Alexander Key
The Brothers Romano
    He had no gun, nor axe. With his long fish-knife he swung, ready to leap overboard...

When they lost the shark’s fin off the masthead, trouble came to the Romanos...

    Everyone called them brothers, Manuel Romano and Mike Romano. They were of the same stamp: deep-chested and swarthy with gaunt saddle-brown faces strongly lined by sun and sea. With the grim kind of silence that comes to men who take their living from the Gulf, they seldom spoke except to each other. Strangers were afraid of them. The chill blue gaze of Manuel was like a knife thrust; Mike’s black eyes were smouldering pits. But the town understood them and loved them.
    To the town they were brothers, for you never saw one without the other. They fished together, trawled shrimp together, got drunk together. Not entirely drunk, for on Wednesdays Manuel stayed sober enough to keep Mike out of trouble and see him home. Saturdays it was Mike’s turn. They never varied the schedule, and if time passed too quickly so that you forgot the day of the week, as is apt to happen where the trade winds rustle long in the palmettos, you would know it was Wednesday night by Mike’s happy tenor. Manuel’s voice on Saturdays was deeper, broken with sudden virile expletives in Spanish.
    They were a curious mixture of bloods. Manuel was Cuban, with a strong dash of Hungarian and Greek. Mike’s mother was Italian. Everyone called them brothers, but Manuel, the blue-eyed one, was graying and he was twenty years older than Mike. He was Mike’s father.
    The town loved them, but watched them a little curiously. Hungarian and Cuban, Greek and Italian. A volatile mixture. Someday, they said, something would happen....
    But for a long time nothing did happen; for the sea was in their blood, and the sea holds a tight rein on temperaments. During the winter months you could see their sturdy powered ketch, the Tortuga, chugging in from the pass with gulls screaming in her wake and her fish hatch brimming with shrimp. The mackerel runs kept them busy after that, and then the shrimp again. But September was their month.
    The price of red snapper goes up in September. September is hurricane month. If you wanted red snapper in the fall of the year, the only place you could buy it was at Romano’s fish house. The Tortuga was barely forty feet over all – too small some said for deep water and snapper work – but she was built for weather and Manuel’s pale eyes could measure the Gulf’s changes better than a barometer. As September approached they became more silent, and then suddenly tense and strangely eager as if they had been waiting all year for this month. Once after a blow the Tortuga came in with her poles swept bare except for the shark’s fin Manuel had fastened to the main for good luck. The following season she limped in under power with no poles at all and Manuel’s arm in a sling.
    At the dock Manuel’s mouth twisted in what might have been a smile. “Madre mio, she rough,” he stated briefly. “But we breeng feesh.” His eyes, though, said that he was not interested in the catch. He had met the Gulf’s monster and beaten it again.
    He had beaten it, but at a cost. And perhaps because the shark’s fin had been lost, things went badly after this trip. Manuel’s arm needed surgical treatment and it developed that he had a wrenched shoulder and torn ligaments in his back, not to speak of several crushed ribs and possible internal injuries. The doctor marveled at his fortitude and packed him off to the hospital in Tallahassee to spend two months in a plaster cast.
    * * *
    Mike had never driven a car in his life. He bought a second-hand one, learned to drive it in an afternoon, and made the long trip every day to see Manuel. He would have stayed with him all the time, but the Tortuga was on the ways and he was busy stepping new spars and repairing the hull.
    During the long hot mornings Manuel waited restlessly until Mike came. When Mike got there he quieted. Mike fed him the ice cream he always brought and the two spent the afternoons mostly in silence, content with each other’s presence and knowing and answering each other’s thoughts with a word or two and a movement of the head. So complete was their understanding, and so much alike were they with the sea’s mark on them, that they might have been twins except for Manuel’s grayness and the deeper lines in his face. It annoyed them both when the nurse entered to check pulse and temperature. She was a pretty brunette, but Mike scowled at her interruptions, big hands clenched on the bedpost, and Manuel grew restless until she left.
    The girl was always glad to leave. “Gosh, those two!” she wailed at the interne. “It gives me the creeps just to have ’em look at me. Would you believe it – I think that black-eyed devil’s jealous every time I step in there!”
