"Jim," he petitioned, "I want you to teach me how to split fish."
"You heard what I said this noon about shirking. I'm through with dodging any kind of work just because it's unpleasant. I want to take my part with the rest of you."
He did, and found that he had an apt pupil. Percy worked until the last pound of the fifteen hundred was salted down in the hogshead. He discovered that it was not half so bad as it had looked, and felt ashamed that he had not tried his hand at the trick before.
"You've earned your supper to-night," observed Jim.
"Yes; but I'm glad it's something besides fish."
"You'll get so you won't mind it after a while."
That night Throppy played his violin and the boys sang. They passed a pleasant hour before going to bed.
"I'd like to go out with you to the trawls, Jim, to-morrow morning," said Percy.
"Glad to have you," responded Spurling, heartily.
Two hours before light they were gliding out of the cove in the _Barracouta_, bound for Medrick Shoal, four miles to the eastward.
"Percy," said Jim as the sloop rolled rhythmically on the long Atlantic swells, "I want to tell you something. I was awake the other night when you left camp. I watched you row north and come back; and I saw the hard fight you had round Brimstone. I'm glad you made a clean breast of the whole thing, even when you thought nobody knew anything about it. It showed me you intended to turn over a new leaf and play fair. You'll find that we'll meet you half-way, and more."
"Glad I didn't know you heard me go out," he remarked. "If I had I might not have had the courage to come back. Well, I've learned my lesson. From now on I'll try not to give you fellows any reason to find fault with me."
Medrick Shoal yielded a good harvest. About eighteen hundred pounds of hake lay in the pens on the _Barracouta_ when they started for home at ten o'clock. As they took the last of their gear aboard, a schooner with auxiliary power, apparently a fisherman, approached from the eastward.
"The _Cassie J._," read Spurling, deciphering the letters on the bow. "Somehow she looks natural, but I don't remember ever hearing that name before. Probably from Gloucester. Wonder what she wants of us."
The vessel slowed down and changed her course until she was running straight toward the _Barracouta_. One of her crew stood in the bow, near the starboard anchor; another held the wheel; but nobody else was visible.