"You'll do, I reckon, now, Adam; so I'll leave you here and go back to camp. Be sure you come in when you hear the signal, which will be three loud cooies."
At noon, when the fishermen gave it up for the day, as the heat stopped all biting on the part of the bass, it was found that while Ted had caught seven fair-sized fish, five of them bass, one a large perch, and a sucker that was the largest Elmer had ever seen around that region, Adam had brought in two bass and a big catfish.
"Py shiminy crickets, dot feller vas dry some foolishness py me," he said, as he held up the still wriggling catfish; "I haf drouples to get him off der hook; and he sthick me dwice so hardt in der finger. Ooch! put it do feel sore yet somedimes. I dink me he preak off some dot thorn in der pone."
"That's another lesson you must learn, Adam," said Elmer. "The catfish has ugly spines that hurt like fun when you run your hand against them. I guess they're poisoned, like the tail of the stingy-ray, down South. I've known a fellow who had a running sore for a month after being stuck by the fin of a cat. And, Ted, seems to me here's another chance to use that colored stuff that was so fine with Landy."
"Right-o, Elmer," exclaimed the other, making a dive for the tent to look up his medicine bag.
So Adam grinned, and allowed the "doctor" to paint his hand in the region where the spines of the catfish had penetrated with such painful results. Indeed, he declared an hour later that the pain had all departed; and Elmer concluded from this that permanganate of potash was good to use on all sorts of poison wounds.
"I believe," he went on to say, "that if I was struck on the arm by a rattler, I'd cut the wound open some, suck all the poison I could out, providing I had no scratch or sore about my mouth, and then take my chances, after painting it freely with the strongest solution of this potash I could bear. Yes, and I think I'd come out much better than those who believe in soaking the patient with whisky."
The afternoon they spent in resting up. Indeed, it was unusually hot, and somehow none of them aspired to exert themselves any more than they could help.
Adam had offered to clean the fish, after he had been shown how, and made quite a good job of it, being very particular, after the fashion of his kind. And Elmer gave Ty the duty of seeing that the fish were served that evening at supper. It would be a poor piece of business if they put several days in up there on the old Sweetwater, famous for its bass fishing, and never once enjoy a mess of the delicious dish.