"To buy as cheaply as you can and sell for as much as you can," Stubby reminded him, "is a fundamental of business. You can't get away from it. My father abandoned that maxim the last two years of his life, and it nearly broke us. He was a public-spirited man. He took war and war-time conditions to heart. In a period of jumping food costs he tried to give people cheaper food. As I said, he nearly went broke trying to do a public service, because no one else in the same business departed from the business rule of making all they could. In fact, men in the same business, I have since learned, were the first to sharpen their knives for him. He was establishing a bad precedent. I don't know but their attitude is sound, after all. In sheer self-defense a man must make all he can when he has a chance. You cannot indulge in philanthropy in a business undertaking these days, Silent John."

"Granted," MacRae made answer. "I don't propose to be a philanthropist myself. But you will get farther with a salmon fisherman, or any other man whose labor you must depend on, if you accept the principle that he is entitled to make a dollar as well as yourself, if you don't stretch every point to take advantage of his necessity. These fellows who fish around Squitty have been gouged and cheated a lot. They aren't fools. They know pretty well who makes the long profit, who pile up moderate fortunes while they get only a living, and not a particularly good living at that."

"Are you turning Bolshevik?" Stubby inquired with mock solicitude.

MacRae smiled.

"Hardly. Nor are the fishermen. They know I'm making money. But they know also that they are getting more out of it than they ever got before, and that if I were not on the job they would get a lot less."

"They certainly would," Abbott drawled. "You have been, and are now, paying more for blueback salmon than any buyer on the Gulf."

"Well, it has paid me. And it has been highly profitable to you, hasn't it?" MacRae said. "You've had a hundred thousand salmon to pack which you would not otherwise have had."

"Certainly," Stubby agreed. "I'm not questioning your logic. In this case it has paid us both, and the fisherman as well. But suppose everybody did it?"

"If you can pay sixty cents a fish, and fifteen per cent, on top of that and pack profitably, why can't other canneries? Why can't Folly Bay meet that competition? Rather, why won't they?"

"Matter of policy, maybe," Stubby hazarded. "Matter of keeping costs down. Apart from a few little fresh-fish buyers, you are the only operator on the Gulf who is cutting any particular ice. Gower may figure that he will eventually get these fish at his own price. If I were eliminated, he would."

"I'd still be on the job," MacRae ventured.

"Would you, though?" Stubby asked doubtfully.

"Yes." MacRae made his reply positive in tone. "You could buy all right. That Squitty Island bunch of trollers seem convinced you are the whole noise in the salmon line. But without Crow Harbor where could you unload such quantities of fish?"

It struck MacRae that there was something more than mere casual speculation in Stubby's words. But he did not attempt to delve into motives.

"A good general," he said with a dry smile, "doesn't advertise his plan of campaign in advance. Without Crow Harbor as a market I could not have done what I have done this season. But Crow Harbor could shut down to-morrow—and I'd go on just the same."

Stubby poked thoughtfully with a pencil at the blotter on his desk.

"Well, Jack, I may as well be quite frank with you," he said at last. "I have had hints that may mean something. The big run will be over at Squitty in another month. I don't believe I can be dictated to on short notice. But I cannot positively say. If you can see your way to carry on, it will be quite a relief to me. Another season it may be different."

"I think I can."

But though MacRae said this confidently, he was privately not so sure. From the very beginning he had expected pressure to come on Stubby, as the active head of Crow Harbor. It was as Stubby said. Unless he—MacRae—had a market for his fish, he could not buy. And within the limits of British Columbia the salmon market was subject to control; by just what means MacRae had got inklings here and there. He had not been deceived by the smoothness of his operations so far. Below the clear horizon there was a storm gathering. A man like Gower did not lie down and submit passively to being beaten at his own game.

But MacRae believed he had gone too far to be stopped now, even if his tactics did not please the cannery interests. They could have squelched him easily enough in the beginning, when he had no funds to speak of, when his capital was mostly a capacity for hard, dirty work and a willingness to take chances. Already he had run his original shoestring to fifteen thousand dollars cash in hand. It scarcely seemed possible. It gave him a startling vision of the profits in the salmon industry, and it was not a tenable theory that men who had controlled such a source of profits would sit idle while he undermined their monopoly. Nevertheless he had made that much money in four months. He had at his back a hundred fishermen who knew him, liked him, trusted him, who were anxious that he should prosper, because they felt that they were sharing in that prosperity. Ninety per cent. of these men had a grievance against the canneries. And he had the good will of these men with sun-browned faces and hook-scarred hands. The human equation in industrial processes is a highly important one, as older, wiser men than Jack MacRae had been a longer time discovering.

He did not try to pin Stubby to a more definite statement. A hint was enough for MacRae. Stubby Abbott could also be depended upon to see things beyond the horizon. If a storm broke Stubby was the most vulnerable, because in a sense he was involved with the cannery interests in general, and they would consider him an apostate and knife him without mercy,—if they could. If the Abbott estate had debts, obligations which could be manipulated, if through the financial convolutions of marketing the Crow Harbor pack Stubby could be reached, the Abbott family had property, a standard of living that stood for comfort, appearance, luxury almost. There are always plenty of roads open to a flank attack on people like that; many levers, financial and otherwise, can be pulled for or against them.

So MacRae, knowing that Stubby must protect himself in a showdown, set about fortifying his own approaches.

For a first move he hired an engineer, put Steve Ferrara in charge of the Blackbird, and started him back to Squitty. Then MacRae took the next train to Bellingham, a cannery town which looks out on the southern end of the Gulf of Georgia from the American side of the boundary. He extended his journey to Seattle. Altogether, he was gone three days.

When he came back he made a series of calls,—at the Vancouver offices of three different canneries and one of the biggest cold-storage concerns on the Pacific Coast. He got a courteous but unsatisfactory reception from the cannery men. He fared a little better with the manager of the cold-storage plant. This gentleman was tentatively agreeable in the matter of purchasing salmon, but rather vague in the way of terms.

"Beginning with May next I can deliver any quantity up to two thousand a day, perhaps more, for a period of about four months," MacRae stated. "What I should like to know is the percentage over the up-coast price you would pay."

But he could not pin the man down to anything definite. He would only speak pleasantly of the market and possible arrangements, utter vague commonplaces in business terminology. MacRae rose.

"I'm wasting your time and my own," he said. "You don't want my fish. Why not say so?"

"We always want fish," the man declared, bending a shrewdly appraising eye on MacRae. "Bring in the salmon and we will do business."

"On your own terms when my carriers are tied to your dock with a capacity load which I must sell or throw overboard within forty-eight hours," MacRae smiled. "No, I don't intend to go up against any take-it-or-leave proposition like that. I don't have to."

"Well, we might allow you five per cent. That's about the usual thing on salmon. And we would rather have salmon now than a promise of them next season."

"Oh, rats!" MacRae snorted. "I'm in the business to make money—not simply to create dividends for your Eastern stockholders while I eke out a living and take all the risks. Come again."

The cold storage man smiled.

"Come and see me in the spring. Meantime, when you have a cargo of salmon, you might run them in to us. We'll pay market prices. It's up to you to protect yourself in the buying."

MacRae went on about his business. He had not expected much encouragement locally, so he did not suffer disappointment. He knew quite well what he could expect in Vancouver if Crow Harbor canceled his contract. He would bring in boatloads of salmon, and the dealers would squeeze him, all but the Terminal Fish Company. And if the market could be controlled, if the men behind could dictate the Crow Harbor policy, they might also bring the Terminal into line. Even if they did not the Terminal could only handle a minor portion of the salmon he could get while the big run swirled around Squitty Island.

But MacRae was not downcast. He was only sober and thoughtful, which had become characteristic of him in the last four months. He was forgetting how to laugh, to be buoyant, to see the world through the rose-colored glasses of sanguine youth. He was becoming a living exampler of his nickname. Even Stubby Abbott marked this when Jack came back from Bellingham.

"Come on out to the house," Stubby urged. "Your men can handle the job a day or two longer. Forget the grind for once. It's getting you."

"No, I don't think it is," MacRae denied. "But a man can't play and produce at the same time. I have to keep going."

He did go out to Abbott's one evening, however, and suffered a good deal of teasing from Nelly over his manhandling of Sam Kaye. A lot of other young people happened to foregather there. They sang and flirted and presently moved the rugs off the living-room floor and danced to a phonograph. MacRae found himself a little out of it, by inclination. He was tired, without knowing quite what was the matter with him. A man, even a young and sturdy man, cannot work like a horse for months on end, eating his meals anyhow and sleeping when he can, without losing temporarily the zest for careless fun. For another thing, he found himself looking at these immaculate young people as any hard-driven worker must perforce look upon drones.

