“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:

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:

“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.”