"This is fishing. Ken, did you see him when he came up?"
"Not very clearly. I had buck-fever. You know how a grouse looks when he flushes right under your feet--a kind of brown blur. Well, this was the same, only silver."
At the end of what Ken judged to be a mile the tarpon was still going. At the end of the second mile he was tired. And three miles down the river from where the fish was hooked Pepe beached the boat on a sandbar and hauled ashore a tarpon six feet ten inches long.
Here Ken echoed Hal's panting gasp of wonder and exultation. As he sat down on the boat to rest he had no feeling in his left arm, and little in his right. His knuckles were skinned and bloody. No game of baseball he had ever pitched had taken his strength like the conquest of this magnificent fish.
"Hal, we'll have some more of this fishing when we get to Tampico," said Ken. "Why, this beats hunting. You have the sport, and you needn't kill anything. This tarpon isn't hurt."
So Ken photographed his prize and measured him, and, taking a last lingering glance at the great green back, the silver-bronze sides, the foot-wide flukes of the tail, at the whole quivering fire-tinted length, he slid the tarpon back into the river.
XXII
STRICKEN DOWN
Much as Ken would have liked to go back to that pool, he did not think of it twice. And as soon as the excitement had subsided and the journey was resumed, George and Hal, and Pepe, too, settled down into a silent weariness that made Ken anxious.
During the afternoon Ken saw Pepe slowly droop lower and lower at the oars till the time came when he could scarcely lift them to make a stroke. And when Ken relieved him of them, Pepe fell like a log in the boat.