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All the time they were driving the seine-boat to its limit, and the skipper was laying to the big steering oar, the longest of them all and taking a strong man to handle it properly laying to it, swinging from the waist like a hammer-thrower, and the boat jumping to it. She came jumping right for us in the dory in a little while.
It was "owling" sure enough, with the seine-boat on a short painter and the dory on a shorter painter still and astern of the seine-boat again. We came near to being lost in the dory. Mel Adams, who was in the dory with me, thinking she was surely going to capsize one time she rode up over the stern of the seine-boat, took a flying leap into the seine-boat.
Between the outer end of our seine-boat and the end of the bowsprit of the Mary Grace Adams was a passage that may have been the width of a vessel. But the space seemed too narrow. Our crew were wondering if he would try it. Even the skipper, standing in the companionway, stepped up on deck to have a better look. "He's got to take it quarterin', and it ain't wide enough," said Eddie Parsons.
As he set a hand upon the spokes and spun them round, a tall gray ship towered above them from the side on which was the seine-boat, and seemed to hang poised a moment on the crest of a sea before the final crash. Colin, who was leaning over the rail watching the dipping of the net, was able to see everything. The fisherman at the bow of the seine-boat jumped for the boom and clasped it safely.
He hadn't even stopped to get into his oilskins, he was in such a hurry. By the skipper's orders I had made fast some of the corks to the thwarts in the dory and Billie took some into the spare dory. The whole length of the seine-boat they were making fast the seine too.
Yes, sir, I cert'nly swore at him good, but it no more jarred him than but when their seine-boat came by, half of 'em smokin', some half-breed among 'em has to sing out, 'Y'ought to hang up a riding light if your vessel's hove-to, he says. What do you think of that, Tommie 'if your vessel's hove-to! and if the Johnnie was going one she was going ten knots an hour."
As soon as we had enough of them off the vessel's deck to make it safe to drive her, the skipper gave her a little more sheet and let her go for New York. We hustled the seine-boat aboard too. Some other vessels must have got fish, too, and there was no time to waste.
"Pretty, pretty," you could almost hear the old seiners saying between their teeth, even as they were all rowing with jaws set and never a let-up until the circle was completed, when it was oars into the air and Clancy leaping from the dory into the seine-boat to help purse up.
Then the Privateer, another fast one, but going sluggishly now because of a stove-in seine-boat wallowing astern. Then the North Wind, with her decks swept clear of everything but her house and hatches. Seine-boat, seine and dory were gone. After her was a big, powerful vessel, the Ave Maria, with the most erratic skipper of all. This man never appeared but the gossip broke out.
So we attended to the sand, and on the way back hauled our second seine out of the hold of the Lucy Foster, and piled it into the seine-boat. With the last of the twine into the seine-boat and just as we were about to push off from the Lucy, Wesley Marrs put a foot on the rail of his vessel and spoke to Maurice.
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