Tish Plays the Game

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  “Swallow!” she snorted. “It’s well named. The thing tried to swallow the whole Atlantic Ocean.”

  It was in charge of a young fisherman named Christopher Columbus Jefferson Spudd.

  “It sounds rather like a coal bucket falling down the cellar stairs,” said Lily May, giving him a cold glance.

  And indeed he looked very queer. He had a nice face and a good figure, but his clothes were simply horrible. He wore a checked suit with a short coat, very tight at the waist, and pockets with buttons on everywhere. And he had a baby-blue necktie and a straw hat with a fancy ribbon on it, and too small for his head.

  Lily May put her hand up as if he dazzled her, and said, “What do we call you if we want you? If we ever do,” she added unpleasantly.

  “Just call me anything you like, miss,” he said with a long look at her, “and I’ll come running. I kind of like Christopher myself.”

  “You would!” said Lily May, and turned her back on him.

  But, as Tish said that night, we might as well employ him as anyone else.

  “Do what we will,” she said, “we might as well recognize the fact that the presence of Lily May is to the other sex what catnip is to a cat. It simply sets them rolling. And,” she added, “if it must be somebody, better Christopher, who is young and presumably unattached, than an older man with a wife and children. Besides, his boat is a fast one, and we shall lose no time getting to and from the fishing grounds.”

  We therefore decided to retain Christopher and the Swallow, although the price, two hundred and fifty dollars a month, seemed rather high.

  “We do not need Christopher,” she said, “but if we must take him with the boat we must. He can chop wood and so on.”

  We spent the next day getting settled. The island was a small one, with only a few fishermen’s houses on it, and Tish drew a sigh of relief.

  “No man except Christopher,” she said to me. “And she detests him. And who can be small in the presence of the Atlantic Ocean? She will go back a different girl, Lizzie. Already she is less selfish. I heard her tell Hannah to-night, referring to Christopher, to ‘feed the brute well.’ There was true thoughtfulness behind that.”

  Christopher, of course, ate in the kitchen.

  It was the next morning that Tish called him in from the woodpile and asked him about the size of codfish.

  “Codfish?” he said. “Well, now, I reckon they’d run a pound or so.”

  “A pound or so?” Tish demanded indignantly. “There is one in the natural history museum at home that must weigh sixty pounds.”

  “Oh, well,” he said, “if you’re talking about museum pieces, there are whales around here that weigh pretty considerable. But you take the run of cod, the oil variety, and you get ’em all sizes. Depends on their age,” he added.

  Tish says that she knew then that he was no fisherman, but it was not for several days that he told her his story.

  “I am not exactly a fisherman,” he said. “I can run a boat all right, so you needn’t worry, but in the winter I clerk in a shoe store in Bangor, Maine. But there is no career in the shoe business, especially on a commission basis. In New England the real money goes to the half-sole-and-heel people.”

  “I suppose that’s so,” said Tish. “I never thought of it.”

  “Then,” he went on, “you take automobiles. Did you ever think how they’ve hurt the sale of shoes? Nobody walks. Folks that used to buy a pair of shoes every year have dropped clean off my list. The tailors are getting my business.”

  “Tailors?” Tish asked.

  “Putting new seats in trousers,” he said gloomily, and stalked away.

  The boat, he told us later, belonged to his uncle, who was a tailor. But he was not tailoring at present. As a matter of fact, he was at the moment in the state penitentiary, and that was how Christopher had the Swallow.

  “He took to bootlegging on the side,” he explained.

  “It was a sort of natural evolution, as you may say. He noticed the wear and tear on hip pockets from carrying flasks, and it seized on his imagination.” He mopped discouragedly at the boat, in which we were about to go on our first fishing trip, and sighed. “Many a case of good hard liquor has run the revenue blockade in this,” he said.

  “Well, there will be no liquor run in it while I’m renting it,” said Tish firmly.

  III

  I CANNOT SAY THAT the fishing was what we had expected. There was plenty of fish, and Tish grew quite expert at opening clams and putting them on her hook. But as Aggie could never bear the smell of clams at any time, and as the rocking of the boat seriously disturbed her, we had rather a troublesome time with her. Once she even begged to be thrown overboard.

  “Nonsense!” Tish said. “You can’t swim and you know it.”

  “I don’t want to swim, Tish,” she said pitifully. “I just want to die, and the quicker the better.”

  On rough days, too, when an occasional wave dashed over us, and Tish would shake herself and speak of the bracing effect of salt water, our poor Aggie would fall into violent sneezing, and more than once lost a fish by so doing. And I shall never forget the day when she drew up a squid, and the wretched thing squirted its ink all over her. There was a certain dignity in the way she turned her blackened face to Tish.

  “I have stood for clams, Tish,” she said, “and I have stood for the rocking of this d-damned boat. But when the very creatures of the deep insult me I’m through!”

