“By the Great Seine!” rumbled the mate, looking at his hands in consternation.
Code made a trumpet of his hands. “Here, cookee, roll up a tub of that bait lively. I want to look at it. And fetch the hammer!”
A suspicion based upon a long-forgotten fact had suddenly leaped into his mind.
When the cook hove the tub of bait on deck Code knocked off the top boards with the hammer and dipped up a handful of the clams. Instead of the firm, fat shellfish that should have been in the clean brine, he found them loose and rotten. This time he himself detected a faint acrid odor quite different from the usual clean, salty smell. Again he dipped to make sure the whole tub was ruined. Then he looked at Ellinwood in despair.
“It’s acid, Pete,” he said. “My father told me about this sort of thing being done sometimes in a close race among bankers for the last load of fish. If they’re all like this we’re done for until we can get more.”
Ellinwood looked at him in amazement, his jaw sagging.
“Well, who in thunder would do this?”
Code laughed bitterly.
“There’s only one man I can think of, and that is the fellow who got my motor-dory under false 156 pretenses. You remember how he made the cook and the boy help him get it over the side? Well, her gasoline-tank was full and her batteries new. She was ready to go two hundred miles on a minute’s notice.”