sn't it?"

"It'll be drowned!" exclaimed the old harpooner. "That's what'll happen
to it."

"Drowned!" cackled one of the crew. "What you givin' us, old hardshell?
Drown a whale, eh? That's like the boy that pumped water on the frog to
drown him."

"You wait and see," growled old Tom. "If that bull don't come up pretty
soon we'll have a circus with it, now I tell ye!"

The whale gave no sign. We tried hauling on the line, and of course it
wouldn't budge.

"It's sure got its feet stuck in the mud down there," admitted the
second mate, and he stood up and wigwagged frantically for the ship.

There were only four boats out and the captain himself chanced to be
aboard. He knew old Tom would not give up anything easy, and so he
brought the Scarboro into hailing distance and we told him what had
happened. We had caught a Tartar; the whale wouldn't come to the surface
and we couldn't let go without losing our line and iron. It was no use
jerking on that line. One can't play a whale like a rock bass!

We rowed to the ship and the line was carried aboard and tagged onto a
winch. We got at it right then and, before long, up came the dead body
of a whale. It was a good sized one--indeed, I thought at the start that
it was bigger looking close beside the bark than it had seemed when we
struck on.

And pretty soon we found out the reason why it seemed different. We
couldn't find the harpoon Tom Anderly had thrown into it! The line was
found jammed to the back of the whale's mouth and wound round its
body--whales will roll over and over when struck just as an old salmon
will when hooked.

That whale was drowned. A whale isn't a fish, anyway, and this one had
been under water so long that it was too late, as Ben Gibson said, to
bring forward any "first aid to the drowned" business!

What puzzled us all--from Captain Hi down to the cook's cat--was what
had become of the iron?

"And, by jingoes!" cried the second mate, "we ain't got all our line
back."

This was plainly a fact. When the whale was grappled onto the bark's
side and the line unwound, we found that it still hung down into the sea
and was quite taut.

"This blamed critter was anchored!" growled Tom Anderly. "And he dragged
his anchor at that."

"Get onto the winch, boys," said Captain Rogers. "Let's see what's hung
to it now."

We wound in the line and up came the whale that we had actually struck!
The harpoon still held in its body. Good reason why I ha