The Spoils of the Sea.
“A shark!” yelled out Mister Bob, evincing much greater fright than his sister Nell, although he was very fond of referring to her contemptuously as “being only a girl,” when manly exploits happened to be the topic of conversation and she chanced to hazard an opinion; and, at the same instant, he jumped madly from the gunwale of the little cutter on to the top of her half-deck forwards, climbing from thence into the lee rigging, where he evidently thought he would be safer. “A shark! Won’t it bite?”
“Aye, by Jove, it will!” said the Captain ironically. “I’d swarm up to the masthead, if I were you, so as to be out of harm’s way. You needn’t mind your sister or any of us down here. We can take care of ourselves!”
This made Bob a bit ashamed, and he began to climb down again from the rigging, looking gingerly the while over the side, as if expecting every minute that the terrible monster of the deep which his imagination had pictured would spring up and seize him.
“I—I—was afraid,” he faltered. “I—I—thought it best to get out of the way.”
“So it seems,” said the old sailor grimly. “It’s lucky, though, that every one was not of the same mind; or where would we all be! Dick, where’s that hatchet I gave you this morning to put into the boat?”
“It’s in the after locker, sir.”
“Look smart, then,” cried the Captain excitedly. “Bear a hand and get it at once.”
At this order, Dick, who, like Bob, had thought “discretion the better part of valour,” and got behind the windlass, in order to have some substantial obstacle between himself and the trawl-net which the Captain, with Mr Dugald Strong’s aid, had partly dragged into the well of the cutter, now crawled out from his retreat; and keeping over well to leeward on the other side of the boom, proceeded to the locker in the stern-sheets, from whence he took out a small axe and handed it to Captain Dresser.
“Ha!” ejaculated the old sailor, as he gripped the weapon tightly and belaboured with the back of it, using all the vigour of his still nervous right arm, the bag, or “pocket” of the net, in which the body of some big fish was seen to be entangled; although neither its form nor appearance could be distinctly distinguished, the folds and meshes being so tightly wrapped round it. “I’ll soon settle him!”