  As, however, a wave came overboard just then and removed practically all the ink, as well as the squid itself, she was fortunately unable to express herself further. It speaks well for our dear Tish’s self-control that she allowed Aggie’s speech to pass without reproof, and even offered her a small glass of blackberry cordial from the bottle we always carried with us.

  But it was in the matter of payment for the fish that our plans suffered a serious reverse. We had on our first day out taken what we imagined was a hundred pounds of various sorts, many unknown to us, and on the way to the fish wharf, while Aggie and I neatly arranged them as to sizes, Tish figured out the probable value.

  “About forty dollars,” she said. “And if they take that thing with whiskers under its chin, even more. Gasoline, one dollar. Christopher’s wages and boat hire per day, eight dollars. Clams, a dollar and a quarter. Leaving a net profit of twenty-nine dollars and seventy-five cents, or clear every month eight hundred and seventy dollars and fifty cents.”

  She closed her notebook and we drew in under the fish wharf, where a man who was chewing tobacco came to the edge and looked down at us.

  “We are selling these fish,” Tish said with her usual dignity. “They are quite fresh, and ought to bring the best market rates.”

  The man spit into the water and then glanced at our boxes.

  “Jerry!” he called. “Want any more fish?”

  “What kind of fish?” a voice replied from back in the shed.

  The man squinted again at our catch.

  “Looks like succotash to me,” he called.

  Jerry came out and stared down at us, and then slowly descended the ladder to the boat. He had a mean face, Tish says, and he made us about as welcome as the bubonic plague. He said nothing, but picked out six haddock and handed them up to the man above.

  “Thirty cents,” he said.

  “I’m paying sixty in the market,” Tish protested.

  “Thirty-five,” he repeated, and started up the ladder.

  “Forty,” said Tish firmly.

  “Look here,” he said with bitterness, “all you’ve had to do is to catch those fish. That’s easy; the sea’s full of ’em. What have I got to do? I’ve got to clean ’em and pack ’em and ice ’em and ship ’em. I’m overpaying you; that’s what I’m doing.”

  “What am I going to do with the others?” Tish demanded angrily. “Seventy pounds of good fish, and half the nation needing food.”

  “You might send it to Congress,” he suggested. “They say it�
�s good for the brain—phosphorus.”

  “You must eat a great deal of fish!” said Tish witheringly.

  “Or,” he said, brightening, “take it home to the cat. There’s nothing a cat will get real worked up about like a nice mess of fish.”

  He then went up the ladder, leaving us in speechless fury. But Tish recovered quickly and began figuring again. “Six haddock at seven pounds each,” she said. “Forty-two pounds at thirty-five cents per pound, or about fourteen dollars. At least we’ve made our expenses. And of course we can eat some.”

  Aggie, who had felt the motion severely coming in, raised herself from the bottom of the boat at this, and asked for another sip of cordial.

  “They smell,” she wailed, and fell back again.

  “All perfectly healthy fish smell,” said Tish.

  “So does a healthy skunk,” said Aggie, holding her handkerchief to her nose, “but I don’t pretend to like it.”

  And then Jerry came down the ladder and handed Tish a quarter and a five-cent piece!

  “There you are,” he said cheerfully. “One of them’s a bit wormy, but we say here that a wormy fish is a healthy fish.”

  I draw a veil over the painful scene that followed. That fish house paid two-thirds of a cent a pound for fish, no more and no less, and the more Tish raged the higher Jerry retreated up the ladder until he was on the wharf again. From there he looked down at us before he disappeared.

  “You might get more out in the desert, lady,” he said as a parting shot. “But then, you’d get a pretty good price for a plate of ice cream in hell too.”

  And with that he disappeared, and left us to face our situation.

  Our deficit on the day, according to Tish, was ten dollars. In three months it would amount to nine hundred dollars. She closed her notebook with a snap.

  “Unless we count intangible assets,” she said, “we shall certainly be bankrupt. Of course there is the gain in health; the salt air—”

  “Health!” said Aggie feebly. “A little more of this, Tish Carberry, and Jerry will be cleaning and packing and icing and shipping something that isn’t fish.”

  “Then again,” said Tish, ignoring this outburst, “we may find something unusual. There are whales about here, according to Christopher. And the oil of the whale is still used, I believe.”

  But after learning from Christopher that whales ranged in size from fifty to one hundred feet, and were not caught on a line, however heavy, but with a knife thrown into some vital part, she was compelled to abandon this idea. Indeed, I do not know how we should have filled up our summer had it not been that on that very evening we received a visit from a Mr. MacDonald, who turned out to be the deputy sheriff on the island.

  Aggie was still far from well that night. She said the floor kept rising and falling, and at dinner several times she had clutched at her plate to keep it from sliding off the table. So she had been about to pour herself a glass of blackberry cordial, when Lily May saw Mr. MacDonald coming, and hastily took the bottle and hid it under a table.

