Short Stories
hoods are only a few inches apart, and when several thousand
of them are suspended just above the bottom, like a fringe, for
a couple of hundred fathoms, they present a formidable obsta-
cle to the fish that travel along the bottom.
Such a fish is the sturgeon, which goes rooting along like a
pig, and indeed is often called "pig-fish." Pricked by the first
hook it touches, the sturgeon gives a startled leap and comes
into contact with half a dozen more hooks. Then it threshes
about wildly, until it receives hook after hook in its soft flesh;
and the hooks, straining from many different angles, hold the
luckless fish fast until it is drowned. Because no sturgeon can
pass through a Chinese line, the device is called a trap in the
fish laws; and because it bids fair to exterminate the sturgeon,
it is branded by the fish laws as illegal. And such a line, we
were confident, Big Alec intended setting, in open and flagrant
violation of the law.
Several days passed after the visit of Big Alec, during
which Charley and I kept a sharp watch on him. He towed his
ark around the Solano Wharf and into the big bight at Turner's
Shipyard. The bight we knew to be good ground for sturgeon,
and there we felt sure the King of the Greeks intended to
begin operations. The tide circled like a mill-race in and out of
this bight, and made it possible to raise, lower, or set a Chi-
nese line only at slack water. So between the tides Charley and
I made it a point for one or the other of us to keep a lookout
from the Solano Wharf.
On the fourth day I was lying in the sun behind the stringer-
piece of the wharf, when I saw a skiff leave the distant shore and
pull out into the bight. In an instant the glasses were at my eyes
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