The Saint on the Spanish Main Read Free Page A

clutches from reverse to forward. The bellying line passed
right under the transom, right through the churning of the propellers, and
as the Saint mechanically went on winding a limp frayed end of nylon
lifted clear of the wake.
    No more than a boat’s length off the
starboard beam, the freed sailfish rose monstrously from the water for one last
derisive pirouette.
    “I did it,” said O’Kevin brokenly.
“There’s no one to blame but me. If ye’d be kinder to me than I
deserve, Simon, would ye just be cuttin’ me throat before ye throw
me overboard to the sharks?”
    “Forget it,” said the Saint,
wiping the sweat from his face. “I was getting tired of the whole
thing anyway.”
    He was amazed to see by his watch that the
battle had lasted more than two and a half hours.
    “An’ almost all the time, that son av a whale was headin’ almost due south,” O’Kevin said.
“We’re further from Bimini now
than we were whin we left Mi ami.”
    Only the taciturn mate had no comment. O’Kevin turned the helm back to him, and a certain
restrained melancholy settled over the whole party as the Colleen swung around and ploughed northwards again with
the stream.
    After a belated lunch of sandwiches and beer
had had their restorative effect, however, Patsy finally stopped shaking his
head and muttering to himself and stomped aft to the bait box.
    “If ye’ll allow me to bend another bait to yer line, sorr,” he said, “we may yet meet the
great-grandfather o’ that tadpole I
lost for ye.”
    If this were really a fishing story, it
would tell how the Saint presently hooked and fought and vanquished an even
bigger sailfish, a leviathan that was likely to remain a world’s record for
all time. Unfortunately the drab requirements of veracity to which your
historian is sub ject will not permit him this pleasure.
    In fact, most of the northward troll yielded
only one medium-sized barracuda. Then, with the islands of Bimini
already clearly in sight, Simon hooked another sailfish; but it was
quite a small one, only about fifty pounds, as they saw on its first jump.
O’Kevin allowed Des to handle the boat, which he did efficiently enough, and in
something less than an hour the exhausted fish was wallowing tamely
alongside. O’Kevin reached down and grasped its bill with a gloved hand and
lifted it half out of the water, his other hand sliding down the wire leader.
He looked at Simon inquiringly.
    “Let it go,” said the Saint.
“We’ll come back and catch him some day when he’s grown up.”
    So this only shows exactly how and why it
was that it was late afternoon when the Colleen threaded her
way between the tricky reefs and shoals that guard the har bor
entrance of Bimini, half a day later than she should normally have
arrived, and flying from one of her raised outriggers the
pennant with which a sport fisherman proclaims that a sailfish has been brought to the boat and voluntarily released.
    The Commissioner was waiting to come aboard as they tied up. Acting as immigration, health, and
cus toms officer combined, he
glanced at their papers, accepted a drink and a cigarette, wished them a
pleasant stay, and stepped back on
the dock in less than fifteen minutes.
    Simon had stayed behind in the cabin to pick
up his suitcase. As he brought it out to the cockpit, O’Kevin was
already on the pier talking to three people who stood there. Simon
handed up his two-suiter, and as he swung himself up after it O’Kevin said:
“This is the gintleman I was talkin’ about. Mr. Templar—Mr. and Mrs. Uckrose.”
    Mr. Clinton Uckrose was a somewhat
pear-shaped man of medium height who looked about fiftyfive, dressed in
an immaculate white silk shirt and white shan tung trousers with a
gaudy necktie knotted around the waist for a belt. Under a peaked cap of
native straw, his face also had a pear-shaped aspect, compounded of broad
blood-hound jowls bracketing a congenitally ag grieved mouth and a pair of oldfashioned
pince-nez