Page:Harold Titus--Timber.djvu/190

182 moments his eyes went to the ragged banners of the solid pine beyond him, blue-black against the fading rose of the sky, and his puffing became more rapid, almost fevered and continued so until a sputter from the pipe bowl indicated that nothing remained but an expiring coal.

He rapped it against the heel of his boot and drew out a package of Peerless. He shook his head and sighed and almost smiled.

"I'll be blistered!" he muttered. "I'll be blistered! Pine—in a stand like that! Old Luke 'll go wild—clean, plumb, hog wild!"

And while Tolman watched the last glory of the dying day, Helen Foraker held her canoe against the rushes on the inside of a sharp bend in the river, while John Taylor in the bow shot his fly out across the swift current to where it milled against the far bank.

The water above them was old rose, like the sky, and a faintly violet mist hung over the stream, blending with the bottle-green of pine trees. The air was cool and damp and sweet, and from the water back in the rushes, from the midst of the current itself, May flies were hatching, coming to the surface like bubbles, spreading their new, damp wings, struggling a moment and then rising into the air to mingle with millions of their kind, to find mates, to function and pass on in their brief cycle, weakened by their hour of life, dropping back to the water which had given them life and into which they had put the life of their kind.

All about the surface was broken as fish rose to feed on the insects, but the girl's eyes were fixed on the deep