Short Stories
knowledge that Big Alec was as willing to bribe as to fight,
and that of late years more than one patrolman had handled
the fisherman's money.
"Do you mean to say - " Carmintel began, in a bullying
tone.
But Charley cut him off shortly. "I mean to say nothing," he
said. "You heard what I said, and if the cap fits, why—"
He shrugged his shoulders, and Carmintel glowered at
him, speechless.
"What we want is imagination," Charley said to me one
day, when we had attempted to creep upon Big Alec in the
gray of dawn and had been shot at for our trouble.
And thereafter, and for many days, I cudgelled my brains
trying to imagine some possible way by which two men, on an
open stretch of water, could capture another who knew how to
use a rifle and was never to be found without one. Regularly,
every slack water, without slyness, boldly and openly in the
broad day, Big Alec was to be seen running his line. And what
made it particularly exasperating was the fact that every fisher-
man, from Benicia to Vallejo knew that he was successfully defy-
ing us. Carmintel also bothered us, for he kept us busy among
the shad-fishers of San Pablo, so that we had little time to spare
on the King of the Greeks. But Charley's wife and children lived
at Benicia, and we had made the place our headquarters, so that
we always returned to it.
"I'll tell you what we can do," I said, after several fruitless
weeks had passed; "we can wait some slack water till Big Alec
has run his line and gone ashore with the fish, and then we can
go out and capture the line. It will put him to time and expense
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