Greatest fishing story ever told, Part Three

This is the final of what I consider the three greatest fishing stories I have ever heard.
This one actually predates our coming to Red Lake in 1961. It was told to me by my father about his uncle, Bill Baughman, who owned and operated Rainbow Lodge on the Pickerel River in Eastern Ontario.
"We're not going fishing!" said Bill to his friend who looked up at him with surprise. They were both carrying their tackle boxes and fishing rods and had just walked down to the dock from the lodge.
"Why not?" his friend asked.
Bill pointed to the boat, or rather to what was lying beneath it. A gigantic musky was suspended in the shade. Its magnificent tail was right under the outboard's propeller and its head was all the way up under the front seat.
Muskies were a common fish in the river in those days, probably in the 1940s, but this was a whopper among whoppers.
One look at the big fish had made their plans to fish for walleye that day vanish. Nothing would do now but to try for the behemoth.
They both opened up their steel tackle boxes and selected a lure. Bill clipped onto his steel leader his favorite northern pike lure, the Jointed Pikie Minnow. His friend tried a Pflueger Tandem Spinner.
They stood on the shore so as not to make noise on the dock and cast their lures beyond the boat. They reeled their lures right beside the big fish which, except for a slow waving of its fins to maintain its position, was motionless.
There was no reaction to either lure. Not on the first cast, not on the second nor the third.
So they switched lures. Bill put on a yellow Flatfish with red spots. His friend tried a red-and-white Dardevle. Three more casts and still nothing from the musky.
Out came the Hofschneider Red-Eye and the Heddon Jitter Bug.
And so on and so forth until they had tried every lure there was in the two tackle boxes.
The musky could have been asleep for all they could tell. It hadn't moved an inch.
The dock was supported by cribs made of peeled logs and filled with rocks and Bill had noticed that on the side of the crib closest to the shore a little rock bass was peering out from between the logs.
He had an idea. He turned over rocks and logs along the shoreline until he found what he was looking for: a worm. Rock bass love worms and although it is illegal today to use rock bass for bait, back then nobody cared. And even if they did Bill was going to try it anyway! He put on a snelled hook and threaded on the worm, then lowered the wiggler right down beside the crib, pleading for the rock bass to leave its shelter for just a second.
It worked! The rotund little panfish shot out and inhaled the worm. Just then a smallmouth bass bolted out of the rocks along the shore and grabbed the rock bass. From out of nowhere came a northern pike and grabbed the bass.
And, with a speed that can only be compared to lightning, the musky whirled out from under the boat and grabbed the northern pike.
In mere seconds it had stripped all the line off the reel, reached the knot at the end, broke the line and was never seen again.

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