"Because they're down in the mud five or six feet and it holds them tighter'n a porous plaster sticks to your back."
"How do you ever get them down so deep?"
"Oh! They go down easy as a rule. You just take a stake under your arm and work it down into the mud. It goes down easy enough, but it won't come out for nothing. Sometimes, though, when the mud's tough or the bottom sandy, they won't go down nohow. Then we have to pump them down."
"Pump them down!" cried Alec in astonishment. "What do you mean?"
"Why, we fasten a hose to the sharp end of the stake, and the engine sucks the mud or sand up through the hose as we work the stake down. I tell you them stakes never comes up!"
"Does it take long to stake out an oyster-bed?" asked Alec.
"Well, that depends upon the weather and the mud and a lot of other things. If an oyster captain is too busy to put down his own poles, he can get a stake sticker to do it for him."
"What's that?"
"Oh! There's lots of men with little boats, who ain't got money enough to start oystering themselves, that make a business of putting out stakes for men who have beds. They charge a dollar a stake, and in a good day they can put down twenty-five or thirty stakes."
"Whew! There must be big money in that. I should think everybody would become stake stickers instead of oystermen."