down
fishing for each other before. I said, 'No, I thought he was out of
town.' I knew he was pretty bad at the Royal. I asked her if she'd like
to have a try with my line, but she said No, thanks, she must be going;
and she went off up the creek. I reckoned Jack Drew had got a bite and
landed her. I felt a bit sorry for her, too.

"The next Saturday evening after the rainy Monday at the Doctor's, I
went down to fish for tailers--and Lizzie. I went down under the banks
to where there was a big she-oak stump half in the water, going quietly,
with an idea of not frightening the fish. I was just unwinding the line
from my rod, when I noticed the end of another