"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."