    The truth was that it enraged Mike to have a woman do for Manuel what he could not do himself. Mike’s mother had run away with an oysterman when he was ten, and in the twenty years that followed neither he nor Manuel had had much use for women.
    It was curious, therefore, that a woman should be the cause of trouble between them.
    Two months was a long time to spend away from the Tortuga, with not even a breath of the sea or the cackle of a marsh hen in the evenings. Two months was an eternity of monotony when it had to be spent puttering over new rigging and riding four hours daily in a car. One afternoon Mike came late. He was half drunk.
    Manuel was sitting up, his deep chest immense with its burden of plaster and his fingers twitching along the edges of it as if he would like to tear the thing to pieces. “We no drink on de boat,” he bit out. “You should no drink in de car.” He had never learned to speak like Mike, who was American born.
    “I drive straight,” said Mike, black eyes strangely intent on the wall. “I ain’t had a good drink since you got sick.”
    “You no t’ink o’ me. The doc, he no let me drink ’ere.”
    Mike grinned vaguely. Liquor generally broke his reserve and made him sing, but he was preoccupied today. “We’ll make up for that when you leave. I found a new place. Just opened up on the point.”
    “Yeah?” Manuel’s cast seemed suddenly about to suffocate him. “Who run him?”
    “Woman named Glory.” Mike started to make curves with his hands, then let them fall abruptly as if he had done the wrong thing. “Big woman, cuss like a man. She okay.”
    “Woman good for fun, mebbe. Dat all.”
    “Sure, but you’ll like Glory.” “When I’m drunk mebbe. Dey all good drunk.”
    “You’ll like her sober.”
    “Carrramba, go on with you! I go plum’ crrrazy in dees place. You git me out!”
    “Two more weeks,” said Mike. “I asked the doc.”
    “Bah!” growled Manuel, eying him covertly. He had missed something in Mike as soon as he appeared. He knew what it was now, and he knew the reason for it. It was something that Mike himself had not yet realized.
    * * *
    A big woman named Glory. She was an ogress who tortured Manuel’s evening and robbed his sleep. Nor was she just another fancy like the girls he and Mike sometimes had fun with when they were drunk. This was something else. “Ay mi madre,” he moaned. “I lose dat shark fin; bad luck she come. Where I catch another fin in dees place?”
    Mike’s visit the next day was brief. Glory was not mentioned, but Manuel could feel her strong in Mike’s mind. When he closed his eyes he could almost see her face, hear her chuckling laugh. It frightened him.
    On the following day, Wednesday, Mike did not come at all. Eight solid weeks ashore is an eternity, and it was Mike’s day to get drunk. He got roaring drunk in Glory’s place. To quiet him she tapped him on the head with a beer bottle and put him in her back room to sober.
    Manuel waited. By evening he had the nurse in tears, the interne boiling, and he had cursed the doctor three times to his face. That night the doctor had to give him two opiates to make him sleep. When the effect of them had worn off shortly after daylight, Manuel climbed out of bed, drew on his clothes, and slipped through the ambulance door without being seen.
    He made his way to Jarney’s bus station, a slow, painful journey because he still wore the cast and it was only during the last few days that he had been allowed on his feet a little. He waited three hours for the bus, then told Jarney to let him off at Glory’s place.
    By the time the bus got there Manuel’s back was in an agony from the two-hour ride. Jarney took one look at him and did not stop. There was trouble in Manuel’s eye; furthermore, Jarney recognized Mike’s car outside, parked in the same place where he had seen it the night before. He drove on to Manuel’s shanty, forced him to bed and sent a boy after Mike.
    Had the boy got there in time, all might have been well. But Mike, in a sudden spirit of repentance, started early for the hospital. He returned as fast as his old car would run, worried and angry by turns and knowing instinctively where he would find Manuel. When he reached home his head was still aching from Glory’s treatment, and two blowouts had not improved his disposition.
    Manuel raised up in bed when he entered, eying him eagerly, reproachfully, and then angrily. Mike glowered back. “You’re some guy!” Mike raged. “I drive all the way in to see you an’ you ain’t there! You hadn’t oughta done this – I’d a brung you home!”