  Christopher brought him in, and he sat down and began to sniff almost immediately. But he said that he had called to secure our assistance; it wasn’t often he needed help, but he needed it now.

  “It’s these here rum runners, ladies,” he said. “You take a place like this, all islands and about a million of them. We’ve got as much coast line as the state of California.”

  “Indeed?” said Tish politely.

  “And they know every inch of it. And every trick,” he added. “’Tain’t more than a week now since the government inspector found a case of Black and White tied under the surface to one of the channel buoys. And who’s to know whether the fellows hauling up lobster pots aren’t hauling up something else too?”

  “Very probably they are,” said Tish dryly—“from the price of lobsters.”

  “There’s liquor all around these waters. Last big storm we had, a lot of it must have got smashed up, and there was a porpoise reeling around the town wharf for two or three hours. Finally it brought up against one of the poles of the fish pier and went asleep there. It was a disgraceful exhibition.”

  “Tish,” Aggie said suddenly, “if this floor doesn’t keep still that bottle will upset.”

  Mr. MacDonald stared at her and then cleared his throat.

  “Of course I’m taking for granted,” he said, “that you ladies believe in upholding the law.”

  “We are members of the W.C.T.U.,” Tish explained. “We stand ready to assist our nation in every possible way. We do not even believe in beer and light wines.”

  He seemed reassured at that, and explained what he wanted. The Government had a number of patrol boats outside, and they were doing their best, but in spite of them liquor was coming in and was being shipped hither and yon.

  “The worst of it is,” he said, “we don’t know who we can trust. Only last week I paid a fellow fifteen dollars good money to take me out and locate a rum runner, and he got lost in the fog and had to come back. Yesterday I learned he got forty dollars from the other side for getting lost.”

  His idea was that under pretense of fishing we could assist him by watching for the criminals, and reporting anything we saw that was suspicious. As Tish said afterward, there was no profit for the church in the arrangement, but there was a spiritual gain to all of us.

  “There are things one cannot measure in dollars and cents,” she said.

  We all agreed, and rose to see Mr. MacDonald to the door. But I think he left in a divided state of mind, for Christopher, standing near the table, upset the bottle of blackberry cordial, and Aggie, who had been watching it, gave a wail and started for it. But the floor was still going up and down to her, and her progress across the room was most unsteady.

  It is to this unfortunate combination undoubtedly that we owe our later ill luck. For Mr. MacDonald caught her as she was about to bump the mantel, and still holding her, turned to Tish.

  “That fellow that double-crossed me,” he said with meaning, “he got thirty days.”

  “When we agree to do a thing we do it,” Tish said stiffly.

  “So did he,” said Mr. MacDonald, and went away, taking a final sniff at the door.

  Tish made her usual preparations for our new role. She at once sent to Bar Harbor for a pair of field glasses, and oiled and loaded her revolver.

  “Not that I mean to shoot them,” she said, “but a well-placed shot or two can wreck their engine. In that case all we shall have to do is to tow them in.”

  She procured also a good towing rope for this purpose, and spent her odd time the next day or two shooting at a floating target in the water. Unfortunately, the fact that a bullet will travel over the water like a skipping stone escaped her, and our next-door neighbor, who was just hauling in the largest halibut of the season, had the misfortune to have his line cut in half and of seeing the halibut escape.

  On the other hand, her resolution was strengthened by a letter from Charlie Sands, her nephew, which showed the moral deterioration being fostered by these wretched liquor smugglers.

  “Dear Aunt Tish,” he wrote. “It has just occurred to me that you are near the Canadian border. Scotch ought to be good and also cheap there. Why not fill a hot-water bag or two for me? Even a bottle or two would not come amiss, and if you are nervous on the train I suggest the space outside your ventilator in the drawing-room.”

  Tish’s indignation was intense. She wrote him a very sharp letter, informing him that she was now in the government service. “If the worst comes,” she said, “I shall not hesitate to arrest my own family. No Carberry has been jailed yet for breaking the nation’s laws, but it is not too late to begin.”

  It may have been pure coincidence, but Lily May ordered a hot-water bag from the mainland soon after that. She said her feet got cold at night.

  I must confess Lily May puzzled us at that time. She would not go fishing, but stayed at home and insulted poor Christopher. She claimed that he spent
most of his time at the woodpile smoking cigarettes, and so she would go out and watch him. Hannah said that her manner to him was really overbearing, and that she believed she said quite insulting things to him under her breath.

  She counted the wood he cut too. Once Hannah heard her say, “Twice two fifty is five hundred. You’ve still five hundred to go.”

  And he groaned and said, “It’s the h— of a long way yet.”

  She was very odd about the revenue matter, also, and said very little when Tish got her badge.

  “Well,” she said, “it may stop a bullet. But that’s all it will stop.”

  As Tish said, such cynicism in the young was really bewildering.

  IV

  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.”