“Next time you come out you won’t feel the motion at all,” Jo promised. “And you’ll forget all about this as soon as you step on shore. Everybody gets a little sick the first time they go outside in a small boat. Ann’s just tough, that’s the only reason she has escaped.”
“Where do you get the fish for the bait, Jo?” asked Ann after she had filled the twentieth bag and they were sweeping in toward the cove with the morning’s catch.
“The lobstermen get it. We would catch our own bait, but the farm work takes so much of my father’s time and I’m not strong enough to handle a trawl alone. So we buy from the men who go out after fish. You see, to go lobstering the way most of the fishermen do would take all day. First, they have to dig their clams down on the sand beach a mile to the south; they use the clams to bait the fish trawls. After the trawls are baited, they have to go out and catch the fish and bring them in. Then the fish are used to catch the lobsters.”
“Sort of ‘great fleas have little fleas to bite ’em,’” Ben quoted.
“I guess you are almost well now, after that,” said Jo as he swung the boat into the river.
Just before landing he once more cut off his engine and let the dory drift alongside a large wooden box afloat in the smoother protected water of the river. “This is the storage box where we put our catch until we gather enough to pay to ship them to Boston.”
He opened the padlock on the cover and swung the big lid up, dumping the day’s catch into it, eighteen in all, most of them fair-sized. Jo felt that his morning’s work had been well worth while.
They landed, pulling the dory after them until it was slightly out of the water. Jo threw the iron anchor well up the beach, so that the tide would not set the boat adrift as it rose to the flood.
When she began to walk Ann discovered that she still felt the motion of the boat and she swayed a bit as she went up the lane. She had real “sea-legs” Jo told her and would soon be a regular deep-sea man.
On the way back to the shack to replace the oars and snap the lock on the door they passed a building Ann had not noticed in the early morning. It was merely a built-in shed between two shacks, a sort of lean-to in a sad state of repair. The door stood open so that she could see the man working inside as she passed by. He was dressed in rough clothing, a pair of dark trousers and a thin shirt opened at the throat, and what surprised her most was the fact that he was not wearing oilskins. He was much younger than any of the other men she had seen that morning and this, too, astonished her, for Jo had said that Walt was the youngest of the fishermen, while this man could not have been as old as her own father. He wore no hat and his thick hair was unkempt. She could see, even as she walked by, that he was unshaven and looked like a tramp—a rather interesting tramp, however.