Abruptly, a section of the channel collapsed and water spilled away into the adjacent creeks. Shouting as he ran, the leader raced through the shallows, his two-bladed paddle hurling the water back into the main channel. His men floundered after him, repairing the breach and driving the water back up the slope.
Leaving them, the leader ran on ahead, where the others were paddling the main body of water across the damp dunes. Although still carried along by its own momentum, the channel had widened into a gliding oval lake, the hundreds of fish tumbling over one another in the spinning currents. Every twenty yards, as the lake poured along, a dozen fish would be left stranded behind, and two older men bringing up the rear tossed them back into the receding wake.
Guiding it with their blades, the men took up their positions around the bows of the lake. At their prow, only a few feet from the front wave, the man in the cape piloted them across the varying contours. The lake coursed smoothly in and out of the channels, cruising over the shallow pools in its path. Half a mile from the shore it tilled along, still almost intact.
"Captain!" There was a shout from the two look-outs in the tail. "Captain Jordan!"
Whirling in the damp salt, the leader raised his paddle and drove the oarsmen back along the shores of the lake. Two hundred yards away, a group of five or six men, heads lowered as they worked their short paddles, had broken down the bank on the western side of the lake and were driving the water outwards across the dunes.
Converging around both banks, the trappers raced toward them, their paddles flashing at the water. The pirates ignored them and worked away at the water, propelling it through the breach. Already a large pool some fifty yards wide had formed among the dunes. As the main body of the lake moved away, they ran down across the bank and began to paddle the pool away among the shallows to the west.
Feet splashed after them through the brine, and the air was filled with whirling paddIes and the spray of flying salt. Trying to recover the water they had lured with such effort from the sea, the trappers drove it back toward the lake. Some of them attacked the pirates, splintering their short paddles with their own heavier blades. The dark-faced leader beat one man to his knees, snapping the bony shaft of his paddle with his foot, then clubbed another across the face, knocking him into the shallows. Warding off the flying blades, the pirates stumbled to their feet, pushing the water between their attackers' legs. Their leader, an older man with a red weal on his bearded face, shouted to them and they darted off in all directions, dividing the water into half a dozen pools, which they drove away with their paddles and bare hands.
In the melee, the main body of the lake had continued its gliding progress to the shore. The defenders broke off the attempt to recapture the water and ran after the lake, their rubber suits streaming with the cold salt. One or two of them stopped to shout over their shoulders, but the pirates had disappeared among the dunes. As the gray morning light gleamed in the wet slopes, their footfalls were lost in the streaming salt.
Nursing his cheek against the rubber pad on his shoulder, Ransom made his way carefully among the watery dunes, steering the small pool through the hollows. Now and then, as the pool raced along under its own momentum, he stopped to peer over the surrounding crests, listening to the distant cries of Jordan and his men. Sooner or later the sternfaced captain would send a party over to the beaches, where the outcasts lived, on a punitive expedition. At the prospect of smashed cabins and wrecked stills, Ransom rallied himself and pressed on, guiding the pool through the dips. Little more than twenty feet wide, it contained half a dozen small fish. One of them was stranded at his feet, and Ransom bent down and picked it up. Before he tossed it back into the water, his frozen fingers felt its plump belly.
Three hundred yards to his right he caught a glimpse of Jonathan Grady propelling his pool through the winding channels toward his shack below a ruined salt-conveyer. Barely seventeen years old, he had been strong enough to take almost half the stolen water for himself, and drove it along untiingly.
The other four members of the band had disappeared among the saltflats. Ransom pushed himself ahead, the salty air stinging the weal on his face. By luck Jordan 's paddle had caught him with the flat of its blade, or he would have been knocked unconscious and carried off to the summary justice of the Johnstone settlement. There his former friendship with the Reverend Johnstone, long-forgotten after ten years, would have been. little help. It was now necessary to go out a full mile from the shore to trap the sea-the salt abandoned during the previous years had begun to slide off the inner beach areas, raising the level of the offshore flats-and the theft of water was becoming the greatest crime for the communities along the coast.
Ransom shivered in the cold light, and tried to squeeze the moisture from the damp rags beneath his suit of rubber strips. Sewn together with pieces of fishgut, the covering leaked at a dozen places. He and the other members of the band had set out three hours before dawn, following Jordan and his team over the gray dunes. They hid themselves in the darkness by the empty channel, waiting for the tide to turn, knowing that they had only a few minutes to steal a small section of the lake. But for the need to steer the main body of water to the reservoir at the settlement, Jordan and his men would have caught them. One night soon, no doubt, they would deliberately sacrifice their catch to rid themselves forever of Ransom.
As Ransom moved along beside the pool, steering it toward the distant tower of the wrecked lightship whose stern jutted from the sand a quarter of a mile away, he automatically counted and recounted the fish swimming in front of him, wondering how long he could continue to prey on Jordan and his men; By now the sea was so far away, the shore so choked with salt, that only the larger and more skillful teams could muster enough strength to trap a sizable body of water and carry it back to the reservoirs. Three years earlier, Ransom and the young Grady had been able to cut permanent channels through the salt, and at high tide enough water flowed down them to carry small catches of fish and crabs. Now, however, as the whole area had softened, the wet sliding salt made it impossible to keep any channel open for more than twenty yards, unless a huge team of men were used, digging the channel afresh as they moved ahead of the stream.
The remains of one of the metal conveyers jutted from the dunes ahead. Small pools of water gathered around the rusting legs, and Ransom began to run faster, paddle whirling in his hands as he tried to gain enough momentum to sweep some of this along with him. Exhausted by the need to keep up a brisk trot, he tripped on to his knees, then stood up and raced after the pool as it approached the conveyer.
A fish flopped at his feet, twisting on the salt slope. Leaving it, Ransom rushed on after the pool, and caught up with it as it swirled through the metal legs. Lowering his head, he whipped the water with the paddle, and carried the pool over the slope into the next hollow.
Despite this slight gain, less than two-thirds of the original pool remained when he reached the lightship. To his left the sunlight was falling on the slopes of the salt tips, lighting up the faces of the hills behind them, but Ransom ignored these intimations of warmth and color. He steered the pool toward the small basin near the starboard bridge of the ship. This narrow tank, twenty yards long and ten wide, he had managed to preserve over the years by carrying stones and pieces of scrap metal down from the shore, and each day beating the salt around them to a firm crust. The water was barely three inches deep, and a few edible kelp and water anemones, Ransom's sole source of vegetable food, floated limply at one end. Often Ransom had tried to breed fish in the pool, but the water was too saline, and the fish invariably died within a few hours. In the reservoirs at the settlement, with their more dilute solutions, the fish lived for months. Ransom, however, unless he chose to live on dried kelp five days out of six, was obliged to go out almost every morning to trap and steal the sea.