“We’ll give it a try,” says Catty, and we headed in for the shore. But we hadn’t touched before a man came running toward us.
“Hey,” says he. “Private property. You can’t land here!”
“Who says so?” Catty asked.
“I do,” says the man, “and I’m plenty big to back it up.”
“Guess you are. Say, what’s going on here, anyhow?”
“Oh, a feller’s just startin’ a gold-fish farm. He’s settin’ out about ten acre of seed and he calc’lates to thrash out about twenty bushel of gold-fish to the acre. Goin’ to sell them to towerists.”
“Anyhow,” Catty says, “we can get an eyeful from here,” and that’s what we did. We anchored off there and pretended to fish but we didn’t do any real fishing, not to speak of, on account of not having bait. I don’t know how it is other places, but right where we were the fish wouldn’t bite a bare hook.
After we’d squinted at those men working ashore for half an hour, we made out what they were up to.
“Well,” says Catty, “I’ll be jiggered!”
“Yes?” says I. “Why?”