"Possibly," MacRae replied. "But there is no certainty that I will get any great number of salmon."

"If you were as uncertain as that," Robbin-Steele said dryly, "you would scarcely be putting several thousand dollars into an elaborately equipped carrier. We may presume that you intend to get the salmon—as you did last year."

"You seem to know a great deal about my business," MacRae observed.

"It is our policy to know, in a general way, what goes on in the salmon industry," Robbin-Steele assented.

MacRae waited for him to continue.

"You have a good deal of both energy and ability," Robbin-Steele went on. "It is obvious that you have pretty well got control of the blueback situation around Squitty Island. You must, however, have an outlet for your fish. We can use these salmon to advantage. On what basis will you deliver them to us on the Fraser if we give you a contract guaranteeing to accept all you can deliver?"

"Twenty per cent, over Folly Bay prices," MacRae answered promptly.

The cannery man shook his head.

"No. We can't afford to boost the cost of salmon like that. It'll ruin the business, which is in a bad enough way as it is. The more you pay a fisherman, the more he wants. We must keep prices down. That is to your interest, too."

"No," MacRae disagreed. "I think it is to my interest to pay the fishermen top prices, so long as I make a profit on the deal. I don't want the earth—only a moderate share of it."

"Twenty per cent. on Folly Bay prices is too uncertain a basis." Robbin-Steele changed his tactics. "We can send our own carriers there to buy at far less cost."

MacRae smiled.

"You can send your carriers," he drawled, "but I doubt if you would get many fish. I don't think you quite grasp the Squitty situation."

"Yes, I think I do," Robbin-Steele returned. "Gower had things pretty much his own way until you cut in on his grounds. You have undoubtedly secured quite an advantage in a peculiar manner, and possibly you feel secure against competition. But your hold is not so strong as Gower's once was. Let me tell you, your hold on that business can be broken, my young friend."

"Undoubtedly," MacRae readily admitted. "But there is a world-wide demand for canned salmon, and I have not suffered for a market—even when influence was used last season to close the home market against me, on Folly Bay's behalf. And I am quite sure, from what I have seen and heard, that many of the big British Columbia packers like yourself are so afraid the labor situation will get out of hand that they would shut down their plants rather than pay fishermen what they could afford to pay if they would be content with a reasonable profit. So I am not at all afraid of you seducing the Squitty trollers with high prices."

"You are laboring under the common error about cannery profits," Robbin-Steele declared pointedly. "Considering the capital invested, the total of the pack, the risk and uncertainty of the business, our returns are not excessive."

MacRae smiled amusedly.

"That all depends on what you regard as excessive. But there is nothing to be gained by an argument on that subject. Canning salmon is a highly profitable business, but it would not be the gold mine it has been if canneries hadn't been fostered at the expense of the men who actually catch the fish, if the government hadn't bestowed upon cannery men the gift of a strangle hold on the salmon grounds, and license privileges that gave them absolute control. I haven't any quarrel with cannery men for making money. You only amuse me when you speak of doubtful returns. I wish I could have your cinch for a season or two."

"You shouldn't have any quarrel with us. You started with nothing and made twenty thousand dollars in a single season," Robbin-Steele reminded.

"I worked like a dog. I took chances. And I was very lucky," MacRae agreed. "I did make a lot of money. But I paid the fishermen more than they ever got for salmon—a great deal more than they would have got if I hadn't broken into the game. Abbott made money on the salmon I delivered him. So everybody was satisfied, except Gower—who perhaps feels that he is ordained by the Almighty to get cheap salmon."

"You're spoiling those men," Robbin-Steele declared irritably. "My observation of that class of labor is that the more money they get the less they will do and the more they will want. You can't carry on any industry on that basis. But that's beside the point. We're getting away from the question. We want you to deliver those fish to us, if you can do so at a reasonable price. We should like to have some sort of agreement, so that we may know what to expect."

"I can deliver the fish," MacRae asserted confidently. "But I don't care to bind myself to anything. Not this far in advance. Wait till the salmon run."

"You are a very shrewd young man, I should say." Robbin-Steele paid him a reluctant compliment and let a gleam of appreciation flicker in his dead-fish eyes. "I imagine you will get on. Come and see me when you feel like considering this matter seriously."

MacRae went down the elevator wondering if the gentleman's agreement among the packers was off, if there was going to be something in the nature of competition among them for the salmon. There would be a few more gill-net licenses issued. More important, the gill-netters would be free to fish where they chose, for whosoever paid the highest price, and not for the cannery which controlled their license. There would be scores of independent purse seiners. Would the packers bid against one another for the catch? It rather seemed to MacRae as if they must. They could no longer sit back secure in the knowledge that the salmon from a given area must come straight to their waiting cans. And British Columbia packers had always dreaded American competition.

Following that, MacRae took train for Bellingham. The people he had dealt with there at the close of the last season had dealt fairly. American salmon packers had never suffered the blight of a monopoly. They had established their industry in legitimate competition, without governmental favors. They did not care how much money a fisherman made so long as he caught fish for them which they could profitably can.

MacRae had no contract with them. He did not want a contract. If he made hard and fast agreements with any one it would be with Stubby Abbott. But he did want to fortify himself with all the information he could get. He did not know what line Folly Bay would take when the season opened. He was not sure what shifts might occur among the British Columbia canneries. If such a thing as free and unlimited competition for salmon took place he might need more than one outlet for his carriers. MacRae was not engaged in a hazardous business for pastime. He had an objective, and this objective was contingent upon making money.

From the American source he learned that a good season was anticipated for the better grades of salmon. He found out what prices he could expect. They were liberal enough to increase his confidence. These men were anxious to get the thousands of British Columbia salmon MacRae could supply.

MacRae returned to Vancouver. Before he had finished unpacking his bag the telephone rang. Hurley, of the Northwest Cold Storage, spoke when he took down the receiver. Could he drop into the Northwest office? MacRae grinned to himself and went down to the grimy wharf where deep-sea halibut schooners rubbed against the dock, their stubby top-hamper swaying under the office windows as they rocked to the swell of passing harbor craft.

He talked with Hurley,—the same gentleman whom he had once approached with no success in the matter of selling salmon. The situation was reversed now. The Northwest was eager to buy. They would pay him, sub rosa, two cents a pound over the market price for fresh salmon if he would supply them with the largest possible quantity from the beginning of the blueback run.

As with Robbin-Steele, MacRae refused to commit himself. More clearly he perceived that the scramble was beginning. The packers and the cold-storage companies had lost control. They must have fish to function, to make a profit. They would cut one another's throats for salmon. So much the better, MacRae cynically reflected. He told Hurley, at last, as he had told Robbin-Steele, to wait till the salmon began to run.

He left the Northwest offices with the firm conviction that it was not going to be a question of markets, but a question of getting the salmon. And he rather fancied he could do that.

Last of all on the list of these men who approached him in this fashion came Stubby Abbott. Stubby did not ask him to call. He came to the Granada in search of Jack and haled him, nothing loth, out to the stone house in the West End. It happened that Betty Gower, Etta Robbin-Steele, and two gilded youths, whom MacRae did not know, were there. They had been walking in the Park. Nelly and her mother were serving tea.

