Argosy All-Story Weekly, July 11, 1925 — page 153: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

PETERSON PRIDE. for his trouble, and cast out into the muddy street. Cathead village is no prating moralizer, but it knows a man’s place at the opening of fishing season. There is a time for every- thing, including drunkenness, according to the sand-bitten creed of the lakes; and the opening of fishing season calls for steadfast sobriety, for devotion to boats and nets, for labor unsweetened by any of the rugged vices that appeal to weary men. | They are a simple people, these unlearned and bewildered children of the five sweet water seas. Minna Peterson was one of them. Narrow distances, blunt encroaching shores hem in their vision; for them there is none of the mysterious and boundless magnitude of the salt oceans, only the posi- tive mastery of unbending weathers, the certitude of labor, the dogmatic march of the seasons, and the inevitable authority of death. Men and. women on a salty coast may point their fingers at a beckoning horizon and say: “ There lies China, there the In- dies.” On the Great Lakes, wives of fisher- men are denied even the comfort of such glamour. They know that beyond their horizons lie merely other villages, unintelli- gible and uninspired as their own. Only the faults of the sea are their heritage, its passions, its loneliness, its animosities, stripped bare of the sorcery of salt. Minna Peterson had ridden out to the fishing banks with her father in the stout- hearted days of canvas; later, with Oscar Lindstrom, who had been her mother’s brother, she learned the obstinacy of a gaso- line engine, the crank antics of a tubby boat in a headlong sea. Gill nets held no mys- teries for her, nor pond nets either. She knew without mistake every ragged pennant that marked the buoys of all the Cathead fleet. “Robin,” she said that May morning when the sun shone crisply into the kitchen window while she prepared breakfast at the stove, “I’m going out along of you to-day. I can lend a hand, better than any boy you can pick up.” “ You! ? “Me. And we'll beat the others again, : __ like you did last season.” —_— She spoke grimly. He winced and gave his attention to the plate before him. ‘We'll make a try of it, anyhow,” she amended. “The nets is pretty snarly.” “Then we'll have to fix them.” Cathead village heard that afternoon that Minna Peterson had gone out. upon the. lake with her husband. They made a good haul, so ran the talk, Robin’s first lift of a late season. But good haul or bad, who was Minna Peterson to fly at the throat of all the conventions of the fishing coast? Casper Clause’s wife nodded to her dis- tantly that night when they met in front of the post office. . “Good ev’n’ to you, Mrs. Clause,” she cried. The older woman paused, made to go on and then turned slowly. “ Did you hear of our catch, Robin’s and mine, this morning? Nine hundred pounds! Not bad for a slow season, you think?” ‘“T’ve heard worse,” Mrs. Clause grum- bled. ‘‘ They’s things worse’n a big haul.” Minna walked home like a queen on parade. Did any one else have a wish to cut her, she gave them little chance. Even the next day when Robin again lay drunk in the cleaning shack and the King- fisher floated at the dock, she faced the fleet proudly, eye for eye, and talked spirit- edly of the boat, of the probable tonnage for the season, of Robin’s skill with con- trary gasoline. She played her part proudly until the first day of June. That morning, which is set aside as a fisherman’s holiday all along the coast, the boats stayed in harbor, and the men of the fleet labored joyously uptown, opposite the post office, construct- ing a rough, out-of-door dance pavilion. Of cedar saplings and Norway pine they” built the sides, and stacked balsam bows on top for a roof. This, in the language of the lakes, is a “ bowery,” a civic institu- tion. On the first of June is the great affair of the season. Minna had met Robin Peterson at a bowery dance. At another Nels Nielson had pleaded that she marry him and set- tle down upon Ottowa Island, had pleaded with an exasperatingly short vocabulary and all the fire of an oil-skinned cavalier. >. CO) 307 . Fee Oe ee ~~ e ¢ — > mse — - => > > ‘eet Sa tt ee ae _ * pt = 7S Se ge 4" a. ee se PR Sg 0 mer at a Os 2 ——~ Se ee ee ee eS a Xe Sa ee Oe le = ee a ee.