“But now you’re free.  It’s your life and liberty for mine—­maybe not quite an even exchange, since you’d have more than even chances if it came to a trial, I suppose.  But it’s the best I can do.  I’m giving you this chance.  I’d be a dirty dog if I didn’t.  But remember this, Spotty!  I give you only one chance, just as you gave me—­just as you took one and saved me.  If I see you again, and this thing hangs over you, I may have to pull you up.”

“All right, Colonel.  That’s a square deal.  But don’t worry.  You won’t see me if I see you first.  I didn’t dream you’d be after me so soon for the job I only done last night.  I’d oughter cleared out, but I was waitin’ for a pal, an—­Oh, well, it was just like you to come around early.”

“Man, don’t you understand?  I’m not after you!  I didn’t for an instant think you had a hand in it until just now.  And I’m not admitting, even yet, that you did have.  I haven’t done a tap of work on the case, and I’m not going to.  My advise to you is to get out of town before I may get into this thing against my will.  Skip, Spotty!  It’s the only way I can pay my debt to you!”

The colonel made as though to hold out his hand to the freckle-faced man opposite him, and then changed the motion of his arm and picked up his glass.

“Skip, Spotty!” he murmured again.

“All right, Colonel, I will!  I know when the goin’s good.  So long.  And—­thanks!”

Spotty, still talking through the corner of his mouth, gave a quick glance around the room and slid out of a side door like an eel, disappearing into the rain and mist.

For some little time the colonel sat before the glasses, in which the cracked ice was rapidly melting.  He, too, made little rings of water on the table.

“I wonder—­” he mused, “I wonder if I did right.”

His hand sought his pocket, and came out empty.

“I guess I must have left it on the bed,” he murmured.  “But I can remember it.”

Then, as though reading from the little green book, he recited: 

“But if the old salmon gets to the sea . . . and he recovers his strength, and comes next summer to the same river, if it be possible. . .”

“Spotty is a veritable salmon,” mused the colonel, “even if he is speckled like a trout.  I wonder, if he gets into the sea of New York, if I’ll ever be able to land him?

“Well, he gave me my life, and I just had to give him a chance for his.  It was all I could do.  Now to fish and forget everything!”

It was a fair morning in April, with the sun just right, with the “wind in the west when the fish bite best,” and Colonel Robert Lee Ashley, with the faithful Shag to carry his rods, creel and a lunch basket, sallied forth from his hotel for a day beside a no-very-distant stream, 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!”