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“I knew we must have had a narrow escape.”

“And you can be tying the fly there on to that gut as steady as a doctor picking up an artery! Well, I envy you. Look at that!” Sir John held out a brown, hairy, shaking hand. “And I don’t reckon myself a coward, either.”

Mr. Molesworth knew that the man’s record had established at any rate his reputation for courage. He had, in fact, been a famous hunter-out of Dacoity.

“I didn’t know you went in for that sort of thing,” pursued Sir John, watching Mr. Molesworth, who, with a penknife, was trimming the ends of gut. “Don’t mind my watching your first cast or two, I hope? I won’t talk. Anglers don’t like being interrupted, I know.”

“I shall be glad of your company: and please talk as much as you choose. To tell the truth, I haven’t handled a rod for years, and I’m making this little experiment to see if I’ve quite lost the knack, rather than with any hope of catching fish.”

It appeared, however, that he had not lost the knack, and after the first cast or two, in the pleasure of recovered skill, his senses abandoned themselves entirely to the sport. Sir John had lit a cigar and seated himself amid the bracken a short distance back from the brink, to watch: but whether he conversed or not Mr. Molesworth could not tell. He remembered afterwards that at the end of twenty minutes or so–probably when his cigar was finished–Sir John rose and announced his intention of strolling some way farther down the valley–“to soothe his nerves a bit,” as he said, adding, “So long! I see you’re going to miss that train, to a certainty.”

Yes, it was certain enough that Mr. Molesworth would miss his train. He fished down the stream slowly, the song and dazzle of the water filling his ears, his vision; his whole being soothed and lulled less by the actual scene than by a hundred memories it awakened or set stirring. He was young again–a youth of twenty with romance in his heart. The plants and grasses he trod were the asphodels, sundew, water-mint his feet had crushed–crushed into fragrance–five-and-twenty years ago. . . .

So deeply preoccupied was he that, coming to a bend where the coombe suddenly widened, and the stream without warning cast its green fringe of alders like a slough and slipped down a beach of flat pebbles to the head waters of a tidal creek, Mr. Molesworth rubbed his eyes with a start. Had the stream been a Naiad she could not have given him the go-by more coquettishly.

He rubbed his eyes, and then with a short gasp of wonder–almost of terror–involuntarily looked around for Sir John. Here before him was a shore, with a church beside it, and at the far end a whitewashed cottage– surely the very shore, church, cottage, of Sir John’s dream! Yes, there was the stone cross before the porch; and here the grid-fashioned church stile; and yonder under the string-course the scaffold-hole with the grass growing out of it!

If Mr. Molesworth’s hands had been steady when he tied on his May-fly, they trembled enough now as he hurriedly put up his tackle and disjointed his rod: and still, and again while he hastened across to the cottage above the rocky spit–the cottage with the larch plantation above and in the garden a laburnum aslant and in bloom–his eyes sought the beach for Sir John.

The cottage was a large one, as Sir John had described. It was, in fact, a waterside inn, with its name, The Saracen’s Head, painted in black letters along its whitewashed front and under a swinging signboard. Looking up at the board Mr. Molesworth discerned, beneath its dark varnish, the shoulders, scimitar, and grinning face of a turbaned Saracen, and laughed aloud between incredulity and a sense of terror absurdly relieved. This, then, was Sir John’s black man!