    “Madre mio! I should wait for you? You no come yesterday; how I know you come today, tomorrow? You maka me seeck! Go back to your woman!”
    “I – I ain’t got no woman! You’re crazy!”
    “Sure you got woman! Don’t lie. I know all ’bout ’er.”
    “You don’t know nothin’!”
    “I know mucha plenty. She no good.”
    “Who’s been tellin’ you tales?”
    Mike had wanted to explain about yesterday, but he did not know how. It had been a new experience to meet someone like Glory, and he didn’t resent the beer bottle episode. She’d been a good sport afterward.
    His hard lips went taut under an emotion he did not understand. “You wouldn’t know,” he bit out at Manuel, acutely conscious that Manuel did know and furious at his blind intuition.
    They both understood each other too well. They glared at each other, chill blue eyes and smouldering black ones, poles that caught each other’s fury and magnified it.
    “Go to hell,” snarled Mike, and slapped him.
    “Vamos!” screamed Manuel.
    Mike slammed out of the place and a minute later Manuel heard the roar of his car. Manuel raved, calmed slowly; suddenly his lower lip trembled and he sank down on his pillows.
    “Ay, Mother of God!” he moaned. “What have I done? Boy he lonely an’ full o’ hell. Mebbe he need woman. Ay mi Madre! I get seeck an’ world no go right.” He clawed upward again and found his knife. “Diablos! It dees t’ing I wear. She make me plum’ mad; I say t’ing I no mean.” He slashed at the cast, hacked through it, began tearing it off with his good hand.
    It took him a long time, for the strength had not yet come back into the arm that had been broken. But he got the cast off, cried out once at the torture of newly-knit muscles being flexed for the first time, and then stretched out on his stomach, exhausted.
    But the sea had bred tough fibers in Manuel. He was up the next day, examining the Tortuga and cleaning out her cabin. She lay beside the dock, newly rigged and newly painted, but between decks she was as he had left her in September. He looked hopefully for a shark’s fin to fasten to the main mast – he and Mike saved them for the Chinese trade – but there were no fins among the cabin debris. Manuel cursed. “Luck no come till I catch shark. Boy no come home till then.” It was a superstition left over from his days in the Bahamas. No small fin would do. It had to be the big dorsal of a leopard shark, and he had to get it himself.
    He went to town and bought a shark hook with a chain leader, and learned from the chandler that Mike had shipped that morning on one of old Maltby’s snapper schooners, the Yellowhammer. Manuel went home, stumbling and writhing inwardly. He had no use for Maltby, and the Yellowhammer was a cranky mongrel that had succeeded in killing a man in nearly every blow she wallowed through.
    Manuel was too weak to handle sail, or to even be out in a boat alone, but he put through the pass under power and trolled for sharks all the following week. He caught sharks, but they were whites or grays; the leopards twisted off the hook before he could shoot them and the last one bit through the chain leader. Manuel hurled epithets at it, went home and took whisky money out of the hollow piling under the shanty, and got drunk. He appeared late that night at Glory’s place, and he was in a mood for anything.
    * * *
    A quart of liquor had put a devil in Manuel that had driven out all signs of illness. He bellowed for food and more whisky, and when Glory herself brought them his pale eyes gleamed.
    He had never seen her before but he knew she was Glory. A great white-aproned reddish-blond woman as tall as he was and with shoulders like a blacksmith. She was pretty in her ample way; she had a chuckle men liked and her contralto could change to a sudden shrill tone they were afraid of. Because her place was out of town and she stayed open all hours for trade, fights were frequent. She stopped them quickly with a beer bottle, a kick, or a swift right to the jaw. What her last name was few people knew, except that it had been changed several times. She liked men, partly for amusement and mostly for the money she could get out of them. What they least suspected was the daughter she kept at boarding school – her sole love and reason for existence.
    Manuel stared at her. For a moment alcohol and something in her movements turned his rage to fascination. A big, vital woman. He had never seen anything like her.
    He muttered suddenly:
    “Seet down.”
    Glory chuckled and sat down; it was good for business to get acquainted with customers, and she knew how to make them spend. She peered at Manuel. “Well for the – honest to gosh, you look enough like another guy I know to be his brother! Oh – you’re Manuel!”
