Argosy, September 1955 — page 16: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Cai ei Me “ate fi > ' ia ae EM ys Cte bok x it yapAt we i4 KEM BENNETT Alice Pascoe spent the day in the coastguard’s hut above Fowey harbour, having left her children in the care of a neighbour. By half past six in the evening Albert was very tired. He had tied a loop of cord round his wrist and fastened the other end to one of the spokes of the Alice’s wheel, so that the tugging of the wheel would awaken him if he chanced to sleep. The wind had lessened. The waves no longer showed white caps. ‘The Alice rode the swell with a neat, swooping motion that would have unravelled the stomach of a landsman but which Albert found soothing. In spite of his tiredness he was glad— glad to be going home, glad to be alive, even glad, in a way that he did not fully understand, that the strangers had robbed him of his promised fifty pounds. He up-ended his ketchup bottle for the last time at six-thirty- five, stared regretfully at its utter emptiness and-pitched it over the side. Dusk was coming down as he sighted the landmark of the Gribbin, a peak of. black and yellow cliff two or three miles west of Fowey. He left the wheel for a moment then, and went to stoop in the cabin entrance in order to light his pipe. It was when he straightened, puffing hard, that he saw the first porpoises. Three of their black backs wheeled a few yards away, the triangular dorsal fins cutting up, over, and down again into the water in a movement of slow poetry. And ahead of the gliding porpoises'a great salmon leaped. More porpoises wheeled. Another salmon broke the surface; then a third and a fourth—and the fourth was so close to the Alice that it almost jumped inboard. Like a man in a dream, Albert flipped the throttles down and went to the cabin. After rummaging for a few seconds, he found the thing he was looking for, a rusty old gaff on the end of a six- foot pole. He went to the side of the boat and leaned over, staring fixedly down into the water. Porpoises and salmon showed nearby but he did not raise his head, , Then there came a gleam of silver and a splash right under the lee of the almost stationary boat, Albert struck, his hands as skilled with the gaff as the hands of a pianist on the keyboard. He felt the gaff bite, and he gave a great heave, staggering back- wards into the well of the boat. He stared down with happy incredulity at the full-grown, twenty-pound cock salmon that he had snatched from the beaks of the porpoises. Then alarm struck at him. Herbert Whiteway. Fifty pound or three months. He glanced about him. The sea was deserted. Arrh, who could have seen? | COMMIEOOKS COME