What Bill did—what he planned and accomplished in the face of ridicule and adverse fortune—earned the rock the name of Feather's Folly in that neighbourhood.
"Anyhow," old Bill was in the habit of repeating, to defend himself, "I 'low it won't happen again. An' I'll see that it don't!"
But season followed season, without event; and the Cocked Hat was still known as Feather's Folly.
Billy Topsail was to learn this.
It was early in the spring of the year—too early by half, the old salts said, for Labrador craft to put out from the Newfoundland ports. Thick, vagrant fogs, drifting with the variable winds, were abroad on all the coast; and the Arctic current was spread with drift ice from the upper shores and with great bergs from the glaciers of the far north. But Skipper Libe Tussel, of the thirty-ton Fish Killer, hailing from Ruddy Cove, was a firm believer in the fortunes of the early bird; moreover, he was determined that the skipper of the Cod Trap, hailing from Fortune, should not this season preëmpt his trap-berth on the Thigh Bone fishing grounds. So the Fish Killer was underway for the north, early as it was; and she was cheerily game to face the chances of wind and ice, if only she might beat the Cod Trap to the favourable opportunities of the Thigh Bone grounds off Indian Harbour.
"It's thick," Robinson remarked to the skipper.
"'Tis thick."
Billy Topsail, now grown old enough for the adventurous voyage to the Labrador coast, was aboard; and he listened to this exchange with a deal of interest. It was his first fishing voyage; he had been north in the Rescue, to be sure, but that was no more than a cruise, undertaken to relieve the starving fishermen of the upper harbours. At last, he was fishing in earnest—really aboard the Fish Killer, bound north, there to fish the summer through, in all sorts of weather, with a share in the catch at the end of it! He was vastly delighted by this: for 'twas a man's work he was about, and 'twas a man's work he was wanting to do.