, bewildering that I could think
of nothing but to hold on. Then the water split with a hissing sound to
let out a great tarpon, long as a door, seemingly as wide, who shot
up and up into the air. He wagged his head and shook it like a
struggling wolf. When he fell back with a heavy splash, a rainbow,
exquisitely beautiful and delicate, stood out of the spray, glowed,
paled, and faded.

[Illustration: SAVALO, OR SILVER KING]

[Illustration: THESE WILD FOWL HAVE THE WONDERFUL BEAUTY AND SPEED OF
FALCONS]

Five times he sprang toward the blue sky, and as many he plunged down
with a thunderous crash. The reel screamed. The line sang. The rod,
which I had thought stiff as a tree, bent like a willow wand. The silver
king came up far astern and sheered to the right in a long, wide curve,
leaving behind a white wake. Then he sounded, while I watched the line
with troubled eyes. But not long did he sulk. He began a series of
magnificent tactics new in my experience. He stood on his tail, then on
his head; he sailed like a bird; he shook himself so violently as to
make a convulsive, shuffling sound; he dove, to come up covered with
mud, marring his bright sides; he closed his huge gills with a slap and,
most remarkable of all, he rose in the shape of a crescent, to
straighten out with such marvelous power that he seemed to actually
crack like a whip.

After this performance, which left me in a condition of mental
aberration, he sounded again, to begin a persistent, dragging pull which
was the most disheartening of all his maneuvers; for he took yard after
yard of line until he was far away from me, out in the Panuco. We
followed him, and for an hour crossed to and fro, up and down, humoring
him, responding to his every caprice, as if he verily were a king. At
last, with a strange inconsistency more human than fishlike, he returned
to the scene of his fatal error, and here in the mouth of the smaller
stream he leaped once more. But it was only a ghost of his former
efforts--a slow, weary rise, showing he was tired. I could see it in the
weakening wag of his head. He no longer made the line whistle.

I began to recover the long line. I pumped and reeled him closer.
Reluctantly he came, not yet broken in spirit, though his strength had
sped. He rolled at times with a shade of the old vigor, with a pathetic
manifestation of the temper that became a hero. I could see the long,
slender tip of his dorsal fin, then his broad ta