It happened, too, that as they chatted over the teacups, a blue-bodied limousine drew up under the Abbott pergola and deposited Mrs. Horace A. Gower for a brief conversation with Mrs. Abbott. It was MacRae's first really close contact with the slender, wonderfully preserved lady whose life had touched his father's so closely in the misty long ago. He regarded her with a reflective interest. She must have been very beautiful then, he thought. She was almost beautiful still. Certainly she was a very distinguished person, with her costly clothing, her rich furs, her white hair, and that faded rose-leaf skin. The petulant, querulous droop of her mouth escaped MacRae. He was not a physiognomist. But the distance of her manner did not escape him. She acknowledged the introduction and thereafter politely overlooked MacRae. He meant nothing at all to Mrs. Horace A. Gower, he saw very clearly. Merely a young man among other young men; a young man of no particular interest. Thirty years is a long time, MacRae reflected. But his father had not forgotten. He wondered if she had; if those far-off hot-blooded days had grown dim and unreal to her?

He turned his head once and caught Betty as intent upon him as he was upon her mother, under cover of the general conversation. He gathered that there was a shade of reproach, of resentment, in her eyes. But he could not be sure. Certainly there was nothing like that in her manner. But the manner of these people, he understood very well, was pretty much a mask. Whatever went on in their secret bosoms, they smiled and joked and were unfailingly courteous.

He made another discovery within a few minutes. Stubby maneuvered himself close to Etta Robbin-Steele. Stubby was not quite so adept at repression as most of his class. He was a little more naive, more prone to act upon his natural, instinctive impulses. MacRae was aware of that. He saw now a swift by-play that escaped the rest. Nothing of any consequence,—a look, the motion of a hand, a fleeting something on the girl's face and Stubby's. Jack glanced at Nelly Abbott sitting beside him, her small blonde head pertly inclined. Nelly saw it too. She smiled knowingly.

"Has the brunette siren hooked Stubby?" MacRae inquired in a discreet undertone.

"I think so. I'm not sure. Etta's such an outrageous flirt," Nelly said. "I hope not, anyway. I'm afraid I can't quite appreciate Etta as a prospective sister-in-law."

"No?"

"She's catty—and vain as a peacock. Stubby ought to marry a nice sensible girl who'd mother him," Nelly observed with astonishing conviction; "like Betty, for instance."

"Oh, you seem to have very definite ideas on that subject," MacRae smiled. He did not commit himself further. But he resented the suggestion. There was also an amusing phase of Nelly's declaration which did not escape him,—the pot calling the kettle black. Etta Robbin-Steele did flirt. She had dancing black eyes that flung a challenge to men. But Nelly herself was no shrinking violet, for all her baby face. She was like an elf. Her violet eyes were capable of infinite shades of expression. She, herself, had a way of appropriating men who pleased her, to the resentful dismay of other young women. It pleased her to do that with Jack MacRae whenever he was available. And until Betty had preempted a place in his heart without even trying, Jack MacRae had been quite willing to let his fancy linger romantically on Nelly Abbott.

As it was,—he looked across the room at Betty chatting with young Lane. What a damned fool he was,—he, MacRae! All his wires were crossed. If some inescapable human need urged him to love, how much better to love this piquant bit of femininity beside him? But he couldn't do it. It wasn't possible. All the old rebellion stirred in him. The locked chambers of his mind loosed pictures of Squitty, memories of things which had happened there, as he let his eyes drift from Betty, whom he loved, to her mother, whom his father had loved and lost. She had made his father suffer through love. Her daughter was making Donald MacRae's son suffer likewise. Again, through some fantastic quirk of his imagination, the stodgy figure of Horace Gower loomed in the background, shadowy and sinister. There were moments, like the present, when he felt hatred of the man concretely, as he could feel thirst or hunger.

"A penny for your thoughts," Nelly bantered.

"They'd be dear at half the price," MacRae said, forcing a smile.

He was glad when those people went their way. Nelly put on a coat and went with them. Stubby drew Jack up to his den.

"I have bought up the controlling interest in the Terminal Fish Company since I saw you last," Stubby began abruptly. "I'm going to put up a cold-storage plant and do what my father started to do early in the war—give people cheaper fish for food."

"Can you make it stick," MacRae asked curiously, "with the other wholesalers against you? Their system seems to be to get all the traffic will bear, to boost the price to the consumer by any means they can use. And there is the Packers' Association. They are not exactly—well, favorable to cheap retailing of fish. Everybody seems to think the proper caper is to tack on a cent or two a pound wherever he can."

"I know I can," Stubby declared. "The pater would have succeeded only he trusted too much to men who didn't see it his way. Look at Cunningham—" Stubby mentioned a fish merchant who had made a resounding splash in matters piscatorial for a year or two, and then faded, along with his great cheap-fish markets, into oblivion—"he made it go like a house afire until he saw a chance to make a quick and easy clean-up by sticking people. It can be done, all right, if a man will be satisfied with a small profit on a big turnover. I know it."

MacRae made no comment on that. Stubby was full of his plan, eager to talk about its possibilities.

"I wanted to do it last year," he said, "but I couldn't. I had to play the old game—make a bunch of money and make it quick. Between you and Gower's pig-headedness, and the rest of the cannery crowd letting me go till it was too late to stop me, and a climbing market, I made more money in one season than I thought was possible. I'm going to use that money to make more money and to squash some of these damned fish pirates. I tell you it's jolly awful. We had baked cod for lunch to-day. That fish cost twenty cents a pound. Think of it! When the fisherman sells it for six cents within fifty miles of us. No wonder everybody is howling. I don't know anything about other lines of food supply, but I can sure put my finger on a bunch of fish profiteers. And I feel like putting my foot on them. Anyway, I've got the Terminal for a starter; also I have a twenty-five-year lease on the water frontage there. I have the capital to go ahead and build a cold-storage plant. The wholesale crowd can't possibly bother me. And the canneries are going to have their hands full this season without mixing into a scrap over local prices of fresh fish. You've heard about the new regulations?"

MacRae nodded assent.

"There's going to be a free-for-all," Stubby chuckled. "There'll be a lot of independent purse seiners. If the canneries don't pay good prices these independent fishermen, with their fast, powerful rigs, will seine the salmon under the packers' noses and run their catch down to the Puget Sound plants. This is no time for the British Columbia packers to get uppish. Good-by, four hundred per cent."

"They'll wiggle through legislation to prevent export of raw salmon," MacRae suggested; "same as they have on the sockeye."

"No chance. They've tried, and it can't be done," Stubby grinned. "There aren't going to be any special privileges for British Columbia salmon packers any more. I know, because I'm on the inside. The fishermen have made a noise that disturbs the politicians, I guess. Another thing, there's a slack in the demand for all but the best grades of salmon. But the number one grades, sockeye and blueback and coho, are short. So that a cannery man with an efficient plant can pay big for those fish. If you can hold that Squitty fleet of trollers like you did last year, you'll make some money."

"Do you want those salmon?" MacRae asked.

