Did you ever try to move a whale? I sat in that skiff and got so mad I had to screw my eyes shut to keep from crying. The crowd on shore began to give me a razz, and the crew of the fishing-boat kept yelling: “Where you want this whale put? You don’t say something pretty soon, we’re going off and leave him.” I was just getting ready to tell them they could take their whale and boil him for glue, if they wanted to, but when I opened my eyes I didn’t say it. Because I was looking square at a way to get the whale into the pool, and it came to me I would get more satisfaction out of it, when I finally got a chance to cuss out Mort, if he couldn’t say the job had got my goat. It wasn’t anything but a tramp steamer, tied up to the steel pier about a mile away, but I knew it must have a winch on it, and it gave me an idea I thought might work.
“You take that whale,” I said, “and tow him to the pier. Lay near the steamer, and I’ll be there and tell you what to do next.”
They wanted twenty-five extra for that, and I paid them and went ashore. I called up a guy that had a truck with a big trailer on it, that he used to haul lumber, and told him to go down to the pier with it. I bought me a couple hundred feet of two-inch hemp hawser, and a couple rolls of one-inch rope, and I sent them down. I rounded up ten bums that didn’t have any more sense, and I sent them down. Then I got into a cab and went down myself to look things over.
There was plenty to look at, all right. My ten bums were there, and my truck and trailer, and my hawser and rope, and about two thousand people, and the Boy Scout band, that had been practicing for Fourth of July, and did one good deed anyhow when they quit blowing their horns and went down to see the whale. He was just coming in under the bows of the ship; and when I saw him, I knew I better get a move on. Because the net, that had been all around him before, had worked up on him like a nightshirt does on a fat man, until all that was holding him was big bunches around the head and flukes.
But Captain Jennings, the skipper, snapped into it pretty quick to help me out, and in a few minutes he and his Finns had made a running noose out of my hawser, and we had two boats over, he in the bow of one and I in the bow of the other, and we were creeping up on the whale. He had a chain link on the noose, to spread it under water, and a float on the free end, just in case we lost it overboard — and it looked like we might make it. The Finns had shipped their oars and were using them as paddles, and we weren’t making a sound. We got to within twenty feet of him, to ten feet, to five feet; then we were up even, and the noose was just going past his tail.
Then I saw Captain Jennings look up. There were a bunch of people in boats, by that time, watching the show, and one of them, a guy in an old clinker-built launch, had drifted within a couple of feet of my boat, and in a second we would hit. He had a camera and was taking pictures. I found out afterward he was a newspaper photographer. I looked at the Captain, and the Captain looked at me. We were afraid to speak, on account of the whale. And when the guy seemed to wake up he was in a pretty bad spot himself. He reached out, caught the stern of my boat, and pushed himself back. The Captain yelled, but it was too late. Because half of that push sent him back, and the other half sent me ahead, and that meant right into the whale.
If he had thrown a spike into a buzz-saw, he couldn’t have stirred things up quicker. Next thing I knew, I was in the water, and I thought it was Niagara Falls, the way it was churning around. I came up, saw a big tail swirling over me, and ducked under. Something hit the water so hard I thought my ears would pop. I came up again, saw the boat bottom-up about three feet away, grabbed for it, missed, and went under again. Something hit my leg an awful wallop. It stood me on my ear so bad I didn’t know which was up and which was down and I began to grab wild. I felt something in my hand, and held on. It was a bumper the crew of the fishing boat had thrown out. They pulled me in, and I stood on deck and looked around.
It was a shambles, all right. Both boats were floating bottom-up, and around them were oars, lifeboats and seats. Finns were climbing out on both sides of the fishing-boat. But what broke your heart was the whale. That last flurry was all he needed. The net was hardly holding him at all now, and he seemed to feel he was pretty near loose, because he kept jerking and fighting, and you could see it was just a matter of minutes.
Captain Jennings stepped up beside me, all wet, and it did my heart good to hear that man cuss. But then he began to yell at another boat the ship had put out to gather up the wreckage. “Look,” he says to me. “It’s got him! The hawser is on his tail!”
I looked, and our float, on the end of the noose, bobbed up for a second and then went under. We jumped in the boat and began to grab for it. It was like trying to catch a frog in a slippery bathtub. Every time we would get to where it was, it would come whip under again, and we wouldn’t have any idea where it would come up. And all the time they were yelling from the pier, and the fishing-boat, and everywhere, that the net was almost gone and he was going to break loose.
We didn’t get it. We never would have got it. But then something flashed down from the pier and cut the water not five feet from the boat. It was this girl, this Mabel Dixon that did the live act in the pool. She was up there with the rest, saw it was an under-water job, and went right over. In a second or two, there was the float, about five feet under, and her red cap beside it, where she was wrestling the hawser. We pulled it in, and her with it.
“He’s loose! The net is gone!”
We went boiling out to sea about fifty miles an hour, then slammed down on the seats and stopped with a jerk, because they had kept the falls swinging over us all the time, and Captain Jennings had thrown the hawser over the hook. There was just enough slack to bend it and catch the end under, and then, thank god, I heard the steam go in the winch.
The first pull left him half in and half out of the water, because our hawser was so long that was as far as the boom could lift. But we got another loop on him, a short one, and they dropped another falls to finish the job. Captain Jennings gave the word, and up he went, across the deck, his blow-hole going like the pop-valve of a locomotive, and both flukes fanning the air like propeller-blades. The crowd cheered, and it was a sight to see, all right; but I didn’t have time to look at it.
I scrambled across the ship to the pier, backed my trailer in, and had them let him down until his head was just touching. Then I had them lower him an inch at a time, and as he came down, I had my ten bums rope him. It was ticklish work, because those flukes were nothing to monkey with. But we got done pretty quick, all except his tail, and I had to let that hang down because the trailer was too short and I had nothing to rope it to. So we started out. First came the Boy Scout band, that came to life and began to play “Shine, Little Glow Worm.” Then came me. Then came the truck, going slow and backfiring about every six feet. Then came the whale, blowing like he would explode, and smashing the ground with his tail. Then came my ten bums. Then came the two thousand people. We were a hot-looking parade, and sounded like a reunion of the field artillery.
When we got to the pool, things were going on pretty lively. Out back was a truck, putting up a strip of canvas all around, that had been around the Wild West show. Out front were a couple of roustabouts from the Wild West show, and a bunch of cops, yelling at a big crowd of people, trying to make them get in line. And up top was another pair, hoisting up a big sign that read like this: