the virtues of which he had heard were most alluring as regarded trout.

"Shag!" exclaimed the colonel, when they were tramping through a field
near the river, having reached that vantage point by a most prosaic
trolley car, "this is a beautiful day!"

"It suah am, sah!"

"And I'm going to catch some fine fish!"

"I suah does hope so, Colonel!"

"All right then! Now don't say another word until I speak to you.
We'll be there pretty soon, and if there's one thing more than another
that I hate, it's to have some one talking when I'm fishing."

"Yes, sah, Colonel!"

"Um! Well, see that you mind!"

Selecting with care a fly from his numerous collection, and hoping the
appetites of the fish would incline them to consider it favorably that
morning, Colonel Ashley proceeded to make his casts, standing not far
from a bent, gnarled and twisted elm tree, that overhung the bank of
the stream where the current had cut into the soil, making a deep eddy,
in which a lazy trout might choose to lie in wait for some choice
morsel.

Lightly as a falling feather, the fisherman let his fly come to rest on
the sun-lit water, and, hardly had it sent the first, few faint ripples
circling toward shore than there was a shrill song of the reel, and the
rod became a bent bow.

"By the bones of Sir Izaak!" cried the colonel, "I've hooked one, Shag!"

"De Lord be praised! So yo' has, Colonel!" cried the negro.

"Shut up!" ordered the colonel, who was beginning to play his fish.
"Did I tell you to speak?"

But Shag only laughed. He knew his master.

After ten minutes of skilful work, during which time the trout nearly
got away by shooting under a submerged log like an undersea boat diving
beneath a battle cruiser, the colonel landed his fish, dropping it,
panting, on the green grass. Then he looked up at Shag and remarked:

"Didn't I tell you this was a perfectly beautiful day?"

"Yo' suah did, Colonel," was the chuckling answer. "Yo' suah did!"

And so much at peace with himself and all the world was Colonel Robert
Lee Ashley just then that, when the crackling of the underbrush behind
him, a moment later, gave notice that some one was approaching, there
was even a smile on his face, though, usually, he could not bear to be
intruded upon when fishing.

Rather idly the colonel, having mercifully killed his fish by a blow on
top of the head and slipped it into the grass-lined creel, looked up to
see approaching a young lady and a tall and somewhat lanky boy. There
was some thing vaguely familiar about the boy, though the fisherman did
not tax his mind with remembering, then, where or when he had seen him
before.

"There he is," went the words of the boy, as he and the young woman
came in sight of the colonel and Shag--but it was at the detective the
lad pointed. "There he is!"

The girl rushed impulsively forward, and, as she held out her hands in
a voiceless appeal, there was worry and anguish depicted on her face.

"Are you Colonel Brentnall?" she asked.

The colonel was sufficiently familiar with his alias not to betray
surprise when it was used.

"I am," he said, and the peaceful, joyous look that had come into his
eyes when he had landed his fish gave way to a hard and professional
stare.

"Oh, Colonel Brentnall! I've come to ask you to help me--help him!
You will, won't you? Don't say you won't!"

The girl's face, her blue eyes, the outstretched hands, the very poise
of her lithe, young body voiced the appeal.

"My dear young lady," began the colonel. But she interrupted with:

"You're the detective, aren't you?"

"Well--er--I--Say rather _a_ detective, for there are many, and I am
only one."

"But you are the one from New York?"

"I am though I don't know how you guessed it. I am not here
professionally, though--in fact, I've practically retired--and I would
much prefer--"

"But you wouldn't refuse to help any one who needed it, would you? You


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