For a full moment she sat there petrified. Then, as her senses returned to her, she made out the figures of two huge black cats half hidden in the green shrubs that capped the rocky wall of Witches Cove.
“They’re not real,” she told herself. “They’re witches’ cats.”
To prove this, she caught up the blue, green, purple cunner and sent it flying toward the cats.
That settled it. Growling, snarling, sending fur flying, they were upon the fish and at one another, tooth and nail in an instant.
“Here, you greedy things!” she exclaimed. “Stop that! Here’s another and yet another!” Two cunners followed the first.
It was just as the cats settled down to their feast that her ear caught a movement farther up the bank and a quick look showed her a very small man, wearing great horn rimmed glasses. Squatting there on the steep bank, he was staring at her, then at the cats. For a moment he remained there. The next he turned and disappeared.
“Someone living in the old Hornaby Place,” she told herself with a quick intake of breath. “Must be. Cats wouldn’t be here. Nobody’s been there for more than six years, and it’s the only place on the island. I wonder—”
She wondered many things before she was through. And in the meantime she caught some fish; not the sort she had hoped to catch, however. Pearl, as has been said, was a dreamer. One often dreams of bigger and better things. It was so with her fishing.
Then, of a sudden, she caught her breath and set her teeth hard as she tugged at the stout codfish line.
“It’s a big one,” she told herself as the look of determination on her round freckled face deepened. “A big cod, or maybe a chicken halibut. If only I can land him!”