    “Si,” he said, chilling. “I’m Manuel.”
    She chuckled and opened the bottle for him; meanwhile her shrewd eyes took in a great deal. “Mind if I have a nip with you? It gits a body down, bein’ on your feet all day. Where’s Mike?”
    “Why you want Mike?”
    “Heavens, man, I don’t want Mike. I just ain’t seen ’im for nigh on two weeks.”
    “You – you no want Mike?”
    She leaned back and laughed. “That’s hot. Say, what would I want with any man? I’ve had enough of ’em under my feet.” She shrugged one shoulder. “They’re all alike. They come an’ go.”
    Manuel gasped. He stood up uncertainly, a vast relief flooding through him. And then, as suddenly as a black squall can come over a placid sea, rage shook him. His fingers clamped viselike on Glory’s arm.
    “You dat she-varmint dat make ’im wild! You put devils in ’im. You —”
    Glory had handled all kinds of men in all kinds of moods. “Take it easy, big boy – take it easy.... Now,” she cooed swiftly. “Sit down an’ tell Glory all about it. You an’ Mike havin’ trouble? Tell Glory.”
    It was oil for turbulent waters. Manuel sat down. He thawed. She poured whisky into his glass and he poured out his woes. “An’ just to think,” she said softly, watching him with one eye like a cat would a canary, “I never knowed he felt that way! I guess he was lonesome, you bein’ sick an’ all—”
    She leaned closer. “You just leave it to Glory,” she purred. “I’ll put Mike right with you. I’ll bring ’im back. Here, have another drink. Wait, that bottle’s empty – I’ll bring you another.”
    “You good gal,” Manuel said thickly. “Mebbe you give me one leetle kees, eh?”
    “Sure,” said Glory. “I’m beginnin’ to like you heaps.”
    It was then that Mike came in.
    * * *
    The Yellowhammer had docked that night after a hard trip on the middle ground. Mike started straight home, his heart dictating direction. He had never been away from Manuel so long in his life. The sight of their shanty and the Tortuga’s masts rising against the starlight sent a wave of trembling over him. Suddenly he felt a suffocating pain inside, and his right hand seemed to burn. He had struck Manuel with that hand. He wished the hand would wither and drop off.
    He tiptoed to the shanty, waited outside with his mouth working soundlessly. The place was dark; maybe Manuel was in bed, ill; maybe they had sent him back to the hospital. He thrust open the door, calling.
    He turned away, finally, sought Manuel in town. Manuel would be somewhere drinking. Mike had forgotten that it was Saturday night.
    Someone told him that Manuel had been seen on the way to the point....
    Mike hurried. He was queerly cold inside now.
    Within the door of Glory’s place he stood long seconds, an icicle plunging through his vitals and a white iron searing his mind.
    And all at once he gave a cry, strangled from torment and swift-rising hate, and he was across the floor with a knife in his hand.
    Glory screamed and leapt back with the whisky bottle raised. Manuel stared stupidly, throat muscles seeking vainly to produce words.
    “Put down that knife you hyena!” Glory shrilled, and hurled the bottle. Mike ducked it. His knife point opened Manuel’s cheek from the eye to the jaw. Glory kicked and the knife went spinning. He struck at Glory but she rolled her head like a man and struck back. There was a man’s weight behind it and it sent Mike crashing against the wall.
    The taste of hot blood in his mouth brought Manuel whirling out of his chair, tigerish and sober. “You cut me,” he spat softly at Mike. “Why you do dat – when my heart have only love in eet?”
    “You dirty double-crossin’ mealy-mouthed catfish!” Mike said. “You take my woman away.”
    “I ain’t your woman!” shrilled Glory. “Git out o’ here!”
    Mike did not look at her. “Yeah,” he went on, deadly quiet, not moving. “You want my woman yourself. You turn her agin’ me. Just for that —”
    Manuel’s eyes were little points of cold steel. “Las’ time you slap me. Now you cut me. Woman, she no —”
    Mike lunged at him. The two rolled thrashing across the floor, clawing, biting, spitting blood and curses. Glory swore. She seized a chair and began to lay it upon them expertly. Mike was on top, but two minutes later Mike was in the road outside with the door locked against him. Manuel, badly battered and bleeding profusely, came to an hour later when the doctor was stitching up his cheek.
