THE HAUNTED POOL
Next day Johnny disappeared among the rhododendrons and mountain ivy that
grow along the right bank of Pounding Mill Creek. His step was light, his
heart was gay. And why not? Had he not fulfilled his mission? Had he not
discovered the much needed half-back for the Hillcrest coach? And did he
not carry in his hands, beside a short split bamboo rod, a can of “soft
craws”? And were not soft craws the bait of baits for this season of the
year? He looked with pride and joy upon the half dozen crawfish, that,
having recently shed their shells, held up soft and harmless claws for
his inspection.
“I’ll get that old sport, the king of all black bass, today,” he assured
himself. “I’ll have him in less than an hour.”
He might have fulfilled this promise had it not been for a lurking shadow
that, passing silently on before him, came to rest at last on a rocky
ledge, above the second deep pool in Pounding Mill Creek.
Johnny had little interest in that second pool for the present. In fact
that particular pool had a peculiar sort of horror for Johnny. A man had
been drowned in that pool. He recalled the story with a chill. A group of
foreign laborers, so the story went, had driven up the creek from the
Gap. They had meant to dynamite this pool and get a mess of fish. Since
this was against the law and since they found Zeb Page, a deputy sheriff,
sitting on a near-by boulder, they had decided to take a swim. The pool
was deep, all of twenty feet. Four of the foreigners could swim. The
water was fine. They enjoyed it immensely.
They had all crawled out on the bank to sun themselves when one of their
number, who had never known the delights of swimming, said, “That’s
nothing. I can do that.” He dove in, clothes and all. He disappeared
beneath the placid surface of the pool. Ten seconds elapsed, twenty,
forty, a full moment, and he did not reappear.
Alarmed, his comrades dove for him. Ten minutes later they brought him to
the top, dead. In each of his two coat pockets, they found a heavy
revolver.
“I always said,” old Uncle Joe Creech always exclaimed after telling this
story, “that totin’ pistol guns would keep a good man down. And that to
my notion mighty nigh proves hit plumb fer sarton.”
“And folks do say,” he would add with a lowered voice and shifting eyes,
“that this here foreigner can be heard on a still night in the dark of
the moon, a shootin’ off of them there pistol guns. But then shucks!” he
would squirt tobacco juice at a crack in the floor. “Shucks! How could he
an’ him drowned and dead?”
Sure enough, how could he? All the same, Johnny never dropped his bait in
that deep pool. He always had a shivery feeling that it might catch on
something soft and that if he hauled in hard enough, he’d bring a dead
body to the top. Pure fancy, he knew this to be, but anyway there were
enough other pools to be fished in. Why not pass this one up? He meant to
pass it up on this day, as on all others, but fate had decreed otherwise.
Quite forgetting the deep pool that lay just beyond the last clump of
mountain laurel, Johnny happily dropped his first wriggling soft craw
into the shadowy waters of the pool next to that one where, more than
once, a grand and glorious old black bass had eluded him.
“I’ll get him,” he whispered. “Get him for sure.”
But would he? He waited. Lurking in the shadows, he watched the dry line
sink down, inch by inch. Then, with a soundless parting of the lips, he
saw the line begin shooting away.
“Bass,” he whispered. “Big old black bass.”
The bass he knew, would run a yard, two, three yards, then pause. Should
he give the line a quick jerk then, setting the hook? Or, as many wise
anglers advised, should he wait for the second run?
The line ceased playing out. Old bass had paused. “Now,” Johnny
whispered. “Now? Or—” He gave a quick jerk. He had him. His heart leaped.
He began reeling in.
Then his hopes fell, only a little fellow. It must be. No real pull at
all. Nor was he mistaken. Close to the surface there appeared a beautiful
young bass, perhaps nine inches long, the kind those mountain natives
call “green pearch.” With a deft snap of his line, Johnny switched him
off, then watched him as, for a moment, stunned by the suddenness of it
all, he stood quite still in the water. Johnny’s thoughts were all
admiration. How beautiful he was, like the things a Chinaman does in
green lacquer.
But the big old black fellow, still lurking down there somewhere in the
shadows? What of him? At once Johnny was alert. Drawing in his line, he
offered up one more precious soft craw on the altar of a fisherman’s
hope.
Down, down went the craw-dad. Down, down sunk the line. But what was
this? Of a sudden the line shot away. Startled, eyes bulging, Johnny
watched his line play out, a yard, two, three, four, five, all but the
length of the pool.
