"Another coil of rope!" Pieter said, pouncing on it.

Hans, who had grinned happily with each new find, did not even look around. Ramsay looked at him questioningly. Anything but stolid, the Dutch fisherman had been bubbling over at the prospect of going fishing again. Now he seemed melancholy, immersed within himself, and his whole attention was given to the lake.

Ramsay followed his gaze, but saw little. True, a vast number of small aquatic worms had been washed ashore by the pounding waves. There must have been countless millions of them, so many that they formed a living carpet as far up the beach as the waves had washed. The wriggling, writhing mass was now disentangling itself, and the worms that could were crawling back into the lake. A number of sea gulls and a number of land birds were gorging themselves, and new birds arrived by the flock.

They scarcely made a dent in the multitude of worms. Ramsay looked again at Hans Van Doorst.

"Never, never!" the fisherman breathed.

Pieter, too, swung to look curiously at him. "What's the matter, Hans?"

"I went on the lake when I was a boy of thirteen," Hans Van Doorst said.

"That was fourteen years ago, in 1852. I thought I had seen much, but never have I seen this!"

"What?" Ramsay asked impatiently.

"Look around you," Hans said. "What do you see?"

"Worms."

"Not worms! Food for whitefish! With these millions washed up, can you not imagine the vast amount remaining in the water? We are all rich men!"

"You think so?" Pieter queried.

"There is no doubt of it! The whitefish go where their food is! There must be countless tons of whitefish here at your very door step, and here is where we shall fish!"

"Do whitefish eat only worms?" Ramsay asked.

"No. They feed on other things, too, notably their own spawn or that of other fish. But enough of this idle talk! I must have a net so we can start fishing at once! Pieter, I would borrow your horse and cart!"

"The cart you may have," Pieter said. "The horse belongs to Ramsay."

"Go ahead and take him," Ramsay urged.

Hans tripped like a dancer to the barn, caught the little horse, and backed him between the shafts of Pieter's two-wheeled cart. Bubbling like a boiling kettle, entirely happy, he started at a fast trot up the sand beach to Three Points. With a startled squawk, Captain Klaus hurried to catch up. The tame sea gull settled affectionately on the rim of the cart's seat.

As Ramsay watched him go, he felt a vast envy of the light-hearted fisherman. If ever he could go away like that, he thought, he would have lived life at its fullest. Not until he looked around did he discover that Pieter was watching too, and his eyes were wistful.

"There is work to be done!" Marta called.

They flushed and walked towards the barnyard, where Marta was tending her poultry. Geese, chickens and ducks swarmed around her and pigeons alighted on her shoulders. She kept her eyes on the men.

As Ramsay and Pieter cleaned the cowbarn, both remained strangely silent. Both thought of the Dutch fisherman. Then Pieter, who had promised to have a dressed pig ready for Tradin' Jack Hammersly, started honing a razor edge on his butchering tools. Ramsay picked up a hoe, preparatory to returning to the corn-patch.

"You think he'll get a net?" Pieter asked.

"I hope so!"

Moodily, scarcely seeing or knowing what he was doing, Ramsay chopped at weeds that had stolen a home in the growing corn. The work suddenly lacked any flavor whatever. Millions of worms, whitefish food, washed up on the beach and the bay in front of Pieter's swarming with whitefish!

That's what the Dutch fisherman had said. Marta brought his mid-morning lunch, and her eyes were troubled.

"Do you think Hans will get what he wants?" she asked.

"I don't know. Marta, why don't you want Pieter to go fishing?"

"You heard what he said. Last night he said it. Fishermen do not die in bed. Those were his words."

"Just talk. The lake's safe enough."

"Yaah? Is that why Joe Mannis can make more money than anybody else around here, just watchin' bodies? Aah! I worry about my man!"

Ramsay said gently, "Don't worry, Marta."

Marta returned to the house and Ramsay continued working. In back of the barn Pieter had his butchered pig strung up on a block and tackle, and the two men looked at each other. Both were waiting for Hans Van Doorst to return.

