d held up another--that is, two of them, side by side.

"So help me!" he swore, "I didn't know I had it! I must have forgotten I
had one, and bought another, at another time. Now, I had forgotten that,
too. So help me!"

If I hadn't known Eddie so well--his proclivity for buying, and
forgetting, and buying over again--also his sterling honor and general
moral purity--the fishes would have got him then, Red Tag and all. As it
was, I condescended to accept the second fly. I agreed that it was not
such a bad production, after all, though I altered my opinion again,
next morning, for whatever had been the embargo laid on other varieties
of trout bait the day before, it was on now, and there was a general
rising to anything we offered--Doctors, Parmcheenie, Absorbent
Cotton--any old thing that skimmed the water and looked big and
succulent.

We broke camp that morning and dropped down toward the next lake--Sand
Lake, it would be, by our crude map and hazy directions. There are no
better rapids and there is no more lively fishing than we had on that
run. There was enough water for us to remain in the canoes, and it was
for the most part whirling, swirling, dashing, leaping water--shooting
between great bowlders--plunging among cruel-looking black
rocks--foaming into whirlpools below, that looked ready to swamp our
light craft, with stores, crew, tackle, everything.

It was my first exhibition of our guides' skill in handling their
canoes. How they managed to just evade a sharp point of rock on one side
and by a quick twist escape shipwreck from a bowlder or mass of bowlders
on the other, I fail to comprehend. Then there were narrow boiling
channels, so full of obstructions that I did not believe a chip could go
through with entire safety. Yet somehow Del the Stout and Charles the
Strong seemed to know, though they had never traveled this water before,
just where the water would let the boats pass, just where the stones
were wide enough to let us through--touching on both sides, sometimes,
and ominously scraping on the bottom, but sliding and teetering into the
cauldron below, where somehow we did not perish, perhaps because we
shot so quickly through the foam. In the beginning I remembered a few
brief and appropriate prayers, from a childhood where such things were a
staff of comfort, and so made my peace with the world each time before
we took the desperate plunge. But as nothing seemed to happen--nothing
fatal, I mean--