_GOING LOBSTERING_
“Hist-sst! Ann! Wake up!”
It was Ben’s voice that woke Ann, and his hand on her shoulder. She
thought it was the middle of the night, it was so dark, and her second
thought was of the wreck. Had anything happened there? They had watched
for days and never seen a sign of life on it.
“Jo just called me,” whispered Ben. “He wants to know whether we would
like to go after lobsters with him. He says it is going to be a fine
day and not too rough for landlubbers like us.”
Would she like to go? Well, rather! Jo had promised that he would take
them some fine day when the swell on the water was not too heavy. The
Baileys, either Jo or his father, made a daily trip out through their
lobster string, which was set beyond the pond rocks and Douglas Head in
the wide expanse of the sea. Jo had decided that Helen had better not
go as she was still so frail that if she grew dizzy and ill out there
probably she would have to go to bed for the rest of the day. And as
she would be grief-stricken if she knew that she was being left behind
the others arranged to go some day without letting her know anything
about it.
Ann’s room was just light enough for her to see her way without
lighting a lamp. She had not realized that the night faded so slowly
just before the sun rose, for she never had been up so early in all her
life. The small clock on the chest of drawers pointed to half past one.
She could hear Ben moving about in his room, scurrying into his clothes
with a sound like the little scramblings of a squirrel.
They found Jo waiting for them by the kitchen steps with a lighted
lantern in his hand.
“Probably we won’t need this after we get across the meadow and strike
the road,” explained Jo, “but now it will be easier going with a light
to shine and show up the bumps. Dawn is coming pretty fast now.”
He struck off down the sloping meadow, going across it diagonally in
such a way as to give the wreck a wide berth. Ann realized that he
deliberately chose the rougher ground of the field in preference to
walking along the road, merely because of that ship waiting to draw
their thoughts into her shadows. Ann had no desire to peer into the
grinning face of the demon in the half-light of the pale dawn. She
still had a vivid recollection of its leer the first time she had seen
it in the gathering shadows of dusk. And dawn is exactly like the dusk
in its power to make things look different from the way they really
are.
“I’m glad we’re not going past the boat,” Ben murmured heartily in her
ear, and she nodded in sympathy.
The cove lay at the mouth of the swamp river and was only a short walk
from the road at the end of the meadow. Jo swung into a swift pace
as waiting for Ben and Ann had made him later than usual. He always
timed himself with the sunrise and should have his dory in the water
and well started before the sun hopped up over the horizon. The others
kept beside him only by running now and then with short quick steps,
and when they caught him Jo would spurt ahead and the race would start
again.
“Ben Seymour couldn’t have paced this,” Ben cried breathlessly. “But
Allan-a-Dale can. Chasing bucks in the wood is fine for strengthening
the wind.”
It was true. In the past few weeks Ben had filled out considerably and
he had grown an inch as well. Ann looked down at her own strong brown
lean hands; they had changed since she first undertook to handle a hoe.
The healed blisters still showed on her palms but they had long ago
ceased to hurt. And so the three of them frisked away in the early dawn
like three young colts turned loose in the meadows.
The gray shacks of the fishermen, clustered at the mouth of the river,
seemed not much larger near at hand than they looked from the bluff.
They all were built with only one story, the shingled roofs coming
almost down to the ground on either side. Small square doors led into
the dark interiors and the windows were nothing but little openings cut
in the walls.
A narrow winding lane led from the dirt road down through the ravine
bordered by thick brush and the same variety of dark pines that stood
about the swamp pond above. After the track reached the pebbly beach
it was paved with crushed clamshells that glistened in the early light
like a pale ribbon over the dark oval pebbles.
As soon as the lane met the shacks it twined gracefully in and out
among them all, so that although the shacks seemed from a distance to
stand together, pressed up in a heap, the lane managed to come directly
to the door of each one of them. Suddenly from a regular workaday world
Ann felt that she had been transplanted into a tiny village out of some
fairy tale, whose inhabitants were yellow gnomes with big sou’wester
hats pulled over their heads. Under the reversed brim of each gnome’s
yellow oiled hat a pair of keen blue eyes, laughing as Fred Bailey’s
eyes laughed, peered out at the children. Every face was brown, seamed,
and leathery. Always a small stubbed pipe belched clouds of smoke about
each lobsterman’s head. All the men were built alike, square and solid,
and they all wore yellow.
