“But weren’t you sea-sick?” I asked.
“Didn’t have a chance to be,” said Munchausen. “I was thinking of the whale all the time. Finally there came a roll in which we went completely under, and with a slight pulling on the line the whale was landed by the force of the wave and laid squarely upon the deck.”
“Great Sapphira!” said I. “But you just said he was wider and longer than the yacht!”
“He was,” sighed Munchausen. “He landed on
the deck and by sheer force of his weight the yacht went down under him. I swam ashore and the whole crew with me. The next day Mr. Whale floated in strangled. He’d swallowed the thousand yards of line and it got so tangled in his tonsils that it choked him to death. Come around next week and I’ll give you a couple of pounds of whalebone for Mrs. Ananias, and all the oil you can carry.”
I thanked the old gentleman for his kind offer and promised to avail myself of it, although as a newspaper man it is against my principles to accept gifts from public men.
“It was great luck, Baron,” said I. “Or at least it would have been if you hadn’t lost your yacht.”
“That was great luck too,” he observed nonchalantly. “It cost me ten thousand dollars a month keeping that yacht in commission. Now she’s gone I save all that. Why it’s like finding money in the street, Ananias. She wasn’t worth more than fifty thousand dollars, and in six months I’ll be ten thousand ahead.”
I could not but admire the cheerful philosophy of the man, but then I was not surprised. Munchausen was never the sort of man to let little things worry him.
“But that whale business wasn’t a circumstance to my catch of three tons of trout with a single cast of a horse-whip in the Blue Hills,” said the Baron after a few moments of meditation, during which I could see that he was carefully marshalling his facts.