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 Chinese 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 and I was
following every movement of the skiff. There were two men in it, and
though it was a good mile away, I made out one of them to be Big Alec;
and ere the skiff returned to shore I made out enough more to know that
the Greek had set his line.

"Big Alec has a Chinese line out in the bight off Turner's Shipyard,"
Charley Le Grant said that afternoon to Carmintel.

A fleeting expression of annoyance passed over the patrolman's face,
and then he said, "Yes?" in an absent way, and that was all.

Charley bit his lip with suppressed anger and turned on his heel.

"Are you game, my lad?" he said to me later on in the evening, just as
we finished washing down the _Reindeer's_ decks and were preparing to
turn in.

A lump came up in my throat, and I could only nod my head.

"Well, then," and Charley's eyes glittered in a determined way, "we've
got to capture Big Alec between us, you and I, and we've got to do it
in spite of Carmintel. Will you lend a hand?"

"It's a hard proposition, but we can do it," he added after a