I wonder what I would do without that Ara, Thomas Hudson thought. You had a wonderful sleep, he told himself, and you couldn’t feel better. We’ve got orders and we are right on their tails and pushing them toward other people. You’re following your orders and look what a beautiful morning you have to follow them in. But things look too damned good.
They moved down the channel keeping a good lookout, but there was nothing but the calm, early morning sea with its friendly undulations and the long green line of Romano inland with the many keys between.
“They won’t sail very far in this,” Henry said.
“They won’t sail at all,” Thomas Hudson said.
“Are we going in to Antón?”
“Sure. And work all of that out.”
“I like Antón,” Henry said. “There’s a good place to lay to, if it’s calm, so they won’t eat us up.”
“Inside they’d carry you away,” Ara said.
A small seaplane showed ahead, flying low and coming toward them. It was white and minute with the sun on it.
“Plane,” Thomas Hudson said. “Pass the word to get the big flag out.”
The plane came on until it buzzed them. Then it circled them twice and went off flying on down to the eastward.
“He wouldn’t have it so good if he found one,” Henry said. “They’d shoot him down.”
“He could send the location and Cayo Francés would pick it up.”
“Maybe,” Ara said. The two other Basques said nothing. They stood back to back and searched their quadrants.
After a while the Basque they called George because his name was Eugenio and Peters could not always say Eugenio said, “Plane’s coming back to the eastward between the outer keys and Romano.”
“He’s going home to breakfast,” Ara said.
“He’ll report us,” Thomas Hudson said. “So in a month maybe everybody will know where we were at this time today.”
“If he doesn’t get the location mixed up on his chart,” Ara said. “Paredón Grande, Tom. Bearing approximately twenty degrees off the port bow.”
“You’ve got good eyes,” Thomas Hudson said. “That’s her, all right. I better take her in and find the channel in to Antón.”
“Turn port ninety degrees and I think you’ll have her.”
“I’ll hit the bank anyway and we can run along it until we find that damned canal.”
They came in toward the line of green keys that showed like black hedges sticking up from the water and then acquired shape and greenness and finally sandy beaches. Thomas Hudson came in with reluctance from the open channel, the promising sea, and the beauty of the morning on deep water, to the business of searching the inner keys. But the plane working the coast in this direction, turning to run over it with the sun behind it, should mean no one had picked the boats up to the eastward. It could be only a routine patrol, too. But it was logical that it should mean the other. A routine patrol would have been out over the channel both ways.
He saw Antón, which was well wooded and a pleasant island, growing before him and he watched ahead for his marks while he worked in toward the bank. He must take the highest tree on the head of the island and fit it squarely into the little saddle on Romano. On that bearing, he could come in even if the sun were in his eyes and the water had the glare of a burning glass.
Today he did not need it. But he did it for practice and when he found his tree, thinking, I should have something more permanent for a bearing on a hurricane coast, he eased along the bank until he fitted the tree carefully into the slot of the saddle, then turned sharp in. He was in the canal between many banks that were barely covered with water and he said to Ara, “Ask Antonio to put a feather out. We might pick up something to eat. This channel has a wonderful bar on the bottom.”
Then he steered straight in on his bearing. He was tempted not to look at the banks but to push it straight through. But then he knew that was one of the things of too much pride Ara had spoken of and he piloted carefully on the starboard bank and made his turn to starboard when it came by the banks and not by the second bearing that he had. It was like running in the regular streets of a new subdivision and the tide was racing in. It came in brown at first, then pure and clean. Just before he came into the part that he thought of as the turning basin where he planned to anchor, he heard Willie shout, “Feesh! Feesh!!” Looking astern, he saw a tarpon shaking himself high in the sun. His mouth was open and he was huge and the sun shone on his silvered scales and on the long green whip of his dorsal fin. He shook himself desperately in the sun and came down in a splash of water.
“
“Worthless
“Can I play him, Tom?” Henry asked. “I’d like to catch him even if he is no good to eat.”
“Take him from Antonio if Willie hasn’t got him. Tell Antonio to get the hell forward. I’m going to anchor.”
The excitement and the leaping of the big tarpon continued astern, with no one paying attention to it except to grin, while they anchored.