“I know Jerry,” he said. “Now you take us. Wouldn’t you think we could fish out here, and fill in our spare time? Not a bit of it. It’s my belief Jerry’s running liquor, and he won’t let a revenue boat near the wharf.”
But he had, he said, discovered a way to circumvent Jerry. He and Bill and Joe fished, all right, only they dried the fish and packed them in boxes.
“Some day,” he said, “we’ll land those fish, and old Jerry will find the market glutted. That’s all; glutted.” He had, he said, a hundred boxes in the hold already. “Only trouble is,” he went on, “we’re getting overloaded. If a big sea comes along, and one’s due most any time, they may shift, and then where are we?”
It was just before we left, I remember, that he asked us if we wouldn’t carry in a few boxes for him and land them at a cove on our island, where a friend of the captain’s was living alone. And Tish agreed at once.
I have no wish to reflect on Tish; her motive, then as later, was of the highest, and for Charlie Sands to say what he does is most ungenerous. At the same time, her reckless kindness led us into serious trouble later on, and I hope will be a lesson to her.
We not only took the boxes of fish to Al Smith, at the cove, that day, but we made repeated excursions to the revenue boat from that time on, carrying back a dozen boxes or so at a time, and taking out an occasional batch of Aggie’s doughnuts, a parcheesi game, and once a bottle of blackberry cordial.
“For mal de mer,” Tish said kindly as she presented it, and it created a profound impression. Bill and Joe seemed quite overcome, and the captain was so moved that he had to walk away and wipe his eyes.
“It’s not the gift,” he said later. “It’s the thought.”
We had naturally not told Lily May. But one day when Mr. Smith, the captain’s friend, was unpacking the boxes of fish at the cove, who should wander into sight but the child herself.
She came right up and looked at the boxes, and said, “What’s that anyhow?”