“How do you tell them apart?” Ann asked Jo.
“Tell them apart?” Jo echoed Ann’s question; it sounded so foolish to
him that he barely took the trouble to make any answer. “Why, I’ve
known them since I was a baby in long clothes. Why shouldn’t I be able
to tell them apart?”
Then, seeing that she was actually puzzled, he stopped teasing and
pointed them out to her; she had seen them all before.
“I do suppose,” he said, “that in the dim light they look as much alike
as so many Chinamen. Don’t you recognize that one down by the boat in
the water? That’s Jed; he’s a mite shorter and rounder than the rest,
though I don’t suppose you’d notice it in broad daylight. Yes, I know
he looks very different with his slicker off. The one traveling along
with the basket--he’s Walt. He’s the youngest next to me. He’ll be
fifty-three this fall. That fellow coming toward us now, he’s Pete
Simonds; he’s quite a joker.”
“Pete Simonds was one who went out to the ship with your father the day
after she was wrecked,” said Ann, remembering the name.
“Sure,” said Jo. “They all were there. They all came up from the
village when I told them that a boat needed help. Why shouldn’t they?”
Ann could not take her eyes from the figures pottering up and down the
shelving beach of pebbles, fitting their dories for the trip out to
sea. These were the men who had taken a small boat across the terrible
pounding waves to go to the help of sailors who had come from no one
knew where. They had risked their lives to try to do something for
others. While Fred Bailey was telling the story Ann had listened as
if some one were reading a thrilling tale out of a magazine or a book,
without half realizing it all had actually happened. But these were
real live men, and old men at that. She had seen them, often, going
along the road on their way to the cove, but she never had thought much
about their connection with the wreck.
She looked more closely at Pete Simonds. As she came up beside him she
noticed how powerful he was in spite of the wrappings of his cumbersome
slicker. His great fingers were gnarled and looked like steel rods.
Under his sou’wester she could see frayed ends of his snow-white hair
and his eyes shone as cold ice shines when the winter sky is unclouded.
“Hallelujah, Jo-ey,” he shouted as he came abreast of them, shifting
his bitten pipe to the other corner of his shaven lips. “Ain’t you a
mite late? A spry boy like you layin’ abed till afternoon! You oughter
be ashamed of yourself.”
“It wasn’t his fault,” Ann spoke bravely into the unsmiling face. “We
delayed him. He promised to take us out in the boat with him this
morning and he had to wait for us. We’re the lazy ones, not Jo.”
“Oho!” The big foghorn voice boomed out and Ann was sure he could be
heard in the village. “So it was you, young lady, he was waiting for.
Wal, now, I don’t blame him.”
“Hush your noise,” ordered Jo, laughing. “This is Ann Seymour and Ben
Seymour who are staying up at the homestead this summer. They don’t
know that you’re pestering them just for fun.”
“Why, o’ course she knows I was only a-funnin’. This young lady has
good sense, I can see that.” Pete clapped one huge hand down on Ann’s
shoulder. “I wouldn’t go for to hurt her feelings.” He looked into
Ann’s eyes. “Jo’s a good boy and a first-class skipper. You couldn’t
have picked a better captain among us.”
Jo visibly swelled under the compliment after Pete had left them, and
Ann was happy to see him so pleased.
“It was nice of Pete to say that about you,” she said softly.
“You bet it was,” said Jo. “He is a close-mouthed old fellow but he
sure knows how to handle a boat. And his bark is a good deal worse
than his bite. He has been awfully kind to me. He taught me just about
everything I know, what with father being so busy often when I needed
help. But Pete never said anything to make me think he was pleased with
the way I was sailing the boat. I can remember when I was very small
and came down here to watch the men; Pete used to pull a pair of oars
in his boat and make a straight trip of over twenty miles a day and
think nothing of it.”
“You said twenty miles?” asked Ben incredulously.
“All of that,” asserted Jo. “He was the first fisherman to buy a motor
for his dory, when everybody thought he was a fool to do it. He used to
sit here on the beach for hours reading over the book of instructions
that came with the engine, and finally he put the parts together and
made the thing work without any help from anybody. It has made a heap
of difference, having engines in the boats. A man can take care of
pretty nigh eighty pots if he has a motor boat, when he used to be held
down to twenty, pulling oars.”
