"Right between the eyes."

After the lobsters were bailed out, Jim and Budge went on board the smack. Captain Higgins weighed the heaping tub of sh.e.l.l-fish.

"One hundred and seventy pounds. Market price 's twenty-five."

He glanced inquiringly at Jim.

"All right!" agreed the latter.

"Then we'll put 'em in the well."

He lifted off a hatch aft of the scale, opening into a compartment containing something over three feet of water; it was twelve feet long and thirteen wide, and divided into two parts by a low part.i.tion running lengthwise of the sloop. Two water-tight bulkheads separated it from the rest of the boat, and several hundred inch-and-a-quarter holes, bored through its bottom to allow free access to the water outside, gave it the appearance of a pepper-box. It already contained hundreds of live lobsters.

Picking the sh.e.l.l-fish carefully from the tub, Jim and the captain dropped them, one by one, into the well. Soon all were safely transferred to their new quarters, and the hatch was replaced. Captain Higgins invited Jim and Budge down into his little den of a cabin.

Unlocking an iron box, he took from it a wallet and began counting out bills.

"Forty-two dollars and a half!"

He pa.s.sed the amount over to Jim.

"You carry quite a sum of ready money, Captain," said Lane.

"Yes; I have to. This business is cash on the nail. My boat can take over twelve thousand pounds of lobsters, and sometimes she's almost filled. I've started out with three thousand dollars in that box, and I rarely go with less than two thousand. It'd surprise you to figure up the amount of cash these smacks spread along the coast. They say that one winter, when lobsters were specially high, a Portland dealer paid a smackman over fifty-five hundred dollars for a single trip."

"Somebody must make a big profit. Think what a lobster costs in a market!"

"Somebody does--sometimes. But it isn't the smackmen. Lobsters ought not to be kept in a well longer than a few days. A friend of mine started out from Halifax with ten thousand pounds of Cape Breton lobsters. He got caught in a gale of wind and lost forty-seven hundred pounds before he landed in Boston. Some years ago a Maine dealer put one hundred and five thousand lobsters in a pound during May and June; he fed them chiefly on herring, and the total cost was over ten thousand dollars.

Things went wrong and he took out just two hundred and fifty-four live ones. Not much profit about that!"

Arranging to call near noon the next Thursday, Captain Higgins had soon rounded Brimstone Point and was on his way to Head Harbor on Isle au Haut, his next stopping-place. In the middle of the afternoon, while the boys were baiting trawls on the _Barracouta_, another boat chugged into the cove. It was a smack from Boston.

"Got any lobsters, boys?" asked the captain, a red-faced, smooth-shaven man of forty.

"All sold!" was Jim's reply. "And we've arranged to let the _Calista_ have what we get."

"What do you do with your 'shorts'?"

"Heave 'em overboard."

"Save 'em for me and I'll give you ten cents apiece for 'em."

"Nothing doing!"

"You and your crowd could clean up fifty dollars more a week here just as well as not. What are you afraid of? The warden can't get out here once in a dog's age."

"The State of Maine doesn't have to hire any warden to keep me honest."

"You're a fool, young fellow!" said the man, heatedly.

"That may be," retorted Jim, "but your saying so doesn't make me one.

Besides, I'd rather be a fool than a crook."

The smackman's red face grew redder.

"Don't you get fresh with me!" he warned, threateningly. "Do you mean to say I'd do anything crooked?"

"You're the best judge about that."

Jim was tiring of the conversation. He turned his back on the stranger and resumed baiting his trawl. Finding that nothing was to be gained by a longer stop, the man, muttering angrily, started his engine and left the cove.

"I'm not saying whether this lobster law's a good thing or not," said Jim to the other boys. "Some fishermen say it isn't. But so long as it's the law it ought to be kept, until we can get a better one. I don't believe in breaking it just for the sake of making a few dollars."

"Then the law doesn't suit everybody," ventured Throppy.

"Not by a long shot! Each session of the Legislature they fight it over, and make some changes, and then a new set of people are dissatisfied.

What's meat to one man is poison to another. It's impossible to pa.s.s a law somebody wouldn't find fault with."

"What keeps one man from pulling another man's traps?" asked Percy.

"His conscience, if he has any; and, if he hasn't, his dread of being found out. It's a mean kind of thieving, but more or less of it's done alongsh.o.r.e. Sometimes it costs a man dear. I know of two cases, within twenty-five miles of this island, where men have been shot dead for that very thing. About as unhealthy as stealing horses out West, if you're caught. Like everything else, now and then it has its funny side. Once a lobsterman lost his watch, chain and all; for a day or two he was asking everybody he met if they'd seen it. A neighbor of his went out to pull his own traps. In one of them he found the first man's watch, hanging by its chain to the door, just where it had been caught and twitched out of its owner's pocket when he had slid the trap overboard, after stealing the lobsters in it. It was a long time before he heard the last of that."

"Did he get his watch back?" asked Percy.

"Don't know!" replied Jim. "But if he didn't it served him right."

On the _Barracouta's_ next trip to Matinicus she brought back the balance of Throppy's wireless outfit. It did not take him long to get his plant in working order. Almost every evening thereafter he spent a short time picking up messages from pa.s.sing steamers and the neighboring islands, and sending others in return. The wireless came to fill an important place in the life of the boys on Tarpaulin, furnishing a bond of connection between them and the outside world.

VIII

SALT-WATER GIPSIES

A few mornings after the first call of the _Calista_ Budge and Percy were out pulling traps. Percy had told Jim plainly that he did not care to do any more trawling. Jim had smiled and made no reply; but after that either Throppy or Budge went out with him after hake. What the others said in private about Percy he neither knew nor cared.

On this particular forenoon the lobster-catchers had half circled the island. As they nosed along the northern sh.o.r.e Percy spied some strange-looking floats ahead.

"There's a red buoy!" he exclaimed. "Somebody else must be fishing here!"

Incredulously Budge glanced forward. What he saw left him sober.

"You're right! This'll be unpleasant news for Jim."

They ran up to the strange float. It was a battered wedge, painted a faded brick color. Percy gaffed it aboard.

"What's the brand?" queried Budge.