didn’t like. Blackie went home and got a gun. If the teacher hadn’t caught Blackie with it, Squirrel-Head wouldn’t be living now. So that’s all the football there was.”

“At the Gap?” Johnny breathed a prayer. “Did you go to high school there?”

“Yes, I—I sort of graduated there last June,” Ballard admitted modestly.

“Thank God,” Johnny breathed. Then—

“Ballard, you’re going to college. You’re going to play real, big-time football.”

“Oh no! I—I can’t,” Ballard was all but speechless. “I—I’ve got less than fifty dollars. You—you can’t go to college on that.”

“Sure you can!” Johnny’s tone was one of finality. “My granddad’s one of the trustees of Hillcrest College. He endowed a scholarship. It’s open. That will pay your tuition. You can work for your room and board. More than half the boys do that. Yes, you’re going to college. And will the coach be pleased! Ballard, old boy, you’re the answer to my prayer.”

“But Johnny,” the mountain boy’s voice hit a flat note, “I read somewhere that college freshmen are not eligible to play football.”

“That’s only in the big colleges and universities,” Johnny explained. “You’ll be eligible in Hillcrest all right.”

“And now,” Johnny said more quietly after a moment. “Now I can go fishing with a good conscience.”

“What’s college got to do with fishing?” Ballard asked in surprise.

Johnny told him.

“I must go to college so you can go fishing,” Ballard laughed. “Well, one excuse is better than none. Wait till I get my ball and I’ll go up the creek with you. He busted my ball, the old rascal! But then maybe that sort of saved my ribs. I’ll not try the back-step after this. Wait!” He sprang into the pen, and before Nicodemus could arrive, was back on the fence with the deflated ball. And that was how Johnny made his first move toward fulfilling his promise to Coach Dizney of old Hillcrest. He had done it with the aid of Nicodemus. There was more to come, very much more.

CHAPTER IV
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,