"But there are thousands of them! Why, right now, I can probably see forty or fifty, and they're not so awfully easy to catch sight of with a little
sea running. And why are they painted all different colors?"
"Different owners," was the reply, "every man has his own color. Every day, or every other day at least, he sails out to the grounds—some of 'em now have motor-boats—and makes a round of his pots. A chap whose buoy is yellow has perhaps a hundred or two yellow buoys scattered about the harbor."
"That sounds like work," said Colin.
"It's hard work," was the reply. "A lobster-pot is weighted with bricks and it's a heavy load to pull up in a boat. It's an awkward thing to handle, too. Then a lobsterman has to rebait his traps, and as he does that with rotten fish, it's not a sweet job. And he can only bring in lobsters over a certain size; anything less than nine and a half inches in length he has to throw back. Sometimes it'll happen that the traps are full of lobsters that are too short or too small, 'shorts' they call 'em, and his day's work won't bring him in much. There's a living in it, but that's about all."
Finding that the captain of the Phalarope knew the lobster business well, as do most men who are natives of the region, Colin kept him busy
answering questions until they ran into New Bedford. As the old center of the whaling industry, the harbor had a great interest for Colin, but there was but one of the whaling ships in at the time, and the ancient fisher-town atmosphere was greatly marred by extensive cotton mills that had been built along the river, just below where the whaling piers used to be. The swordfish schooners were at the pier, however, large as life, and Colin felt quite a thrill of excitement as he stepped aboard the little vessel on which he was to live for the next couple of days, and saw the narrow dark bunks in the entirely airless cabin in which four men were to sleep. Dr. Jimson and Colin practically were going as members of the crew, the two men, whose places they were taking, staying home from the trip.
Long before sunrise the following morning they were up, and by daybreak the schooner was standing out of the harbor for Block Island, one of the famous haunts of the swordfish. Colin, who had good eyesight, and who was always eager to be up and doing, volunteered to go to the crow's-nest and keep a lookout for the dorsal fin of a swordfish, which, he was told, could be seen a couple of miles away. There was no advantage
in going aloft, however, until toward noon, when, the water being still, the swordfish come up to sun themselves.
Once Colin was quite sure that he saw a swordfish, but just as he was about to shout, there flashed across his mind a sentence that he had read somewhere of the likelihood of confusing a shark's fin with that of a swordfish, and soon he was able to make out that it was a shark. As it grew toward noon and the sun's rays beat directly on him, Colin began to realize that sitting on a scantling two inches by four at the top of a schooner's mast in a bobbing sea, under a broiling sun, was a long way from being a soft snap, but he would have scorned to make a complaint. He was more than glad, though, when the cook hailed all hands to dinner, and one of the sailors went to the crow's-nest.