About a half-hour before noon Captain Klaus soared back to his accustomed place on the house's ridge pole. A moment later the little black horse appeared on the beach, and Hans drove to the barn.

Ramsay and Pieter, meeting him, stifled their astonishment. When Hans left them, to all outward appearances he had been a normal person. Now blood had dried on his nose and his right eye was puffy and streaked with color. Anger seethed within him.

"There is no honor any more!" he said bitterly. "And men are not men!"

"What happened?" Ramsay inquired.

"What happened? I went to Three Points to get us a pound net! Carefully did I explain to that frog-mouthed Fontan, whose wife knits the best pound nets on Lake Michigan, what I wanted. I know pound nets cost five hundred dollars, but I was very careful to prove that we have untold riches just waiting to be caught! As soon as we made some catches, I said, we would pay him his money, plus a bonus for his trouble. Fontan became abusive."

"Then what?" Pieter said.

"He hit me twice. Because of these thrice-cursed broken ribs I cannot move as swiftly as I should. Then I hit him once, and the last I saw of him he was lying on one of his wife's pound nets. After that came the constable who, as everybody knows, is merely another one of Devil Chad's playthings, and said he would put me in jail. It was necessary to hit the constable, too."

Hans Van Doorst leaned against the side of the barn, glumly lost in his own bitter thoughts. Coming from the house to meet Hans and sensing the men's moodiness, Marta fell silent beside her husband. Ramsay unhitched the little black horse, put him back into the corral, and hung the harness on its wooden pegs.

After five minutes, Pieter Van Hooven broke the thick silence. "I do not know whether or not it will be any good, perhaps not. But last year a fisherman came here in a very small boat. He was going to Three Points, he said, to get himself a larger boat and he had to make time. I do not know what happened to him, for he never came back and I have not seen him since. Probably Joe Mannis got him. But before he took his leave he asked me to store for him a box of nets and ..."

"A box of nets!" Hans Van Doorst's melancholy left him like a wind-blown puff of feathers. He put an almost passionate arm about Pieter's shoulders. "All is lost! All is gone! Then this--this miracle worker! He talks of a box of nets! Tell me, Pieter! Tell me it is still there!"

"It must be, for it was never taken away," Pieter said.

"Then let us get it! Let us get and look at it before I faint with excitement!"

Pieter and Hans disappeared in the barn, and a moment later they reappeared with a long, deep wooden box between them. Having lain in the barn for a year, the box and its contents were thick with dust and spiders had woven their own gossamer nets everywhere. Hans Van Doorst patted the dust away. He looked with ecstatic eyes, and he unfolded a few feet of the net. Ramsay saw that it was similar to the gill net insofar as it had stones--sinkers--on one side and a place for floats on the other. Made of sixteen-thread twine, the net had a three-inch mesh.

"A seine," Hans Van Doorst pronounced, "and a well-made seine, though it was not made in Two Rivers. It was brought here by one of the Ohio fishermen, for that is the way they tie their meshes. Let us see some more. I would say that it is about eight hundred feet long. That is not ample; we still need good pound nets, but with it we may again go fishing. Help me, Pieter."

Pieter and Hans dragged the box to a small tree, tied one end of the seine to the tree's trunk, and began to unwind the net toward another little tree. Ramsay saw how shrewdly the Dutch fisherman had guessed.

The trees, within a few feet one way or the other, were just about eight hundred feet apart and Hans Van Doorst tied the other end of the seine to the far tree. He stood still, a small happy grin lighting his face, and looked at their discovery.

Slowly, with Ramsay, Marta and Pieter trailing him, he started to walk the length of the seine as it lay on the ground. He kept his eyes downward, and as he walked along he talked almost to himself. "A good seine, yes, a good seine, but it has received hard use. Here is almost five feet where it scraped among sharp rocks, and the mesh is worn.

Under a heavy load of fish, it will break. That hole was made by a sunken log or other object, for you can see that it is a clean tear.

This one was made by a huge fish, probably a sturgeon, for just see how the mesh is mangled where he lunged time after time against it. Now this ..."