It sounded piquant—­a noble theft indeed!  I now murmured a bit myself, striving to convey an active incredulity that yet might be vanquished by facts.  The lady quite ignored this, diverging to her own opinion of New York.  She tore the wrapper from a Sunday issue of a famous metropolitan daily and flaunted its comic supplement at me.  “That’s how I always think of New York,” said she—­“a kind of a comic supplement to the rest of this great country.  Here—­see these two comical little tots standing on their uncle’s stomach and chopping his heart out with their axes—­after you got the town sized up it’s just that funny and horrible.  It’s like the music I heard that time at a higher concert I was drug to in Boston—­ingenious but unpleasant.”

But this was not what I would sit up for after a hard day’s fishing—­this coarse disparagement of something the poor creature was unfitted to comprehend.

“Ben Sutton,” I remarked firmly.

* * * * *

“The inhabitants of New York are divided fifty-fifty between them that are trying to get what you got and them that think you’re trying to get what they got.”

“Ben Sutton,” I repeated, trying to make it sullen.

“Ask a man on the street in New York where such and such a building is and he’ll edge out of reaching distance, with his hand on his watch, before he tells you he don’t know.  In Denver, or San Francisco now, the man will most likely walk a block or two with you just to make sure you get the directions right.”

“Ben Sutton!”

“They’ll fall for raw stuff, though.  I know a slick mining promoter from Arizona that stops at the biggest hotel on Fifth Avenue and has himself paged by the boys about twenty times a day so folks will know how important he is.  He’ll get up from his table in the restaurant and follow the boy out in a way to make ’em think that nine million dollars is at stake.  He tells me it helps him a lot in landing the wise ones.”

“Stole a street-car track,” I muttered desperately.

“The typical New Yorker, like they call him, was born in Haverhill, Massachusetts, and sleeps in New Rochelle, going in on the 8:12 and coming out on the—­”

“I had a pretty fight landing that biggest one this afternoon, from that pool under the falls up above the big bend.  Twice I thought I’d lost him, but he was only hiding—­and then I found I’d forgotten my landing net.  Say, did I ever tell you about the time I was fishing for steel head down in Oregon, and the bear—­” The lady hereupon raised a hushing hand.

* * * * *