They were sons and daughters of the well-to-do, divorced from all uncouthness, with pretty manners and good clothes. They seemed serene in the assurance—MacRae got this impression for the first time in his social contact with them—that wearing good clothes, behaving well, giving themselves whole-heartedly to having a good time, was the most important and satisfying thing in the world. They moved in an atmosphere of considering these things their due, a birthright, their natural and proper condition of well-being.

And MacRae found himself wondering what they gave or ever expected to give in return for this pleasant security of mind and body. Some one had to pay for it, the silks and georgettes and white flannels, furs and strings of pearls and gold trinkets, the good food, the motor cars, and the fun.

He knew a little about every one he met that evening, for in Vancouver as in any other community which has developed a social life beyond the purely primitive stages of association, people gravitate into sets and cliques. They lived in good homes, they had servants, they week-ended here and there. Of the dozen or more young men and women present, only himself and Stubby Abbott made any pretense at work.

Yet somebody paid for all they had and did. Men in offices, in shops, in fishing boats and mines and logging camps worked and sweated to pay for all this well-being in which they could have no part. MacRae even suspected that a great many men had died across the sea that this sort of thing should remain the inviolate privilege of just such people as these. It was not an inspiring conclusion.

He smiled to himself. How they would stare if he should voice these stray thoughts in plain English. They would cry out that he was a Bolshevik. Absolutely! He wondered why he should think such things. He wasn't disgruntled. He wanted a great many things which these young people of his own age had gotten from fairy godmothers,—in the shape of pioneer parents who had skimmed the cream off the resources of a developing frontier and handed it on to their children, and who themselves so frequently kept in the background, a little in awe of their gilded offspring. MacRae meant to beat the game as it was being played. He felt that he was beating it. But nothing would be handed him on a silver salver. Fortune would not be bestowed upon him in any easy, soft-handed fashion. He would have to render an equivalent for what he got. He wondered if the security of success so gained would have any greater value for him than it would have for those who took their blessings so lightly.

This kink of analytical reasoning was new to MacRae, and it kept him from entering whole-heartedly into the joyous frivolity which functioned in the Abbott home that evening. He had never found himself in that critical mood before. He did not want to prattle nonsense. He did not want to think, and he could not help thinking. He had a curious sense of detachment from what was going on, even while he was a part of it. So he did not linger late.

The Blackbird had discharged at Crow Harbor late in the afternoon. She lay now at a Vancouver slip. By eleven o'clock he was aboard in his bunk, still thinking when he should have been asleep, staring wide-eyed at dim deck beams, his mind flitting restlessly from one thing to another. Steve Ferrara lay in the opposite bunk, wheezing his breath in and out of lungs seared by poison gas in Flanders. Smells of seaweed and tide-flat wafted in through open hatch and portholes. A full moon thrust silver fingers through deck openings. Gradually the softened medley of harbor noises lulled MacRae into a dreamless sleep. He only wakened at the clank of the engine and the shudder of the Blackbird's timbers as Steve backed her out of her berth in the first faint gleam of dawn.

The Blackbird made her trip and a second and a third, which brought the date late in August. On his delivery, when the salmon in her hold had been picarooned to the cannery floor, MacRae went up to the office. Stubby had sent for him. He looked uncomfortable when Jack came in.

"What's on your mind now?" MacRae asked genially.

"Something damned unpleasant," Stubby growled.

"Shoot," MacRae said. He sat down and lit a cigarette.

"I didn't think they could do it," Abbott said slowly. "But it seems they can. I guess you'll have to lay off the Gower territory after all, Jack."

"You mean you will," MacRae replied. "I've been rather expecting that. Can Gower hurt you?"

"Not personally. But the banks—export control—there are so many angles to the cannery situation. There's nothing openly threatened. But it has been made perfectly clear to me that I'll be hampered and harassed till I won't know whether I'm afoot or on horseback, if I go on paying a few cents more for salmon in order to keep my plant working efficiently. Damn it, I hate it. But I'm in no position to clash with the rest of the cannery crowd and the banks too. I hate to let you down. You've pulled me out of a hole. I don't know a man who would have worked at your pitch and carried things off the way you have. If I had this pack marketed, I could snap my fingers at them. But I haven't. There's the rub. I hate to ditch you in order to insure myself—get in line at somebody else's dictation."

"Don't worry about me," MacRae said gently. "I have no cannery and no pack to market through the regular channels. Nor has the bank advanced me any funds. You are not responsible for what I do. And neither Gower nor the Packers' Association nor the banks can stop me from buying salmon so long as I have the money to pay the fishermen and carriers to haul them, can they?"

"No, but the devil of it is they can stop you selling," Stubby lamented bitterly. "I tell you there isn't a cannery on the Gulf will pay you a cent more than they pay the fishermen. What's the use of buying if you can't sell?"

MacRae did not attempt to answer that.

"Let's sum it up," he said. "You can't take any more bluebacks from Gower's territory. That, I gather, is the chief object. I suppose they know as much about your business as you know yourself. Am I to be deprived of the two boat charters into the bargain?"

"No, by the Lord," Stubby swore. "Not if you want them. My general policy may be subject to dictation, but not the petty details of my business. There's a limit. I won't stand for that."

"Put a fair price on the Birds, and I'll buy 'em both," MacRae suggested. "You had them up for sale, anyway. That will let you out, so far as my equipment is concerned."

"Five thousand each," Stubby said promptly.

"They're good value at that. And I can use ten thousand dollars to advantage, right now."

"I'll give you a check. I want the registry transferred to me at once," MacRae continued. "That done, you can cease worrying over me, Stub. You've been square, and I've made money on the deal. You would be foolish to fight unless you have a fighting chance. Oh, another thing. Will the Terminal shut off on me, too?"

"No," Stubby declared. "The Terminal is one of the weapons I intend ultimately to use as a club on the heads of this group of gentlemen who want to make a close corporation of the salmon industry on the British Columbia coast. If I get by this season, I shall be in shape to show them something. They will not bother about the Terminal, because the Terminal is small. All the salmon they could take from you wouldn't hurt Gower. What they want is to enable Gower to get up his usual fall pack. It has taken him this long to get things shaped so he could call me off. He can't reach a local concern like the Terminal. No, the Terminal will continue to buy salmon from you, Jack. But you know they haven't the facilities to handle a fourth of the salmon you have been running lately."

"I'll see they get whatever they can use," MacRae declared. "And if it is any satisfaction to you personally, Stub, I can assure you that I shall continue to do business as usual."

Stubby looked curious.

"You've got something up your sleeve?"

"Yes," MacRae admitted. "No stuffed club, either. It's loaded. You wait and keep your ears open."

MacRae's face twisted into a mirthless smile. His eyes glowed with the fire that always blazed up in them when he thought too intensely of Horace Gower and the past, or of Gower's various shifts to defeat him in what he undertook. He had anticipated this move. He was angrily determined that Gower should not get one more salmon, or buy what he got a cent cheaper, by this latest strategy.

"You appear to like old Horace," Stubby said thoughtfully, "about as much as our fellows used to like Fritz when he dropped high explosives on supposedly bomb-proof shelters."

"Just about as much," MacRae said shortly. "Well, you'll transfer that registry—when? I want to get back to Squitty as soon as possible."

"I'll go to town with you now, if you like," Stubby offered.

They acted on that. Within two hours MacRae was the owner of two motor launches under British registry. Payment in full left him roughly with five thousand dollars working capital, enough by only a narrow margin. At sunset Vancouver was a smoky smudge on a far horizon. At dusk he passed in the narrow mouth of Squitty Cove. The Bluebird was swinging about to go when her sister ship ranged alongside. Vincent Ferrara dropped his hook again. There were forty trollers in the Cove. MacRae called to them. They came in skiffs and dinghys, and when they were all about his stern and some perched in sea boots along the Blackbird's low bulwarks, MacRae said what he had to say.

"Gower has come alive. My market for fish bought in Gower's territory is closed, so far as Crow Harbor is concerned. If I can't sell salmon I can't buy them from you. How much do you think Folly Bay will pay for your fish?"

He waited a minute. The fishermen looked at him in the yellow lantern light, at each other. They shifted uneasily. No one answered his question.

MacRae went on.

"You can guess what will happen. You will be losers. So will I. I don't like the idea of being frozen out of the salmon-buying business, now that I have got my hand in. I don't intend to be. As long as I can handle a load of salmon I'll make the run. But I've got to run them farther, and you fellows will have to wait a bit for me now and then, perhaps. The cannery men hang together. They are making it bad for me because I'm paying a few cents more for salmon. They have choked off Crow Harbor. Gower is hungry for cheap salmon. He'll get them, too, if you let him head off outside buyers. Since I'm the only buyer covering these grounds, it's up to you, more than ever, to see that I keep coming. That's all. Tell the rest of the fishermen what I say whenever you happen to run across them."

