Tales of the Fish Patrol | Page 7

to justice."

"He gave himself up and stood trial," Charley answered. "It cost him
fifty thousand dollars to win the case, which he did on technicalities
and with the aid of the best lawyers in the state. Every Greek fisherman
on the river contributed to the sum. Big Alec levied and collected the
tax, for all the world like a king. The United States may be all-powerful,
my lad, but the fact remains that Big Alec is a king inside the United
States, with a country and subjects all his own."
"But what are you going to do about his fishing for sturgeon? He's
bound to fish with a 'Chinese line.'"
Charley shrugged his shoulders. "We'll see what we will see," he said
enigmatically.
Now a "Chinese line" is a cunning device invented by the people whose
name it bears. By a simple system of floats, weights, and anchors,
thousands of hooks, each on a separate leader, are suspended at a
distance of from six inches to a foot above the bottom. The remarkable
thing about such a line is the hook. It is barbless, and in place of the
barb, the hook is filed long and tapering to a point as sharp as that of a
needle. These hoods are only a few inches apart, and when several
thousand of them are suspended just above the bottom, like a fringe, for
a couple of hundred fathoms, they present a formidable obstacle to the
fish that travel along the bottom.
Such a fish is the sturgeon, which goes rooting along like a pig, and
indeed is often called "pig-fish." Pricked by the first hook it touches,
the sturgeon gives a startled leap and comes into contact with half a
dozen more hooks. Then it threshes about wildly, until it receives hook
after hook in its soft flesh; and the hooks, straining from many different
angles, hold the luckless fish fast until it is drowned. Because no
sturgeon can pass through a Chinese line, the device is called a trap in
the fish laws; and because it bids fair to exterminate the sturgeon, it is
branded by the fish laws as illegal. And such a line, we were confident,
Big Alec intended setting, in open and flagrant violation of the law.
Several days passed after the visit of Big Alec, during which Charley
and I kept a sharp watch on him. He towed his ark around the Solano

Wharf and into the big bight at Turner's Shipyard. The bight we knew
to be good ground for sturgeon, and there we felt sure the King of the
Greeks intended to begin operations. The tide circled like a mill-race in
and out of this bight, and made it possible to raise, lower, or set a
Chinese line only at slack water. So between the tides Charley and I
made it a point for one or the other of us to keep a lookout from the
Solano Wharf.
On the fourth day I was lying in the sun behind the stringer-piece of the
wharf, when I saw a skiff leave the distant shore and pull out into the
bight. In an instant the glasses were at my eyes and I was following
every movement of the skiff. There were two men in it, and though it
was a good mile away, I made out one of them to be Big Alec; and ere
the skiff returned to shore I made out enough more to know that the
Greek had set his line.
"Big Alec has a Chinese line out in the bight off Turner's Shipyard,"
Charley Le Grant said that afternoon to Carmintel.
A fleeting expression of annoyance passed over the patrolman's face,
and then he said, "Yes?" in an absent way, and that was all.
Charley bit his lip with suppressed anger and turned on his heel.
"Are you game, my lad?" he said to me later on in the evening, just as
we finished washing down the Reindeer's decks and were preparing to
turn in.
A lump came up in my throat, and I could only nod my head.
"Well, then," and Charley's eyes glittered in a determined way, "we've
got to capture Big Alec between us, you and I, and we've got to do it in
spite of Carmintel. Will you lend a hand?"
"It's a hard proposition, but we can do it," he added after a pause.
"Of course we can," I supplemented enthusiastically.

And then he said, "Of course we can," and we shook hands on it and
went to bed.
But it was no easy task we had set ourselves. In order to convict a man
of illegal fishing, it was necessary to catch him in the act with all the
evidence of the crime about him--the hooks, the lines, the