Ann had peeped into a shack where a lantern glowed. It was stacked with
barrels of salt and open kegs of steeping fishbait; nets were festooned
on the walls, coiled ropes were thrown here and there, and a yellow
goblin was preparing for his morning’s voyage out to sea. The air was
filled with the pungent smell of tar.
Jo opened the padlock of his own shack, reached into the darkness, and
pulled out a pair of oars. Then he shut the door after him, leaving the
lock dangling from the hinge.
“We don’t clasp it,” he explained, “while we are out on the water;
otherwise our neighbors would think we didn’t trust our tackle open to
them.”
“Why are you taking oars, if it is a motor boat that you use?” asked
Ann.
“In case anything should happen to the engine. It’s safer.”
“And why aren’t you taking all the rest of the things that the other
men are working with?” inquired Ben.
“I thought it was likely to be fine to-day, so I stored the bait kegs
in the dory last night. We can get off right now.”
With Ben’s help he shoved the light dory into the smooth water of the
river and helped Ann aboard, suggesting that she should sit in the bow
as she was heavier than Ben. The two boys in the back would balance the
dory evenly.
“She would have been afloat if the tide had been up a mite,” apologized
Jo; “but sometimes the water runs out on the ebb a bit faster than we
calculate and that drops the boats a mite high up the beach.”
Ben had climbed in over the gunwale without minding his wet feet.
Sea water would dry without giving him a cold. He really had enjoyed
helping to push the dory afloat.
Jo took his place by the engine; he could manage it and the tiller at
the same time. He spun the wheel of the motor once or twice, the engine
sputtered as the spark ignited the gasoline and then it caught in a
clear put-put. Then he seized the tiller cord and pointed the boat’s
nose steadily out toward the dark smoothly rolling waves of the sea
beyond the mouth of the river. They were off.
Under Jo’s expert handling the boat took the first wave without effort.
With the second wave she rolled a little, but as Jo swung her more
toward the end of Douglas Head she moved steadily up and over the crest
of each running wave and slid gently down on the far side.
From where she sat in the bow Ann could feel the dory rise and
plunge, run forward and rise to plunge again. The wind was fresh and
cool, blowing straight into her face and tossing her short hair all
topsy-turvy. The sky far over to the east had turned a blood-red with
flames of orange shooting up through the center of the mass of color.
Suddenly the first sun ray shot out over the water and touched the
racing boat. The last of the darkness melted quickly away.
“Oh, Ben! Isn’t it wonderful!” Ann exclaimed.
But her brother was not so enthusiastic. “I am not sure that I like it
yet,” he admitted. “I have a queer feeling in my middle; all gone, like
dropping down in a fast elevator.”
“That comes from the pancakes you ate last night,” said Jo
unsympathetically. “Don’t think about them and you will be all right in
a minute.”
“I forgot,” said Ann, putting her hand in her pocket. “I brought these
crackers; it will be rather a long time before breakfast and I thought
that mother would say we must eat something.”
“I ought to have thought of that,” apologized Jo, “but I never have
anything myself.”
But though he did not feel the crying emptiness that was upsetting Ben,
Jo ate his share. Never had crackers tasted better to any of them.
“That was a fine idea of yours, Ann,” said Ben.
“Now,” advised Jo, “if you should sing you’d feel even better. I’ve
heard that some doctors cure patients by giving them something worse
than they have already.”
“That cure might work,” admitted Ben, “but it seems hard to give you
and Ann a dose of the same medicine, and besides, I don’t need any,
now. What shall I sing?”
“Oh, we wouldn’t suffer in silence,” said Jo. “We’ll sing, too. How’s
this one?” And he began:
Oh, it’s bonny, bonny weather
For sailormen at sea,
He pulls his ropes and trims his sails,
And sings so merrily----
His fresh young voice rang out high and clear in the new warm sunlight.
“Jo!” exclaimed Ann. “I never have heard you sing. I didn’t know you
could. Where did you learn that song?”
“I sing only when I’m in the boat,” Jo answered laughingly. “It must
be the bobbing up and down that makes me want to do it, just like a
chippie bird swinging on the branch of a tree. My mother used to sing
me that song when I was little. She taught it to me.”
“You were old enough to remember her?” Ann asked gently.
“Yes,” he replied, speaking as gently as Ann had asked her question, “I
remember her very well. I was nine years old when she got through.”
Ann had learned since she came to Pine Ledge that the fishermen never
spoke of any one as dying. They talked as though the person who had
left this world had finished a task and gone somewhere else. They had
“got through” with the present job of living and were resting.
