"She's thrown it a half-mile, or less, in the bushes," said Luke.
"And there's her hook in the top of that tree," said John. "What gumps girls are when you take them out-of-doors!"
All went into the bushes to look for the astonished fish. They looked, and looked, and looked; listened for its beating and flopping against the ground.
After a while, Luke said he thought it must be one of the climbing fish described by Agassiz, and that it had gone up a tree.
"I mos' found it twice't; but it was a frog an' a lizar', 'stead uv the fish," said Jacob Isaac.
To this day, it remains a mystery where Elsie's fish went to.
Jacob Isaac climbed the tree to rescue Elsie's hook and line, while the other boys went down the stream to find a cat-fish hole that they had heard of.
"Don't pull at the line that way," Puss said to the thrasher in the tree-top; "you'll break it. There, the hook is caught on that twig. You must go out on the limb and unhitch it."
"Lim' hangs over the watto," Jacob Isaac said; but he crawled out on it, and reached for the hook.
Then Elsie shrieked, for crashing through the branches came Jacob Isaac, and splashed back-foremost into the water. Then there was confusion. Jacob called to the girls to help him; they called to the boys to help; the boys, ignorant of the accident, shouted back that they were going on to where they could have quiet, and went tramping away. Then Elsie tried to tell Jacob Isaac how to swim, while Puss Leek darted off to where the horses were tethered. She mounted the one she had ridden--a gentle thing, aged eighteen. Then she came crashing through the bushes and brush, clucking and jerking the bridle, dashed down the bank, and plunged into the stream.
[Illustration: "HE KNELT ON THE BANK TO FIX HIS BAIT."]
Elsie held her breath at the sight. The water rose to the flanks, but Puss kept her head steady, sat her saddle coolly, and, when Jacob Isaac appeared, put out a resolute hand, and got hold of his jacket,--speaking, meanwhile, a soothing word to the horse, which was now drinking. She got the boy's head above water.
"I'll hold on to you; and you must hold on to the stirrup and to the horse's mane," she said.
Jacob Isaac, without a word, got hold as directed. Puss held on with a good grip, as she had promised, and the careful old horse pawed through the water to the bank--only a few yards distant, by the way.