Harry shinnied up the ladder to the dock, reappearing in the galley half an hour later. "How much?" Andy said, his young voice excited. "What kind of price did we get?"

The skipper made a show of consulting the fish ticket he held in one hand. "Buck-fifty."

"A dollar and fifty cents?" Andy said. "Per crab?"

"Per pound," Kate corrected him gently.

Andy's voice went up into a squeak. "Per pound? Per pound?"

He lunged for paper and pencil. His face screwed up with concentration, the tip of his tongue protruding from one corner of his mouth. After tremendous amounts of scribbling and adding and erasing and multiplying, he produced a figure and stared down at it with disbelieving eyes. "Eighty-three hundred dollars?" he said finally. His face paled, flushed and paled again beneath its tan. Again his voice went up to a squeak. "A crew share for this one trip is eighty-three hundred dollars?"

Kate smacked him on the back. "If it was easy, everybody'd be doing it. That's why they pay us the big bucks, boy."

She looked around for agreement and found it, in a mild sort of way. Seth gave a casual nod, Ned said "uhhuh" in an absentminded tone, and Harry disappeared into his stateroom.

A little deflated, Andy turned to Kate. "For crying out loud, you'd think they made eighty-three hundred bucks every day out there."

"Yes," Kate said, "you would think that, wouldn't you." She picked up the piece of paper and peered at the clumsy squiggles. She made a few doodles with the pencil and totaled them up.

"Eighty-three hundred dollars?"

She nodded, her face wearing a rueful expression he didn't understand but was too wrought up to question.

"Yup. It's eighty-three hundred dollars, all right. Each."