"Sure I want them. I want them as soon as they begin to run big enough to be legally taken for sale," Stubby declared. "I'm going to rush that cold-storage construction. By the time you begin collecting bluebacks I'll have a place for them, all you can buy. I'll have storage for three hundred thousand fish. I'm going to buy everything and start half a dozen retail stores at the same time. Just imagine the situation in this burg of a hundred and fifty thousand people with waters that swarm with fish right at our doors—salmon selling for thirty cents a pound, hardly ever below twenty, other fish in about the same proportion. It's a damned scandal, and I don't much blame a man who works for four dollars a day thinking he might as well turn Bolshevik. I know that I can pay twelve cents for salmon and make a good profit selling for sixteen. Can you make money supplying me with bluebacks at twelve cents a pound?"

"Yes, more money than I made last year," MacRae replied—"unless Folly Bay boosts prices to the sky in an effort to drive me out of business."

"I don't think there's much danger of that," Stubby said. "I doubt if Folly Bay opens this season. It's reported that Gower is broke."

"Eh?" MacRae looked his doubt.

"That's what they say," Stubby went on. "It's common talk. He sold his place in town a short while ago. He has the cannery on the market. And there are no takers. Folly Bay used to be a little gold mine. But Gower rode the fishermen too hard. And you balled things up last season. He lost his grip. I suppose he was involved other ways, too. Lots of these old-timers are, you know. Anyway, he seems to be trying to get out from under. But nobody wants to take over a plant that has a black eye among the men who catch the fish, in a territory where you appear to have a pretty strong hold."

"At the same time, if I can pay so much for salmon, haul them up the coast and make a profit on that, and if you can pay this advanced price and pack them at a still bigger profit, why in blazes can't a plant right there on the grounds pay top price and still make money?" MacRae asked impatiently.

"Could," Stubby declared. "Certainly. But most men in the salmon canning business aren't like you and me, Jack. They are used to big returns on a three months' season. They simply can't stand the idea of paying out big gobs of money to a sulky, un-shaven bohunk whose whole equipment isn't worth a thousand dollars. They think any man in sea boots ought to be damn well satisfied if he makes a living. They say high wages, or returns, spoil fishermen. On top of these new regulations nobody hankers to buy a plant where they might have to indulge in a price war with a couple of crazy young fools like you and me—that's what they call us, you know. That is why no experienced cannery man will touch Folly Bay the way things stand now. It's a fairly good plant, too. I don't know how Gower has managed to get in a hole. I don't believe one poor season could do that to him. But he sure wants to get rid of Folly Bay. It is a forty-thousand-dollar plant, including the gas boats. He has been nibbling at an offer of twenty-five thousand. I know, because I made it myself."

"What'll you do with it if you get it?" MacRae asked curiously. "It's no good unless you get the fish. You'd have to put me out of business."

"Well, I wasn't exactly figuring on that," Stubby grinned. "In the first place, the machinery and equipment is worth that much in the open market. And if I get it, we'll either make a deal for collecting the fish, or you can take a half-interest in the plant at the ground-floor price. Either way, we can make it a profitable investment for both of us."

"You really think Gower is in a bad way?" Jack asked reflectively.

"I know it," Stubby replied emphatically. "Oh, I don't mean to say that abject poverty is staring him in the face, or anything like that. But it looks to me as if he had lost a barrel of money somehow and was anxious to get Folly Bay off his hands before it sets him further in the hole. You could make Folly Bay pay big dividends. So could I. But so long as you cover his ground with carriers, every day he operates is a dead loss. I haven't much sympathy for him. He has made a fortune out of that place and those fishermen and spent it making a big splurge in town. Anyway, his wife has all kinds of kale, so we should worry about old Horace A."

MacRae lit a cigarette and listened to the flow of Stubby's talk, with part of his mind mulling over this information about Horace Gower. He wondered if that was why Robbin-Steele was so keen on getting a contract for those Squitty bluebacks, why Hurley of the Northwest wanted to make a deal for salmon; if they reckoned that Gower had ceased to be a factor and that Jack MacRae held the Squitty Island business in the hollow of his hand. MacRae smiled to himself. If that were true it was an advantage he meant to hold for his own good and the good of all those hard-driven men who labored at the fishing. In a time that was economically awry MacRae's sympathy turned more to those whose struggle was to make a living, or a little more if they could, than to men who already had more than they needed, men who had no use for more money except to pile it up, to keep piling it up. MacRae was neither an idealist nor a philanthropic dreamer. But he knew the under dog of the great industrial scramble. In his own business he would go out of his way to add another hundred dollars a year to a fisherman's earnings. He did not know quite clearly why he felt like that. It was more or less instinctive. He expected to make money out of his business, he was eager to make money, but he saw very clearly that it was only in and through the tireless labor of the fishermen that he could reap a profit. And he was young enough to be generous in his impulses. He was not afraid, like the older men, that if those who worked with their hands got a little more than sufficient to live on from season to season they would grow fat and lazy and arrogant, and refuse to produce.

Money was a necessity. Without it, without at least a reasonable amount of money, a man could not secure any of the things essential to well-being of either body or mind. The moneyless man was a slave so long as he was moneyless. MacRae smiled at those who spoke slightingly of the power of money. He knew they were mistaken. Money was king. No amount of it, cash in hand, would purchase happiness, perhaps, but lack of it made a man fall an easy victim to dire misfortunes. Without money a man was less than the dirt beneath the feet of such as Robbin-Steele and Hurley and Gower, because their criterion of another man's worth was his ability to get money, to beat the game they all played.

MacRae put himself and Stubby Abbott in a different category. They wanted to get on. They were determined to get on. But their programme of getting on, MacRae felt, was a better one for themselves and for other men than the mere instinct to grab everything in sight. MacRae was not exactly a student of economics or sociology, but he had an idea that the world, and particularly his group-world, was suffering from the grab-instinct functioning without control. He had a theory that society would have to modify that grab-instinct by legislation and custom before the world was rid of a lot of its present ills. And both his reason and his instinct was to modify it himself, in his dealings with his fellows, more particularly when those he dealt with were simple, uneducated men who worked as hard and complained as little as salmon fishermen.

He talked with Stubby in the den until late in the afternoon, and then walked downtown. When he reached the Granada he loafed uneasily in the billiard room until dinner. His mind persistently turned from material considerations of boats and gear and the season's prospects to dwell upon Betty Gower. This wayward questing of his mind irritated him. But he could not help it. Whenever he met her, even if it were only a brief, casual contact, for hours afterward he could not drive her out of his mind. And he was making a conscious effort to do that. It was a matter of sheer self-defense. Only when he shut Betty resolutely out of the chambers of his brain could he be free of that hungry longing for her. While he suffered from that vain longing there was neither peace nor content in his life; he could get no satisfaction out of working or planning or anything that he undertook.

That would wear off, he assured himself. But he did not always have complete confidence in this assurance. He was aware of a tenacity of impressions and emotions and ideas, once they took hold of him. Old Donald MacRae had been afflicted with just such characteristics, he remembered. It must be in the blood, that stubborn constancy to either an affection or a purpose. And in him these two things were at war, pulling him powerfully in opposite directions, making him unhappy.

Sitting deep in a leather chair, watching the white and red balls roll and click on the green cloth, MacRae recalled one of the maxims of Hafiz:

"'Two things greater than all things are And one is Love and the other is War.'"

