"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."