“That’s the figure,” insisted Henry Burns. “You’ll have to pay more, if we sell them to the market, you know. Then there’s the hotel up the shore. What would your boarders say if we took them up there and sold them?”
Steward Blake looked at Henry Burns sternly for a moment; then a grim smile played about the corners of his mouth.
“You’re kind of sharp, aren’t you?” he asked. “Well, I guess you’ve got me there, as these are the first of the season. Throw in an extra dozen for good measure, and it’s a bargain.”
“All right,” said Henry Burns.
A few moments later, with three twenty-dollar bills tucked away in a wallet in his inner waistcoat pocket, Henry Burns, with Harvey, was going briskly down to the wharf, where he and his comrades were soon engaged in loading the fish into the hotel wagon.
“We can be haughty now, ourselves,” he said, as they got under way once more and stood down for the market.
Ten cents apiece was the marketman’s figure, and they let the remainder go for that. Then, with eighty dollars for the entire morning’s catch, they went aboard the Viking and punched and pummelled one another like a lot of young bears, from sheer excess of joy.
“I wonder how the crew will come out,” said Harvey. “I’m afraid they won’t do as well at a bargain as you did, Henry.”
“Perhaps so,” said Henry Burns. “They’ve got Little Tim aboard, and he’s pretty shrewd, sometimes.”
And indeed, it was at Little Tim’s suggestion that the Surprise went on up the coast, after the crew had done business with the hotel left for them according to the agreement, and they sold the remainder of their catch at the hotel at Hampton, three miles farther on. And they, too, found themselves rich at the end of their bargaining, with sixty dollars to divide among the four of them.