MacRae doubted this. He had had experience of both. At the moment he could see nothing in either but vast accumulations of futile anguish both of the body and the soul.



CHAPTER XVIII

A Renewal of Hostilities

The pussy willows had put out their fuzzy catkins and shed them for delicate foliage when MacRae came back to Squitty Cove. The alder, the maple and the wild cherry, all the spring-budding trees and shrubs, were making thicket and foreshore dainty green and full of pleasant smells. Jack wakened the first morning at daybreak to the muted orchestration of mating birds, the song of a thousand sweet-voiced, unseen warblers. The days were growing warm, full of sunshine. Distant mountain ranges stood white-capped and purple against sapphire skies. The air was full of the ancient magic of spring.

Yet MacRae himself, in spite of these pleasant sights and sounds and smells, in spite of his books and his own rooftree, found the Cove haunted by the twin ghosts he dreaded most, discontent and loneliness. He was more isolated than he had ever been in his life. There was no one in the Cove save an old, unkempt Swede, Doug Sproul, who slept eighteen hours a day in his cabin while he waited for the salmon to run again, a withered Portuguese who sat in the sun and muttered while he mended gear. They were old men, human driftwood, beached in their declining years, crabbed and sour, looking always backward with unconscious regret.

Vin Ferrara was away with the Bluebird, still plying his fish venture. Dolly and Norman Gower were married, and Dolly was back on the Knob in the middle of Squitty Island, keeping house for her husband and Uncle Peter and Long Tom Spence while they burrowed in the earth to uncover a copper-bearing lead that promised a modest fortune for all three. Peter Ferrara's house at the Cove stood empty and deserted in the spring sun.

People had to shift, to grasp opportunities as they were presented, MacRae knew. They could not take root and stand still in one spot like the great Douglas firs. But he missed the familiar voices, the sight of friendly faces. He had nothing but his own thoughts to keep him company. A man of twenty-five, a young and lusty animal of abounding vitality, needs more than his own reflections to fill his days. Denied the outlet of purposeful work in which to release pent-up energy, MacRae brooded over shadows, suffered periods of unaccountable depression. Nature had not designed him for either a hermit or a celibate. Something in him cried out for affection, for companionship, for a woman's tenderness bestowed unequivocally. The mating instinct was driving him, as it drove the birds. But its urge was not the general, unspecified longing which turns a man's eyes upon any desirable woman. Very clearly, imperiously, this dominant instinct in MacRae had centered upon Betty Gower.

He was at war with his instincts. His mind stipulated that he could not have her without a revolutionary overturning of his convictions, inhibitions, soundly made and passionately cherished plans of reprisal for old injustices. That peculiar tenacity of idea and purpose which was inherent with him made him resent, refuse soberly to consider any deviation from the purpose which had taken form with such bitter intensity when he kindled to his father's account of those drab years which Horace Gower had laid upon him.

Jack MacRae was no angel. Under his outward seeming his impulses were primitive, like the impulses of all strong men. He nursed a vision of beating Gower at Gower's own game. He hugged to himself the ultimate satisfaction of that. Even when he was dreaming of Betty, he was mentally setting her aside until he had beaten her father to his knees under the only sort of blows he could deal. Until he had made Gower know grief and disappointment and helplessness, and driven him off the south end of Squitty landless and powerless, he would go on as he had elected. When he got this far Jack would sometimes say to himself in a spirit of defiant recklessness that there were plenty of other women for whom ultimately he could care as much. But he knew also that he would not say that, nor even think it, whenever Betty Gower was within reach of his hand or sound of his voice.

He walked sometimes over to Point Old and stared at the cottage, snowy white against the tender green, its lawn growing rank with uncut grass, its chimney dead. There were times when he wished he could see smoke lifting from that chimney and know that he could find Betty somewhere along the beach. But these were only times when his spirits were very low.

Also he occasionally wondered if it were true, as Stubby Abbott declared, that Gower had fallen into a financial hole. MacRae doubted that. Men like Gower always got out of a hole. They were fierce and remorseless pursuers of the main chance. When they were cast down they climbed up straightway over the backs of lesser men. He thought of Robbin-Steele. A man like that would die with the harness of the money-game on his back, reaching for more. Gower was of the same type, skillful in all the tricks of the game, ruthless, greedy for power and schooled to grasp it in a bewildering variety of ways.

No, he rather doubted that Gower was broke, or even in any danger of going broke. He hoped this might be true, in spite of his doubts, for it meant that Gower would be compelled to sacrifice this six hundred acres of MacRae land. The sooner the better. It was a pain to MacRae to see it going wild. The soil Donald MacRae had cleared and turned to meadow, to small fields of grain, was growing up to ferns and scrub. It had been a source of pride to old Donald. He had visualized for his son more than once great fields covered with growing crops, a rich and fruitful area, with a big stone house looking out over the cliffs where ultimate generations of MacRaes should live. If luck had not gone against old Donald he would have made this dream come true. But life and Gower had beaten him.

Jack MacRae knew this. It maddened him to think that this foundation of a dream had become the plaything of his father's enemy, a neglected background for a summer cottage which he only used now and then.

There might, however, be something in the statements Stubby had made. MacRae recalled that Gower had not replaced the Arrow. The underwriters had raised and repaired the mahogany cruiser, and she had passed into other hands. When Betty and her father came to Cradle Bay they came on a cannery tender or a hired launch. MacRae hoped it might be true that Gower was slipping, that he had helped to start him on this decline.

Presently the loneliness of the Cove was broken by the return of Vincent Ferrara. They skidded the Bluebird out on the beach at the Cove's head and overhauled her inside and out, hull and machinery. That brought them well into April. The new carrier was complete from truck to keelson. She had been awaiting only MacRae's pleasure for her maiden sea-dip. So now, with the Bluebird sleeked with new paint, he went down for the launching.

There was a little ceremony over that.

"It's bad luck, the very worst sort of luck, to launch a boat without christening her in the approved manner," Nelly Abbott declared. "I insist on being sponsor. Do let me, Jack."

So the new sixty-footer had a bottle of wine from the Abbott cellar broken over her brass-bound stemhead as her bows sliced into the salt water, and Nelly's clear treble chanted:

"I christen thee Agua Blanco."

Vin Ferrara's dark eyes gleamed, for agua blanco means "white water" in the Spanish tongue.

The Terminal Fish Company's new coolers were yawning for fish when the first blueback run of commercial size showed off Gray Rock and the Ballenas. All the Squitty boats went out as soon as the salmon came. MacRae skippered the new and shining Blanco, brave in white paint and polished brass on her virgin trip. He followed the main fleet, while the Bluebird scuttled about to pick up stray trollers' catches and to tend the rowboat men. She would dump a day's gathering on the Blanco's deck, and the two crews would dress salmon till their hands were sore. But it saved both time and fuel to have that great carrying capacity, and the freezing plant which automatically chilled the fish. MacRae could stay on the grounds till he was fully loaded. He could slash through to Vancouver at nine knots instead of seven. A sea that would toss the old wrecked Blackbird like a dory and keep her low decks continually awash let the Blanco pass with only a moderate pitch and roll.