“My mother taught the district school before she was married,” Jo
continued. “She was very smart and she taught me a great deal during
the winter evenings. In lots of ways she was like your mother; kind,
you know, with never a cross word, and always understanding when I
tried to please her. She knew lots of songs and taught them to me. How
she used to laugh because I always got the tune right even when I was
so little that I could hardly say the words! One bit she used to sing
a lot and I liked it one of the best, but though I remember the tune I
have forgotten most of the words. I wish I knew them. Maybe you know
it, Ann. It started something like this:
Maxwelton’s braes are bonnie,
Where early fa’s the dew----”
“Oh, I know that,” said Ben.
“Yes, we know the rest of that, Jo. It is ‘Annie Laurie,’ an old Scotch
song, and it goes on like this,” and Ann took up the song where Jo had
been interrupted.
“That’s the one! That’s the one!” cried Jo happily. Then he stopped
suddenly. “Hey! Here’s my first buoy, and I came near running it down.”
Ben peered after the block of green and yellow that Jo had just missed
striking. “However do you manage to come away out here and hit a little
block of wood floating in the middle of the ocean?”
“That’s easy. I do it every morning,” Jo answered. “And I don’t
generally pass it by, as I was going to do to-day.”
He turned the dory in a wide circle and just before reaching the buoy
he shut off his engine and coasted alongside. Seizing a short boat book
that lay beside him on the thwart he deftly caught the rope attached to
the buoy and began to haul it in. Yard after yard ran through his hands
until finally it began to pull harder, as if a heavy load were attached
to it.
“Here she comes,” he said.
The huge wooden crate swung up beside the boat. Jo opened the catch
at the top and threw up the swinging lid. Then he began to take out
the lobsters. They were green and shining, with big claws waving
frantically in their effort to catch Jo’s fingers. One, two, three, and
four he fished out of the crate. The last was a small one and he threw
it back into the water.
“It is too short,” he said. “We are not allowed to bring them in as
small as that.”
“Aren’t they good to eat?” asked Ann.
“They’re the sweetest and the tenderest. But if the lobstermen began
selling them there soon wouldn’t be any left to grow up. Lobsters under
ten inches long aren’t allowed to be sold in the state of Maine.”
“What a lot you know, Jo!” exclaimed Ben admiringly.
Jo looked a little surprised. “That’s my business; of course I know
that, about boats and lobsters. There’s a plenty of things that you
know and I don’t.”
He dropped the three big lobsters into a wooden box in the dory. “Now
hand me one of those bait bags, Ben, if you please; out of the keg
behind you.”
He took the bag, wet and dripping, from Ben’s outstretched hand and
fastened it into the trap, taking out the half-empty one that had been
there. Then he closed the cover, hasped it, and let the trap slip
gently down, down, away from sight in the clear green water.
“Now for the next,” he said as he spun the wheel, and the dory once
again pointed her course up the coast.
Jo visited twenty of his pots that morning, replacing the bait in each
before he dropped it back into the water. Ann soon learned to fill
the little bait bags which he handed across to her as he pulled them
out of the pots and she always had them ready for him by the time the
next pot had been hauled to the surface. They had taken pity on Ben
and forbidden him to handle the bait, for the smell of the fish was a
little too much for his slight attack of seasickness.
“I’m all right now,” he insisted.
“Next time you come out you won’t feel the motion at all,” Jo promised.
“And you’ll forget all about this as soon as you step on shore.
Everybody gets a little sick the first time they go outside in a small
boat. Ann’s just tough, that’s the only reason she has escaped.”
“Where do you get the fish for the bait, Jo?” asked Ann after she had
filled the twentieth bag and they were sweeping in toward the cove with
the morning’s catch.
“The lobstermen get it. We would catch our own bait, but the farm work
takes so much of my father’s time and I’m not strong enough to handle
a trawl alone. So we buy from the men who go out after fish. You see,
to go lobstering the way most of the fishermen do would take all day.
First, they have to dig their clams down on the sand beach a mile to
the south; they use the clams to bait the fish trawls. After the trawls
are baited, they have to go out and catch the fish and bring them in.
Then the fish are used to catch the lobsters.”
“Sort of ‘great fleas have little fleas to bite ’em,’” Ben quoted.
“I guess you are almost well now, after that,” said Jo as he swung the
boat into the river.
