ectly;" and determined to spend a few minutes in adding to his
brace, he hurried on, thinking how beautiful the great, dense clump of
trees on the other side of the stream appeared, many of them drooping
gracefully over the water.

"The beauty of a place like this is," he thought, "that you can leave
things about and there is no one to take them."

He smiled as he picked up his rod, drew the line through his fingers,
and baited the hook with the great insect ready to cast right over into
the stream so that the locust might be washed naturally into the sunlit
pool.

"Now, if I can catch another as big as the--Hullo! where are those
fish?"

Nic did not cast the locust, but stared hard at the spot where the fish
had been laid down upon some fern leaves; but though the latter were
still glistening with slime, the prizes were gone.

"They must have flopped their way back into the water," said Nic to
himself; "they went that way because it was all on a slope. Well, of
all the tiresome nuisances I ever knew, this is about the worst. I
wouldn't have lost those fish for anything. They must have flopped to
and fro down here and over that soft place."

Nic's thoughts stood still. The soft place he alluded to was close down
to the shallow where Leather had waded in, and the water which had
dripped from his legs lay upon the herbage and soft, dank, moist earth;
but there was something else--footprints! Not Leather's, made by broad
shoe-soles, but newly impressed marks with wide-spreading toes, the big
toe in each case being rather thumb-like in its separation from the
others.

For some two or three minutes Nic did not stir, but bent down staring at
those footprints. Then he glanced sharply over the shallows at the
thick foliage, fully expecting to see a spear come flying at him.

"That's the way my fish went," he muttered as he turned and fled,
feeling a sudden check the next minute, as if some one had seized the
rod which hung over his shoulder, and a thrill of fear ran through him
as he turned sharply round, when snap went the line, and he saw that the
hook and locust were sticking in an overhanging bough, and about a yard
of the line was hanging down.

That was enough to drive away some of his fear, but not all.

"One can't fight blacks with fishing-rods," muttered the boy as he again
began to run, and he made his way homeward more quickly than he had
come, and did not pause once to look back, though if he had i