IV
AVALON BAY
I
Avalon Bay, on the east of Santa Catalina Island, clips between its two horns a little seaside town unique of its kind. Billy Harman had described it to Captain Blood as a place where you saw girls bathing in Paris hats. However that may be, you see stranger things than this at Avalon.
It is the head centre of the big-game fisheries of the California coast. Men come here from all parts of America and Europe to kill tarpon and yellow-tail and black sea bass, to say nothing of shark, which is reckoned now as a game fish. Trippers come from Los Angeles to go round in glass-bottomed boats and inspect the sea gardens, and bank presidents, Steel Trust men, and millionaires of every brand come for their health.
You will see monstrous shark gallowsed on the beach and three-hundred-pound bass being photographed side by side with their captors, and you will have the fact borne in on you that the biggest fish that haunt the sea can be caught and held and brought to gaff with a rod weighing only a few ounces and a twenty-strand line that a child could snap.
Every one talks fish at Avalon, from the boatmen who run the gasoline launches to the latest-arrived man with a nerve breakdown who has come from the wheat pit or Wall Street to rest himself by killing sharks or fighting tuna, every one. Here you are estimated not by the size of your bank balance, but by the size of your catch. Not by your social position, but by your position in sport, and here the magic blue or red button of the Tuna Club is a decoration more prized than any foreign order done in diamonds.
Colonel Culpepper and his daughter, Rose, were staying at Avalon just at the time the Yan-Shan business occurred on San Juan. The colonel hailed from the Middle West and had a wide reputation on account of his luck and his millions. Rose had a reputation of her own; she was reckoned the prettiest girl wherever she went, and just now she was the prettiest girl in Avalon.
This morning, just after dawn, Miss Culpepper was standing on the veranda of the Metropole Hotel, where the darkies were dusting mats and putting the cane chairs in order. Avalon was still half in shadows, but a gorgeous morning hinted of itself in the blue sky overhead and the touch of dusk-blue sea visible from the veranda. The girl had come down undecided as to whether she would go on the water or for a ramble inland, but the peep of blue sea decided her. It was irresistible, and, leaving the hotel, she came toward the beach.
No one was out yet. In half an hour or less the place would be alive with boatmen, but in this moment of enchantment not a soul was to be seen either on the premises of the Tuna Club or on the little plage or on the shingle, where the small waves were breaking, crystal clear, in the first rays of the sun.