VII
SHORTS AND COUNTERS
Percy slept soundly that night. To be sure, the alarm routed out the Spurlingites at the unseemly hour of four, but that was far better than twelve. After breakfast he enjoyed a cigarette on the beach while the others were helping Filippo clear away. It was a calm, beautiful morning, and as young Whittington gazed over the smooth, blue sea he felt that even a fisherman's life might have its redeeming features.
At six they all started to make the round of the lobster-traps, on the Barracouta. The first string of white buoys, striped with green, was encountered off Brimstone Point.
"Here's where we make a killing," said Jim.
As he approached the first buoy he opened his switch, stopping the engine. Putting on his woolen mittens, he picked up the gaff. Close under the starboard quarter bobbed the brown bottle that served as a toggle. Reaching out with his gaff, he hooked this aboard, and began hauling in the warp. At last the heavily weighted trap started off bottom and began to ascend. In a half-minute its end, draped with marine growths, broke the surface.
Holding the trap against the side, Jim tore off its incumbrances. The trailing mass was composed principally of irregular, brownish-black, leathery sheets at the end of long stems.
"Kelp!" answered Jim to Percy's inquiry. "Devil's aprons! They grow on rocky bottom. I've seen a trap so loaded with 'em that you could hardly stir it."
He dragged the lath coop up on the side. It contained a miscellaneous assortment, the most interesting objects in which were four or five black, scorpion-like shell-fish clinging to the netted heads and sprawling on the bottom. Unbuttoning the door at the top, Jim darted in his hand and seized one of these by its back. Round came the claws, wide open, and snapped shut close to his fingers; but he had grasped his prize at the one spot where the brandishing pincers could not reach him.
"He's a 'counter,' fast enough! No need of measuring him! Must weigh at least two pounds."
Jim dropped the snapping shell-fish into a tub in the standing-room.
"I thought lobsters were red," remarked Percy.
"They are—after you boil 'em."
Spurling's hand went into the trap again. This time the result was not so satisfactory. Out came a little fellow, full of fight. Jim tested his length by pressing his back between the turned-up ends of a brass measure screwed against the side of the standing-room.
"Thought so! He's a 'short'!"
He tossed the lobster overboard.
"What did you throw him away for?" asked Percy. "Isn't he good to eat?"
"Nothing better! But it's the State law. Everything that comes short of four and three-fourths inches, solid bone measure, from the tip of the nose to the end of the back, has to be thrown over where it's caught."
"Why's that?"
"To keep 'em from being exterminated. It's based on the same principle as the law on trout or any other game-fish. Lobsters are growing scarcer every year, and something has to be done to preserve 'em."
"Does everybody throw the little ones away?"
"No! If they did there'd be more of legal size. The Massachusetts law allows the sale there of lobsters an inch and a half shorter than the length specified here; so their smacks come down, lie outside the three-mile limit, and buy 'shorts' of every fisherman who's willing to break the Maine law to sell 'em. Besides that, most of the summer cottagers along the coast buy and catch all the 'shorts' they can. So it's no wonder the lobster's running out."
While Jim talked he was emptying the trap. Another "counter" went into the tub, and two more "shorts" splashed overboard. The financial side of the question interested Percy.
"How many 'shorts' will you probably get a week?"
"Five hundred or more."
"And how much would a Massachusetts smack pay you for 'em?"
"Ten or twelve cents apiece."
"Then you expect to throw more than fifty dollars a week over the side, just to obey the law?"
"That's what!"
Percy lapsed into silence. The lobsters disposed of, Jim began to clear the trap of its other contents. A big brown sculpin was floundering on the laths. Taking him out gingerly, Jim tossed him into the bait-tub upon the hake heads.
"He'll do for bait in a few days."
He picked out and threw over three or four large starfish, or "five-fingers." The hake head stuck on the bait-spear in the center was almost gone; Jim replaced it with a fresh head from the bait-tub. Then he seized a mottled, purplish crab that had been aimlessly scuttling to and fro across the bottom of the pot, and impaled him, back down, on the barb of the spear. Shutting and buttoning the door, he slid the trap overboard, started his engine, and headed for the next buoy.
