Free God's Kingdom by Howard Frank Mosher Page A

the rainbow trout jumping the High Falls on their way upriver to spawn. The run was at its peak this weekend. Several fish a minute fought their way up through the rapids, arcing out of the water to clear the falls, their crimson sides flashing in the spring sunshine. Jim inhaled the fresh scent of the aerated water. He was dying to feel the pulsing weight of a fish on the end of his line. Prof clapped him on the shoulder. “I know, son,” he shouted over the roar of the cataract below. “You feel like the detained wedding guest in the poem. Don’t give up hope. We may yet sneak in an hour on the bridge pool before nightfall.”
    Jim had no idea who the detained wedding guest was or what poem Prof was referring to, but how many warm Saturdays in early May when the rainbow run was on did a young fisherman have in his life?
    An impossibly red male trout Jim estimated would weigh between seven and eight pounds leaped, hit the lip of the flume, and was knocked back down the current. It gathered itself in the holding pool below the falls, then shot up the cataract again. This time it tailwalked the last foot or two over the top of the falls into the calmer water above.
    â€œHow do they do it, Prof? It’s like they defy gravity.”
    â€œIt’s their matrimonial instinct, son. That’s the strongest force there is. Stronger than gravity, even. You’ll know when the time comes.”
    Another huge trout cartwheeled its way up and over the thundering waterfall. Prof grinned. “I felt like that once.”
    Suspecting that a story was about to follow, Jim waited silently. Already, he was beginning to learn that the fewer questions he asked, the more people were apt to tell him. Especially in the Kingdom, no one liked too many questions.
    Prof retreated several steps back from the edge of the bank, where they could speak without shouting. “It was the late summer of ’99. I’d been home from that hoo-ha in Cuba for a month or two. I’d just hired on to teach Latin and ancient history at the Academy. Somehow, I’d also managed to get myself appointed justice of the peace for Kingdom Common. The old justice, Judge Benson, was ailing, and nobody else wanted the job so the town fathers hung it on me.
    â€œOne evening a few days before the school term started, Ephraim Fairbrother, the town constable, showed up at my place with a young woman in tow. A very attractive young woman, I might add. She had dark eyes and hair and a dark complexion, like one or two Cuban gals I’d gotten to know down below, and a figure like—oh my, Jim, she had a figure. I couldn’t tell for sure, but I wouldn’t have guessed she was a day over twenty. Well, Old Man Fairbrother, who didn’t have the sense God gave a gnat, had hauled her up in front of me for peddling without a license, and for vagrancy. But as the girl was quick to point out, she wasn’t a peddler at all. She was a traveling dressmaker from Montreal. She’d breeze into a town, take a room at a boardinghouse or hotel, and make arrangements to model her dresses for the better-off ladies of the area. She had a dress for every occasion. Being such a beauty herself, she’d have looked good in a washerwoman’s smock, much less an expertly tailored evening gown, so of course she always got a good number of orders for bespoke dresses. For a modest down payment, she’d take a lady’s measurements, and when she’d accumulated enough orders, she’d go back to Montreal and make them tailored dresses.
    â€œWell, Jimmy. That comely young seamstress was as mad as a blue-tailed hornet. She said she was no more a common peddler than ‘the old gendarme’ was the ‘bishop of Montreal.’ As for being a vagrant, she was boarding at the manse, and she assured me that Miss Hark would most certainly give her a good name. She said that if I wished to verify her claims, I could come over to