Tish Plays the Game by Mary Roberts Rinehart

any more fish?”
    “What kind of fish?” a voice replied from back in the shed.
    The man squinted again at our catch.
    “Looks like succotash to me,” he called.
    Jerry came out and stared down at us, and then slowly descended the ladder to the boat. He had a mean face, Tish says, and he made us about as welcome as the bubonic plague. He said nothing, but picked out six haddock and handed them up to the man above.
    “Thirty cents,” he said.
    “I’m paying sixty in the market,” Tish protested.
    “Thirty-five,” he repeated, and started up the ladder.
    “Forty,” said Tish firmly.
    “Look here,” he said with bitterness, “all you’ve had to do is to catch those fish. That’s easy; the sea’s full of ’em. What have I got to do? I’ve got to clean ’em and pack ’em and ice ’em and ship ’em. I’m overpaying you; that’s what I’m doing.”
    “What am I going to do with the others?” Tish demanded angrily. “Seventy pounds of good fish, and half the nation needing food.”
    “You might send it to Congress,” he suggested. “They say it’s good for the brain—phosphorus.”
    “You must eat a great deal of fish!” said Tish witheringly.
    “Or,” he said, brightening, “take it home to the cat. There’s nothing a cat will get real worked up about like a nice mess of fish.”
    He then went up the ladder, leaving us in speechless fury. But Tish recovered quickly and began figuring again. “Six haddock at seven pounds each,” she said. “Forty-two pounds at thirty-five cents per pound, or about fourteen dollars. At least we’ve made our expenses. And of course we can eat some.”
    Aggie, who had felt the motion severely coming in, raised herself from the bottom of the boat at this, and asked for another sip of cordial.
    “They smell,” she wailed, and fell back again.
    “All perfectly healthy fish smell,” said Tish.
    “So does a healthy skunk,” said Aggie, holding her handkerchief to her nose, “but I don’t pretend to like it.”
    And then Jerry came down the ladder and handed Tish a quarter and a five-cent piece!
    “There you are,” he said cheerfully. “One of them’s a bit wormy, but we say here that a wormy fish is a healthy fish.”
    I draw a veil over the painful scene that followed. That fish house paid two-thirds of a cent a pound for fish, no more and no less, and the more Tish raged the higher Jerry retreated up the ladder until he was on the wharf again. From there he looked down at us before he disappeared.
    “You might get more out in the desert, lady,” he said as a parting shot. “But then, you’d get a pretty good price for a plate of ice cream in hell too.”
    And with that he disappeared, and left us to face our situation.
    Our deficit on the day, according to Tish, was ten dollars. In three months it would amount to nine hundred dollars. She closed her notebook with a snap.
    “Unless we count intangible assets,” she said, “we shall certainly be bankrupt. Of course there is the gain in health; the salt air—”
    “Health!” said Aggie feebly. “A little more of this, Tish Carberry, and Jerry will be cleaning and packing and icing and shipping something that isn’t fish.”
    “Then again,” said Tish, ignoring this outburst, “we may find something unusual. There are whales about here, according to Christopher. And the oil of the whale is still used, I believe.”
    But after learning from Christopher that whales ranged in size from fifty to one hundred feet, and were not caught on a line, however heavy, but with a knife thrown into some vital part, she was compelled to abandon this idea. Indeed, I do not know how we should have filled up our summer had it not been that on that very evening we received a visit from a Mr. MacDonald, who turned out to be the deputy sheriff on the island.
    Aggie was still far from well that night. She said the floor kept rising and falling, and at dinner several times she had clutched at her plate to keep it