    * * *
    The town talked a great deal then. The Romanos went their separate ways, careful never to meet each other, Mike drinking on Wednesdays as usual and Manuel on Saturdays. Manuel lived on the Tortuga now, and Mike with Captain Vic Rossi, the Yellowhammer’s skipper. The town council made an effort once to close Glory’s place, but it was beyond the city limits and they were not successful. Glory laughed it off. “You’d think ’twas me set ’em to squabblin’,” she chuckled. “Say, the next time I catch either o’ them knife-totin’ lunatics in here, there’s gonna be a broken head.” She might have saved herself the breath. Neither of the Romanos ever went near her again.
    February came and went. When the weather permitted the Yelloivhammer put out to the middle ground for snapper and grouper. Captain Vic had no sons, and he had a soft heart under his surface bluster. Mike was a sailor, something that went a long way with Captain Vic. He worried over Mike’s black brooding, and liking him, sought to bring about a match with his daughter Lucia. To accomplish it he talked the Yellowhammer’s owner into putting Mike on as second in command.
    Manuel shrimped a little during the winter runs, then cursed it and began making long trips to the middle ground in all kinds of weather. He seemed to loathe the sight of land, coming in often with his ice half gone and his snapper spoiling. Sometimes he wasted entire days grimly trolling for leopard sharks. He caught sharks, but none of them were leopards. He would rave then, cut off their tails and throw them back in alive.
    These outbursts punctuated periods of vicious silence. Snapper hands grew more afraid of him. Finally they refused to ship. Manuel went alone.
    Few men would have cared to risk the open Gulf without help. Manuel felt better alone; his strength had come back and the ketch rig gave him no trouble. He spat whenever he saw the warning flags on the weather tower, and would start out in a half gale and have all sail drawing before he was through the channel. He seldom took in jib and mizzen until he was well over that great curving stretch of deep coral avenues known as the middle ground, ready to lash his wheel and ride close hauled while he fished.
    It became common talk along the waterfront, Manuel’s defiance of the weather. They wondered how long it would last, and they speculated on what would happen when he met Mike again. The Romanos had not seen each other for months.
    But in July the two ships chanced to pass each other in the channel, the Yellowhammer wallowing clumsily under the finger of a squall she was running to escape, the Tortuga slicing by like a stormy petrel eager for wind. It happened near the end of the breakwater where the channel narrowed, and they passed close – Mike at the port rail, Manuel hardly a dozen feet away at the Tortuga’s wheel. Neither one moved or said a word, but their eyes clashed across the water – chill blue eyes and smouldering black ones that locked and fought.
    Every hand on the Yellowhammer’s deck felt the impact of those glances; for days afterward they kept out of the reach of Mike’s fists. Mike had almost become his old self before this. He had even started going to the movies with Captain Vic’s Lucia. But when the Yellowhammer docked Mike quarreled bitterly with her and stayed drunk until it was time to sail again. Lucia cried as if her heart would break and Captain Vic stormed.
    * * *
    August came, bringing its sudden violent squalls and its threat of September. A blow put the old Yellowhammer on the ways for three weeks and by the time she was patched and in the water again, September was half over. The few snapper boats that ventured outside kept their radios going for weather reports and hugged the islands, ready to run back through the pass like frightened quail at the first hint of trouble. The Tortuga rode the middle ground alone, and there was still no shark’s fin at her masthead.
    But September passed with no more than a half gale, and October came in with a disarming mildness. The snapper boats put out to the banks again; stubby green and black schooners from the upper Gulf ports; former Greek spongers from the lower coast; great Cuban well schooners that could carry a live catch of fifty tons. They rode close hauled over the middle ground, scattered a few miles apart with the Tortuga and the Yellowhammer within sight of each other. More than one crew cursed the sharks that followed like wolf packs behind the ships, stripping lines.
    The snapper fisherman has a consuming hatred of the entire shark family. Be it blue shark, hammerhead, white shark or leopard, they are all the same to him. They steal his fish. When they come there is nothing to do but stow lines and seek another spot.
