Picking the shell-fish carefully from the tub, Jim and the captain dropped them, one by one, into the well. Soon all were safely transferred to their new quarters, and the hatch was replaced. Captain Higgins invited Jim and Budge down into his little den of a cabin. Unlocking an iron box, he took from it a wallet and began counting out bills.
"You carry quite a sum of ready money, Captain," said Lane.
"Yes; I have to. This business is cash on the nail. My boat can take over twelve thousand pounds of lobsters, and sometimes she's almost filled. I've started out with three thousand dollars in that box, and I rarely go with less than two thousand. It'd surprise you to figure up the amount of cash these smacks spread along the coast. They say that one winter, when lobsters were specially high, a Portland dealer paid a smackman over fifty-five hundred dollars for a single trip."
"Somebody must make a big profit. Think what a lobster costs in a market!"
"Somebody does--sometimes. But it isn't the smackmen. Lobsters ought not to be kept in a well longer than a few days. A friend of mine started out from Halifax with ten thousand pounds of Cape Breton lobsters. He got caught in a gale of wind and lost forty-seven hundred pounds before he landed in Boston. Some years ago a Maine dealer put one hundred and five thousand lobsters in a pound during May and June; he fed them chiefly on herring, and the total cost was over ten thousand dollars. Things went wrong and he took out just two hundred and fifty-four live ones. Not much profit about that!"
Arranging to call near noon the next Thursday, Captain Higgins had soon rounded Brimstone Point and was on his way to Head Harbor on Isle au Haut, his next stopping-place. In the middle of the afternoon, while the boys were baiting trawls on the _Barracouta_, another boat chugged into the cove. It was a smack from Boston.
"Got any lobsters, boys?" asked the captain, a red-faced, smooth-shaven man of forty.
"All sold!" was Jim's reply. "And we've arranged to let the _Calista_ have what we get."
"Save 'em for me and I'll give you ten cents apiece for 'em."
"You and your crowd could clean up fifty dollars more a week here just as well as not. What are you afraid of? The warden can't get out here once in a dog's age."