It was hardly light when we were waked up. Naboth was getting up the anchor; the engine was running, and just as Catty and I got on deck, we heard Mr. Browning throw in the clutch. Mr. Topper fired our cannon in salute to the Yacht Club, and we moved out of the harbor into Buzzards Bay.
It was a little misty and we couldn’t see far, but Mr. Browning was navigating, and had all of us standing forward to look out for spars and buoys and such-like. We headed right across the bay. Pretty soon the sun came out, and a little breeze came along, and the mists disappeared. A long ways ahead we could see land, and the chart said it was Cuttyhunk, with bigger land off the port bow, and a tiny island called Penikese to starboard.
“That’s the leper colony,” says Mr. Browning.
“Real lepers—like in the Bible?” says Catty.
“Regular lepers. The government keeps them there—like on that island in the Sandwich group.”
“Not if I’ve got anything to say about it,” says Mr. Browning. “I’ve got a lot of curiosity, but lepers are something I don’t need in my business. The nearest we get to that island is about a mile away from it.”
“Huh,” says Catty to me. “I had an idea leprosy was just a Bible disease and in Ben Hur. Didn’t ever figger we had it right at home.”
“I’ve et fish all my life,” says he, “and I never got it. Why, when Dad and I were tramps, we pretty nearly _lived_ on fish, and we never had a sign of it. Fish, your grandmother!”
“Maybe it wasn’t fish,” says I. “Maybe it was snakes.”
“And maybe it was angle worms,” says Catty.
“Anyhow, folks get it from something,” says I.
Just as we headed up the narrow channel that leads through rocks and reefs to Cuttyhunk, that a fish line is named after, there was a little lobster boat laying to and pulling up a lobster pot. We ran up alongside and cut out the engine, and Mr. Browning hollered to know if the man had any lobsters to sell.
“Got a pail?” says he, and Naboth fetched up a pail. Then the man filled it chock-full of little lobsters and passed it back to us, and Mr. Browning says, “How much?” and the man says, “Oh, about a dollar’n a quarter.”
Those were the first lobsters I’d ever seen, except on the labels of cans, and I didn’t think so much of them on account of their being so small, until Mr. Topper explained they were young ones, which was why the lobster man sold them to us so cheap.