    Sharks were bad this fall; both the Tortuga and the Yellowhammer did more cruising than fishing. Sharks tore up Manuel’s lines. They leaped clear of the water and seized fish before they could be drawn to deck. Finally they bit off every baited hook the instant it touched the surface. Manuel tried other locations and the sharks followed. He cursed them with a slow deadly calm, used his rifle on them until he was out of ammunition, and looked up to see the Yellowhammer within hailing distance. Her men were on the foredeck, hacking a luckless gray shark to pieces in an orgy of hate.
    Manuel shook his fist at them. “Mil diablos!” he spat. “Where I go, you go! You breeng me bad luck!”
    “Git away!” Captain Vic screamed back. “You breenga da bada luck yourself!”
    “Bah! You better git away. Wind she come. Dat tub you got sink.” Captain Vic choked. “Bah, bah, bah at you! You beeg fool! Where da wind? Show me da wind!”
    “Apaga canalla!” roared Manuel, and hurled a lead sinker at him. It fell short and the two boats drifted out of earshot of each other.
    Captain Vic raged, shaking his hairy paws frenziedly. “Dama da feesh! Dama da boat! I go backa to Napoli!” He subsided finally and glared at Mike. “Da weather, you tella me. She okay mebbe?”
    Mike glowered back, muttered something under his breath and swung away. The deck cleared in front of him. He went below. Captain Vic eyed the sky, which was innocent, and followed Mike down the after hatch. Mike was listening to a radio report. The report was likewise innocent, as was the barometer. If there was weather making, it wasn’t on the Gulf.
    But an hour later, at noon, Mike growled at Captain Vic, “We ain’t got a catch yet, but I’m thinkin’ we’d better git under way.”
    Captain Vic gaped at him. Something tense and watchful had come over Mike. Mike’s narrowed eyes were fastened on the Tortuga, separated from them by two miles of gentle blue swells. Captain Vic followed his glance, frowning, and saw the Tortuga’s big mains’l come down. She drifted presently under bare poles.
    “Why he do dat?” muttered Captain Vic.
    “Why would I know?” Mike bit out savagely. “We better head for home.” “You heapa crazy,” fumed Captain Vic. “Ev’thing heapa crazy. We no catcha da feesh we go broke. We catcha da feesh.”
    Mike shrugged. “Okay.”
    The battle with the sharks started all over again.
    * * *
    Manuel had no radio, nor would he have paid any attention to reports. He snorted at the thought of weather men cooped indoors, dabbling with charts and little instruments. Plague them all! What did they know of the Gulf’s fits of temper? The Gulf was a caldron that brewed all manner of things; some of them were born titanically in a few minutes and were dead in an hour or two, never reaching the ears of men on shore. If you had been raised in the islands you learned to read your weather from the wind’s changes, the amount of mist over the moon, the subtle movements of the swells.
    It was now that Manuel showed the same tense watchfulness that had come over Mike. But under it his anger passed and he seemed calm and almost happy. He took in the mains’l, lashed everything down tight, and closed the hatches. Afterward he rolled a cigarette and smoked slowly.
    Once, when clouds began to bank high on the horizon, he started the motor and idled along for more than a half mile before he realized he had been keeping the Y ellowhammer abeam. He cursed. “Dios mio, why I do dat? Eet not my fault, ’e go on dat tub!”
    But twfice again in the next hour he ran the motor, bringing the Yellowhammer nearer. The clouds were turning to thunderheads, the swells growing lumpy. Once he glanced wistfully up at the mainmast, wishing he had a shark’s fin to fasten there. A big leopard’s fin. It had been bare for over a year.
    His eyes drifted over the swells, purpling now, and rested on a great mottied torpedo body several yards astern. He glared at it balefully. The shark stared back with its little cat eyes.
    “El diablo grande,” he muttered. “You beeg – mucha beeg.” He studied it with speculative hate. The huge spotted sharks were fiends. They were afraid of nothing on earth, even rifle bullets. They would go after a man if his feet so much as trailed in the water, rolling over in a lightning rush as no other shark did, bringing up jaws that could sever steel as well as a human body. Manuel had hooked several of them during the past few months but they had been too much for him to handle alone. This one was the largest he had ever seen.
