Pete came in with a scowl on his face, cursing everything under the
sun, and especially a fisherman's life. When told of the smoke smudge
he evinced comparatively little interest.

"We'll find out what she is when she gets here. What I'd like to know
is, what's the matter with our bait?"

"Bait gone wrong again?" asked Code anxiously, his brows knitting.
"That stuff on the trawl wasn't the only bad bait, then."

"No. Everybody's complainin' this mornin'.

"Not only can't catch fish, but ye can't hardly string the stuff on
the hooks. An' that ain't all. It has a funny smell that I never found
in any other clam bait I ever used."

"Why, what's the matter with your hands, Pete?" cried Code, pointing.
Ellinwood had removed his nippers, and the skin of his fingers and
palms was a queer white and beginning to shred off as if immersed long
in hot water.

"By the Great Seine!" rumbled the mate, looking at his hands in
consternation.

Code made a trumpet of his hands. "Here, cookee, roll up a tub of that
bait lively. I want to look at it. And fetch the hammer!"

A suspicion based upon a long-forgotten fact had suddenly leaped into
his mind.

When the cook hove the tub of bait on deck Code knocked off the top
boards with the hammer and dipped up a handful of the clams. Instead
of the firm, fat shellfish that should have been in the clean brine,
he found them loose and rotten. This time he himself detected a faint
acrid odor quite different from the usual clean, salty smell. Again he
dipped to make sure the whole tub was ruined. Then he looked at
Ellinwood in despair.

"It's acid, Pete," he said. "My father told me about this sort of
thing being done sometimes in a close race among bankers for the last
load of fish. If they're all like this we're done for until we can get
more."

Ellinwood looked at him in amazement, his jaw sagging.

"Well, who in thunder would do this?"

Code laughed bitterly.

"There's only one man I can think of, and that is the fellow who
got my motor-dory under false pretenses. You remember how he made
the cook and the boy help him get it over the side? Well, her
gasoline-tank was full and her batteries new. She was ready to go two
hundred miles on a minute's notice."

"But why should he do that--"

"Oh, think, Pete, _think!_ Don't you remember? He's one of the men I
went up to Castalia to get, the time that lawyer came to Freekirk
Head. And he's the only man in the whole crew I don't