“Yes, certainly,” replied Joe Hinman.
“Well, give me that one,” said Squire Brackett, pointing to one of large size, “and that one, there,” pointing to the small one.
Joe handed them over.
“Those will cost you thirty-five cents, squire,” he said.
“That small one will cost you more than that,” chuckled the squire to himself, as he paid the money.
Then the squire, reaching a hand into his pocket and producing a folding rule, opened it and laid it carefully along the length of the lobster.
“Ha!” he exclaimed, turning in triumph to the boys, “that lobster will cost you just twenty dollars. That’s a short lobster—a half-inch shorter than the law allows. You know the fine for it.”
“Why, you don’t mean that, do you, squire?” asked Joe Hinman, dismayed at seeing the profits of their fishing thus suddenly threatening to vanish. “We haven’t shipped a single short lobster all this summer. But we don’t stop to measure them down here. We wait till we get up to the car. We have a measuring-stick there, and if a lobster is under the law we set him free, near the ledges off the camp. We throw out some old fish around those ledges, to see if we can’t keep them around there, and be able to catch ’em later—perhaps another year, when they’ve got their growth.”
“No, you don’t!” exclaimed the squire. “Can’t fool me that way. There’s the evidence!” And he held up the incriminating lobster, triumphantly.
As matter of fact, the squire well knew that the fishermen around Grand Island, when they wanted a lobster for a dinner, took the first one that came to hand, long or short. They figured out that the law was devised to prevent the indiscriminate and wholesale shipping of lobsters before they had attained a fair growth; and the local custom about the island was to catch and eat a lobster, long or short, whenever anybody wanted one. Nor was the squire an exception to this custom. But the law answered his purpose now.