MacRae worked hard. He found ease in work. When the last salmon was dressed and stowed below, many times under the glow of electric bulbs strung along the cargo boom, he would fall into his bunk and sleep dreamlessly. Decks streaming with blood and offal, plastered with slime and clinging scales—until such time as they were washed down—ceased to annoy him. No man can make omelettes without breaking eggs. Only the fortunate few can make money without soiling their hands. There is no room in the primary stages of taking salmon for those who shrink from sweat and strain, from elemental stress. The white-collared and the lily-fingered cannot function there. The pink meat my lady toys with on Limoges china comes to her table by ways that would appal her. Only the men who toil aboard the fishing boats, with line and gear and gutting knife know in what travail this harvest of the sea is reaped.

MacRae played fair, according to his conception of fair play. He based his payments on a decent profit, without which he could not carry on. Running heavier cargoes at less cost he raised the price to the fishermen as succeeding runs of blueback salmon were made up of larger, heavier fish. Other buyers came, lingered awhile, cursed him and went away. They could not run to Vancouver with small quantities of salmon and meet his price. But MacRae in the Blanco could take six, eight, ten thousand salmon profitably on a margin which the other buyers said was folly.

The trolling fleet swelled in numbers. The fish were there. The old-timers had prophesied a big blueback year, and for once their prophecy was by way of being fulfilled. The fish schooled in great shoals off Nanaimo, around Gray Rock, the Ballenas, passed on to Sangster and Squitty. And the fleet followed a hundred strong, each day increasing,—Indians, Greeks, Japanese, white men, raking the salmon grounds with glittering spoon hooks, gathering in the fish.

In early June MacRae was delivering eighteen thousand salmon a week to the Terminal Fish Company. He was paying forty cents a fish, more than any troller in the Gulf of Georgia had ever got for June bluebacks, more than any buyer had ever paid before the opening of the canneries heightened the demand. He was clearing nearly a thousand dollars a week for himself, and he was putting unheard-of sums in the pockets of the fishermen. MacRae believed these men understood how this was possible, that they had a feeling of cooeperating with him for their common good. They had sold their catches on a take-it-or-leave-it basis for years. He had put a club in their hands as well as money in their pockets. They would stand with him against less scrupulous, more remorseless exploiters of their labor. They would see that he got fish. They told him that.

"If somebody else offered sixty cents you'd sell to him, wouldn't you?" MacRae asked a dozen of them sitting on the Blanco's deck one afternoon. They had been talking about canneries and competition.

"Not if he was boosting the price up just to make you quit, and then cut it in two when he had everything to himself," one man said. "That's been done too often."

"Remember that when the canneries open, then," MacRae said dryly. "There is not going to be much, of a price for humps and dog salmon this fall. But there is going to be a scramble for the good canning fish. I can pay as much as salmon are worth, but I can't go any further. If I should have to pull my boats off in mid-season you can guess what they'll pay around Squitty."

MacRae was not crying "wolf." There were signs and tokens of uneasiness and irritation among those who still believed it was their right and privilege to hold the salmon industry in the hollows of their grasping hands. Stubby Abbott was a packer. He had the ears of the other packers. They were already complaining to Stubby, grouching about MacRae, unable to understand that Stubby listened to them with his tongue in his cheek, that one of their own class should have a new vision of industrial processes, a vision that was not like their own.

"They're cultivating quite a grievance about the price you're paying," Stubby told Jack in confidence. "They say you are a damned fool. You could get those fish for thirty cents and you are paying forty. The fishermen will want the earth when the canneries open. They hint around that something will drop with a loud bang one of these days. I think it's just hot air. They can't hurt either of us. I'll get a fair pack at Crow Harbor, and I'll have this plant loaded. I've got enough money to carry on. It makes me snicker to myself to imagine how they'll squirm and squeal next winter when I put frozen salmon on the market ten cents a pound below what they figure on getting. Oh, yes, our friends in the fish business are going to have a lot of grievances. But just now they are chiefly grouching at you."

MacRae seldom set foot ashore those crowded days. But he passed within sight of Squitty Cove and Poor Man's Rock once at least in each forty-eight hours. For weeks he had seen smoke drifting blue from the cottage chimney in Cradle Bay. He saw now and then the flutter of something white or blue on the lawn that he knew must be Betty. Part of the time a small power boat swung to the mooring in the bay where the shining Arrow nosed to wind and tide in other days. He heard current talk among the fishermen concerning the Gowers. Gower himself was spending his time between the cottage and Folly Bay.

The cannery opened five days in advance of the sockeye season on the Fraser. When the Gower collecting boats made their first round MacRae knew that he had a fight on his hands. Gower, it seemed to him, had bared his teeth at last.

The way of the blueback salmon might have furnished a theme for Solomon. In all the years during which these fish had run in the Gulf of Georgia neither fishermen, canners, nor the government ichthyologists were greatly wiser concerning their nature or habits or life history. Grounds where they swarmed one season might prove barren the next. Where they came from, out of what depths of the far Pacific those silvery hordes marshaled themselves, no man knew. Nor, when they vanished in late August, could any man say whither they went. They did not ascend the streams. No blueback was ever taken with red spawn in his belly. They were a mystery which no man had unraveled, no matter that he took them by thousands in order that he himself might subsist upon their flesh. One thing the trollers did know,—where the small feed swarmed, in shoal water or deep, those myriads of tiny fish, herring and nameless smaller ones, there the blueback would appear, and when he did so appear he could be taken by a spoon hook.

Away beyond the Sisters—three gaunt gray rocks rising out of the sea miles offshore in a fairway down which passed all the Alaska-bound steamers, with a lone lighthouse on the middle rock—away north of Folly Bay there opened wide trolling grounds about certain islands which lay off the Vancouver Island shore,—Hornby, Lambert Channel, Yellow Rock, Cape Lazo. In other seasons the blueback runs lingered about Squitty for a while and then passed on to those kelp-grown and reef-strewed grounds. This season these salmon appeared first far south of Squitty. The trolling scouts, the restless wanderers of the fleet, who could not abide sitting still and waiting in patience for the fish to come, first picked them up by the Gulf Islands, very near that great highway to the open sea known as the Strait of San Juan. The blueback pushed on the Gray Rock to the Ballenas, as if the blackfish and seal and shark that hung always about the schools to prey were herding them to some given point. Very shortly after they could be taken in the shadow of the Ballenas light the schools swarmed about the Cove end of Squitty Island, between the Elephant on Sangster and Poor Man's Rock. For days on end the sea was alive with them. In the gray of dawn and the reddened dusk they played upon the surface of the sea as far as the eye reached. And always at such times they struck savagely at a glittering spoon hook. Beyond Squitty they vanished. Fifty and sixty salmon daily to a boat off the Squitty headlands dwindled to fifteen and twenty at the Folly Bay end. Those restless trollers who crossed the Gulf to Hornby and Yellow Rock Light got little for their pains. Between Folly Bay and the swirling tide races off the desolate head of Cape Mudge the blueback disappeared. But at Squitty the runs held constant. There were off days, but the fish were always there. The trollers hung at the south end, sheltering at night in the Cove, huddled rubstrake to rubstrake and bow to stern, so many were they in that little space, on days when the southeaster made the cliffs shudder under the shock of breaking seas. If fishing slackened for a day or two they did not scatter as in other days. There would be another run hard on the heels of the last. And there was.

