The dory took in hundreds of pounds in the forty-eight hours of the aristocrats’ passing. Pompano had been scarce for two years. They brought twenty-five cents a pound at the wholesale market. The whole town came to the dock to see the dory unloaded. Boats put out feverishly from all the tidal rivers, but the pompano had passed.

Mart’s share of the big catch was enough to buy the net and rowboat he was using. He was now the capitalist. When Cully fished alone, Mart had half of the catch coming to him. His own catches need no longer be shared. Until early summer he prospered.

Then the fish, of a sudden, simply were not there any more. It was astonishing. Mart and the Johnsons and the Harpers lamented together.

“There’s nary fish by day and there’s nary fish by night.”

“Hit’s them pound-net fishermen north up the Gulf,” Harper decided. “Them big ol’ pound-nets, with traps in the bottoms, they jest scoops in everything. ’Course, them fellers has the right to make a livin’, but it shore makes fishin’ sorry down here.”

Two or three days often passed without a catch. Times were lean. The fish house paid three cents a pound. When twenty pounds of fish at this price had to be divided two or three ways, there was not enough to buy grits and meal. Mart and Florry were better off than the rest. Johnson said that if fishing did not soon improve, he would have to give away his two younger boys. He could not feed them.

The Johnsons and the Harpers had no gardens on their bare soil. They could no longer buy greens. They grew sallow from the steady diet of fish and corn pone. Mart had planted a garden back of the old house, where the soil was thickest on the shell. Florry tended it. They had collards and cow-peas and pole beans. They shared as far as they could.

Harper fought the fish house to get four cents a pound.

“This is Saturday,” the dealer answered. “If I have to pay you men four cents today, the fish house won’t open Monday morning.”

Fishing would pick up. They knew that. The fish would run again. It was a question of how long they could all hold out.

Perhaps despair made them careless. Harper must have known the signs. He had seen too many September gales drive in across the wide sweep of the Gulf not to know a fuzzykin. In the daytime that mass of black cloud, low-slung in the south, full of wind and thunder, was ominous but not alarming. Time could be gauged, and distance. At night, seeing that certain sign of high winds, Harper should have had the small fleet put in at once.