More schooners had crept up in the night, and the long blue seas were full of sails and dories. Far away on the horizon, the smoke of some liner, her hull invisible, smudged the blue, and to eastward a big ship’s topgallant sails, just lifting, made a square nick in it. Disko Troop was smoking by the roof of the cabin – one eye on the craft around, and the other on the little fly at the mainmast-head.
“When dad kerflummoxes that way,” said Dan, in a whisper, “he’s doin’ some high-line thinkin’ fer all hands. I’ll lay my wage an’ share we’ll make berth soon. Dad he knows the cod, an’ the Fleet they know dad knows. See ’em comin’ up one by one, lookin’ fer nothin’ in particular, o’ course, but scrowgin’ on us all the time? There’s the Prince Leboa; she’s a Chatham boat. She’s crep’ up sence last night. An’ see that big one with a patch in her foresail an’ a new jib? She’s the Carrie Pitman from West Chatham. She won’t keep her canvas long on less her luck’s changed since last season. She don’t do much ’cep’ drift. There ain’t an anchor made’ll hold her… When the smoke puffs up in little rings like that, dad’s studyin’ the fish. Ef we speak to him now, he’ll git mad. Las’ time I did, he jest took an’ hove a boot at me.”
Disko Troop stared forward, the pipe between his teeth, with eyes that saw nothing. As his son said, he was studying the fish – pitting his knowledge and experience on the Banks against the roving cod in his own sea. He accepted the presence of the inquisitive schooners on the horizon as a compliment to his powers. But now that it was paid, he wished to draw away and make his berth alone, till it was time to go up to the Virgin and fish in the streets of that roaring town upon the waters. So Disko Troop thought of recent weather, and gales, currents, food-supplies, and other domestic arrangements, from the point of view of a twenty-pound cod; was, in fact, for an hour a cod himself, and looked remarkably like one. Then he removed the pipe from his teeth.
“Dad,” said Dan, “we’ve done our chores. Can’t we go overside a piece? It’s good catchin’ weather.”
“Not in that cherry-coloured rig ner them ha’afbaked brown shoes. Give him suthin’ fit to wear.”
“Dad’s pleased – that settles it,” said Dan, delightedly, dragging Harvey into the cabin, while Troop pitched a key down the steps. “Dad keeps my spare rig where he kin overhaul it, ’cause ma sez I’m keerless.” He rummaged through a locker, and in less than three minutes Harvey was adorned with fisherman’s rubber boots that came half up his thigh, a heavy blue jersey well darned at the elbows, a pair of flippers, and a sou’wester.
“Naow ye look somethin’ like,” said Dan. “Hurry!”
“Keep nigh an’ handy,” said Troop, “an’ don’t go visitin’ raound the Fleet. Ef any one asks you what I’m cal’latin’ to do, speak the truth – fer ye don’t know.”
A little red dory, labelled Hattie S., lay astern of the schooner. Dan hauled in the painter, and dropped lightly on to the bottom boards, while Harvey tumbled clumsily after.
“That’s no way o’ gettin’ into a boat,” said Dan. “Ef there was any sea you’d go to the bottom, sure. You got to learn to meet her.”
Dan fitted the thole-pins, took the forward thwart, and watched Harvey’s work. The boy had rowed, in a ladylike fashion, on the Adirondack ponds; but there is a difference between squeaking pins and well-balanced rowlocks – light sculls and stubby, eight-foot sea-oars. They stuck in the gentle swell, and Harvey grunted.
“Short! Row short!” said Dan. “Ef you cramp your oar in any kind o’ sea you’re liable to turn her over. Ain’t she a daisy? Mine, too.”
The little dory was specklessly clean. In her bows lay a tiny anchor, two jugs of water, and some seventy fathoms of thin, brown dory-roding. A tin dinner-horn rested in cleats just under Harvey’s right hand, beside an ugly-looking maul, a short gaff, and a shorter wooden stick. A couple of lines, with very heavy leads and double cod-hooks, all neatly coiled on square reels, were stuck in their place by the gunwale.
“Where’s the sail and mast?” said Harvey, for his hands were beginning to blister.
Dan chuckled. “Ye don’t sail fishin’-dories much. Ye pull; but ye needn’t pull so hard. Don’t you wish you owned her?”
“Well, I guess my father might give me one or two if I asked ’em,” Harvey replied. He had been too busy to think much of his family till then.
“That’s so. I forgot your dad’s a millionaire. You don’t act millionary any, naow. But a dory an’ craft an’ gear” – Dan spoke as though she were a whale-boat – “costs a heap. Think your dad ’u’d give you one fer – fer a pet like?”
“Shouldn’t wonder. It would be ’most the only thing I haven’t stuck him for yet.”
“Must be an expensive kinder kid to home. Don’t slitheroo thet way, Harve. Short’s the trick, because no sea’s ever dead still, an’ the swells’ll – ”
Crack! The loom of the oar kicked Harvey under the chin and knocked him backward.
“That was what I was goin’ to say. I hed to learn too, but I wasn’t more than eight years old when I got my schoolin’.”
Harvey regained his seat with aching jaws and a frown.
“No good gettin’ mad at things, dad says. It’s our own fault ef we can’t handle ’em, he says. Le’s try here. Manuel’ll give us the water.”
The “Portugee” was rocking fully a mile away, but when Dan up-ended an oar he waved his left arm three times.
“Thirty fathom,” said Dan, stringing a salt clam on to the hook. “Over with the dough-boys. Bait same’s I do, Harve, an’ don’t snarl your reel.”
Dan’s line was out long before Harvey had mastered the mystery of baiting and heaving out the leads. The dory drifted along easily. It was not worth while to anchor till they were sure of good ground.
“Here we come!” Dan shouted, and a shower of spray rattled on Harvey’s shoulders as a big cod flapped and kicked alongside. “Muckle, Harvey, muckle! Under your hand! Quick!”
Evidently “muckle” could not be the dinner-horn, so Harvey passed over the maul, and Dan scientifically stunned the fish before he pulled it inboard, and wrenched out the hook with the short wooden stick he called a “gob-stick”. Then Harvey felt a tug, and pulled up zealously.
“Why, these are strawberries!” he shouted. “Look!”
The hook had fouled among a bunch of strawberries, red on one side and white on the other – perfect reproductions of the land fruit, except that there were no leaves, and the stem was all pipy and slimy.
“Don’t tech ’em! Slat ’em off. Don’t – ”
The warning came too late. Harvey had picked them from the hook, and was admiring them.
“Ouch!” he cried, for his fingers throbbed as though he had grasped many nettles.
“Naow ye know what strawberry-bottom means. Nothin’ ’cep’ fish should be teched with the naked fingers, dad says. Slat ’em off agin’ the gunnel, an’ bait up, Harve. Lookin’ won’t help any. It’s all in the wages.”
Harvey smiled at the thought of his ten and a half dollars a month, and wondered what his mother would say if she could see him hanging over the edge of a fishing-dory in mid-ocean. She suffered agonies whenever he went out on Saranac Lake; and, by the way, Harvey remembered distinctly that he used to laugh at her anxieties. Suddenly the line flashed through his hand, stinging even through the “flippers”, the woolen circlets supposed to protect it.
“He’s