    He spat at it. His eyes riveted covetously upon its tall dorsal fin, and the knife scar Mike had left on his cheek darkened and then turned white. He jabbed a crooked forefinger at the fin. “Dees time I git eet – if mebbe I have to cut eet off alive!”
    Suddenly he turned, threw open the hatch, and slid down to rummage through his gear for another shark hook. There were no hooks left. But his hand closed upon a harpoon head and he went on deck and fitted it with an old . gaff handle and a stout manila line. He baited a snapper hook with a whole fish, let it trail over the stern, and stood with the harpoon poised.
    * * *
    The shark remained motionless, watching Manuel. Manuel swore at it softly. “Clavos de Cristo – you black-spotted son of a thousand devils! What for you no eat ? Or mebbe you want me to put myself on de hook, eh? By —”
    There was a flash of movement, a white column of spray, and shark and bait were gone before the harpoon descended. Manuel watched it come back and settle where it had been before.
    He dangled another fish over the stern. The action was repeated and he missed again. His eyes became icy slits. “T’ree, four time, I git you. You eat feesh, soon you not so fast. Then I slit your white belly when you turn over.”
    He did it on the third attempt. The steel bit deep and the gaff handle snapped under the explosive shock that followed. But the line was fastened to the harpoon. It smoked out across the rail, jerked taut, and the Tortuga heeled sharply.
    When the brute turned Manuel flipped the slack over the bitts. He roared his hate at it, crying and cursing and sometimes laughing as he strained with all his great strength to take in more line.
    In a half hour he had it almost under the transom – a threshing, viciously lunging fury that churned the green brine to a bloody froth and threatened every second to snap the rope or tear loose from the steel. Manuel gave one quick glance over the deck. The rifle was empty. The ax was nowhere in sight. And there was no other harpoon.
    He jerked the long fish-knife from his belt and leaped over the stern, directly upon the big triangular dorsal. Churning spray smothered him. The rough hide scraped flesh from his arms. He hung on and slashed deep with his knife. The shark spun clear and its tail slapped the water with a sound like a pistol shot. Manuel was thrown a dozen feet. He came up swimming, the knife in one hand and the big dorsal fin between his teeth, and struck out with all his remaining strength for the Tortuga’s bow.
    Other sharks had been attracted by the blood. Manuel could hear a horrible lashing and snapping coming from the stern. He whirled once and stabbed at something that streaked close, then reached the bobstay safely and drew himself on deck. He roared exultantly when he had lashed the big fin to the mast, and with both fists shook his defiance at the black skies. “Blow!” he screamed. “Blow!” He reeled suddenly and sound died in his throat.
    The Tortuga was rising and falling with a queer motion, though the line over her stern was now hanging slack. The swells were no longer swells; they had lost direction and the water rose in dark heaving mounds as if some great force strove to suck it upward. Driving rain squalls had thrown a loop of black entirely around the horizon. The sun shot fanlike through the swifttumbling clouds, making the sea’s circle a kaleidoscope of tossing blue, green and purple in a hundred changing shades.
    Swinging through a rain veil a :able’s length away, sail cracking in the sudden whirling gusts, was the Yellowhammer. Between them, rowing furiously, was a man in one of the Yellowhammer’s boats. It was Mike.
    Mike looked over his shoulder as he came nearer, saw Manuel, and abruptly feathered his oars. “You —” he burst out. “You fool! I saw you go in after that varmint – but I didn’t see you come out. What you mean, leavin’ the Tortuga that way?”
    “Dios mio! She my boat – I do what I please!”
    “You crazy loon, I helped build 'er! She’s part mine! You might a lost ’er!”
    “Vamos! Go back where you belong !”
    “I’ll break your —” Wind and sudden rain drowned his voice. The small boat upended violently and crashed down. Mike was thrown across the thwarts. A geysering wave tossed him again. The Yellowhammer, a moment ago so near, was blotted out entirely.
    * * *
    Manuel caught up a mooring line and heaved it at Mike. Mike grabbed for it, not because he wanted to, but because he was in the water now and the capsized boat was beyond reach. And there was imminent danger of sharks.