Its trap was caught among the rocks on the bottom, and Jim, unable to start it by hand, was obliged to make the warp fast and have recourse to towing. Just as it looked as if the line were about to part, the trap let go. It yielded one "counter" and three "shorts." Also, it contained more than a dozen brown, unhealthy-looking, membranous things, shaped like long coin-purses, lined with rows of suckers, and with mouths at one end.
"Sea-cucumbers! I've seen a trap full of 'em, almost to the door. They're after the bait, like everything else."
Trap after trap was pulled, with varying success. Occasionally from a single one three or four good-sized lobsters would be taken; occasionally one would yield nothing at all. But the majority averaged one "counter." Percy could not accustom himself to the seeming waste of throwing over the "shorts."
"I should think you might sell those little fellows to the Massachusetts boats, and nobody be the wiser for it."
"I could; but I won't. I'll make clean money or I won't make any at all."
There was a finality in Jim's tones that closed the subject for good. Half the traps had now been hauled and there were about seventy-five pounds of lobsters in the tub. Spiny, egg-like sea-urchins, green wrinkles, and an occasional flounder or lamper-eel gave variety to the catch. There was always the hope that the next trap might yield five or six big fellows.
"Now and then," said Jim, "you get one so large he can't crawl into a pot. He'll be on the head, just as you start pulling, and he'll hang to the netting until he comes to the top. After they take hold of anything, they hate to let go."
"What's the biggest one you ever saw?" asked Lane.
"One day when I was in Rockland, a smack brought in a fifteen-pounder she'd bought at Seal Island. But of course they grow a good deal larger than that. The big ones don't taste nearly so good as the little ones. After they get to be a certain age, seven or eight years, the fishermen think, they don't 'shed.' Then you find 'em covered with barnacles, their claws cracked into squares, all wrinkled up. Those old grubbers belong to the offshore school; they stay outside, and never come in on the rocks."
Percy was listening with all his ears.
"What do you mean by saying they don't 'shed'?" he asked.
"Harken to the lecture on lobsters by Professor James Spurling!" announced Lane in stentorian tones.
The next group of traps was some distance off, so Jim had a chance to talk without interruption.
"In the spring a lobster that is growing begins to find his shell too tight, so he has to get out of it. Some time after the first of July he crawls in under the rocks or kelp, where the fish can't trouble him. His shell splits down the back and he pulls himself out. He stays there for a week or ten days while a new and larger shell is forming. When he begins to crawl again, he's raving hungry. One queer thing I almost forgot. Fishermen say that, while he is lying under cover, all soft and unprotected, a hard-shell lobster, active and ugly, generally stands guard outside the hole, ready to fight off any enemy that may come along."
By the time the last trap was pulled the lobster question had been pretty thoroughly canvassed.
"Guess I've told you all I know, and more, too," said Jim.
They were back in Sprowl's Cove at half past ten, and put their lobsters into the car with the others. Hardly had they finished when a motor-sloop came round the eastern point.
"Here's a smack!" exclaimed Jim. "On time to the minute! Shouldn't wonder if it was Captain Higgins in the Calista!"
The boat swept into the cove in a broad circle, and ranged alongside the car. At the helm stood a tall, grizzled man of perhaps sixty, with gray beard and twinkling blue eyes. A lanky, freckled boy stuck his head up out of the cabin.
"Any lobsters to sell, boys?" inquired the man.
"Isn't this Captain Higgins?" asked Jim.
"That's my name—Benjamin B. Higgins, of the smack Calista, buying lobsters from Cranberry Island to Portland, and this is my son Brad, my first mate and crew. I own this boat from garboard to main truck, bowsprit-tip to boom-end, and I don't wear any man's dog-collar. I'll give you a square deal on weight and pay you as much as any smackman, neither more nor less. Do we trade?"
"We do," answered Jim. "Let's have your dip-net!"
Stepping upon the car, he was soon bailing out the lobsters. Captain Higgins placed them in a tub on his deck scale.
"Going to be here long, boys?"
"We've taken the island for the season from my Uncle Tom Sprowl."
"So you're Cap'n Tom's nephew? Must be Ezra Spurling's boy."
Jim nodded.
"Glad to meet you! Made a trip once to the Grand Banks with Ezra; must be all of thirty years ago. Well, time flies! If you'll save your lobsters for me, I'll look in here every Thursday. How does that hit you?"
"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 shell-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 partition 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 shell-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 passed 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 pass 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 alongshore. 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 passing 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.