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hook sewed into it, will ride the surface about fifty feet astern. See, the sailor’s dropping the bamboo outriggers now. The line will run taut from your bait to a heavy clothespin at the tip of the outrigger. Then there’ll be twenty or so feet of slack between the clothespin and the tip of your rod. The sail’ll come up and whack the fish with his bill. That’s to kill it. It’ll knock the line out of the clothespin, and the fish will lie dead on the water while we keep moving. Then the sail’ll grab it. As soon as the slack is all gone, hold tight and hit him three or four times. Not hard. Like this.” I took the rod and showed him.
    “How will I know if he’s hooked?” Jimmy asked.
    Wolta roared. “He’ll rise up and talk to you, boy. He’ll come up and tell you all about it.”
    Jimmy flushed. He said, “Thanks, Mr. Thompson.”
    I was assembling my equipment. For sail I use a five-foot, five-ounce tip, 4/0 star drag reel carrying five hundred yards of 6-thread, 18-pound test line. Wolta looked on curiously. He said, “That’s a lot lighter outfit than these, Thompson.” I nodded. The boat rods carry 32-thread line, 14/0 drag reels. Wolta said, “That rod won’t fit in the gimbal, will it?”
    “No,” I said shortly.
    Wolta frowned. “What the hell! If you can use that stuff, why should we fish with rope and crowbars?”
    I said, “If you never fished for sail before and if you hooked one with this equipment, you’d have a thousand to one chance of bringing him in. He’d break your line or your tip every time.”
    Wolta gave me that grin. “I guess you know what you’re talking about,” he said.
    The bait was all sewed. It was taken off the ice, and Pedro helped rig the lines. As soon as we rounded the headlands, the bait went out. I said, “You two fish. As soon as you’ve hooked one, the other man reels in. Fast. I’ll take the place of whoever hooks the first one.”
    “Hooks or catches,” Wolta said suspiciously.
    I looked him squarely in the eyes. “Hooks!” I said.
    “Okay, okay,” he mumbled, turning away. I had learned something interesting about Lew Wolta.
    The first half hour was dull. Pedro headed straight out, and the shore line began to recede; the dusty brown hills began to appear behind the green hills that encircle Acapulco. The swell was heavy. I watched both Jimmy and Wolta and saw with relief that neither of them seemed conscious of the movement of the boat. A seasick man aboard spoils my pleasure in the day, as I know how badly he wants to return to the stability of the land.
    The bait danced and skittered astern, taking off into the air at the crests of the waves, sometimes going under the surface for a dozen yards.
    Wolta called for more beer and called loudly again as the sailor was uncapping the bottle.
    The engineer, acting as lookout, yelled and pointed. Pedro took a quick look and heeled the boat around. The sail was a dust brown shape dimly seen a few inches under the surge of the blue sea.
    We dragged the bait by him, and he seemed to shake himself, move in a big circle, come in on the bait with arrowlike speed. He was headed for Gerran’s bait. For a moment the sail knifed the water a few yards behind the bait and then there was a boiling spot on the flank of a wave and the line snapped out of Gerran’s clothespin.
    I watched the line tauten as Pedro cut speed.
    “Now!” I said.
    Jimmy hit him just a shade late, but hit him with the right force. The line whined out of the reel as the sail, about seventy pounds of angry, startled temper, walked up into the air, three feet of daylight showing under his bullet-lean tail.
    Jimmy gasped. The sail jumped high again, ten yards farther. High in the air he shook his head, and we saw the bait snap free and fall out in a long arc. The fish was off the hook and, somewhere under the surface of the sea, he was heading for distant parts.
    There was that letdown of tension that always comes with a lost