They became articulate. They plied MacRae with questions. He answered tersely, as truthfully as he could. They cursed Folly Bay and the canneries in general. But they were not downcast. They did not seem apprehensive that Folly Bay would get salmon for forty cents. MacRae had said he would still buy. For them that settled it. They would not have to sell their catch to Folly Bay for whatever price Gower cared to set. Presently they began to drift away to their boats, to bed, for their work began in that gray hour between dawn and sunrise when the schooling salmon best strike the trolling spoon.

One lingered, a returned soldier named Mullen, who had got his discharge in May and gone fishing. Mullen had seen two years in the trenches. He sat in his skiff, scowling up at MacRae, talking about the salmon packers, about fishing.

"Aw, it's the same everywhere," he said cynically. "They all want a cinch, easy money, big money. Looks like the more you have, the more you can grab. Folly Bay made barrels of coin while the war was on. Why can't they give us fellers a show to make a little now? But they don't give a damn, so long as they get theirs. And then they wonder why some of us guys that went to France holler about the way we find things when we come home."

He pushed his skiff away into the gloom that rested upon the Cove.

The Bluebird was packed with salmon to her hatch covers. There had been a fresh run. The trollers were averaging fifty fish to a man daily. MacRae put Vincent Ferrara aboard the Blackbird, himself took over the loaded vessel, and within the hour was clear of Squitty's dusky headlands, pointing a course straight down the middle of the Gulf. His man turned in to sleep. MacRae stood watch alone, listening to the ka-choof, ka-choof of the exhaust, the murmuring swash of calm water cleft by the Bluebird's stem. Away to starboard the Ballenas light winked and blinked its flaming eye to seafaring men as it had done in his father's time. Miles to port the Sand Heads lightship swung to its great hawsers off the Fraser River shoals.

MacRae smiled contentedly. There was a long run ahead. But he felt that he had beaten Gower in this first definite brush. Moving in devious channels to a given end Gower had closed the natural markets to MacRae.

But there was no law against the export of raw salmon to a foreign country. MacRae could afford to smile. Over in Bellingham there were salmon packers who, like Folly Bay, were hungry for fish to feed their great machines. But—unlike Folly Bay—they were willing to pay the price, any price in reason, for a supply of salmon. Their own carriers later in the season would invade Canadian waters, so many thorns in the ample sides of the British Columbia packers. "The damned Americans!" they sometimes growled, and talked about legislation to keep American fish buyers out. Because the American buyer and canner alike would spend a dollar to make a dollar. And the British Columbia packers wanted a cinch, a monopoly, which in a measure they had. They were an anachronism, MacRae felt. They regarded the salmon and the salmon waters of the British Columbia coast as the feudal barons of old jealously regarded their special prerogatives. MacRae could see them growling and grumbling, he could see most clearly the scowl that would spread over the face of Mr. Horace A. Gower, when he learned that ten to twenty thousand Squitty Island salmon were passing down the Gulf each week to an American cannery; that a smooth-faced boy out of the Air Service was putting a crimp in the ancient order of things so far as one particular cannery was concerned.

This notion amused MacRae, served to while away the hours of monotonous plowing over an unruffled sea, until he drove down abreast the Fraser River's mouth and passed in among the nets and lights of the sockeye fleet drifting, a thousand strong, on the broad bosom of the Gulf. Then he had to stand up to his steering wheel and keep a sharp lookout, lest he foul his propellor in a net or cut down some careless fisherman who did not show a riding light.



CHAPTER XI

Peril of the Sea

The last of August set the Red Flower of the Jungle books blooming along the British Columbia coast. The seeds of it were scattered on hot, dry, still days by pipe and cigarette, by sparks from donkey engines, by untended camp fires, wherever the careless white man went in the great coastwise forests. The woods were like a tinder box. One unguarded moment, and the ancient firs were wrapped in sheets of flame. Smoke lay on the Gulf like a pall of pungent fog, through which vessels ran by chart and compass, blind between ports, at imminent risk of collision.

Through this, well on into September, MacRae and Vincent Ferrara gathered cargoes of salmon and ran them down the Gulf to Bellingham, making their trips with the regularity of the tides, despite the murk that hid landmarks by day and obscured the guiding lighthouse flashes when dark closed in. They took their chances in the path of coastwise traffic, straining their eyes for vessels to leap suddenly out of the thickness that shut them in, their ears for fog signals that blared warning. There were close shaves, but they escaped disaster. They got the salmon and they delivered them, and Folly Bay still ran a bad second wherever the Bird boats served the trolling fleet. Even when Gower at last met MacRae's price, his collectors got few fish. The fishermen took no chances. They were convinced that if MacRae abandoned buying for lack of salmon Folly Bay would cut the price in two. It had been done before. So they held their fish for the Bird boats. MacRae got them all. Even when American buyers trailed MacRae to the source of his supply their competition hurt Gower instead of MacRae. The trollers supplied MacRae with all the salmon he could carry. It was still fresh in their minds that he had come into the field that season as their special Providence.

But the blueback run tapered off at Squitty. September ushered in the annual coho run on its way to the spawning grounds. And the coho did not school along island shores, feeding upon tiny herring. Stray squadrons of coho might pass Squitty, but they did not linger in thousands as the blueback did. The coho swept into the Gulf from mysterious haunts in blue water far offshore, myriads of silver fish seeking the streams where they were spawned, and to which as mature fish they now returned to reproduce themselves. They came in great schools. They would loaf awhile in some bay at a stream mouth, until some irresistible urge drove them into fresh water, up rivers and creeks, over shoal and rapid, through pool and canyon, until the stream ran out to a whimpering trickle and the backs of the salmon stuck out of the water. Up there, in the shadow of great mountains, in the hidden places of the Coast range, those that escaped their natural enemies would spawn and die.

While the coho and the humpback, which came about the same time, and the dog salmon, which comes last of all—but each to function in the same manner and sequence—laid in the salt-water bays, resting, it would seem, before the last and most terrible struggle of their brief existence, the gill-net fishermen and the cannery purse-seine boats took toll of them. The trollers harried them from the moment they showed in the Gulf, because the coho will strike at a glittering spoon anywhere in salt water. But the net boats take them in hundreds at one drift, and the purse seiners gather thousands at a time in a single sweep of the great bag-like seine.

When September days brought the cohoes in full force along with cooler nights and a great burst of rain that drowned the forest fires and cleared away the enshrouding smoke, leaving only the pleasant haze of autumn, the Folly Bay purse-seine boats went out to work. The trolling fleet scattered from Squitty Island. Some steamed north to the troubled waters of Salmon River and Blackfish Sound, some to the Redondas where spring salmon could be taken. Many put by their trolling gear and hung their gill nets. A few gas boats and a few rowboat men held to the Island, depending upon stray schools and the spring salmon that haunted certain reefs and points and beds of kelp. But the main fleet scattered over two hundred miles of sea.

MacRae could have called it a season and quit with honor and much profit. Or he might have gone north and bought salmon here and there, free-lancing. He did neither. There were enough gill-netters operating on Gower's territory to give him fair cargoes. Every salmon he could divert from the cans at Folly Bay meant,—well, he did not often stop to ask precisely what that did mean to him. But he never passed Poor Man's Rock, bleak and brown at low tide, or with seas hissing over it when the tide was at flood, without thinking of his father, of the days and months and years old Donald MacRae had lived and worked in sight of the Rock,—a life at the last lonely and cheerless and embittered by the sight of his ancient enemy preening his feathers in Cradle Bay. Old Donald had lived for thirty years unable to return a blow which had scarred his face and his heart in the same instant. But his son felt that he was making better headway. It is unlikely that Donald MacRae ever looked at Gower's cottage nestling like a snowflake in the green lee of Point Old, or cast his eyes over that lost estate of his, with more unchristian feelings than did his son. In Jack MacRae's mind the Golden Rule did not apply to Horace Gower, nor to aught in which Gower was concerned.

So he stayed on Folly Bay territory with a dual purpose: to make money for himself, and to deprive Gower of profit where he could. He was wise enough to know that was the only way he could hurt a man like Gower. And he wanted to hurt Gower. The intensity of that desire grew. It was a point of honor, the old inborn clan pride that never compromised an injury or an insult or an injustice, which neither forgave nor forgot.

For weeks MacRae in the Blackbird and Vin Ferrara in her sister ship flitted here and there. The purse seiners hunted the schooling salmon, the cohoes and humps. The gill-netters hung on the seiner's heels, because where the purse seine could get a haul so could they. And the carriers and buyers sought the fishermen wherever they went, to buy and carry away their catch.

