“Going right into the business, aren’t you?” he said. “Well, I like to see you young fellows with some spunk. Don’t fetch in so many that I can’t handle ’em,” he added, with a twinkle in his eye; “and if you underrun your trawls twice a day, so the fish will come in here good and fresh, I’ll pay you half a cent a pound. You’ll find it some work, though, when the sea is running strong. Got to take the fish off the hooks in the morning, and then underrun again at evening and bait up all the hooks for the night’s catch.” “We’ll do that all right,” responded Henry Burns. “We’ll bring them in fresh.” They put in hard, busy days now, rising at the first of daylight and going outside as soon as the wind would allow. They had only one dory with which to tend the trawls, so two of the boys usually tended one, and then the other two took their turn. It proved, indeed, hard work when the sea was high. If the night’s catch had been good, the trawls came up heavy; and there was ever the danger, with the pitching of the boat, of running one of the innumerable hooks into the hands. But they soon became expert at it, learning how to sit braced in the boat and hold the trawl with a firm grasp, so that it might not slip through the hands, and how to unhook the fish. Then, when they had underrun both trawls, they would stand off in the _Viking_ for a different feeding-ground for the cod, and fish until it was time to bait up the trawls for the night. By degrees, they came to learn other feeding-grounds than the few Will Hackett had shown them, by following the little fleet; and they went now, occasionally, clear across the bay that lay between Loon Island and South Haven Island. This was often rough water, for they were at the very entrance to the bay, at the open sea, and the waves piled in heavily, even when the wind was light, showing there had been a disturbance far out. This took them to the shoal water in about the reefs at the foot of South Haven Island, a protected spot from the north, under the lee, but open to the full sweep of the sea from the south. It was in this place at about five of the afternoon, on the fourth day following their arrival, that they experienced a sudden and startling change of weather. They had gone out in the morning, with a light southerly breeze blowing, which had held steadily throughout the day. But now, near sundown, it had died away, so that they had weighed anchor and were about to beat back slowly across the bay, toward harbour. They had scarcely got under way, however, when the wind, with extraordinary fickleness, fell off altogether, a strange and unusual calm succeeding. “That’s queer!” exclaimed Harvey, glancing about with some apprehension. “Looks as though we were hung up here for the night. It won’t do to try to anchor near these reefs, and we can’t fetch bottom where we are. I guess we are in for a row of a mile to get under the lee of one of those little islands where we can lie safe.”