He opened his mouth to say more. She gave her head a small, single shake. Her steady gaze held a clear, silent warning, and Andy, if naive, was not stupid. He shut his mouth and stepped forward to help pull the pot on board.
It was only the beginning. For five hours they picked pots that weren't theirs. On the bridge Gault worked the spotlight, picking the next set of buoys out of the fog, while he watched the radar for approaching vessels.
On deck, with a grin of pure enjoyment on his face and a knife in his hand, Ned slashed through the pot webbing. His face expressionless, Seth cut bait jars loose and pitched them over the side, and then cut the shots of line, once where it attached to the bridle of each pot and again below the buoys. They were good solid pots, one-and-a-quarter-inch mild steel, with zinc anoids to retard rusting. When the pot did go overboard, it was a seven-by-seven-by-three-foot 750-pound piece of junk. Even if it could be salvaged, it would have to almost entirely be remade before it was fishable again.
Kate, working silently and efficiently alongside the rest of the crew, was sickened, both at the display of spite and at the waste of equipment. She worried about Andy, who worked next to her mechanically, a strained look on his pale face. "You okay?" she asked him in a low voice. He nodded without replying and she had to be satisfied with that.
They pulled pots, they sorted crab, they slashed webbing, they cut line, they punctured buoys, until their backs ached and their heads hurt. They hurried for fear of discovery, and spoke only seldom, and then in whispers.
What made it worse was that Johansen wasn't on the crab at all and the pots coming up were mostly garbage.
One had what Kate would have sworn was at least a thousand pounds of females in it, another only a couple of chicken halibut. If she'd known how hard thieving was, and how unrewarding, she might have made more of a protest in the beginning.
Straightening her back and groaning a little, she noticed that the sound of the Avilda's engine had changed. A loud whisper floated down from the catwalk in front of the bridge, and she looked up to see Harry Gault motioning to her.
"Got a boat coming up on us on the screen," he said in a hoarse whisper. "Tell Ned we're taking off."
They stripped the deck bare of any shred of the Daisy Mae's gear, pitching it all over the side. In his haste Andy pitched over a couple of their own knives and a twenty-five-fathom shot of their own line, too. He gave Ned a fearful look.
Ned was feeling very pleased with life, and shrugged in response to Andy's look. "No problem. Plenty more where they came from."
The rumble of the diesel increased and Kate sent up a fervent hope that the old girl's engine held together long enough for a clean getaway. Sound carried over water, and the other boat undoubtedly had its own radar.
They had to know the Avilda was there, and if the pots belonged to them, they had to know what the Avilda had been up to. Kate just hoped they didn't have a rifle.
Their luck held. The Avilda was unpursued. They ran flat-out for eight hours through the fog to the beginning of their own string. There followed a grueling twenty-four hours with no stops of pulling pots, rebaiting and resetting them. Toward the end of the string the pots suddenly began coming up loaded, which meant they had worked their way beyond where the pot robbers had stopped or been scared off by the approach of another boat. More crab went in the hold and the atmosphere on deck improved. This trip out the weather was infinitely better, fog or no fog, and the crew worked much more swiftly and efficiently. Although Kate did miss the big swells when it came to shoving pots that outweighed her by 630 pounds across a deck that seemed to have increased considerably in width between this trip and the last.
They were clearing the deck and covering the hold when a hammering on the bridge window made the deck crew look up. Harry was circling his extended forefinger in the air. He went so far as to open a window and yell,
"I'll bring 'er in, the rest of you get some shut-eye."
As before when the skipper had given the signal for home, Ned trotted astern and tossed a short length of one-inch manila line overboard, its bound end looped around a cleat on the stem rail, its free end trailing behind, twisting and turning in the wake of white foam.
Andy watched covertly from amidships, and nudged Kate when Ned passed forward. "What's that line for?" he asked in a low voice. "It's not connected to anything, it's just dragging behind us."
Kate was standing at the railing, her face into the wind, as if the cold, clear sea air could scour her clean of the taint of the night's activities. Following his gaze, tired as she was, she smiled and replied in the same low voice, "It's the lady's line."
"The what?"
She opened the door into the galley. "The lady's line.
It's an old sailors' custom, dates back before the whalers, I think."
"What does it mean?" he said, following her down the passageway.
"When it comes time to turn for home, they toss a free line in the water, so the ladies they left behind can pull their loved ones home."
Andy thought it over, his face brightening a little. "I like it. It's got tradition."
"Don't say anything about it," Kate told him, still in a low voice. "It's not talked about, it's just done."
He grinned a tired grin. "Don't want to break the spell, huh?"
"Do you walk under ladders?"
His grin faded and he paused, the door to their room halfway open. "Do you let black cats cross your path?"
Kate asked him. "When you spill salt, do you quick toss a pinch of it over your shoulder? Do you knock wood when you say something that might tempt fate?" He didn't answer, of course, and she smiled again, following him into their room. "Don't say anything about the lady's line. Nobody likes having their superstitions made fun of."
"I don't care what they do on the Avilda anyway," he said, his momentary animation passing off, leaving his face white and weary. "I'm getting off this boat, Kate. Anybody who could do that to somebody else's livelihood… how much does a seven-by cost?"
"I don't know. Three, four hundred, something like that."
"And all that polypro, and the buoys, and the bait jars.
Not to mention the time lost fishing." He closed his eyes and repeated firmly, "I don't know where I'm going, but I'm getting off this boat."
She put a comforting hand on his shoulder. "That's life in the big leagues, Andy."
"It's not my life," he declared. "And I bet I can find me a skipper who feels the same way. When I do, I'm outta here." Without another word he stripped down to his longies and climbed into his bunk. The snores that almost immediately issued from the top bunk made Kate wish for as clear a conscience.
So completely had she been immersed in the role of able-bodied seaman cum apprentice pot pirate that she was halfway out of her own clothes when she remembered why she had signed on the Avilda in the first place.
Simultaneously she realized that with the rest of the crew in the sack and the skipper on watch, now was the perfect time to toss Harry Gault's stateroom.
Andy didn't skip snore when she cracked the door and slipped into the passageway. The snores coming from behind Ned and Seth's door were so loud she wondered how either of them could sleep. At least she didn't have to sneak. She wasn't up to it.
The skipper's cabin was the one closest to the galley.
True, it was only a step from his door to the stairs leading up to the bridge, but Kate disapproved. The truly conscientious skipper, in her experience, slept in the chart room bunk at sea so as to be close to the bridge, not the galley. Still, it made it easier for her to break and enter, and she was grateful for that if for nothing else.
Not that there was much breaking to the entering. The door to his cabin was unlocked and swung smoothly and noiselessly inward, closing with a silent click behind her.