Folly Bay suffered bad luck from the beginning. Gower had four purse-seine boats in commission. Within a week one broke a crankshaft in half a gale off Sangster Island. The wind put her ashore under the nose of the sandstone Elephant and the seas destroyed her.

Fire gutted a second not long after, so that for weeks she was laid up for repairs. That left him but two efficient craft. One operated on his concessions along the mainland shore. The other worked three stream mouths on Vancouver Island, straight across from Folly Bay.

Still, Gower's cannery was getting salmon. In those three bays no other purse seiner could shoot his gear. Folly Bay held them under exclusive license. Gill nets could be drifted there, but the purse seiner was king.

A gill net goes out over a boat's stern. When it is strung it stands in the sea like a tennis net across a court, a web nine hundred feet long, twenty feet deep, its upper edge held afloat by corks, its lower sunk by lead weights spaced close together. The outer end is buoyed to a float which carries a flag and a lantern; the inner is fast to the bitts of the launch. Thus set, and set in the evening, since salmon can only be taken by the gills in the dark, fisherman, launch, and net drift with the changing tides till dawn. Then he hauls. He may have ten salmon, or a hundred, or treble that. He may have none, and the web be torn by sharks and fouled heavy with worthless dogfish.

The purse seiner works in daylight, off a powerfully engined sixty-foot, thirty-ton craft. He pays the seine out over a roller on a revolving platform aft. His vessel moves slowly in a sweeping circle as the net goes out,—a circle perhaps a thousand feet in diameter. When the circle is complete the two ends of the net meet at the seiner's stern. A power winch hauls on ropes and the net closes. Nothing escapes. It draws together until it is a bag, a "purse" drawn up under the vessel's counter, full of glistening fish.

The salmon is a surface fish, his average depth seldom below four fathoms. He breaks water when he feeds, when he plays, when he runs in schools. The purse seiner watches the signs. When the salmon rise in numbers he makes a set. To shoot the gear and purse the seine is a matter of minutes. A thousand salmon at a haul is nothing. Three thousand is common. Five thousand is far below the record. Purse seines have been burst by the dead weight of fish against the pull of the winch.

The purse seine is a deadly trap for schooling salmon. And because the salmon schools in mass formation, crowding nose to tail and side to side, in the entrance to a fresh-water stream, the Fisheries Department having granted a monopoly of seining rights to a packer has also benevolently decreed that no purse seine or other net shall operate within a given distance of a stream mouth,—that the salmon, having won to fresh water, shall go free and his kind be saved from utter extinction.

These regulations are not drawn for sentimental reasons, only to preserve the salmon industry. The farmer saves wheat for his next year's seeding, instead of selling the last bushel to the millers. No man willfully kills the goose that lays him golden eggs. But the salmon hunter, eagerly pursuing the nimble dollar, sometimes grows rapacious in the chase and breaks laws of his own devising,—if a big haul promises and no Fisheries Inspector is by to restrain him. The cannery purse seiners are the most frequent offenders. They can make their haul quickly in forbidden waters and get away. Folly Bay, shrewdly paying its seine crews a bonus per fish on top of wages, had always been notorious for crowding the law.

Solomon River takes its rise in the mountainous backbone of Vancouver Island. It is a wide, placid stream on its lower reaches, flowing through low, timbered regions, emptying into the Gulf in a half-moon bay called the Jew's Mouth, which is a perfect shelter from the Gulf storms and the only such shelter in thirty miles of bouldery shore line. The beach runs northwest and southeast, bleak and open, undented. In all that stretch there is no point from behind which a Fisheries Patrol launch could steal unexpectedly into the Jew's Mouth.

Upon a certain afternoon the Blackbird lay therein. At her stern, fast by light lines to her after bitts, clung half a dozen fish boats, blue wisps of smoke drifting from the galley stovepipes, the fishermen variously occupied. The Blackbird's hold was empty except for ice. She was waiting for fish, and the Bluebird was due on the same errand the following day.

Nearer shore another cluster of gill-netters was anchored, a Jap or two, and a Siwash Indian with his hull painted a gaudy blue. And in the middle of the Jew's Mouth, which was a scant six hundred yards across at its widest, the Folly Bay No. 5 swung on her anchor chain. A tubby cannery tender lay alongside. The crews were busy with picaroons forking salmon out of the seiner into the tender's hold. The flip-flop of the fish sounded distinctly in that quiet place. Their silver bodies flashed in the sun as they were thrown across the decks.

When the tender drew clear and passed out of the bay she rode deep with the weight of salmon aboard. Without the Jew's Mouth, around the Blackbird and the fish boats and the No. 5 the salmon were threshing water. Klop. A flash of silver. Bubbles. A series of concentric rings that ran away in ripples, till they merged into other widening rings. They were everywhere. The river was full of them. The bay was alive with them.

A boat put off from the seiner. The man rowed out of the Jew's Mouth and stopped, resting on his oars. He remained there, in approximately the same position. A sentry.

The No. 5 heaved anchor, the chain clanking and chattering in a hawsepipe. Her exhaust spat smoky, gaseous fumes. A bell clanged. She moved slowly ahead, toward the river's mouth, a hundred yards to one side of it. Then the brown web of the seine began to spin out over the stern. She crossed the mouth of the Solomon, holding as close in as her draft permitted, and kept on straight till her seine was paid out to the end. Then she stopped, lying still in dead water with her engine idling.

The tide was on the flood. Salmon run streams on a rising tide. And the seine stood like a wall across the river's mouth.

Every man watching knew what the seiner was about, in defiance of the law. The salmon, nosing into the stream, driven by that imperative urge which is the law of their being, struck the net, turned aside, swam in a slow circle and tried again and again, seeking free passage, until thousands of them were massed behind the barrier of the net. Then the No. 5 would close the net, tauten the ropes which made it a purse, and haul out into deep water.

It was the equivalent of piracy on the high seas. To be taken in the act meant fines, imprisonment, confiscation of boat and gear. But the No. 5 would not be caught. She had a guard posted. Cannery seiners were never caught. When they were they got off with a warning and a reprimand. Only gill-netters, the small fry of the salmon industry, ever paid the utmost penalty for raids like that. So the fishermen said, with a cynical twist of their lips.

"Look at 'em," one said to MacRae. "They make laws and break 'em themselves. They been doin' that every day for a week. If one of us set a piece of net in the river and took three hundred salmon the canners would holler their heads off. There'd be a patrol boat on our heels all the time if they thought we'd take a chance."

"Well, I'm about ready to take a chance," another man growled. "They clear the bay in daylight and all we get is their leavings at night."

The No. 5 pursed her seine and hauled out until she was abreast of the Blackbird. She drew close up to her massive hull a great heap of salmon, struggling, twisting, squirming within the net. The loading began. Her men laughed and shouted as they worked. The gill-net fishermen watched silently, scowling. It was like taking bread out of their mouths. It was like an honest man restrained by a policeman's club from taking food when he is hungry, and seeing a thief fill his pockets and walk off unmolested.

"Four thousand salmon that shot," Dave Mullen said, the same Mullen who had talked to MacRae in Squitty one night. "Say, why should we stand for that? We can get salmon that way too."

He spoke directly to MacRae.

"What's sauce for the goose ought to be sauce for the gander," MacRae replied. "I'll take the fish if you get them."

"You aren't afraid of getting in wrong yourself?" the man asked him.

MacRae shook his head. He did not lean to lawlessness. But the cannery men had framed this law. They cried loudly and continually for its strict enforcement. And they violated it flagrantly themselves, or winked at its violation when that meant an added number of cases to their pack. Not alone in the Jew's Mouth; all along the British Columbia coast the purse seiners forgot the law when the salmon swarmed in a stream mouth and they could make a killing. Only canneries could hold a purse-seine license. If the big men would not honor their own law, why should the lesser? So MacRae felt and said.

The men in the half-dozen boats about his stern had dealt all the season with MacRae. They trusted him. They neither liked nor trusted Folly Bay. Folly Bay was not only breaking the law in the Jew's Mouth, but in breaking the law they were making it hard for these men to earn a dollar legitimately. Superior equipment, special privilege, cold-blooded violation of law because it was safe and profitable, gave the purse seiner an unfair advantage. The men gathered in a little knot on the deck of one boat. They put their heads together and lowered their voices. MacRae knew they were angry, that they had reached the point of fighting fire with fire. And he smiled to himself. He did not know what they were planning, but he could guess. It would not be the first time the individual fishermen had kicked over the traces and beaten the purse seiners at their own game. They did not include him in their council. He was a buyer. It was not his function to inquire how they took their fish. If they could take salmon which otherwise the No. 5 would take, so much the worse for Folly Bay,—and so much the better for the fishermen, who earned their living precariously at best.