MacRae ran the Blanco into Squitty Cove one afternoon and made fast alongside the Bluebird which lay to fore and aft moorings in the narrow gut of the Cove. The Gulf outside was speckled with trollers, but there were many at anchor, resting, or cooking food.

One of the mustard pots was there, a squat fifty-foot carrier painted a gaudy yellow—the Folly Bay house color—flying a yellow flag with a black C in the center. She was loading fish from two trollers, one lying on each side. One or two more were waiting, edging up.

"He came in yesterday afternoon after you left," Vin Ferrara told Jack. "And he offered forty-five cents. Some of them took it. To-day he's paying fifty and hinting more if he has to."

MacRae laughed.

"We'll match Gower's price till he boosts us out of the bidding," he said. "And he won't make much on his pack if he does that."

"Say, Folly Bay," Jack called across to the mustard-pot carrier, "what are you paying for bluebacks?"

The skipper took his eye off the tallyman counting in fish.

"Fifty cents," he answered in a voice that echoed up and down the Cove.

"That must sound good to the fishermen," MacRae called back pleasantly. "Folly Bay's getting generous in its declining years."

It was the off period between tides. There were forty boats at rest in the Cove and more coming in. The ripple of laughter that ran over the fleet was plainly audible. They could appreciate that. MacRae sat down on the Blanco's after cabin and lit a cigarette.

"Looks like they mean to get the fish," Vin hazarded. "Can you tilt that and make anything?"

"Let them do the tilting," MacRae answered. "If the fish run heavy I can make a little, even if prices go higher. If he boosts them to seventy-five, I'd have to quit. At that price only the men who catch the fish will make anything. I really don't know how much we will be able to pay when Crow Harbor opens up."

"We'll have some fun anyway." Vin's black eyes sparkled.

It took MacRae three days to get a load. Human nature functions pretty much the same among all men. The trollers distrusted Folly Bay. They said to one another that if Gower could kill off competition he would cut the price to the bone. He had done that before. But when a fisherman rises wearily from his bunk at three in the morning and spends the bulk of the next eighteen hours hauling four one hundred and fifty foot lines, each weighted with from six to fifteen pounds of lead, he feels that he is entitled to every cent he can secure for his day's labor.

The Gower boats got fish. The mustard pot came back next day, paying fifty-five cents. A good many trollers sold him their fish before they learned that MacRae was paying the same. And the mustard pot evidently had his orders, for he tilted the price to sixty, which forced MacRae to do the same.

When the Blanco unloaded her cargo of eight-thousand-odd salmon into the Terminal and MacRae checked his receipts and expenditures for that trip, he discovered that he had neither a profit nor a loss.

He went to see Stubby, explained briefly the situation.

"You can't get any more cheap salmon for cold storage until the seiners begin to take coho, that's certain," he declared. "How far can you go in this price fight when you open the cannery?"

"Gower appears to have gone a bit wild, doesn't he?" Stubby ruminated. "Let's see. Those fish are running about five pounds now. They'll get a bit heavier as we go along. Well, I can certainly pack as cheaply as he can. I tell you, go easy for a week, till I get Crow Harbor under way. Then you can pay up to seventy-five cents and I'll allow you five cents a fish commission. I don't believe he'll dare pay more than that before late in July. If he does, why, we'll see what we can do."

MacRae went back to Squitty. He could make money with the Blanco on a five-cent commission,—if he could get the salmon within the price limit. So for the next trip or two he contented himself with meeting Gower's price and taking what fish came to him. The Folly Bay mustard pots—three of them great and small—scurried here and there among the trollers, dividing the catch with the Bluebird and the Blanco. There was always a mustard-pot collector in sight. The weather was getting hot. Salmon would not keep in a troller's hold. Part of the old guard stuck tight to MacRae. But there were new men fishing; there were Japanese and illiterate Greeks. It was not to be expected that these men should indulge in far-sighted calculations. But it was a trifle disappointing to see how readily any troller would unload his catch into a mustard pot if neither of MacRae's carriers happened to be at hand.

"Why don't you tie up your boats, Jack?" Vin asked angrily. "You know what would happen. Gower would drop the price with a bang. You'd think these damned idiots would know that. Yet they're feeding him fish by the thousand. They don't appear to care a hoot whether you get any or not. I used to think fishermen had some sense. These fellows can't see an inch past their cursed noses. Pull off your boats for a couple of weeks and let them get their bumps."

"What do you expect?" MacRae said lightly. "It's a scramble, and they are acting precisely as they might be expected to act. I don't blame them. They're under the same necessity as the rest of us—to get it while they can. Did you think they'd sell me fish for sixty if somebody else offered sixty-five? You know how big a nickel looks to a man who earns it as hard as these fellows do."

"No, but they don't seem to care who gets their salmon," Vin growled. "Even when you're paying the same, they act like they'd just as soon Gower got 'em as you. You paid more than Folly Bay all last season. You put all kinds of money in their pockets that you didn't have to."

"And when the pinch comes, they'll remember that," MacRae said. "You watch, Vin. The season is young yet. Gower may beat me at this game, but he won't make any money at it."

MacRae kept abreast of Folly Bay for ten days and emerged from that period with a slight loss, because at the close he was paying more than the salmon were worth at the Terminal warehouse. But when he ran his first load into Crow Harbor Stubby looked over the pile of salmon his men were forking across the floor and drew Jack into his office.

"I've made a contract for delivery of my entire sockeye and blueback pack," he said. "I know precisely where I stand. I can pay up to ninety cents for all July fish. I want all the Squitty bluebacks you can get. Go after them, Jack."

And MacRae went after them. Wherever a Folly Bay collector went either the Blanco or the Bluebird was on his heels. MacRae could cover more ground and carry more cargo, and keep it fresh, than any mustard pot. The Bluebird covered little outlying nooks, the stragglers, the rowboat men in their beach camps. The Blanco kept mostly in touch with the main fleet patrolling the southeastern end of Squitty like a naval flotilla, wheeling and counterwheeling over the grounds where the blueback played. MacRae forced the issue. He raised the price to sixty-five, to seventy, to seventy-five, to eighty, and the boats under the yellow house flag had to pay that to get a fish. MacRae crowded them remorselessly to the limit. So long as he got five cents a fish he could make money. He suspected that it cost Gower a great deal more than five cents a salmon to collect what he got. And he did not get so many now. With the opening of the sockeye season on the Fraser and in the north the Japs abandoned trolling for the gill net. The white trollers returned to their first love because he courted them assiduously. There was always a MacRae carrier in the offing. It cost MacRae his sleep and rest, but he drove himself tirelessly. He could leave Squitty at dusk, unload his salmon at Crow Harbor, and be back at sunrise. He did it many a time, after tallying fish all day. Three hours' sleep was like a gift from the gods. But he kept it up. He had a sense of some approaching crisis.

