He went way out and turned his back on the town and fished. He wasn't to finish the work on the _Lillie-Bennie_. They said that morning they thought they'd have to send down the Cape for an "expert." So _he_ would probably go to work at the new cold storage--working with a lot of Portagee laborers. He wondered why things were this way with him. They seemed to have just happened so. When you should have had some money it didn't come natural to do the things of people who have no money. The money went out of the "Bank" fishing about three years before his father sold his vessels. During those last three years Captain Silas Doane had spent all the money he had to keep things going, refusing to believe that the way of handling fish had changed and that the fishing between Cape's End and the Grand Banks would no longer be what it had been. When he sold he kept one vessel, and the next Winter she went ashore right across there on the northeast arm of the Cape. Joe Doane was aboard her that night. Myrtie was a baby then. It was of little Myrtie he thought when it seemed the vessel would pound herself to pieces before they could get off. _He_ couldn't be lost! He had to live and work so his little girl could have everything she wanted--After that the Doanes were without a vessel--and Doanes without a vessel were fish out of sea. They had never been folks to work on another man's boat. He supposed he had never started any big new thing because it had always seemed he was just filling in between trips. A good many years had slipped by and he was still just putting in time. And it began to look as if there wasn't going to be another trip. Suddenly he had to laugh. Some _joke_ on Joe Cadara! He could see him going down the Front street--broad, slow, _dumb_. Why, Joe Cadara thought his family _needed_ him. He thought they got along because he made those trips. But had Joe Cadara ever been able to give his wife a fireless cooker? Had the government presented a goat to the Cadaras when Joe was there? Joe Doane sat out on the breakwater and laughed at the joke on Joe Cadara. When Agnes Cadara was a little girl she would run to meet her father when he came in from a trip. Joe Doane used to like to see the dash she made. But Agnes was just tickled to death with her mourning! He sat there a long time--sat there until he didn't know whether it was a joke or not. But he got two haddock and more whiting than he wanted to carry home. So he felt better. A man sometimes needed to get off by himself. As he was turning in at home he saw Ignace Silva about to start out on a trip with Captain Gorspie. Silva thought he _had_ to go. But Silva had been saved--and had _his_ wife a fireless cooker? Suddenly Joe Doane called. "Hey! Silva! You're the government goat!" The way Doane laughed made Silva know this was a joke; not having a joke of his own he just turned this one around and sent it back. "Government goat yourself!" "Shouldn't wonder," returned Joe jovially.