Tales of Fishes Part 6

"Lift him! Closer!" called Captain Dan. "In two minutes I'll have a gaff in him!"

I made a last effort. Dan reached for the leader.

Then the hook tore out.

My swordfish, without a movement of tail or fin, slowly sank--to vanish in the blue water.

After resting my blistered hands for three days, which time was scarcely long enough to heal them, I could not resist the call of the sea.

We went off Seal Rocks and trolled about five miles out. We met a sand-dabber who said he had seen a big broadbill back a ways. So we turned round. After a while I saw a big, vicious splash half a mile east, and we made for it. Then I soon espied the fish.

We worked around him awhile, but he would not take a barracuda or a flying-fish.

It was hard to keep track of him, on account of rough water. Soon he went down.

Then a little later I saw what Dan called a Marlin. He had big flippers, wide apart. I took him for a broadbill.

We circled him, and before he saw a bait he leaped twice, coming about half out, with belly toward us. He looked huge, but just how big it was impossible to say.

After a while he came up, and we circled him. As the bait drifted round before him--twenty yards or more off--he gave that little wiggle of the tail sickle, and went under. I waited. I had given up hope when I felt him hit the bait. Then he ran off, pretty fast. I let him have a long line. Then I sat down and struck him. He surged off, and we all got ready to watch him leap. But he did not show.

He swam off, sounded, came up, rolled around, went down again. But we did not get a look at him. He fought like any other heavy swordfish.

In one and one-half hours I pulled him close to the boat, and we all saw him. But I did not get a good look at him as he wove to and fro behind the boat.

Then he sounded.

I began to work on him, and worked harder. He seemed to get stronger all the time.

"He feels like a broadbill, I tell you," I said to Captain Dan.

Dan shook his head, yet all the same he looked dubious.

Then began a slow, persistent, hard battle between me and the fish, the severity of which I did not realize at the time. In hours like those time has wings. My hands grew hot. They itched, and I wanted to remove the wet gloves. But I did not, and sought to keep my mind off what had been half-healed blisters. Neither the fish nor I made any new moves, it all being plug on his part and give and take on mine. Slowly and doggedly he worked out toward the sea, and while the hours pa.s.sed, just as persistently he circled back.

Captain Dan came to stand beside me, earnestly watching the rod bend and the line stretch. He shook his head.

"That's a big Marlin and you've got him foul-hooked," he a.s.serted. This statement was made at the end of three hours and more. I did not agree.

Dan and I often had arguments. He always tackled me when I was in some such situation as this--for then, of course, he had the best of it. My brother Rome was in the boat that day, an intensely interested observer.

He had not as yet hooked a swordfish.

"It's a German submarine!" he declared.

My brother's wife and the other ladies with us on board were inclined to favor my side; at least they were sorry for the fish and said he must be very big.

"Dan, I could tell a foul-hooked fish," I a.s.serted, positively. "This fellow is too alive--too limber. He doesn't sag like a dead weight."

"Well, if he's not foul-hooked, then you're all in," replied the captain.

Cheerful acquiescence is a desirable trait in any one, especially an angler who aspires to things, but that was left out in the ordering of my complex disposition. However, to get angry makes a man fight harder, and so it was with me.

At the end of five hours Dan suggested putting the harness on me. This contrivance, by the way, is a thing of straps and buckles, and its use is to fit over an angler's shoulders and to snap on the rod. It helps him lift the fish, puts his shoulders more into play, rests his arms.

But I had never worn one. I was afraid of it.

"Suppose he pulls me overboard, with that on!" I exclaimed. "He'll drown me!"

"We'll hold on to you," replied Dan, cheerily, as he strapped it around me.

Later it turned out that I had exactly the right view concerning this harness, for Dustin Farnum was nearly pulled overboard and--But I have not s.p.a.ce for that story here. My brother Rome wants to write that story, anyhow, because it is so funny, he says.

On the other hand, the fact soon manifested itself to me that I could lift a great deal more with said harness to help. The big fish began to come nearer and also he began to get mad. Here I forgot the pain in my hands. I grew enthusiastic. And foolishly I bragged. Then I lifted so hard that I cracked the great Conroy rod.

Dan threw up his hands. He quit, same as he quit the first day out, when I hooked the broadbill and the reel froze.

"Disqualified fish, even if you ketch him--which you won't," he said, dejectedly.

"Crack goes thirty-five dollars!" exclaimed my brother. "Sure is funny, brother, how you can decimate good money into the general atmosphere!"

If there really is anything fine in the fighting of a big fish, which theory I have begun to doubt, certainly Captain Dan and Brother R. C.

did not know it.

Remarks were forthcoming from me, I am ashamed to state, that should not have been. Then I got Dan to tie splints on the rod, after which I fought my quarry some more. The splints broke. Dan had to bind the cracked rod with heavy pieces of wood and they added considerable weight to what had before felt like a ton.

The fish had been hooked at eleven o'clock and it was now five. We had drifted or been pulled into the main channel, where strong currents and a choppy sea made the matter a pretty serious and uncomfortable one.

Here I expended all I had left in a short and furious struggle to bring the fish up, if not to gaff, at least so we could see what he looked like. How strange and unfathomable a feeling this mystery of him gave rise to! If I could only see him once, then he could get away and welcome. Captain Dan, in antic.i.p.ation of a need of much elbow room in that c.o.c.kpit, ordered my brother and the ladies to go into the cabin or up on top. And they all scrambled up and lay flat on the deck-roof, with their heads over, watching me. They had to hold on some, too. In fact, they were having the time of their lives.

My supreme effort brought the fish within the hundredth foot length of line--then my hands and my back refused any more.

"Dan, here's the great chance you've always hankered for!" I said. "Now let's see you pull him right in!"

And I pa.s.sed him the rod and got up. Dan took it with the pleased expression of a child suddenly and wonderfully come into possession of a long-unattainable toy. Captain Dan was going to pull that fish right up to the boat. He was! Now Dan is big--he weighs two hundred; he has arms and hands like the limbs of a Vulcan. Perhaps Dan had every reason to believe he would pull the fish right up to the boat. But somehow I knew that he would not.

My fish, perhaps feeling a new and different and mightier hand at the rod, showed how he liked it by a magnificent rush--the greatest of the whole fight--and he took about five hundred feet of line.

Dan's expression changed as if by magic.

"Steer the boat! Port! Port!" he yelled.

Probably I could not run a boat right with perfectly fresh and well hands, and with my lacerated and stinging ones I surely made a mess of it. This brought language from my boatman--well, to say the least, quite disrespectable. Fortunately, however, I got the boat around and we ran down on the fish. Dan, working with long, powerful sweeps of the rod, got the line back and the fish close. The game began to look great to me. All along I had guessed this fish to be a wonder; and now I knew it.

Hauling him close that way angered him. He made another rush, long and savage. The line smoked off that reel. Dan's expression was one of utmost gratification to me. A boatman at last cornered--tied up to a whale of a fis.h.!.+

Somewhere out there a couple of hundred yards the big fish came up and roared on the surface. I saw only circling wake and waves like those behind a speedy motor-boat. But Dan let out a strange shout, and up above the girls screamed, and brother Rome yelled murder or something. I gathered that he had a camera.

"Steady up there!" I called out. "If you fall overboard it's good night!... For we want this fis.h.!.+"

I had all I could do. Dan would order me to steer this way and that--to throw out the clutch--to throw it in. Still I was able to keep track of events. This fish made nineteen rushes in the succeeding half-hour.