It was dusk when the purse seiner finished loading her catch and stowed the great net in a dripping heap on the turntable aft. At daylight or before, a cannery tender would empty her, and she would sweep the Jew's Mouth bare of salmon again.

With dusk also the fishermen were busy over their nets, still riding to the Blackbird's stern. Then they moved off in the dark. MacRae could hear nets paying out. He saw lanterns set to mark the outer end of each net. Silence fell on the bay. A single riding light glowed at the No. 5's masthead. Her cabin lights blinked out. Her crew sprawled in their bunks, sound asleep.

Under cover of the night the fishermen took pattern from the seiner's example. A gill net is nine hundred feet long, approximately twenty feet deep. They stripped the cork floats off one and hung it to the lead-line of another. Thus with a web forty feet deep they went stealthily up to the mouth of the Solomon. With a four-oared skiff manning each end of the nine hundred-foot length they swept their net around the Jew's Mouth, closed it like a purse seine, and hauled it out into the shallows of a small beach. They stood in the shallow water with sea boots on and forked the salmon into their rowboats and laid the rowboats alongside the Blackbird to deliver,—all in the dark without a lantern flicker, with muffled oarlocks and hushed voices. Three times they swept the bay.

At five in the morning, before it was lightening in the east, the Blackbird rode four inches below her load water line with a mixed cargo of coho and dog salmon, the heaviest cargo ever stowed under her hatches,—and eight fishermen divided two thousand dollars share and share alike for their night's work.

MacRae battened his hatch covers, started his engine, heaved up the hook, and hauled out of the bay.

In the Gulf the obscuring clouds parted to lay a shaft of silver on smooth, windless sea. The Blackbird wallowed down the moon-trail. MacRae stood at the steering wheel. Beside him Steve Ferrara leaned on the low cabin.

"She's getting day," Steve said, after a long silence. He chuckled. "Some raid. If they can keep that lick up those boys will all have new boats for next season. You'll break old Gower if you keep on, Jack."

The thought warmed MacRae. To break Gower, to pull him down to where he must struggle for a living like other common men, to deprive him of the power he had abused, to make him suffer as such a man would suffer under that turn of fortune,—that would help to square accounts. It would be only a measure of justice. To be dealt with as he had dealt with others,—MacRae asked no more than that for himself.

But it was not likely, he reflected. One bad season would not seriously involve a wary old bird like Horace Gower. He was too secure behind manifold bulwarks. Still in the end,—more spectacular things had come to pass in the affairs of men on this kaleidoscopic coast. MacRae's face was hard in the moonlight. His eyes were somber. It was an ugly feeling to nurse. For thirty years that sort of impotent bitterness must have rankled in his father's breast—with just cause, MacRae told himself moodily. No wonder old Donald had been a grave and silent man; a just, kindly, generous man, too. Other men had liked him, respected him. Gower alone had been implacable.

Well into the red and yellow dawn MacRae stood at the wheel, thinking of this, an absent look in eyes which still kept keen watch ahead. He was glad when it came time for Steve's watch on deck, and he could lie down and let sleep drive it out of his mind. He did not live solely to revenge himself upon Horace Gower. He had his own way to make and his own plans—even if they were still a bit nebulous—to fulfill. It was only now and then that the past saddened him and made him bitter.

The week following brought great runs of salmon to the Jew's Mouth. Of these the Folly Bay No. 5 somehow failed to get the lion's share. The gill-net men laughed in their soiled sleeves and furtively swept the bay clear each night and all night, and the daytime haul of the seine fell far below the average. The Blackbird and the Bluebird waddled down a placid Gulf with all they could carry.

And although there was big money-making in this short stretch, and the secret satisfaction of helping put another spoke in Gower's wheel, MacRae did not neglect the rest of his territory nor the few trollers that still worked Squitty Island. He ran long hours to get their few fish. It was their living, and MacRae would not pass them up because their catch meant no profit compared to the time he spent and the fuel he burned making this round. He would drive straight up the Gulf from Bellingham to Squitty, circle the Island and then across to the mouth of the Solomon. The weather was growing cool now. Salmon would keep unspoiled a long time in a trailer's hold. It did not matter to him whether it was day or night around Squitty. He drove his carrier into any nook or hole where a troller might lie waiting with a few salmon.

The Blackbird came pitching and diving into a heavy southeast swell up along the western side of Squitty at ten o'clock in the black of an early October night. There was a storm brewing, a wicked one, reckoned by the headlong drop of the aneroid. MacRae had a hundred or so salmon aboard for all his Squitty round, and he had yet to pick up those on the boats in the Cove. He cocked his eye at a cloud-wrack streaking above, driving before a wind which had not yet dropped to the level of the Gulf, and he said to himself that it would be wise to stay in the Cove that night. A southeast gale, a beam sea, and the tiny opening of the Jew's Mouth was a bad combination to face in a black night. As he stood up along Squitty he could hear the swells break along the shore. Now and then a cold puff of air, the forerunner of the big wind, struck him. Driving full speed the Blackbird dipped her bow deep in each sea and rose dripping to the next. He passed Cradle Bay at last, almost under the steep cliffs, holding in to round Poor Man's Rock and lay a compass course to the mouth of Squitty Cove.

And as he put his wheel over and swept around the Rock and came clear of Point Old a shadowy thing topped by three lights in a red and green and white triangle seemed to leap at him out of the darkness. The lights showed, and under the lights white water hissing. MacRae threw his weight on the wheel. He shouted to Steve Ferrara, lying on his bunk in the little cabin aft.

He knew the boat instantly,—the Arrow shooting through the night at twenty miles an hour, scurrying to shelter under the full thrust of her tremendous power. For an appreciable instant her high bow loomed over him, while his hands twisted the wheel. But the Blackbird was heavy, sluggish on her helm. She swung a little, from square across the rushing Arrow, to a slight angle. Two seconds would have cleared him. By the rules of the road at sea the Blackbird had the right of way. If MacRae had held by the book this speeding mass of mahogany and brass and steel would have cut him in two amidships. As it was, her high bow, the stem shod with a cast bronze cutwater edged like a knife, struck him on the port quarter, sheared through guard, planking, cabin.

There was a crash of riven timbers, the crunching ring of metal, quick oaths, a cry. The Arrow scarcely hesitated. She had cut away nearly the entire stern works of the Blackbird. But such was her momentum that the shock barely slowed her up. Her hull bumped the Blackbird aside. She passed on. She did not even stand by to see what she had done. There was a sound of shouting on her decks, but she kept on.

MacRae could have stepped aboard her as she brushed by. Her rail was within reach of his hand. But that did not occur to him. Steve Ferrara was asleep in the cabin, in the path of that destroying stem. For a stunned moment MacRae stood as the Arrow drew clear. The Blackbird began to settle under his feet.

MacRae dived down the after companion. He went into water to his waist. His hands, groping blindly, laid hold of clothing, a limp body. He struggled back, up, gained the deck, dragging Steve after him. The Blackbird was deep by the holed stern now, awash to her after fish hatch. She rose slowly, like a log, on each swell. Only the buoyancy of her tanks and timbers kept her from the last plunge. There was a light skiff bottom up across her hatches by the steering wheel. MacRae moved warily toward that, holding to the bulwark with one hand, dragging Steve with the other lest a sea sweep them both away.

He noticed, with his brain functioning unruffled, that the Arrow drove headlong into Cradle Bay. He could hear her exhaust roaring. He could still hear shouting. And he could see also that the wind and the tide and the roll of the swells carried the water-logged hulk of the Blackbird in the opposite direction. She was past the Rock, but she was edging shoreward, in under the granite walls that ran between Point Old and the Cove. He steadied himself, keeping his hold on Steve, and reached for the skiff. As his fingers touched it a comber flung itself up out of the black and shot two feet of foam and green water across the swamped hull. It picked up the light cedar skiff like a chip and cast it beyond his reach and beyond his sight. And as he clung to the cabin pipe-rail, drenched with the cold sea, he heard that big roller burst against the shore very near at hand. He saw the white spray lift ghostly in the black.

MacRae held his hand over Steve's heart, over his mouth to feel if he breathed. Then he got Steve's body between his legs to hold him from slipping away, and bracing himself against the sodden lurch of the wreck, began to take off his clothes.



