I dare say one would bite directly;" 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.