REVOLVER

(1) The Killer

(2) Firing at the Orca
(3) Waiting for a Rise

Photographs by the Author

treasure have dug here and there; gophers and squirrels have undermined it, and some of the eighteen pillars that supported the heavy tiled roof are down, and others are broken. The building is about three hundred feet long, the corridors fifty feet wide, and the old mission, once a principality, a part of the evolution of Spanish America, is well worthy a visit in the valley of mustard in the heart of the Coast Range.

"We have one thing here besides mustard," said a townsman, " and that's trout. The Santa Ynez is one of the most attractive streams in the State. In its upper reaches it is filled with rainbow trout, and down below, the steelheads are running."

That this was true any one could see, as in the little laguna at the mouth of the river, anglers were wading about in hip-boots, casting carefully with small spoons, occasionally hooking a large fish, playing him literally all over the laguna. Salmon trout or steelhead was the game. Fishes as large as twenty pounds have been taken here; fish that leap four or five feet into the air when hooked, and give an angler fine play.

This stream is about the southern limit of steelhead on the California coast, the fish being seen at its best in the Russian and other rivers north of San Francisco.

But as you have seen, this is all from hearsay, as I was listening to Robert Burdette lecture and preach instead of fishing, and I cannot wish the reader better fisherman's luck than was mine way up at Lompoc by the little river that, like Burdette's philosophy, runs laughing down through fields of gold to the distant sea.

CHAPTER XXI

THE HARLEQUIN OF THE FISHES

those who go down to the sea in ships on

The Atlantic coast, and especially make

their way in winter down among the Bahama and Leeward islands, along the mysterious Spanish main, a vision of loveliness is often vouchsafed in the guise of long, big-headed fishes, which give a continual and extraordinary exhibition of agility, directly in front of the cutwater of the fastest steamer, yacht, or sailing vessel, seemingly playing with it. From a distance of several feet, they look blue-backed, not unlike albacore; and they go by the name of dolphins, but are fishes; not the whale-like creature known as the bottle-nosed dolphin, which has the habits of the porpoise and others of the whale family.

It has been my good fortune to take several of these fishes which live out at sea in the Atlantic; one from the dolphin-striker of a ship, with a spear; and again in a vast floating patch of weed-a disconnected section of the Sargasso Sea, where I had an excellent opportunity to see