the wide-stretching nets. The narrow space was our logical course,
but Charley, at the wheel, steered the Mary Rebecca straight for
the nets. This did not cause any alarm among the fishermen,
because up-river sailing craft are always provided with "shoes" on
the ends of their keels, which permit them to slip over the nets
without fouling them.

"Now she takes it!" Charley cried, as we dashed across the middle
of a line of floats which marked a net. At one end of this line
was a small barrel buoy, at the other the two fishermen in their
boat. Buoy and boat at once began to draw together, and the
fishermen to cry out, as they were jerked after us. A couple of
minutes later we hooked a second net, and then a third, and in this
fashion we tore straight up through the centre of the fleet.

The consternation we spread among the fishermen was tremendous. As
fast as we hooked a net the two ends of it, buoy and boat, came
together as they dragged out astern; and so many buoys and boats,
coming together at such breakneck speed, kept the fishermen on the
jump to avoid smashing into one another. Also, they shouted at us
like mad to heave to into the wind, for they took it as some
drunken prank on the part of scow-sailors, little dreaming that we
were the fish patrol.

The drag of a single net is very heavy, and Charley and Ole Ericsen
decided that even in such a wind ten nets were all the Mary Rebecca
could take along with her. So when we had hooked ten nets, with
ten boats containing twenty men streaming along behind us, we
veered to the left out of the fleet and headed toward Collinsville.