CHAPTER XII

Between Sun and Sun

Walking when he could, crawling on hands and knees when his legs buckled under him, MacRae left a blood-sprinkled trail over grass and moss and fallen leaves. He lived over and over that few minutes which had seemed so long, in which he had been battered against broken rocks, in which he had clawed over weedy ledges armored with barnacles that cut like knives, hauling Steve Ferrara's body with him so that it should not become the plaything of the tides. MacRae was no stranger to death. He had seen it in many terrible forms. He had heard the whistle of the invisible scythe that cuts men down. He knew that Steve was dead when he dragged him at last out of the surf, up where nothing but high-flung drops of spray could reach him. He left him there on a mossy ledge, knowing that he could do nothing more for Steve Ferrara and that he must do something for himself. So he came at last to the end of that path which led to his own house and crept and stumbled up the steps into the deeper darkness of those hushed, lonely rooms.

MacRae knew he had suffered no vital hurt, no broken bones. But he had been fearfully buffeted among those sea-drenched rocks, bruised from head to foot, shocked by successive blows. He had spent his strength to keep the sea from claiming Steve. He had been unmercifully slashed by the barnacles. He was weak from loss of blood, and he was bleeding yet, in oozy streams,—face, hands, shoulders, knees, wherever those lance-edged shells had raked his flesh.

He was sick and dizzy. But he could still think and act. He felt his way to matches on a kitchen shelf, staggered into his bedroom, lit a lamp. Out of a dresser drawer he took clean white cloth, out of another carbolic acid. He got himself a basin of water.

He sat down on the edge of his bed. As he tore the first strip of linen things began to swim before his eyes. He sagged back on a pillow. The room and the lamp and all that was near him blended in a misty swirl. He had the extraordinary sensation of floating lightly in space that was quiet and profoundly dark—and still he was cloudily aware of footsteps ringing hollow on the bare floor of the other room.

He became aware—as if no interval had elapsed—of being moved, of hands touching him, of a stinging sensation of pain which he understood to be the smarting of the cuts in his flesh. But time must have gone winging by, he knew, as his senses grew clearer. He was stripped of his sodden, bloody undershirt and overalls, partly covered by his blanket. He could feel bandages on his legs, on one badly slashed arm. He made out Betty Gower's face with its unruly mass of reddish-brown hair and two rose spots of color glowing on her smooth cheeks. There was also a tall young man, coatless, showing a white expanse of flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled above his elbows. MacRae could only see this out of one corner of his eye, for he was being turned gently over on his face. Weak and passive as he was, the firm pressure of Betty's soft hands on his skin gave him a curiously pleasant sensation.

He heard her draw her breath sharply and make some exclamation as his bare back turned to the light.

"This chap has been to the wars, eh, Miss Gower?" he heard the man say. "Those are machine-gun marks, I should say—close range, too. I saw plenty of that after the Argonne."

"Such scars. How could a man live with holes like that through his body?" Betty said. "He was in the air force."

"Some Hun got in a burst of fire on him, sometime, then," the man commented. "Didn't get him, either, or he wouldn't be here. Why, two or three bullet holes like that would only put a fellow out for a few weeks. Look at him," he tapped MacRae's back with a forefinger. "Shoulders and chest and arms like a champion middle weight ready to go twenty rounds. And you can bet all your pin money, Miss Gower, that this man's heart and lungs and nerves are away above par or he would never have got his wings. Takes a lot to down those fellows. Looks in bad shape now, doesn't he? All cut and bruised and exhausted. But he'll be walking about day after to-morrow. A little stiff and sore, but otherwise well enough."

"I wish he'd open his eyes and speak," Betty said. "How can you tell? He may be injured internally."

The man chuckled. He did not cease work as he talked. He was using a damp cloth, with a pungent medicated smell. Dual odors familiar to every man who has ever been in hospital assailed MacRae's nostrils. Wherever that damp cloth touched a cut it burned. MacRae listened drowsily. He had not the strength or the wish to do anything else.

"Heart action's normal. Respiration and temperature, ditto," he heard above him. "Unconsciousness is merely natural reaction from shock, nerve strain, loss of blood. You can guess what sort of fight he must have made in those breakers. If you were a sawbones, Miss Gower, you wouldn't be uneasy. I'll stake my professional reputation on his injuries being superficial. Quite enough to knock a man out, I grant. But a physique of this sort can stand a tremendous amount of strain without serious effect. Hand me that adhesive, will you, please?"

There was an air of unreality about the whole proceeding in MacRae's mind. He wondered if he would presently wake up in his bunk opposite Steve and find that he had been dreaming. Yet those voices, and the hands that shifted him tenderly, and the pyjama coat that was slipped on him at last, were not the stuff of dreams. No, the lights of the Arrow, the smash of the collision, the tumbling seas which had flung him against the rocks, the dead weight of Steve's body in his bleeding arms, were not illusions.

He opened his eyes when they turned him on his back.

"Well, old man, how do you feel?" Betty's companion asked genially.

"All right," MacRae said briefly. He found that speech required effort. His mind worked clearly enough, but his tongue was uncertain, his voice low-pitched, husky. He turned his eyes on Betty. She tried to smile. But her lips quivered in the attempt. MacRae looked at her curiously. But he did not say anything. In the face of accomplished facts, words were rather futile.

He closed his eyes again, only to get a mental picture of the Arrow leaping at him out of the gloom, the thunder of the swells bursting against the foot of the cliffs, of Steve lying on that ledge alone. But nothing could harm Steve. Storm and cold and pain and loneliness were nothing to him, now.

He heard Betty speak.

"Can we do anything more?"

"Um—no," the man answered. "Not for some time, anyway."

"Then I wish you would go back to the house and tell them," Betty said. "They'll be worrying. I'll stay here."

"I suppose it would be as well," he agreed. "I'll come back."

"There's no need for either of you to stay here," MacRae said wearily. "You've stopped the bleeding, and you can't do any more. Go home and go to bed. I'm as well alone."

There was a brief interval of silence. MacRae heard footsteps crossing the floor, receding, going down the steps. He opened his eyes. Betty Gower sat on a low box by his bed, her hands in her lap, looking at him wistfully. She leaned a little toward him.

"I'm awfully sorry," she whispered.

"So was the little boy who cut off his sister's thumb with the hatchet," MacRae muttered. "But that didn't help sister's thumb. If you'll run down to old Peter Ferrara's house and tell him what has happened, and then go home yourself, we'll call it square."

"I have already done that," Betty said. "Dolly is away. The fishermen are bringing Steve Ferrara's body to his uncle's house. They are going to try to save what is left of your boat."

"It is kind of you, I'm sure, to pick up the pieces," MacRae gibed.

"I am sorry," the girl breathed.

"After the fact. Belting around a point in the dark at train speed, regardless of the rules of the road. Destroying a valuable boat, killing a man. Property is supposed to be sacred—if life has no market value. Were you late for dinner?"

In his anger he made a quick movement with his arms, flinging the blanket off, sending intolerable pangs through his bruised and torn body.

Betty rose and bent over him, put the blanket back silently, tucked him in like a mother settling the cover about a restless child. She did not say anything for a minute. She stood over him, nervously plucking bits of lint off the blanket. Her eyes grew wet.

"I don't blame you for feeling that way," she said at last. "It was a terrible thing. You had the right of way. I don't know why or how Robertson let it happen. He has always been a careful navigator. The nearness when he saw you under his bows must have paralyzed him, and with our speed—oh, it isn't any use, I know, to tell you how sorry I am. That won't bring that poor boy back to life again. It won't—"

"You killed him—your kind of people—twice," MacRae said thickly. "Once in France, where he risked his life—all he had to risk—so that you and your kind should continue to have ease and security. He came home wheezing and strangling, suffering all the pains of death without death's relief. And when he was beginning to think he had another chance you finish him off. But that's nothing. A mere incident. Why should you care? The country is full of Ferraras. What do they matter? Men of no social or financial standing, men who work with their hands and smell of fish. If it's a shock to you to see one man dead and another cut and bloody, think of the numbers that suffer as great pains and hardships that you know nothing about—and wouldn't care if you did. You couldn't be what you are and have what you have if they didn't. Sorry! Sympathy is the cheapest thing in the market, cheaper than salmon. You can't help Steve Ferrara with that—not now. Don't waste any on me. I don't need it. I resent it. You may need it all for your own before I get through. I—I am—"

MacRae's voice trailed off into an incoherent murmur. He seemed to be floating off into those dark shadowy spaces again. In reality he was exhausted. A man with his veins half emptied of blood cannot get in a passion without a speedy reaction. MacRae went off into an unconscious state which gradually became transformed into natural, healthy sleep, the deep slumber of utter exhaustion.

At intervals thereafter he was hazily aware of some one beside him, of soft hands that touched him. Once he wakened to find the room empty, the lamp turned low. In the dim light and the hush the place seemed unutterably desolate and forsaken, as if he were buried in a crypt. When he listened he could hear the melancholy drone of the southeaster and the rumble of the surf, two sounds that fitted well his mood. He felt a strange relief when Betty came tiptoeing in from the kitchen. She bent over him. MacRae closed his eyes and slept again.