    Before the dark fins knifed toward him he was drawn quickly over the Tortuga’s side. He stumbled across the unsteady deck, spewing brine and incoherent oaths, and whirled on Manuel with his jaw outthrust. “I – I didn’t ask you to pull me in! I don’t like the stinkin’ sight o’ you! Start the motor; take me back!”
    Manuel flung the bunched line in his face. “I no ask you to come! Bah! You wanna cut de other cheek now?” He jabbed a trembling finger at his scar. “Go ’head, cut eet! Cut eet!” Mike spat at him. Manuel’s fist smashed through the rain. They rolled together over the tangle of ropes and crashed against the after house. The Tortuga shuddered, plunged, and the stinging rain suddenly became a Niagara of solid water that cascaded the length of the starboard rail.
    Manuel heaved upward, stared. “She spout!” he screamed. “She spout all over!”
    Mike spun to his feet, everything forgotten but the Tortuga’s peril. “Take the wheel,” he snapped, and threw himself down the hatch to start the motor.
    It took them both, working in tight-lipped coordination, to shuttle the ketch back and forth in the zones of safety. The loop of black squalls circling the horizon had lifted, lifted high, and it was now a monstrous snake of destruction with a writhing tail flung far over the Gulf. From it little spinning black lines dropped downward like dripping paint. The lines gained size as they dropped, became living five-hundred-foot columns of water as they touched the sea. Still they grew, and, swelling to the limits of the little hurricanes that bore them, bent and toppled like Gargantuan smokestacks dynamited by the gods. Waterspouts. Grand, awesome, and most terrible of all the Gulf’s offerings.
    Manuel counted nine of them within the area of his vision. When a way seemed clear to the open water beyond, the black tail curled and dropped a new spout in the Tortuga’s path, churning acres of leaping swells into a slithering maelstrom. Manuel roared his contempt. He had forgotten the Yellozvhammer. When he saw her she was a mile off the port quarter, her foremast gone and her mains’l still up and drawing.
    Mike sighted her and cried out. Manuel twirled the wheel. A schooner is beyond control when there is canvas on her main and her foresails are carried away.
    “He fool,” cried Manuel. “He should no try sail in dees t’ing.”
    “He had to,” Mike snapped. “Engine’s no good.” He spun down the hatch, stepped up the Tortuga’s motor until the deck trembled, hurtled back, and groaned.
    A heaving black curtain had overtaken the schooner. When it passed there was no sign of her.
    “Dios mio!” they exclaimed together. “Dios mio!”
    It took the Tortuga a long time to reach the spot, for she had to fight and dodge her way along for nearly double the actual distance. When she got there nothing was to be seen but a few pieces of splintered wreckage and a grim patrol of sharks.
    For a half hour they cruised around the spot.
    Neither spoke.
    Thunder crashed in a requiem, rain poured in blinding torrents, stopped suddenly, and the evening sun sliced the heavens. The whole thing had come and gone in two brief hours. The Gulf quieted as if her outburst had never been, smiled her sweet smile of treachery and bathed her face in a million sunset colors.
    Mike rubbed his jaw and swallowed. “Captain Vic, he—” Mike looked away, throat too tight for speech.
    “He – he good man,” Manuel said softly. “Ver’ good man. Eet no right.”
    Mike shook his head and spoke savagely :
    “That tub they gave him wasn’t fit to go out.”
    “Gracias a Dios,” Manuel breathed fervently. “I glad you come here. I very glad.”
    “There’s Lucia,” Mike said after awhile. “She – she’s all alone now.”
    Manuel nodded.
    “Lucia good girl.”
    Mike looked at him suddenly, almost pleading. “She – I – you think mebbe—”
    “All men need good woman sometime. But—” Manuel stopped, went on uneasily. “You – you t’ink mebbe she no care if we git drunk together? Woman funny ’bout dat.”
    “Aw, she won’t care. She’ll look out after us.”
    “Bueno! We got shark fin now. Mebbe wind she blow fair.” He took a deep breath and went to help Mike set the canvas.

    1938
    (Argosy, vol. 279, #2, January 29, pp.52-63)

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