Jim Spurling, Fisherman Part 28

Both listened again. A sound reached their ears, plain and unmistakable, the rote of das.h.i.+ng water.

"There's the surf!" rejoiced Percy. "Don't you hear it?"

"_Si_, I hear it," answered Filippo.

Dropping the buoy he had just gaffed, Percy took the oars and began rowing hard toward the sound, which gradually grew louder. The fog came on with a rush, sliding over them like an avalanche. It was hardly possible to see beyond the tips of the oar-blades.

"Lucky we can hear that surf!" said Percy, comfortably. "But strange it sounds so loud and so near."

Now it was close ahead. He stopped rowing, puzzled. A blast of cold air smote them. Suddenly there was a rus.h.i.+ng all around. It was not the surf at all, but waves, breaking before the coming wind. They were lost in the fog!

Percy faced Filippo blankly. For a moment his head went round. With bitter regret he now realized that in dropping the buoy he had given up a certainty for an uncertainty that might cost them dearly. But nothing was to be gained by yielding to discouragement. He reviewed his scanty stock of sea lore.

"That wind is probably blowing from some point between northeast and southeast. If we turn around, and run straight before it, we'll be likely to hit the island."

He swung the pea-pod stern to the breeze.

"Here goes! Watch out sharp for lobster-buoys, Filippo!"

But no buoys appeared. They might pa.s.s within ten feet of one and never see it. Five, ten, twenty, thirty minutes pa.s.sed; and still no sign of Tarpaulin. The wind was becoming stronger, the waves higher; their rus.h.i.+ng was now loud enough to drown the sound of any surf that might be breaking on the ledges of the island. Percy rowed for a quarter-hour longer, dread plucking at his heart-strings. At last he rested on his oars.

"We've missed it," he acknowledged, despondently.

They were lost now in good earnest. It was one o'clock. The fog hung over them like a heavy gray pall, so damp and thick that it was almost stifling. Percy turned the pea-pod bow to the wind and began rowing again.

"We must try to hold our own till it clears up," he observed, with attempted cheerfulness.

But his tones lacked conviction. It might not clear for two or three days. By degrees his strokes lost their force, until the oars were barely dipping. The boat was going astern fast.

Two o'clock. Long ere this Jim and Budge must have returned from trawling and realized that the pea-pod and its occupants were lost. They were probably searching for them now, perhaps miles away on the other side of the island, wherever it might be.

A gruff bark startled them. A round, black, whiskered head suddenly thrust up out of the water close to the port gunwale. Filippo cried out in alarm, but Percy rea.s.sured him.

"Only a seal!"

Abruptly the sea grew rough. All around them tossed and streamed and writhed long, black ap.r.o.ns of kelp. They were pa.s.sing over a sunken ledge. Soon it lay behind them; the kelp vanished and the waves grew lower.

Three o'clock went by; then four. The afternoon was waning. The thick, woolly gray that surrounded them a.s.sumed a more somber shade. Night was coming, pitchy and starless, doubly so for the two lost boys, adrift on the open ocean.

Hark! What was that? They both heard it, far distant, off the port bow!

Percy leaped up in excitement.

"The shot-gun!" he cried. "They're signaling!"

Heading the boat toward the sound, he rowed his hardest, while Filippo strained forward, listening. Ten minutes dragged by, and once again--_pouf!_--slightly louder, and slightly to starboard. Percy corrected his course and again threw his whole heart into his rowing.

So it went for an hour, the signals sounding at ten-minute intervals, each louder and nearer than the one before. At last Percy thought it possible that their voices might be heard against the wind. He stopped rowing.

"Now shout, Filippo!"

Their cries pealed out together. They were heard. An answering hail came back. Soon the puff-puff-puff of the _Barracouta's_ exhaust was driving rivets through the fog. A little later they were on board the sloop, answering the inquiries of Jim and Budge, while the empty pea-pod towed astern.