He awakened at last, alert, refreshed, free of that depression which had rested so heavily on him. And he found that weariness had caught Betty Gower in its overpowering grip. She had drawn her box seat up close beside him. Her body had drooped until her arms rested on the side of the bed, and her head rested on her arms. MacRae found one of his hands caught tight in both hers. She was asleep, breathing lightly, regularly. He twisted his stiffened neck to get a better look at her. He could only see one side of her face, and that he studied a long time. Pretty and piquant, still it was no doll's face. There was character in that firm mouth and round chin. Betty had a beautiful skin. That had been MacRae's first impression of her, the first time he saw her. And she had a heavy mass of reddish-brown hair that shone in the sunlight with a decided wave in it which always made it seem unruly, about to escape from its conventional arrangement.

MacRae made no attempt to free his hand. He was quite satisfied to let it be. The touch of her warm flesh against his stirred him a little, sent his mind straying off into strange channels. Queer that the first woman to care for him when he crept wounded and shaken to the shelter of his own roof should be the daughter of his enemy. For MacRae could not otherwise regard Horace Gower. Anything short of that seemed treason to the gray old man who had died in the next room, babbling of his son and the west wind and some one he called Bessie.

MacRae's eyes blurred unexpectedly. What a damned shame things had to be the way they were. Behind this girl, who was in herself lovely and desirable as a woman should be, loomed the pudgy figure of her father, ruthless, vindictively unjust. Gower hadn't struck at him openly; but that, MacRae believed, was merely for lack of suitable opening.

But that did not keep Jack MacRae from thinking—what every normal man begins to think, or rather to feel, soon or late—that he is incomplete, insufficient, without some particular woman to love him, upon whom to bestow love. It was like a revelation. He caught himself wishing that Betty would wake up and smile at him, bend over him with a kiss. He stared up at the shadowy roof beams, feeling the hot blood leap to his face at the thought. There was an uncanny magic in the nearness of her, a lure in the droop of her tired body. And MacRae struggled against that seduction. Yet he could not deny that Betty Gower, innocently sleeping with his hand fast in hers, filled him with visions and desires which had never before focused with such intensity on any woman who had come his way. Mysteriously she seemed absolved of all blame for being a Gower, for any of the things the Gower clan had done to him and his, even to the misfortune of that night which had cost a man his life.

"It isn't her fault," MacRae said to himself. "But, Lord, I wish she'd kept away from here, if this sort of thing is going to get me."

What this was he did not attempt to define. He did not admit that he was hovering on the brink of loving Betty Gower—it seemed an incredible thing for him to do—but was vividly aware that she had kindled an incomprehensible fire in him, and he suspected, indeed he feared with a fear that bordered on spiritual shrinking, that it would go on glowing after she was gone. And she would go presently. This spontaneous rushing to his aid was merely what a girl like that, with generous impulses and quick sympathy, would do for any one in dire need. She would leave behind her an inescapable longing, an emptiness, a memory of sweetly disturbing visions. MacRae seemed to see with remarkable clarity and sureness that he would be penalized for yielding to that bewitching fancy. By what magic had she so suddenly made herself a shining figure in a golden dream? Some necromancy of the spirit, invisible but wonderfully potent? Or was it purely physical,—the soft reddish-brown of her hair; her frank gray eyes, very like his own; the marvelous, smooth clearness and coloring of her skin; her voice, that was given to soft cadences? He did not know. No man ever quite knows what positive qualities in a woman can make his heart leap. MacRae was no wiser than most. But he was not prone to cherish illusions, to deceive himself. He had imagination. That gave him a key to many things which escape a sluggish mind.

"Well," he said to himself at last, with a fatalistic humor, "if it comes that way, it comes. If I am to be the goat, I shall be, and that's all there is to it."

Under his breath he cursed Horace Gower deeply and fervently, and he was not conscious of anything incongruous in that. And then he lay very thoughtful and a little sad, his eyes on the smooth curve of Betty's cheek swept by long brown lashes, the corner of a red mouth made for kissing. His fingers were warm in hers. He smiled sardonically at a vagrant wish that they might remain there always.

Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad. MacRae wondered if the gods thus planned his destruction?

A tremulous sigh warned him. He shut his eyes, feigned sleep. He felt rather than saw Betty sit up with a start, release his hand. Then very gently she moved that arm back under the blanket, reached across him and patted the covers close about his body, stood looking down at him.

And MacRae stirred, opened his eyes.

"What time is it?" he asked.

She looked at a wrist watch. "Four o'clock." She shivered.

"You've been here all this time without a fire. You're chilled through. Why didn't you go home? You should go now."

"I have been sitting here dozing," she said. "I wasn't aware of the cold until now. But there is wood and kindling in the kitchen, and I am going to make a fire. Aren't you hungry?"

"Starving," he said. "But there is nothing to eat in the house. It has been empty for months."

"There is tea," she said. "I saw some on a shelf. I'll make a cup of that. It will be something warm, refreshing."

MacRae listened to her at the kitchen stove. There was the clink of iron lids, the smell of wood smoke, the pleasant crackle of the fire. Presently she came in with two steaming cups.

"I have a faint recollection of talking wild and large a while ago," MacRae remarked. Indeed, it seemed hazy to him now. "Did I say anything nasty?"

"Yes," she replied frankly; "perhaps the sting of what you said lay in its being partly true. A half truth is sometimes a deadly weapon. I wonder if you do really hate us as much, as your manner implied—and why?"

"Us. Who?" MacRae asked.

"My father and me," she put it bluntly.

"What makes you think I do?" MacRae asked. "Because I have set up a fierce competition in a business where your father has had a monopoly so long that he thinks this part of the Gulf belongs to him? Because I resent your running down one of my boats? Because I go about my affairs in my own way, regardless of Gower interests?"

"What do these things amount to?" Betty answered impatiently. "It's in your manner, your attitude. Sometimes it even shows in your eyes. It was there the morning I came across you sitting on Point Old, the day after the armistice was signed. I've danced with you and seen you look at me as if—as if," she laughed self-consciously, "you would like to wring my neck. I have never done anything to create a dislike of that sort. I have never been with you without being conscious that you were repressing something, out of—well, courtesy, I suppose. There is a peculiar tension about you whenever my father is mentioned. I'm not a fool," she finished, "even if I happen to be one of what you might call the idle rich. What is the cause of this bad blood?"

"What does it matter?" MacRae parried.

"There is something, then?" she persisted.

MacRae turned his head away. He couldn't tell her. It was not wholly his story to tell. How could he expect her to see it, to react to it as he did? A matter involving her father and mother, and his father. It was not a pretty tale. He might be influenced powerfully in a certain direction by the account of it passed on by old Donald MacRae; he might be stirred by the backwash of those old passions, but he could not lay bare all that to any one—least of all to Betty Gower. And still MacRae, for the moment, was torn between two desires. He retained the same implacable resentment toward Gower, and he found himself wishing to set Gower's daughter apart and outside the consequences of that ancient feud. And that, he knew, was trying to reconcile the irreconcilable. It couldn't be done.

"Was the Arrow holed in the crash?"

Betty stood staring at him. She blinked. Her fingers began again that nervous plucking at the blanket. But her face settled presently into its normal composure and she answered evenly.

"Rather badly up forward. She was settling fast when they beached her in the Bay."

"And then," she continued after a pause, "Doctor Wallis and I got ashore as quickly as we could. We got a lantern and came along the cliffs. And two of the men took our big lifeboat and rowed along near the shore. They found the Blackbird pounding on the rocks, and we found Steve Ferrara where you left him. And we followed you here by the blood you spattered along the way."

A line from the Rhyme of the Three Sealers came into MacRae's mind as befitting. But he was thinking of his father and not so much of himself as he quoted:

"'Sorrow is me, in a lonely sea, And a sinful fight I fall.'"

"I'm afraid I don't quite grasp that," Betty said. "Although I know Kipling too, and could supply the rest of those verses. I'm afraid I don't understand."

"It isn't likely that you ever will," MacRae answered slowly. "It is not necessary that you should."

Their voices ceased. In the stillness the whistle of the wind and the deep drone of the seas shattering themselves on the granite lifted a dreary monotone. And presently a quick step sounded on the porch. Doctor Wallis came hurriedly in.

"Upon my soul," he said apologetically. "I ought to be shot, Miss Grower. I got everybody calmed down over at the cottage and chased them all to bed. Then I sat down in a soft chair before that cheerful fire in your living room. And I didn't wake up for hours. You must be worn out."

"That's quite all right," Betty assured him. "Don't be conscience-stricken. Did mamma have hysterics?"

Wallis grinned cheerfully.