Then, “Now!” he breathed once again. And—what? Was he snagged on a rock?
It seemed so. But who could be sure? He strained at his line cautiously.
It did not budge.
“Fellow’d think it was an alligator,” he whispered. He put a little more
strain upon his line. It gave to his touch. Then, of a sudden it went
slack.
“Dumb! Got off! He—”
At that instant the pole was all but jerked from his hand and at
precisely the same instant, the most magnificent fish he had ever seen
leaped clear of the water. He leaped again and yet again. Johnny’s heart
stood still. Then as he saw the fish vanish, felt the tug and knew he
still had him, his heart went racing.
It was at this precise second in the long history of the world that
Johnny’s ears were smitten by an unearthly scream. It came from the
direction of that other pool, the foreigner’s death pool, the haunted
pool. The scream was repeated not once but twice. It was followed by a
loud splash.
There could be but one conclusion. Someone had been about to fall into
the pool. That someone could not swim. Someone HAD fallen into the deep
pool.
Johnny dropped his pole, heaved a sudden sigh of regret and at the same
time dashed through the bushes. Arriving breathless at the edge of that
other pool, he saw a head rise partially above the water. A mass of
crinkly brown hair floated on the surface. Without further thought,
Johnny plunged, clothes and all, into the pool, to begin an Australian
crawl toward the spot where the head had been. But where was it? For a
space of ten seconds, he could not locate it. When at last his racing
gaze came to rest, it was upon a spot close to the opposite bank. The
head was there, also a pair of fair, round shoulders.
Johnny paused in his swimming to see a girl, of some sixteen summers,
emerge, fully clothed and dripping, from the pool.
Just then she turned about to look at him and say, as a rare smile played
about her lips, “Oh! You in swimming too?”
To measure Johnny’s emotions at that moment would be impossible. The girl
was beautiful. But the witch? Why had she screamed? Had she meant to
deceive him? And his fish? Gone of course. Even a Tennessee shad could
loose himself from a drifting pole like that.
“No,” he said, speaking slowly. “I’m not in swimming. I fell in, same as
you did.”
“But I didn’t fall in,” the girl shook the water from her hair. “I jumped
in.”
“And do you always scream like that when you dive?” Johnny was puzzled
and angry.
“Nearly always.” The girl sat down upon a rock in the bright sunshine.
“There’s some sort of bird that screams before he dives. I like it.”
“And I suppose,” Johnny said mockingly, “that you always go in clothes
and all?”
“Always,” she said soberly. “It wouldn’t be quite decent not to unless
you have a bathing suit. And I haven’t one. I’ve asked Dad to buy me one
many times but he always forgets.”
“Who’s Dad?” Johnny asked quickly.
“Dad is Colonel Crider. I’m Jensie Crider. Now please,” there was a
friendly note in her voice, “stop being ugly. Come on out in the sun.
We’ll be all dry in a half hour. I want you to tell me about a lot of
things.”
Jensie Crider, Johnny was thinking to himself. The very girl I’ve wanted
to know. And such a meeting as this!
“You made me lose a black bass, a—a whopper,” he grinned in spite of
himself.
“Oh! I’m sorry!” she was all sympathy. “But I’ll find you another, a
bigger one. You wait and see!” She stood up to shake herself until her
damp garments spun about her. “Now please do come up and get all dried
out.”
Who could but obey this order from so beautiful a siren?
“Now tell me,” she said when Johnny had settled himself upon the rock,
“what do you do besides catch fish?”
“Sometimes I go scouting for football players.”
“Do you find them?”
“Found one last night.”
“Down here in the mountains?” she voiced her surprise.
“It’s Ballard Ball. You’d be astonished. He’s an artful dodger. I—” he
was about to tell her how he had found him but changed his mind. “I—I’m
going to take him with me to college.”
“Oh, college.” The girl’s voice dropped. “Father wants me to go to
college. I’m not going.”
“Why not?”
“Why should I?”
Johnny told her why. He spoke in such glowing terms of big football
games, wild rallies, of bonfires, and sings around great open fireplaces,
the joyous friendships of youth and the satisfaction to be had from
learning something new every day that at last quoting from last Sabbath’s
Sunday School lesson, she murmured:
“‘Almost thou persuadest me.’”
“But see!” she sprang to her feet. “Now we are all dry. And I shall keep
my promise. Now for that big, black bass!”