Just before landing he once more cut off his engine and let the dory
drift alongside a large wooden box afloat in the smoother protected
water of the river. “This is the storage box where we put our catch
until we gather enough to pay to ship them to Boston.”
He opened the padlock on the cover and swung the big lid up, dumping
the day’s catch into it, eighteen in all, most of them fair-sized. Jo
felt that his morning’s work had been well worth while.
They landed, pulling the dory after them until it was slightly out of
the water. Jo threw the iron anchor well up the beach, so that the tide
would not set the boat adrift as it rose to the flood.
When she began to walk Ann discovered that she still felt the motion
of the boat and she swayed a bit as she went up the lane. She had real
“sea-legs” Jo told her and would soon be a regular deep-sea man.
On the way back to the shack to replace the oars and snap the lock
on the door they passed a building Ann had not noticed in the early
morning. It was merely a built-in shed between two shacks, a sort of
lean-to in a sad state of repair. The door stood open so that she
could see the man working inside as she passed by. He was dressed in
rough clothing, a pair of dark trousers and a thin shirt opened at
the throat, and what surprised her most was the fact that he was not
wearing oilskins. He was much younger than any of the other men she had
seen that morning and this, too, astonished her, for Jo had said that
Walt was the youngest of the fishermen, while this man could not have
been as old as her own father. He wore no hat and his thick hair was
unkempt. She could see, even as she walked by, that he was unshaven and
looked like a tramp--a rather interesting tramp, however.
“Who is that man?” she asked Jo.
“Him? That’s Warren Bain.” Jo’s voice sounded contemptuous.
“He doesn’t seem like the other fishermen.” Ann did not wish to show
her interest, especially as Jo did not seem eager to talk about the
stranger. But she was feeling inquisitive about him and she had already
learned that Jo talked more freely if he were not being questioned.
“He’s a queer fellow,” Jo continued after a moment, as though it had
taken him a while to decide whether or not to gossip. “He don’t belong
to these parts. Came from Down East this spring and set out lobstering
from the cove here. We don’t quite take to his coming, because there
are more lobsters down his way than there are here and we feel that
it would be fairer for him to keep to his home grounds. Besides, he
ain’t been none too friendly with the men since he came, and he pries
into other folks’ private affairs a good deal. I haven’t got anything
against him, but I just don’t like his way.”
As they passed the open door of the shed Warren Bain lifted his head
from his work and saw them. Then he moved slowly and lazily to the
doorway and watched them. He said nothing, although he looked Ann and
Ben over from head to foot. Ann was annoyed by his intense stare and
she resented the fact that he did not reply immediately to Jo’s curt
greeting.
“Fine morning,” Jo had said when the man first noticed them.
Finally Bain shifted his eyes a little from Ann and Ben and relaxed
against the side post of his shack, lounging comfortably. “Good
enough,” he said, and nodded his head to Jo.
“You kids stayin’ up at the Baileys’?” he asked with a slow drawl.
Trying not to be angry, Ann answered, “Yes. We are spending the summer
with Jo.”
“Hum,” and Bain brought his piercing eyes back to Ann’s face. “Where do
you spend all o’ your spare time?”
Jo interrupted Ann before she could answer such an astonishingly rude
question. “I don’t know that that is for you to worry about,” Jo said,
and though his words were discourteous, his voice was quietly polite.
“Oh,” Warren Bain apologized, “I was just interested. I didn’t mean to
be pryin’. It really ain’t none of my business.”
Ann thought that he was going to laugh at their indignation, but he did
not. He lounged against the door and watched them as they went away up
the lane.
When she thought that they must be completely out of sight, Ann turned
excitedly to Jo. “You don’t suppose that he knows anything about
the wrecked schooner?” she whispered breathlessly, although the man
couldn’t hear, not possibly. “Perhaps he doesn’t want to have us play
on it and perhaps interfere with whatever he plans to do.”
“Gee, Ann!” exclaimed Ben. “You have brains! I’ll bet that he knows
something! No man would have acted in such a strange way for no reason
at all.”
“What do you think, Jo?” insisted Ann.
Jo did not answer for another moment. He thought for a little space,
piecing together all the different things that had happened--especially
trying to tie them up with that lantern and the fire in the woods.
“I think you are right, Ann,” he said at last. “I believe he does know
something, and we will watch him as well as the ship.”