not think so far ahead as that. But food he must have. So he had dug
some worms and put them in one of his trick cans and then proceeded to
untangle the line. Having secured an unknotted length of five or six
feet he equipped this with a fish-hook of his own manufacture and
sallied forth toward the river. He was not only hungry, but sleepy,
and it never occurred to him that this was the exorbitant price of four
cigarettes.

Hunger and sleep vied with each other in the shuffling body of Keekie
Joe as he crossed Main Street and cut across the fields toward the
marshes.

Down by the river was a little shanty in which was a mass of fishing
seine. It stood hospitably open, for the hinges of the door were all
rusted away and the dried and shrunken boards lay on the marshy ground
before the entrance. Keekie Joe had intended to make sure that there
was nothing to eat in the shanty before casting his line in the
neighboring water. For there was the barest chance that a petrified
crust of bread, ancient remnant of some fisherman's lunch, might be in
the place.

Once Keekie Joe had found such a crust there. But the place was bare
now of everything except deserted spider-webs, black and heavy with
dust. These and the mass of net upon the ground were all that Keekie
Joe could see in the light of the genial moonbeams which shone through
the open doorway and wriggled in through the cracks in the
weather-beaten boards.

And now again Keekie Joe had to make a choice. He was hungry, oh, so
hungry. But he was sleepy, too, to the point of blinking