Moving his lips, which were as scant as the rest of him, the man looked toward the cobwebbed rafters.

“What she ’spects and what she kin git be two differint things. Five bucks’ll buy ye sixteen an’ two-thuds lobstuhs. I’ll make it seventeen. Want twenny, ye be a dolluh shawt.”

And then he pulled up the drawbridge and withdrew into the castle of his impervious stinginess. On the wharf outside, the boys were debating which would be easier and quicker—to ask Gertrude Williams for the extra dollar or to row back to the boat and take it from their stash (now reduced to twenty-nine dollars and thirty cents, thanks to their fondness for ice cream)—when Nathaniel noticed a Friendship sloop moored to a float below. Two men in oilskin overalls were scooping lobsters from the sloop’s live well into a trap door in the top of one of the cars.

“Hey, if you’re selling, I’m buying, if the price is right,” Nathaniel called down.

The older of the two looked up. He had close-cropped, gray hair and jug-handle ears.

“Whachye consider a right price?”

“Twenty cents each.”

“Haow many?”

“An even score.”

“What’s the trouble? George ain’t in a mood ta baagin?”

“If you’re talking about the tightwad inside, he sure ain’t.”

“That tightwad be my brother, but reckon we kin do business.”

He waved Nathaniel down the gangway.

“George, he’s a daisy, ain’t he? Chaages ye yachtsmen on this side a kinder tax,” said the fisherman. “Jus’ on account of ye kin ’ford it.”

Catching the faint burr of contempt in the man’s voice, Nathaniel said he was not a yachtsman.

“Coulda foolt me. C’mon aboard. Pick the ones ye like.”

It was a combination of things—the bad fit of the borrowed shoes (they were Tony Burton’s and a size too large), the Rockland ferry announcing its imminent departure with a shrill, unexpected blast of its steam whistle, and the sloop’s deck, wet and slimy from the menhaden oil leaking from a bait bucket—that caused Nathaniel to slip and fall as a vaudeville clown falls, both feet flying out from under him, his arms flailing. He landed on his back on a trap, and felt the lathes crack under his weight. He lay for a few moments between the halves of the broken trap, staring at the sky and the sloop’s boom. The fishermen’s faces appeared above him. Must be father and son, he thought, because the younger had the same jug-handle ears.

“Be ye hurt?” asked the older man.

He shook his head, then tried to stand, but he couldn’t move. Wedged tightly, he was, for all practical purposes, attached to the trap, or it to him, and it weighed at least thirty pounds, being made of oak, with five or six housebricks in its floor to anchor it to the seabottom.