And then Jerry came down the ladder and handed Tish a quarter and a five-cent piece!
“There you are,” he said cheerfully. “One of them’s a bit wormy, but we say here that a wormy fish is a healthy fish.”
I draw a veil over the painful scene that followed. That fish house paid two-thirds of a cent a pound for fish, no more and no less, and the more Tish raged the higher Jerry retreated up the ladder until he was on the wharf again. From there he looked down at us before he disappeared.
“You might get more out in the desert, lady,” he said as a parting shot. “But then, you’d get a pretty good price for a plate of ice cream in hell too.”
And with that he disappeared, and left us to face our situation.
Our deficit on the day, according to Tish, was ten dollars. In three months it would amount to nine hundred dollars. She closed her notebook with a snap.
“Unless we count intangible assets,” she said, “we shall certainly be bankrupt. Of course there is the gain in health; the salt air——”
“Health!” said Aggie feebly. “A little more of this, Tish Carberry, and Jerry will be cleaning and packing and icing and shipping something that isn’t fish.”
“Then again,” said Tish, ignoring this outburst, “we may find something unusual. There are whales about here, according to Christopher. And the oil of the whale is still used, I believe.”
But after learning from Christopher that whales ranged in size from fifty to one hundred feet, and were not caught on a line, however heavy, but with a knife thrown into some vital part, she was compelled to abandon this idea. Indeed, I do not know how we should have filled up our summer had it not been that on that very evening we received a visit from a Mr. MacDonald, who turned out to be the deputy sheriff on the island.