There was an ominous quiet hanging upon the early sunlight. The suppressed calm was something greater than that inspired by the sight of a few devout people starting out upon the yacht for early mass. The guests were appearing singly upon the broad verandas of the hotel. Each in turn as he appeared seemed possessed of the same apprehension, a nervousness of manner. The sleep of this Sunday morning was the closing of a week of wild and reckless dissipation among the guests. Such intense excitement at the island had not been experienced in many summers. From the wharf of the castle across the bay at the other side of “Ghost Hollow” the gramophone had sung “coon songs” and recited at length for several evenings in succession, and a music box in the main corridor of the hotel had given a continuous performance from twelve to twelve, till the nerves of the martyred guests had reached a state fit to be recited in a patent medicine advertisement.
“What’s that I don’t know, a big fish?” And Mr. Hot Water, dressed in his new bicycle suit, strode excitedly a few steps forward on the veranda, then backed up, balanced himself and side-stepped a little to get a fresh start. Then he came on again, with his meerschaum pipe tightly grasped in his right hand.
“By Gum! That’s a terror. If it isn’t a pickerel it’s a maskinonge. It’s either one, anyway, if it isn’t a maskinonge. Who caught it?” Then he looked at the three individuals before him for the first time. What he saw made him change the meerschaum quickly from the right to the left hand, and then he blinked his eyes till recalled by Mr. Du Ponté. When Mr. Hot Water (a regular patron of the hotel, known to be threatened musically, and also as a local weather authority) comprehended the outfit before him he saw a large fish, of the maskinonge family, strung on an inch pole suspended between two trees eight feet apart. He saw, also, three of his fellow guests at the Point strangely arrayed before him, one dressed in white duck trousers, with a red silk scarf tightly knotted above the knee, another with hand and fore-arm wound with linen handkerchiefs and hung in a sling across his breast, while the third, Mr. Du Ponté, was, aside from his loquaciousness, apparently in his normal condition, i. e., he had escaped from the terrible catastrophe that had overtaken his friends with no severe injuries to his person.
Mr. Hot Water, being somewhat of a “sport” himself, was led to inquire for the particulars of the landing of the large fish. After stepping cautiously around the group for a few minutes, he placed the meerschaum between his teeth again and began to mutter questions which showed him to be in a credulous state of mind. “By Gum! I don’t know, by Gum! Now, I have been here, and I’ve been down to my club fishin’, fishin’; I’ve been down to Kitskees Island, too. That’s right. My guide—my guide rowed me down there and all the way back, too. I had out a thousand feet of line, but I never caught anything like that.” He looked cunningly out of the corner of his eye toward Mr. Du Ponté and inquired again what the fish weighed. Three other guests filled with curiosity had now joined the group, and Ponté began to explain.
“Fifty-seven pounds is the weight of this fish. He has just been weighed in the ice-house around there back of the hotel, near the landing.” (Thirty-seven pounds had been the original quotation.) “You see, Mr. Hot Water, this is no ordinary maskinonge. Take, for instance, the back extension from shoulder to shoulder, which denotes a terrible propelling force, and then if you notice these spots (pointing with a twig he had cut for the purpose) they are not the marks of a common fish. This ‘ere fish was a leader of his tribe; a king, so to speak, among his fellows.”
“Perhaps he’s a ‘King Fish’,” suggested Mr. Hot Water, with apparent concern, at the same time winking both eyes at the “cottager” with the red handkerchief tied about the trousers at the knee.
“No,” returned Du Ponté; “we have looked him up and we find that having those spots, and the second bicuspid tooth being black, prove him to be a regular ‘King Filipino’ maskinonge.”
“By Gum! that’s funny—I wonder how he got here. Must have followed the ‘line boat’ up the Suez Canal, I guess, or p’raps he didn’t. He must weigh more than fifty-seven pounds—though I don’t know. I guess not, though those fish grow, those Filipino fish grow very fast. They say they do, though I couldn’t say myself. I should think he would weigh more, though, being a king. Here’s Mr. Mac, he ought to know a ‘King Filipino,’ he goes to the market every day,” continued Mr. Hot Water. Again he blinked both eyes at the “cottager” with the red handkerchief about the knee, and the laugh didn’t seem to be on Mr. Hot Water.
Mr. Mac was another weekly visitor at the Island, spending the half holiday about the rush beds and channels in quest of the sly “Wall Eye.” For many seasons he had been doing this sort of thing. The distinguishing mark of the pickerel, the pike and the maskinonge were as familiar to him as were the quotations on the Exchange, upon which he was an active operator six days of the week. The responsibility of Mac’s habit of listening courteously to what a fellow had to say, for the time carefully concealing his final verdict, dates back for its origin to the conservative atmosphere of old Glengarry County, where he had spent the days of his boyhood.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” said Mr. Mac, in a slow, deliberate voice, slightly pitched, as he reached the inner circle surrounding the fish suspended between the two small hickory trees. The peak of his blue yachting cap was pulled well down over his nose, which shielded from the principals in the “fish game” the twinkle in the eye which would have been the only clue detectable upon his imperturbable features to indicate his belief, skeptical or otherwise, concerning the proceedings. “Well, now, that is a pretty good morning’s catch, that one fish is. Where did you get him, might I ask?” and Mac raised his head slowly backward till his eyes from under the shield of his cap rested on the level of the faces of the three bandaged principals guarding the fish. “Must have had some trouble, too, in landing him,” and he indicated with an inclination of the yachting cap toward the red bandage around the white duck trousers at the knee of the “cottager.”