The air was still, and the low, gentle swells out on the water were opalescent in the early morning light. Sipes had just returned from a visit to his set-lines and gill-nets, over a mile away in the lake. He had started about two o’clock, and his boat on the beach contained the slimy merchandise which we were to convert into what Sipes called “cash-money” during the day.
We went down to the shore to inspect the catch. Numerous flopping tails and other unavailing protests against uncongenial environment were evident in the boat. There were fifteen or twenty Whitefish, about a dozen carp, several suckers, and a lot of good-sized perch, which had been found in the gill-nets. The set-lines had yielded two sturgeon, one weighing about thirty-five pounds and the other over fifty. These two finny victims dominated the boat.
“I swatted ’em when I took ’em in, but they seem to be gittin’ gay agin,” remarked Sipes, as he reached for an old axe handle lying near the bow. The struggling fish soon became quiet.
“There comes yer old college friend,” he said, as he glanced up the beach. The rheumatic horse was patiently pulling the odd vehicle along the shore, near the water line where the sand was firm, partially concealing the bent figure with the faded slouch hat on the seat behind him.
“I’d know that ol’ hat if I seen it at the South Pole,” said Sipes. “It turns up in front an’ flops down behind. It’s got some little holes in the top, through which some wind blows when ’e’s wearin’ it. He’s ’ad it ever since I come on the beach, an’ that wasn’t yisterd’y, neither, an’ they ain’t no other lid that ’ud look right on John, an’ they ain’t nobody else that ’ud wear it fer a minute. He needn’t never be ’fraid that anybody’s goin’ to swipe it, ’specially ’round ’ere.”
After the conventional greetings, flavored with much bantering and playful innuendoes by Sipes concerning the disreputable society which some nice fresh fish were about to get into, the two worthies weighed the catch, in installments, on some steelyards with a tin pan attachment, which were kept in the shanty. Sipes made a memorandum with a stubby pencil on the inside of the door, where his accounts were kept. “I got so dam’ many things to think of that I can’t keep track of ’em ’less I jot ’em down,” he remarked, as he slowly and laboriously inscribed some figures on the rough board.
John had a few fish in his box that he had found in his own nets that morning, and a few more that Sipes said “didn’t look recent” and “must ’ave bin caught some time previous.”
The fish that Sipes had brought in were turned over to John on a consignment basis. It was their custom to divide the proceeds equally. Sipes considered that old John was “pufectly honest about everythin’ but cash-money an’ fish.” He therefore kept “strict ’count o’ wot goes out an’ wot comes back.” The inside of the door was covered with a maze of hieroglyphics, the complicated records of previous transactions.
“If I wasn’t strictly honest at all times,” said Sipes, confidentially, while John was out of hearing, “I’d slip some hunks o’ lead that I use fer sinkers on the set-lines down the gullets o’ them sturgeon. I can git lead fer six cents a pound an’ sturgeon is worth twenty. If anybody found the hunks they’d think they’d bin eat offen the lines, but of course I wouldn’t do nothin’ like that; an’ besides, them big fish has to be dressed ’fore they’re weighed, an’ they ’ave to be cut in chunks fer small sales. A sturgeon that only weighs about six or seven pounds an’ don’t ’ave to be cut open ’fore ’e’s sold, can swallow a couple o’ sinkers without hurtin’ ’is digestion any.”
After all necessary details had been attended to, we climbed into the seat and started. Sipes winked at me impressively, and his last words were, “Don’t you fellers take in no bad money.”