THE smoking-room steward yawned his despair. The card parties had broken up half an hour before, nightcap drinks had been ordered, tumblers had been emptied, and half a dozen men had risen to their feet with “Good night” upon their lips. It looked as if the long-suffering attendant were to be allowed a real six hours’ sleep below.
And then a single word—“fishing”—had changed all these bright prospects in the twinkling of an eye. The globe-trotting Englishman, Mathers, was vaunting the fifty-six-pound salmon he had caught in the Sands River, British Columbia. It seemed that not a man in the room could take to his bed in peace till he had confuted the boaster from stores of personal experience. Fresh cigars were lit, tumblers were refilled, and story climbed upon story in unctuous mendacity.
Muller, the German bagman, bumbled tales of Baltic sturgeon that would make two bites of the British Columbian salmon if they encountered them after breakfast time; Morehead, fresh from Florida, smiled superiorly as he told of one-hundred-and-fifty-pound tarpon, caught with a line and rod, of the weight of a walking-cane; Rivaz, the creole, asked what was the matter with a two-hundred-weight tuna that it should score second place to what was nothing more than a glorified herring? Across the clouds of smoke romance answered to romance; falsehood was fought with its own weapons.
Finally Morehead, abandoning his earliest illustration, harked back to the land from which it was drawn. Alligators—had any one of them enjoyed the sport of hanging a looped line over an alligator run, and opening a manhole through the earth upon their lairs? That was fishing if you liked, with the odds upon the fish! Till you had joined in the tug which yanked a fighting saurian ashore you didn’t know what human muscles could stand—you might go shark-fishing every day of your life, and miss learning it.
The suddenness of the topic left him, for the moment, master of the field. Professional liars, hurriedly reviewing their conversational equipments, found themselves with no better weapon than an already over-tempered imagination. None of them had been in Florida—none could supply the substratum of fact which alone is a true foundation for convincing fiction.
Then a new voice shattered the periods of Morehead’s triumph. In the corner, with one foot banked against the table and the other stretched across the lounge, sat a long and lanky graybeard, his extended limbs giving him something of the effect of a pair of human compasses. So far he had added nothing to the conversation.
“Say, now, my dear sir,” he drawled plaintively, “you know you have not got any real alligators in Florida.”
The young man’s face grew purple.
“Not got any!” he blared. “Not got any!”
“Not to call alligators!” persisted the veteran complacently. “What, now, would be your idea of the length, breadth and jaw-capacity of one of your little pets?”