By the third week in July MacRae was taking three fourths of the bluebacks caught between the Ballenas and Folly Bay. He would lie sometimes within a stone's throw of Gower's cannery, loading salmon.

He was swinging at anchor there one day when a rowboat from the cannery put out to the Blanco. The man in it told MacRae that Gower would like to see him. MacRae's first impulse was to grin and ignore the request. Then he changed his mind, and taking his own dinghy rowed ashore. Some time or other he would have to meet his father's enemy, face him, talk to him, listen to what he might say, tell him things. Curiosity was roused in him a little now. He desired to know what Gower had to say. He wondered if Gower was weakening; what he could want.

He found Gower in a cubby-hole of an office behind the cannery store.

"You wanted to see me," MacRae said curtly.

He was in sea boots, bareheaded. His shirt sleeves were rolled above sun-browned forearms. He stood before Gower with his hands thrust in the pockets of duck overalls speckled with fish scales, smelling of salmon. Gower stared at him silently, critically, it seemed to MacRae, for a matter of seconds.

"What's the sense in our cutting each other's throats over these fish?" Gower asked at length. "I've been wanting to talk to you for quite a while. Let's get together. I—"

MacRae's temper flared.

"If that's what you want," he said, "I'll see you in hell first."

He turned on his heel and walked out of the office. When he stepped into his dinghy he glanced up at the wharf towering twenty feet above his head. Betty Gower was sitting on a pile head. She was looking down at him. But she was not smiling. And she did not speak. MacRae rowed back to the Blanco in an ugly mood.

In the next forty-eight hours Folly Bay jumped the price of bluebacks to ninety cents, to ninety-five, to a dollar. The Blanco wallowed down to Crow Harbor with a load which represented to MacRae a dead loss of four hundred dollars cash.

"He must be crazy," Stubby fumed. "There's no use canning salmon at a loss."

"Has he reached the loss point yet?" MacRae inquired.

"He's shaving close. No cannery can make anything worth reckoning at a dollar or so a case profit."

"Is ninety cents and five cents' commission your limit?" MacRae demanded.

"Just about," Stubby grunted. "Well"—reluctantly—"I can stand a dollar. That's the utmost limit, though. I can't go any further."

"And if he gets them all at a dollar or more, he'll be canning at a dead loss, eh?"

"He certainly will," Stubby declared. "Unless he cans 'em heads, tails, and scales, and gets a bigger price per case than has been offered yet."

MacRae went back to Squitty with a definite idea in his mind. Gower had determined to have the salmon. Very well, then, he should have them. But he would have to take them at a loss, in so far as MacRae could inflict loss upon him. He knew of no other way to hurt effectively such a man as Gower. Money was life blood to him, and it was not of great value to MacRae as yet. With deliberate calculation he decided to lose the greater part of what he had made, if for every dollar he lost himself he could inflict equal or greater loss on Gower.

The trailers who combed the Squitty waters were taking now close to five thousand salmon a day. Approximately half of these went to Folly Bay. MacRae took the rest. In this battle of giants the fishermen had lost sight of the outcome. They ceased to care who got fish. They only watched eagerly for him who paid the biggest price. They were making thirty, forty, fifty dollars a day. They no longer held salmon—only a few of the old-timers—for MacRae's carriers. It was nothing to them who made a profit or suffered a loss. Only a few of the older men wondered privately how long MacRae could stand it and what would happen when he gave up.

MacRae met every raise Folly Bay made. He saw bluebacks go to a dollar ten, then to a dollar fifteen. He ran cargo after cargo to Crow Harbor and dropped from three to seven hundred dollars on each load, until even Stubby lost patience with him.

"What's the sense in bucking him till you go broke? I'm in too deep to stand any loss myself. Quit. Tie up your boats, Jack. Let him have the salmon. Let those blockheads of fishermen see what he'll do to 'em once you stop."

But MacRae held on till the first hot days of August were at hand and his money was dwindling to the vanishing point. Then he ran the Blanco and the Bluebird into Squitty Cove and tied them to permanent moorings in shoal water near the head. For a day or two the salmon had shifted mysteriously to the top end, around Folly Bay and the Siwash Islands and Jenkins Pass. The bulk of the fleet had followed them. Only a few stuck to the Cove and Poor Man's Rock. To these and the rowboat trollers MacRae said:

"Sell your fish to Folly Bay. I'm through."

Then he lay down in his bunk in the airy pilot house of the Blanco and slept the clock around, the first decent rest he had taken in two months. He had not realized till then how tired he was.

When he wakened he washed, ate, changed his clothes and went for a walk along the cliffs to stretch his legs. Vin had gone up to the Knob to see Dolly and Uncle Peter. His helper on the Bluebird was tinkering about his engine. MacRae's two men loafed on the clean-slushed deck. They were none of them company for MacRae in his present mood. He sought the cliffs to be alone.

Gower had beaten him, it would seem. And MacRae did not take kindly to being beaten. But he did not think this was the end yet. Gower would do as he had done before. When he felt himself secure in his monopoly he would squeeze the fishermen, squeeze them hard. And as soon as he did that MacRae would buy again. He could not make any money himself, perhaps. But he could make Gower operate at a loss. That would be something accomplished.

MacRae walked along the cliffs until he saw the white cottage, and saw also that some one sat on the steps in the sun. Whereupon he turned back. He didn't want to see Betty. He conceived that to be an ended chapter in his experiences. He had hurt her, and she had put on her armor against another such hurt. There was a studied indifference about her now, when he met her, which hurt him terribly. He supposed that in addition to his own incomprehensible attitude which she resented, she took sides with her father in this obvious commercial warfare which was bleeding them both financially. Very likely she saw in this only the open workings of his malice toward Gower. In which MacRae admitted she would be quite correct. He had not been able to discover in that flaring-up of passion for Betty any reason for a burial of his feud with Gower. There was in him some curious insistence upon carrying this to the bitter end. And his hatred of Gower was something alive, vital, coloring his vision somberly. The shadow of the man lay across his life. He could not ignore this, and his instinct was for reprisal. The fighting instinct in MacRae lurked always very near the surface.

He spent a good many hours during the next three or four days lying in the shade of a gnarly arbutus which gave on the cliffs. He took a book up there with him, but most of the time he lay staring up at the blue sky through the leaves, or at the sea, or distant shore lines, thinking always in circles which brought him despairingly out where he went in. He saw a mustard pot slide each day into the Cove and pass on about its business. There was not a great deal to be got in the Cove. The last gas boat had scuttled away to the top end, where the blueback were schooling in vast numbers. There were still salmon to be taken about Poor Man's Rock. The rowboat men took a few fish each day and hoped for another big run.

There came a day when the mustard pot failed to show in the Cove. The rowboat men had three hundred salmon, and they cursed Folly Bay with a fine flow of epithet as they took their rotting fish outside the Cove and dumped them in the sea. Nor did a Gower collector come, although there was nothing in the wind or weather to stop them. The rowboat trollers fumed and stewed and took their troubles to Jack MacRae. But he could neither inform nor help them.

