"I'm no butcher," returned Lane. "Come to think of it, I don't care much for lamb, after all."
"Now see here!" said Jim. "What's the use of beating round the bush? We're all crazy for fresh meat. The only thing to do is to draw lots to see who'll sacrifice his feelings and do the shooting. We'll settle that now."
He cut four toothpicks into uneven lengths.
He had noticed that the Italian's olive face had grown pale.
"You're it, Budge! Don't be a quitter! There's the gun and here's our last shell. Don't miss!"
Lane's lips tightened. But he took the gun, put in the shell, and started up over the bank.
"Don't follow me," he flung back. "I'll do this alone."
Five minutes of silence followed. Then--_bang!_
The boys felt unhappy. In a few minutes Lane came crunching down the gravel slope. His face was sober.
"Up there! I didn't agree to bring it down."
Jim, Percy, and Stevens went up to the pasture; Lane remained in the cabin. A careful search failed to reveal the victim. Jim walked to the edge of the bank.
"Don't know! Running around up there, I s'pose!"
"No! I couldn't. And I know none of the rest of you could, either. So I fired in the air."
"Well, I guess that's the easiest way out of it for everybody. Next trip to Matinicus I'll order a hind quarter from Rockland. It'll mean a little more wear and tear on the company's pocketbook, but a good deal less on our feelings."
One of the accompaniments of the heat and fog of those August days was a kind of salt-water mirage. Ships and steamers miles away below the horizon were lifted into plain view. Low, distant islands rose to perpendicular bluffs, distorted by the wavering air-currents; other islands appeared directly above the first, and came down to join them. Percy watched these novel moving pictures with great interest.
Every few mornings either the trawl or the lobster-traps would yield something unusual. Now it might be a dozen bream, called by the fishermen "brim," "redfish," or "all-eyes"; again up would come a catfish, savage and sharp-toothed, able to dent an ash oar; and rarely a small halibut would appear, drowned on the trawl. Sometimes the lobstermen would capture a monkfish, whose undiscriminating appetite had led him to try to swallow a glass float; or a trap would come to the surface freighted with huge five-fingers or containing a short, ribbon-shaped eel, blood-red from nose to tail-tip.