"Well, not quite," he drawled. "At any rate, all's quiet along the Potomac now. How's the patient getting on?"

"I'm O.K.," MacRae spoke for himself, "and much obliged to you both for tinkering me up. Miss Gower ought to go home."

"I think so myself," Wallis said. "I'll take her across the point. Then I'll come back and have another look over you."

"It isn't necessary," MacRae declared. "Barring a certain amount of soreness I feel fit enough. I suppose I could get up and walk now if I had to. Go home and go to bed, both of you."

"Good night, or perhaps it would be better to say good morning." Betty gave him her hand. "Pleasant dreams."

It seemed to MacRae that there was a touch of reproach, a hint of the sardonic in her tone and words.

Then he was alone in the quiet house, with his thoughts for company, and the distant noises of the storm muttering in the outer darkness.

They were not particularly pleasant processes of thought. The sins of the fathers shall be visited even unto the third and fourth generation. Why, in the name of God, should they be, he asked himself?

Betty Gower liked him. She had been trying to tell him so. MacRae felt that. He did not question too closely the quality of the feeling for her which had leaped up so unexpectedly. He was afraid to dig too deep. He had got a glimpse of depths and eddies that night which if they did not wholly frighten him, at least served to confuse him. They were like flint and steel, himself and Betty Gower. They could not come together without striking sparks. And a man may long to warm himself by fire, MacRae reflected gloomily, but he shrinks from being burned.



CHAPTER XIII

An Interlude

At daybreak Peter Ferrara came to the house.

"How are you?" he asked.

"Sore. Wobbly." MacRae had tried his legs and found them wanting.

"It was a bad night all round, eh, lad?" Peter rumbled in his rough old voice. "Some of the boys got a line on the Blackbird and hauled what was left of her around into the Cove. But she's a ruin. The engine went to pieces while she was poundin' on the rocks. Steve lays in the house. He looks peaceful—as if he was glad to be through."

"I couldn't save him. It was done like that." MacRae snapped his fingers.

"I know," Old Peter said. "You're not to blame. Perhaps nobody is. Them things happen. Manuel'll feel it. He's lost both sons now. But Steve's better off. He'd 'a' died of consumption or something, slow an' painful. His lungs was gone. I seen him set for weeks on the porch wheezin' after he come home. He didn't get no pleasure livin'. He said once a bullet would 'a' been mercy. No, don't worry about Steve. We all come to it soon or late, John. It's never a pity for the old or the crippled to die."

"You old Spartan," MacRae muttered.

"What's that?" Peter asked. But MacRae did not explain. He asked about Dolly instead.

"She was up to Potter's Landing. I sent for her and she's back," Peter told him. "She'll be up to see you presently. There's no grub in the house, is there? Can you eat? Well, take it easy, lad."

An hour or so later Dolly Ferrara brought him a steaming breakfast on a tray. She sat talking to him while he ate.

"Gower will have to pay for the Blackbird, won't he?" she asked. "The fishermen say so."

"If he doesn't in one way he will another," MacRae answered indifferently. "But that doesn't help Steve. The boat doesn't matter. One can build boats. You can't bring a man back to life when he's dead."

"If Steve could talk he'd say he didn't care," Dolly declared sadly. "You know he wasn't getting much out of living, Jack. There was nothing for him to look forward to but a few years of discomfort and uncertainty. A man who has been strong and active rebels against dying by inches. Steve told me—not so very long ago—that if something would finish him off quickly he would be glad."

If that had been Steve's wish, MacRae thought, then fate had hearkened to him. He knew it was true. He had lived at elbows with Steve all summer. Steve never complained. He was made of different stuff. It was only a gloomy consolation, after all, to think of Steve as being better off. MacRae knew how men cling to life, even when it has lost all its savor. There is that imperative will-to-live which refuses to be denied.

Dolly went away. After a time Wallis came over from the cottage at Cradle Bay. He was a young and genial medico from Seattle, who had just returned from service with the American forces overseas, and was holidaying briefly before he took up private practice again. He had very little more than a casual interest in MacRae, however, and he did not stay long once he had satisfied himself that his patient had little further need of professional services. And MacRae, who was weaker than he expected to find himself, rested in his bed until late afternoon brought bars of sunlight streaming through openings in the cloud bank which still ran swift before the wind.

Then he rose, dressed, made his way laboriously and painfully down to the Cove's edge and took a brief look at the hull of the Blackbird sunk to her deck line, her rail and cabins broken and twisted. After that he hailed a fisherman, engaged him to go across to Solomon River and apprise the Bluebird. That accomplished he went back to the house. Thereafter he spent days lying on his bed, resting in a big chair before the fireplace while his wounds healed and his strength came back to him, thinking, planning, chafing at inaction.

There was a perfunctory inquest, after which Steve's body went away to Hidalgo Island to rest beside the bodies of other Ferraras in a plot of ground their grandfather had taken for his own when British Columbia was a Crown colony.

MacRae carried insurance on both his carriers. There was no need for him to move against Gower in the matter. The insurance people would attend efficiently to that. The adjusters came, took over the wreck, made inquiries. MacRae made his formal claim, and it was duly paid.

But long before the payment was made he was at work, he and Vin Ferrara together, on the Bluebird, plowing the Gulf in stormy autumn weather. The season was far gone, the salmon run slackening to its close. It was too late to equip another carrier. The cohoes were gone. The dog salmon, great-toothed, slimy fish which are canned for European export—for cheap trade, which nevertheless returned much profit to the canneries—were still running.

MacRae had taken ninety per cent. of the Folly Bay bluebacks. He had made tremendous inroads on Folly Bay's take of coho and humpback. He did not care greatly if Gower filled his cans with "dogs." But the Bellingham packers cried for salmon of whatsoever quality, and so MacRae drove the Bluebird hard in a trade which gave him no great profit, chiefly to preserve his connection with the American canners, to harass Folly Bay, and to let the fishermen know that he was still a factor and could serve them well.

He was sick of the smell of salmon, weary of the eternal heaving of the sea under his feet, of long cold tricks at the wheel, of days in somber, driving rain and nights without sleep. But he kept on until the salmon ceased to run, until the purse seiners tied up for the season, and the fishermen put by their gear.

MacRae had done well,—far better than he expected. His knife had cut both ways. He had eighteen thousand dollars in cash and the Bluebird. The Folly Bay pack was twelve thousand cases short. How much that shortage meant in lost profit MacRae could only guess, but it was a pretty sum. Another season like that,—he smiled grimly. The next season would be better,—for him. The trollers were all for him. They went out of their way to tell him that. He had organized good will behind him. The men who followed the salmon schools believed he did not want the earth, only a decent share. He did not sit behind a mahogany desk in town and set the price of fish. These men had labored a long time under the weighty heel of a controlled industry, and they were thankful for a new dispensation. It gave MacRae a pleasant feeling to know this. It gave him also something of a contempt for Gower, who had sat tight with a virtual monopoly for ten years and along with his profits had earned the distrust and dislike of a body of men who might as easily have been loyal laborers in his watery vineyards,—if he had not used his power to hold them to the most meager return they could wring from the sea.

He came home to the house at Squitty Cove with some odds and ends from town shops to make it more comfortable, flooring to replace the old, worn boards, a rug or two, pictures that caught his fancy, new cushions for the big chairs old Donald MacRae had fashioned by hand years before, a banjo to pick at, and a great box of books which he had promised to read some day when he had time. And he knew he would have time through long winter evenings when the land was drenched with rain, when the storm winds howled in the swaying firs and the sea beat clamorously along the cliffs. He would sit with his feet to a glowing fire and read books.

He did, for a time. When late November laid down a constant barrage of rain and the cloud battalions marched and countermarched along the coast, MacRae had settled down. He had no present care upon his shoulders. Although he presumed himself to be resting, he was far from idle. He found many ways of occupying himself about the old place. It was his pleasure that the old log house should be neat within and without, the yard clean, the garden restored to order. It had suffered a season's neglect. He remedied that with a little labor and a little money, wishing, as the place took on a sprightlier air, that old Donald could be there to see. MacRae was frank in his affection for the spot. No other place that he had ever seen meant quite the same to him. He was always glad to come back to it; it seemed imperative that he should always come back there. It was home, his refuge, his castle. Indeed he had seen castles across the sea from whose towers less goodly sights spread than he could command from his own front door, now that winter had stripped the maple and alder of their leafy screen. There was the sheltered Cove at his feet, the far sweep of the Gulf—colored according to its mood and the weather—great mountain ranges lifting sheer from blue water, their lower slopes green with forest and their crests white with snow. Immensities of land and trees. All his environment pitched upon a colossal scale. It was good to look at, to live among, and MacRae knew that it was good.