So Brown and I put aboard the craft a substantial cold supper; and the
heavy artillery embarked, taking aboard a guitar to be worked by Miss
Dingleheimer, and knitting for the others.
It was a lovely evening. Brown and I had been discussing a plan to
dynamite the lake and stun the fish, that method appealing to us as the
only possible way to secure a specimen of the stupendous minnows which
inhabited the depths. In fact, it was our only hope of possessing one of
these creatures--fishing with a donkey engine, steel cable, and a hook
baited with a bat being too uncertain and far more laborious and
expensive.
I was still smoking my pipe, seated at the foot of the big pine-tree,
watching the water turn from gold to pink: Brown sat higher up the slope,
his arm around Angelica White. I carefully kept my back toward them.
On the lake the heavy artillery were revelling loudly, banqueting,
singing, strumming the guitar, and trailing their hands overboard across
the sunset-tinted water.
I was thinking of nothing in particular as I now remember, except that I
noticed the bats beginning to flit over the lake; when Brown called to me
from the slope above, asking whether it was perfectly safe for the heavy
artillery to remain out so late.
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