"Your seamans.h.i.+p wasn't bad, Perce," was Jim's judgment. "After you dropped the buoy, and then found you'd been rowing into the teeth of the wind, it might have been better to have tried only to hold your own until we came out to look you up. That breeze at first was nearer north than northeast, and when you ran before it you went south past the island. After that you were all at sea. But I might have done just the same thing. I can't tell you, though, how glad we are to see you back, even if it did cost next to our last sh.e.l.l of birdshot. The Gulf of Maine's a pretty homesick place to be kicking round in on a foggy night."

"You aren't any gladder than we are," replied Percy.

He glanced at the pea-pod towing astern.

"But say, Jim! Just cast your eye over that tub. When it comes to catching lobsters, haven't Filippo and I got the rest of the bunch beat to a frazzle?"

XIV

SWORDFIs.h.i.+NG

All through July the Tarpaulin Islanders had been troubled with dogfish.

Beginning with a few scattering old "ground dogs," which apparently live on the banks the year round, they had become more and more numerous as the month advanced. Bait was stripped from the hooks; fish on the trawl were devoured until only heads and backbones were left; and the robbers themselves were caught in increasing numbers. At last their depredations became unbearable.

Jim and Percy had made a set one foggy morning on Medrick Shoal. When the trawl came up it was a sight to make angels weep. For yards at a stretch the hooks were bare or bitten off. Then came "dogs" of all sizes from "garter-dogs," or "shoe-strings," a foot long, to full-grown ten-pounders of about a yard. Mingled with them was an occasional lonesome skeleton of a haddock, cusk, or hake.

"Look at the pirate!" said Jim.

Grasping a ganging well above the hook, he held the fish up for Percy's inspection. It was two feet long, of a dirty gray color, slim, shark-shaped, with mouth underneath. Before each of the two fins on its back projected a sharp horn.

"Think of buying perfectly good herring at Vinalhaven, and freighting 'em way down here to feed a thing like that!" mourned Jim. "He's the meanest thief that ever grew fins. Swims too slow to catch a fish that's free; but good-by to anything that's hooked, if he's round. He'll gouge out a piece as big as a baseball at every bite. I'd hate to fall overboard in a school of 'em."

"Don't touch him!" he warned, hastily, as Percy reached out an investigating hand. "He'll stick those horns into you, and they're rank poison."

"Aren't dogfish good for anything?" asked Percy.

"Not a thing! No, I'll take that back. They can be ground up for fertilizer; their livers are full of oil; and their skin makes the finest kind of sandpaper for cleaning or polis.h.i.+ng metal without scratching it. They've been canned, too, under the name of grayfish; but no fisherman'd ever eat 'em; he knows 'em too well."

Rod after rod of trawl yielded the same results.

"I'm almost tempted to save my buoys and anchors, and cut all the rest away," announced Jim in disgust. "I've known it to be done. They wear the line out, sawing across it. But I guess the best way is to save what we can and stop fis.h.i.+ng for a while. Sometimes they come square-edged, like a stone wall, just as they have this morning; and in a few days they'll have gone somewhere else. Hope it'll be that way this time!"

It was almost noon before the whole trawl was aboard. It had yielded barely two hundred pounds of hake.

"Tell you what!" exclaimed Jim as he looked at his compa.s.s and headed the _Barracouta_ westward through the fog for home, "we'll put the trawl in the house for a few days, and fit up for swordfis.h.i.+ng. There's a good ground fifteen miles south of the island. I've been down there with Uncle Tom. If we could get some fair-sized fish, it'd be worth our while to take 'em into Rockland."

That afternoon they mustered their swordfish gear. In the house were three or four of the wrecked coaster's mast-hoops. One of these Jim lashed to the sloop's jibstay, about waist-high above the end of the bowsprit.

"That'll do for the pulpit!"

Near the jaws of the gaff he nailed a little board seat, rigged like a bracket on a roof for s.h.i.+ngling. On this the lookout could sit, his arm round the mast, watching for fins.