the surface. A
smart rap on the head with the maul and he came into the dory quietly.
There were little pink crabs sticking to him and he did not seem as
fat as he should, although he topped the fifty-pound mark.

"Lousy!" said Code. "Lousy and hungry! It's good fishing."

With a short, stout stick at hand he wrenched the hook out of the
cod's mouth, baited up, and cast again. The descending bait was rushed
and seized. This time both hooks bore victims.

When there were no speckled cod on the hooks there were silvery hake,
velvety black pollock, beautiful scarlet sea-perch that look like
little old men, and an occasional ugly dogfish with his Chinese jade
eyes.

When the dogfish came the men pulled up their anchors and rowed a mile
or so away, for where the dogfish pursues all others fly. He has the
shape and traits of his merciless giant brother, the tiger-shark, with
the added menace of a horn full of poison in the middle of his back
instead of a dorsal fin; an evil, curved horn, the thrust of which
can be nearly fatal to a man.

The bottom of the dory became covered with a flooring of liquid silver
bodies that twined together and rolled with the roll of the dory.

At five o'clock Code wound his line on the reel (he usually used two
at a time, but one had been plenty with such fishing), and started to
pull for the distant _Charming Lass_. He was now fully five miles from
her, and his nearest neighbor was Bill Kent, three miles away. All
hands were drawing in toward her, for they knew they must take a quick
mug-up and then dress down until the last cod lay in his shroud of
salt.

The schooner lay to the northeast of Schofield, and as he bent to his
work he did not see a strange, level mass of gray that advanced slowly
toward him. From a distance to the lay observer this mass would have
looked like an ordinary cloud-bank, but the experienced eyes of a
fisherman would have discerned its ghastly gray hue and its flat
contour.

All the afternoon there had been a freshening breeze, and now
Schofield found himself rowing against a head sea that occasionally
slapped over the high bow of the dory and ran aft over the half ton of
fish that lay under his feet.

He had not pulled for fifteen minutes when the whole world about him
was suddenly obscured by the thick, woolly fog that swirled past on
the wind. It was as though an impenetrable wall had been suddenly
built up on all sides, a wall that offered no resistance