“No.”
“You quitting?”
Don nodded.
“I like you for that.” The other boy put out a hand. For a second Don gripped it. Then, together they rowed back to the motor boat.
The sea was calm now. Twirling the wheel to his motor, Don went pop-popping away to his lobster traps. Having lifted these, he piled them high on the deck, then turned his prow once more toward Monhegan. His lobster fishing days on Monhegan shoals were at an end. But he was not going to leave Monhegan, not just yet. The wild charm of the place had got him. Strange and startling things were yet to greet him there.
CHAPTER VIII
FROM OUT THE FOG
Despite the fog that lay low over the water, the sea was choppy. The fisherman who rode in the improvised crow’s nest in the forward rigging of the fishing sloop rose ten feet in air to fall, then to rise and fall again. There was a tossing, whirling motion that would have made most girls deathly sick. Not so this one; for the fisherman who stood there ever gripping the harpoon, with alert eyes watching, ever watching the narrow circle of fogbound ocean, was Ruth.
Swordfish had been reported off Monhegan; in fact Captain Field had brought in a modest-sized one only the day before.
Although Don and the two girls had decided that lobster trapping on the Monhegan shoals was unfair to those daring souls who made their home on these wave-beaten shores, they were spending a few days on the island.
“May never be here again,” Don had said. “From all I can see, it’s not quite like anything on earth.