It was the middle of July when Tish finally started on her dangerous
duty. Aggie had begged to be left at home, but Tish had arranged a duty
for each of us.
“I shall steer the boat,” she said. “Aggie is to lower and lift up the
anchor, and you, Lizzie, are to take charge of the fishing tackle and
the bait.”
We were, as I have said, to pretend to be fishing, and thus avert the
suspicion of the bootleggers.
Lily May and Christopher saw us off, and Lily May’s farewell was
characteristic of her.
“Pick out a good-looking rum runner for me,” Lily May called. “I know
father would love to have one in the family.”
We had gone about three miles, I think, when I heard a peculiar noise,
like the rumbling of steam, but no one else noticed it. A little later,
however, Aggie called out that there was a fountain playing not far
ahead. Tish at once announced that it was a whale spouting, and changed
our course so as to avoid it.
We saw no more of it, and Aggie was beginning to look white about the
ears and the tip of the nose as usual, when Tish decided to drop our
anchor and there take up our position. She therefore stopped the engine
and Aggie heaved the anchor overboard. But we did not stop.
“There’s certainly a very fast tide,” Tish said, looking over the side.
“We are going as fast as before.”
“Then the bottom’s moving too,” Aggie said sharply. “The anchor’s
caught, all right.”
We looked about. Either we were moving out to sea or Smith’s Island
was going toward the mainland and would soon collide with it. And at
that moment the front end of the boat dipped down, shipping an enormous
amount of sea, and throwing us all forward, and then the entire boat
shot ahead as if it had been fired out of a gun.
“It’s an earthquake, Tish,” Aggie groaned, lying prone in the water.
Tish pulled herself to her knees and stared about her.
“It may be a tidal wave,” she said. “But they go in, not out.” She then
stared again, forward, and finally rose to her feet. I followed her,
and she lifted a shaking finger and pointed ahead. Only a hundred feet
or so from us, and heading for Europe, was an enormous whale. One point
of our anchor had caught in his blowhole, and we were traveling at
what I imagine was sixty miles an hour or more.
“Really, Aggie,” Tish said, “this is a little too much! I gave you the
lightest duty on the boat--simply to anchor this boat to the bottom.
Instead----”
“What did you want me to do?” Aggie demanded. “Go down with it, and
hook it to a rock?”
“When I want a whale I’ll ask for a whale,” said Tish with dignity. But
with her usual alertness she was already making a plan. She at once
started the engine and put it in reverse. “After all,” she said, “we
have the thing, and we may as well try to take it in.”
But there was no perceptible effect, and after a moment or so the
engine choked, and would not start again. Tish’s second thought,
therefore, of running at the whale and stunning it until we could
free ourselves, was not practical. And the creature itself began to
show signs of extreme nervous irritation; it struck the water really
terrific blows with its enormous broad flat tail, and Aggie remembered
a moving picture she had seen, where a whale had turned in anger on a
boat and had crushed it like a peanut shell.
And to add to our difficulties there was a fishing fleet ahead of us,
and the creature was heading directly for it. We went through that
fleet without touching a boat!
One fisherman yelled to us. “Better let go!” he called. “If you do get
him what’ll you do with him?”
“If I ever get him,” Tish said grimly, “I’ll know what to do with him.”
But of course the man was a mile behind us by that time.
We had left the islands far behind us, and the last bit of land was out
of sight. With her usual forethought Tish ordered us to put on our life
preservers, and after that we set to work to endeavor to loosen the
anchor rope from the ring to which it was fastened.
But the tension was too great, and careful search revealed no hatchet
with which to cut ourselves free. Our knife had gone overboard with the
first jerk. In this emergency my admiration for Tish was never greater.
“One of two things will happen,” she said. “Either he will go down to
the sea bottom, taking the boat with him, or he will strike for his
native haunts, which to the north whale is probably the arctic region
around Greenland. In the first event, we have our life preservers; in
the second case, our sweaters. And as there is nothing more to do, we
may as well have our luncheon.”
Her courage was contagious, and while Aggie spread the cloth on our
folding table, I brought out the sandwiches and coffee. I daresay the
schooner had been in sight for some time, just ahead of us, before we
noticed it, and Tish thinks that the whale was too excited to see it at
all. Anyhow, we were within half a mile of it and heading directly at
it when we first saw it.
Aggie was the first to see what was happening, and she ran forward and
yelled to the other boat to head him off. But there was no one in sight
on it, and the whale kept straight on. Within a hundred feet or so,
however, he suddenly dived; the Swallow went on, however, striking the
other boat in the center, and the jar must have loosened the anchor,
for we remained on the surface.
It was then that a man carefully peered over the edge of the revenue
boat and looked down at us.
“My land!” he said. “I was just waiting for you to explode!”
He then said that he had thought they had been struck by a torpedo, and
on Tish explaining, he looked rather odd and brought two other men to
look at us. In the end, however, we convinced them, and they invited
us on board while they bailed our boat and fixed our engine.
The first man was the captain, and while Aggie made us some fresh tea
in the galley Tish confided to him our real purpose, and showed him her
badge.
He seemed greatly impressed, and said, “If more people would see their
duty and do it, we would get rid of the rum evil.”
He then said that they were also a part of the revenue fleet, or had
been. He didn’t know how long they could stick it out.
“I’m all right,” he said. “But now you take Joe and Bill, there.
They’re not normal any more; it’s the loneliness gets them. Nothing to
do but wait, you see.”
“You might try cross-word puzzles,” Tish suggested.
“We had a book of them,” he said dejectedly. “But Bill got mad one day
trying to think of a South American river, in five letters, and flung
it overboard.”
Over our tea Tish discoursed of the reasons which had turned us from
our original idea to the revenue service, and the captain nodded his
head.
“I know Jerry,” he said. “Now you take us. Wouldn’t you think we could
fish out here, and fill in our spare time? Not a bit of it. It’s my
belief Jerry’s running liquor, and he won’t let a revenue boat near the
wharf.”
But he had, he said, discovered a way to circumvent Jerry. He and Bill
and Joe fished, all right, only they dried the fish and packed them in
boxes.
“Some day,” he said, “we’ll land those fish, and old Jerry will find
the market glutted. That’s all; glutted.” He had, he said, a hundred
boxes in the hold already. “Only trouble is,” he went on, “we’re
getting overloaded. If a big sea comes along, and one’s due most any
time, they may shift, and then where are we?”
It was just before we left, I remember, that he asked us if we wouldn’t
carry in a few boxes for him and land them at a cove on our island,
where a friend of the captain’s was living alone. And Tish agreed at
once.
I have no wish to reflect on Tish; her motive, then as later, was
of the highest, and for Charlie Sands to say what he does is most
ungenerous. At the same time, her reckless kindness led us into serious
trouble later on, and I hope will be a lesson to her.
We not only took the boxes of fish to Al Smith, at the cove, that day,
but we made repeated excursions to the revenue boat from that time
on, carrying back a dozen boxes or so at a time, and taking out an
occasional batch of Aggie’s doughnuts, a parcheesi game, and once a
bottle of blackberry cordial.
“For _mal de mer_,” Tish said kindly as she presented it, and it
created a profound impression. Bill and Joe seemed quite overcome, and
the captain was so moved that he had to walk away and wipe his eyes.
“It’s not the gift,” he said later. “It’s the thought.”
We had naturally not told Lily May. But one day when Mr. Smith, the
captain’s friend, was unpacking the boxes of fish at the cove, who
should wander into sight but the child herself.
She came right up and looked at the boxes, and said, “What’s that
anyhow?”
“It’s dried fish,” said Tish. “And I’ll thank you to say nothing about
it.”