"Well," Gramps said with an effort, "I guess that's your business."
Without another word the old man turned to start homeward. Bud followed, miserable in the knowledge that he had betrayed Gramps. But even though it was abominable to take a trout on anything except a dry fly, he couldn't have done otherwise. Gram had asked them to bring her one trout.
They took old shark on their seventh trip to the ledge. Gramps did it with a cunningly placed midge. Bud knew he would never forget the battle that followed or the plucking of Old Shark from shallow water when Gramps had finally worked him there.
They bore their prize proudly home, showed it to Gram. Then, in Gramps' asthmatic pickup truck--a vehicle that, until now, Bud had not even suspected was on the farm--they carried the trout to Pat Haley's store at Haleyville. Old Shark was a sensation and Pat Haley began at once to freeze him in a block of ice.
"What now?" Bud asked, as he and Gramps started home.
"Oh, him. Even if he had any flavor and wasn't tougher'n a shoehorn, he's too much for us to eat. Nobody else'll want him for the same reasons." Gramps drove in silence for a while and then said, "Tell you what we'll do. When Pat's finished and everybody who wants a look at Old Shark has had it, we'll send him down to the orphanage. They don't often have trout there."
As he walked toward the road with a lunch pail dangling from one hand, it seemed to Bud that the driveway--endlessly long when he had labored up it that first day, with a chip on his shoulder and fear in his heart--had shrunken miraculously. He glanced quickly behind him to see if he was being watched and, seeing nobody, bent down to loosen the laces of the shiny black school shoes Gram had bought him in Haleyville. Then he straightened up and walked on, trying to manage a natural gait. But it was hopeless because after the conquest of Old Shark he had stopped wearing shoes. The soles of his feet had become so calloused that he could even run over the sharp stones around Gramps' gravel pit. Now, at the end of the summer, it had been so long since he had worn shoes that he felt as if he were dragging a ball and chain on each foot. His shoes pinched, too, but you could not go to school barefooted, not if Gram Bennett had anything to say about it.