"Right here."
Ramsay heard the mockery in Hans' voice. "And I suppose that it is a
gill net?"
"How'd you know that?" Devil Chad challenged.
"I gazed into my crystal ball," Hans said smoothly, "and I discovered
that, when one fisherman wishes to eliminate a competitor, he can
always stretch a gill net across the tunnel of a pound net. There is
certain to be a battle, and whoever survives controls the fishing."
Ramsay began to understand. Fishing on Lake Michigan was governed by no
enforceable law but only by the ethics of the fishermen themselves. Most
of them were ethical; when one found a good fishing ground, others
usually respected his rights. But there was no law that said they had to
respect them. Should one fisherman care to trespass on the rights of
another, he could always find some way to provoke a quarrel. Then,
regardless of anything else that happened, he could say that he was only
trying to protect his property or claim in some other way that his was a
just quarrel. Few people would be able to prove to the contrary.
Then a blue-and-white buoy, a marker used on a gill net, floated into
sight. Hans saw it, too, and again his voice was mocking. "Is that the
net you mean?"
There were subdued voices on the Mackinaw boat. Joe Mannis put his
shotgun down and stepped to the bow of the boat with a gaff hook in his
hand. He lay prone, stabbed with the gaff, and hooked the buoy. Foot by
foot he reeled in thirty yards of tattered gill net. Hans' scornful
laughter rolled like a barrel through the mist and bounded back in
echoes. Ramsay, highly amused, echoed Hans.
"Find your other buoy!" Hans called. "Pull it in, take it home, and
repair your gill net! But do not again set it on our fishing grounds!"
The Mackinaw boat floated into the mist. Ramsay saw the baffled rage on
Devil Chad's face. But mostly he was aware of the contempt of Hans for
Devil Chad.
"Here!" Hans called. "You're missing a man!" He turned to Jake Hillis.
The constable glowered back, like a stupid horse.
"Want to swim over and join your little friends?" Hans invited.
"No."
"Well, we brought you out from the sand. We'll take you back to the
sand."
Hans' shoulders were shaking with silent mirth as he bent his back to
the pound boat's oars. He steered in to the pier they had built, and
expertly nosed the boat in to its landing. A mist-draped wraith, Marta,
awaited them. "What happened?" she queried anxiously.
"Nothing," Pieter assured her.
"A great deal," Hans corrected. "They caught the White Sturgeon, for no
other fish in the lake could have wrecked a net so completely. I told
you we have a friend."
He took a pouch from his pocket, counted five silver dollars from it,
and dropped them into Jake Hillis' hand. Captain Klaus flew down from
the house top to alight on Hans' shoulder. "_Quark!_" he squawked.
As though he understood perfectly, Hans said, "That is right, my little
one." And to Jake Hillis he said, "If you see them, tell them not to
come again."
Deliberately turning his back on the constable, Hans stared out over the
lake. Then Jake Hillis was gone, and somehow it was as though he had
never even been with them. Ramsay waited expectantly. Hans turned away
from his intent study of the lake, and he was frowning as though there
was some complicated problem which he must solve. Yet when he spoke, his
voice betrayed nothing abnormal and there was no sign that he might have
been under the least strain. "Perhaps it would be well not to fish again
today. That is a shame, for the season draws to a close and we cannot
fish much longer, anyway. Still, we have done all that it is necessary
to do, and next year we will be well-situated. We will have gear and
tackle. I go to work on the boat."