"Another coil of rope!" Pieter said, pouncing on it.
Hans, who had grinned happily with each new find, did not even look around. Ramsay looked at him questioningly. Anything but stolid, the Dutch fisherman had been bubbling over at the prospect of going fishing again. Now he seemed melancholy, immersed within himself, and his whole attention was given to the lake.
Ramsay followed his gaze, but saw little. True, a vast number of small aquatic worms had been washed ashore by the pounding waves. There must have been countless millions of them, so many that they formed a living carpet as far up the beach as the waves had washed. The wriggling, writhing mass was now disentangling itself, and the worms that could were crawling back into the lake. A number of sea gulls and a number of land birds were gorging themselves, and new birds arrived by the flock. They scarcely made a dent in the multitude of worms. Ramsay looked again at Hans Van Doorst.
"Never, never!" the fisherman breathed.
Pieter, too, swung to look curiously at him. "What's the matter, Hans?"
"I went on the lake when I was a boy of thirteen," Hans Van Doorst said. "That was fourteen years ago, in 1852. I thought I had seen much, but never have I seen this!"
"What?" Ramsay asked impatiently.
"Look around you," Hans said. "What do you see?"
"Worms."
"Not worms! Food for whitefish! With these millions washed up, can you not imagine the vast amount remaining in the water? We are all rich men!"