a big, vicious splash half a mile
east, and we made for it. Then I soon espied the fish.

We worked around him awhile, but he would not take a barracuda or a
flying-fish.

It was hard to keep track of him, on account of rough water. Soon he
went down.

Then a little later I saw what Dan called a Marlin. He had big flippers,
wide apart. I took him for a broadbill.

We circled him, and before he saw a bait he leaped twice, coming about
half out, with belly toward us. He looked huge, but just how big it was
impossible to say.

After a while he came up, and we circled him. As the bait drifted round
before him--twenty yards or more off--he gave that little wiggle of the
tail sickle, and went under. I waited. I had given up hope when I felt
him hit the bait. Then he ran off, pretty fast. I let him have a long
line. Then I sat down and struck him. He surged off, and we all got
ready to watch him leap. But he did not show.

He swam off, sounded, came up, rolled around, went down again. But we
did not get a look at him. He fought like any other heavy swordfish.

In one and one-half hours I pulled him close to the boat, and we all saw
him. But I did not get a good look at him as he wove to and fro behind
the boat.

Then he sounded.

I began to work on him, and worked harder. He seemed to get stronger all
the time.

"He feels like a broadbill, I tell you," I said to Captain Dan.

Dan shook his head, yet all the same he looked dubious.

Then began a slow, persistent, hard battle between me and the fish, the
severity of which I did not realize at the time. In hours like those
time has wings. My hands grew hot. They itched, and I wanted to remove
the wet gloves. But I did not, and sought to keep my mind off what had
been half-healed blisters. Neither the fish nor I made any new moves, it
all being plug on his part and give and take on mine. Slowly and
doggedly he worked out toward the sea, and while the hours passed, just
as persistently he circled back.

Captain Dan came to stand beside me, earnestly watching the rod bend and
the line stretch. He shook his head.

"That's a big Marlin and you've got him foul-hooked," he asserted. This
statement was made at the end of three hours and more. I did not agree.
Dan and I often had arguments. He always tackled me when I was in some
such situation as this--for then, of course, he had the best of it. My
brother Rome was in the boat that day, an intensely interested observer