End of the Tiger Read Online Free Page B

fish.
    “Absolutely beautiful!” Jimmy said softly.
    Wolta gave his hoarse laugh. “Absolutely butter-fingered, pal. You had him and you lost him.”
    “I’ve never seen anything like that,” Jimmy said.
    “I’d have liked to see him boated,” Wolta said. “What the hell good is it to look at a fish?”
    Pedro smiled at Jimmy and said, in his thick English, “Bad luck. Next time you get heem.” Then he turned to Wolta. “You reel in too slow, meester. Faster next time, eh?”
    Wolta, smiling, said, “You run your boat, pop. I’ll reel in like I damn well please.”
    I threw my bait out over the side toward the stern. I was learning about Wolta. I said in Spanish to Pedro, “This one is all mouth, my friend.” I said to Wolta, “I just told him that if I hook a fish, he’s to cut your line if you don’t bring it in fast enough.”
    Wolta said, “Okay, okay. Don’t get in a sweat, Thompson.”
    I sat down. I had the drag off, my thumb on the spool. Jimmy said, behind me, “You don’t use the clothespin?”
    “No. When I get a strike, I let the line run free, thenthrow on the drag when I hit him. It’s harder to do it right this way, but when you get onto it, you can figure the time to fit the way each fish hits.”
    Wolta said, a faint sneer in his tone, “Don’t bother the expert, Jimmy.”
    I let that one pass.
    Ten minutes later Wolta said, “I hear it takes about a half hour, forty minutes to boat one with the equipment I’m using. How long does it take with your rig?”
    “Longer. Maybe an hour with the same size fish.”
    He still wore the smile. He said, “That’s great! I pay a third of the boat the same as you and then when you hook one, I got to stop fishing for an hour.”
    “That’s right,” I said mildly.
    Pedro had reached the area he liked. He began to zig-zag back and forth across the area. The Spanish word for that maneuver is, very neatly, the same as the Spanish word for eel.
    I was first to see the fish coming in toward Wolta’s bait. I said, “One coming up.” Pedro slowed a little as Wolta tensed. It was as unreasonable as any sailfish. It cut by Wolta’s bait and, instead of hitting mine first to kill it, it gulped it whole. It was one very hungry fish. I hit it immediately.
    When it jumped, I saw that it was probably a shade smaller than the one Jimmy had hooked. As it ran I saw Wolta reeling in rapidly.
    Any sailfish could find freedom if it had the sense to run on a straight line, take all the line, break the line at the end of the run. But five hundred yards is a long way to go in a straight line. I stood in front of the chair. When it jumped, I kept the line taut, pulling it off balance, slapping it down against the sea before it could shake its head.
    It headed for the Orient; then, as I was getting worried about the line, it began to cut around in a vast circle, and I won back a little line. It stopped jumping. Bringing in the line was the usual tough problem. A hundred yards from the boat and twenty minutes later it walked on its tail for a good dozen yards and then, as I had expected, it sounded. I horsed it up, a few feet at a time. It made one more jump close to the boat and thencame in, dog weary. Pedro handled the gaff. The sailor grasped the bill, and Pedro belted it across the back of the neck with the weighted club.
    The sail came in over the transom, glistening with a hundred impossibly beautiful irridescent colors. Jimmy squatted and watched the colors slowly fade until the fish became the usual shining gunmetal black of the dead sail. He turned glowing eyes up toward me and said, “That was wonderful!”
    “The experts are always wonderful,” Wolta said. He grinned at me. “Do I have your permission to fish?”
    He got his line in first. Fresh bait was put on the other line, and Jimmy took his place in the chair. It was not over five minutes later that a sail, without warning, came up from downstairs and slapped Wolta’s bait. I was behind his