e else. Hope it'll be that way this time!"

It was almost noon before the whole trawl was aboard. It had yielded
barely two hundred pounds of hake.

"Tell you what!" exclaimed Jim as he looked at his compass and headed
the _Barracouta_ westward through the fog for home, "we'll put the trawl
in the house for a few days, and fit up for swordfishing. There's a good
ground fifteen miles south of the island. I've been down there with
Uncle Tom. If we could get some fair-sized fish, it'd be worth our while
to take 'em into Rockland."

That afternoon they mustered their swordfish gear. In the house were
three or four of the wrecked coaster's mast-hoops. One of these Jim
lashed to the sloop's jibstay, about waist-high above the end of the
bowsprit.

"That'll do for the pulpit!"

Near the jaws of the gaff he nailed a little board seat, rigged like a
bracket on a roof for shingling. On this the lookout could sit, his arm
round the mast, watching for fins.

"Now for a harpoon!"

Across the rafters inside the house lay a hard-pine pole eighteen feet
long, ending in a tapering two-foot iron. Strung on a fish-line hanging
from a spike were a half-dozen swordfish darts. These were sharp, stubby
metal arrows, all head and tail and no body, with a socket cast on one
side to admit the top of the pole-iron. Back of the arrow-head was a
hole, through which was fastened the buoy-line.

"Righto!" exclaimed Jim. "Now when the fog clears we'll be ready to do
business."

That very night the mists scaled away before a brisk north wind. Morning
showed the sea clear for miles, though a fleecy haze still blurred the
southern and eastern horizon.

"We'll take this chance," decided Jim. "May not get a better. Remember
it's dog-days!"

At five o'clock they started south. Before eight they were on the
swordfish-grounds. The wind, blowing against the long ocean swell,
raised a fairly heavy sea. Though the day was clear, they could still
feel the fog in the air.

Jim allotted the company their several stations.

"Budge, you swarm up to that seat on the gaff and watch out for fins!
Throppy, you steer as Budge tells you! Stand by to take the dory, Perce,
and go after any fish I'm lucky enough to iron. Filippo, be ready to
throw that buoy and coil of warp off the starboard bow the minute I make
a strike. I'll get out in the pulpit with the harpoon. Keep alive,
everybody! We're liable to run across something any minute."

Perched aloft, Bu