g
something besides fishing sort of rested me; so I looked around and up
at the sky, wiped my face on the skirt of my sunbonnet, and put on
another worm. I had only one more left, and I began to wonder if I
could wade in and catch a fish by hand; I did teeny ones sometimes, but
I knew the water there was far above my head, for I had measured it
often with the pole; it wouldn't do to try that; instead of helping
mother any, a funeral would kill her, too, so I fell back on the
Crusaders, and tried again.

Strange how thinking about them helped. I pretended I was fighting my
way to the Holy City, and this was the Jordan just where it met the
sea, and I had to catch enough fish to last me during the pilgrimage
west or I'd never reach Jerusalem to bring home a shell for the Stanton
crest. I pretended so hard, that I got braver and stronger, and asked
the Lord more like there was some chance of being heard. All at once
there was a jerk that almost pulled me in, so I jerked too, and a big
fish flew over my head and hit the bank behind me with a thump. Of
course by a big fish I don't mean a red horse so long as my arm, like
the boys bring from the river; I mean the biggest fish I ever caught
with a pin in our creek. It looked like the whale that swallowed
Jonah, as it went over my head. I laid the pole across the roots,
jumped up and turned, and I had to grab the stump to keep from falling
in the water and dying. There lay the fish, the biggest one I ever had
seen, but it was flopping wildly, and it wasn't a foot from a hole in
the grass where a muskrat had burrowed through. If it gave one flop
that way, it would slide down the hole straight back into the water;
and between me and the fish stood our cross old Shropshire ram. I
always looked to see if the sheep were in the meadow before I went to
the creek, but that morning I had been so crazy to get something for
mother to eat, I never once thought of them--and there it stood!

That ram hadn't been cross at first, and father said it never would be
if treated right, and not teased, and if it were, there would be
trouble for all of us. I was having more than my share that minute,
and it bothered me a lot almost every day. I never dared enter a field
any more if it were there, and now it was stamping up and down the
bank, shaking its head, and trying to get me; with one flop the fish
went ALMOST in the hole, and the next a little away from it.
Everything put together