BYME-BY-TARPON 



door, seemingly as wide, who shot up and up into 

 the air. He wagged his head and shook it like a 

 struggling wolf. When he fell back with a heavy 

 splash, a rainbow, exquisitely beautiful and delicate, 

 stood out of the spray, glowed, paled, and faded. 



Five times he sprang toward the blue sky, and as 

 many he plunged down with a thunderous crash. 

 The reel screamed. The line sang. The rod, which 

 I had thought stiff as a tree, bent like a willow wand. 

 The silver king came up far astern and sheered to 

 the right in a long, wide curve, leaving behind a 

 white wake. Then he sounded, while I watched 

 the line with troubled eyes. But not long did he 

 sulk. He began a series of magnificent tactics new 

 in my experience. He stood on his tail, then on 

 his head; he sailed like a bird; he shook himself so 

 violently as to make a convulsive, shuffling sound; 

 he dove, to come up covered with mud, marring his 

 bright sides; he closed his huge gills with a slap 

 and, most remarkable of all, he rose in the shape of 

 a crescent, to straighten out with such marvelous 

 power that he seemed to actually crack like a whip. 



After this performance, which left me in a con- 

 dition of mental aberration, he sounded again, to 

 begin a persistent, dragging pull which was the most 

 disheartening of all his maneuvers; for he took yard 

 after yard of line until he was far away from me, 

 out in the Panuco. We followed him, and for an 

 hour crossed to and fro, up and down, humoring 

 him, responding to his every caprice, as if he verily 

 were a king. At last, with a strange inconsistency 

 more human than fishlike, he returned to the scene 

 of his fatal error, and here in the mouth of the 