Then upon an evening when the sun rested on the serrated backbone of Vancouver Island, a fiery ball against a sky of burnished copper, flinging a red haze down on a slow swell that furrowed the Gulf, Jack MacRae, perched on a mossy boulder midway between the Cove and Point Old, saw first one boat and then another come slipping and lurching around Poor Man's Rock. Converted Columbia River sailboats, Cape Flattery trollers, double-enders, all the variegated craft that fishermen use and traffic with, each rounded the Rock and struck his course for the Cove, broadside on to the rising swell, their twenty-foot trolling poles lashed aloft against a stumpy mast and swinging in a great arc as they rolled. One, ten, a dozen, an endless procession, sometimes three abreast, again a string in single file. MacRae was reminded of the march of the oysters—

"So thick and fast they came at last, And more and more and more."

He sat watching them pass, wondering why the great trek. The trolling fleet normally shifted by pairs and dozens. This was a squadron movement, the Grand Fleet steaming to some appointed rendezvous. MacRae watched till the sun dipped behind the hills, and the reddish tint left the sea to linger briefly on the summit of the Coast Range flanking the mainland shore. The fish boats were still coming, one behind the other, lurching and swinging in the trough of the sea, rising and falling, with wheeling gulls crying above them. On each deck a solitary fisherman humped over his steering gear. From each cleaving stem the bow-wave curled in white foam.

There was something in the wind. MacRae felt it like a premonition. He left his boulder and hurried back toward the Cove.

The trolling boats were packed about the Blanco so close that MacRae left his dinghy on the outer fringe and walked across their decks to the deck of his own vessel. The Blanco loomed in the midst of these lesser craft like a hen over her brood of chicks. The fishermen had gathered on the nearest boats. A dozen had clambered up and taken seats on the Blanco's low bulwarks. MacRae gained his own deck and looked at them.

"What's coming off?" he asked quietly. "You fellows holding a convention of some sort?"

One of the men sitting on the big carrier's rail spoke.

"Folly Bay's quit—shut down," he said sheepishly. "We come to see if you'd start buying again."

MacRae sat down on one sheave of his deck winch. He took out a cigarette and lighted it, swung one foot back and forth. He did not make haste to reply. An expectant hush fell on the crowd. In the slow-gathering dusk there was no sound but the creak of rubbing gunwales, the low snore of the sea breaking against the cliffs, and the chug-chug of the last stragglers beating into the shelter of the Cove.

"He shut down the cannery," the fishermen's spokesman said at last. "We ain't seen a buyer or collector for three days. The water's full of salmon, an' we been suckin' our thumbs an' watching 'em play. If you won't buy here again we got to go where there is buyers. And we'd rather not do that. There's no place on the Gulf as good fishin' as there is here now."

"What was the trouble?" MacRae asked absently. "Couldn't you supply him with fish?"

"Nobody knows. There was plenty of salmon. He cut the price the day after you tied up. He cut it to six bits. Then he shut down. Anyway, we don't care why he shut down. It don't make no difference. What we want is for you to start buyin' again. Hell, we're losin' money from daylight to dark! The water's alive with salmon. An' the season's short. Be a sport, MacRae."

MacRae laughed.

"Be a sport, eh?" he echoed with a trace of amusement in his tone. "I wonder how many of you would have listened to me if I'd gone around to you a week ago and asked you to give me a sporting chance?"

No one answered. MacRae threw away his half-smoked cigarette. He stood up.

"All right, I'll buy salmon again," he said quietly. "And I won't ask you to give me first call on your catch or a chance to make up some of the money I lost bucking Folly Bay, or anything like that. But I want to tell you something. You know it as well as I do, but I want to jog your memory with it."

He raised his voice a trifle.

"You fellows know that I've always given you a square deal. You aren't fishing for sport. You're at this to make a living, to make money if you can. So am I. You are entitled to all you can get. You earn it. You work for it. So am I entitled to what I can make. I work, I take certain chances. Neither of us is getting something for nothing. But there is a limit to what either of us can get. We can't dodge that. You fellows have been dodging it. Now you have to come back to earth.

"No fisherman can get the prices you have had lately. No cannery can pack salmon at those prices. Sockeye, the finest canning salmon that swims in the sea, is bringing eighty cents on the Fraser. Bluebacks are sixty-five cents at Nanaimo, sixty at Cape Mudge, sixty at the Euclataws.

"I can do a little better than that," MacRae hesitated a second. "I can pay a little more, because the cannery I'm supplying is satisfied with a little less profit than most. Stubby Abbott is not a hog, and neither am I. I can pay seventy-five cents and make money. I have told you before that it is to your interest as well as mine to keep me running. I will always pay as much as salmon are worth. But I cannot pay more. If your appreciation of Folly Bay's past kindness to you is so keen that you would rather sell him your fish, why, that's your privilege."

"Aw, that's bunk," a man called. "You know blamed well we wouldn't. Not after him blowin' up like this."

"How do I know?" MacRae laughed. "If Gower opened up to-morrow again and offered eighty or ninety cents, he'd get the salmon—even if you knew he would make you take thirty once he got you where he wanted you."

"Would he?" another voice uprose. "The next time a mustard pot gets any salmon from me, it'll be because there's no other buyer and no other grounds to fish."

A growled chorus backed this reckless statement.

"That's all right," MacRae said good-naturedly. "I don't blame you for picking up easy money. Only easy money isn't always so good as it looks. Fly at it in the morning, and I'll take the fish at the price I've said. If Folly Bay gets into the game again, it's up to you."

When the lights were doused and every fisherman was stretched in his bunk, falling asleep to the slow beat of a dead swell breaking in the Cove's mouth, Vin Ferrara stood up to seek his own bed.

"I wonder," he said to Jack, "I wonder why Gower shut down at this stage of the game?"

MacRae shook his head. He was wondering that himself.



CHAPTER XIX

Top Dog

Some ten days later the Bluebird swung at anchor in the kelp just clear of Poor Man's Rock. From a speck on the horizon the Blanco grew to full shape, flaring bow and pilot house, walking up the Gulf with a bone in her teeth. She bore down upon her consort, sidled alongside and made fast with lines to the bitts fore and aft. Vin Ferrara threw back his hatch covers. His helper forked up salmon with a picaroon. Vin tossed them across into the Blanco's hold. At the same time the larger carrier's short, stout boom swung back and forth, dumping into the Bluebird's fish pens at each trip a hundred pounds of cracked ice. Presently this work was done, the Bluebird's salmon transferred to the Blanco, the Bluebird's pens replenished with four tons of ice.

Vin checked his tabs with the count of fish. The other men slushed decks clean with buckets of sea water.

"Twenty-seven hundred," MacRae said. "Big morning. Every troller in the Gulf must be here."

"No, I have to go to Folly Bay and Siwash Islands to-night," Vin told him. "There's about twenty boats working there and at Jenkins Pass. Salmon everywhere."

They sat in the shade of the Blanco's pilot house. The sun beat mercilessly, a dog-day sun blazing upon glassy waters, reflected upward in eye-straining shafts. The heat seared. Within a radius of a mile outside the Rock the trollers chug-chugged here and there, driving straight ahead, doubling short, wheeling in slow circles, working the eddies. They stood in the small cockpit aft, the short tiller between their legs, leaving their hands free to work the gear. They stood out in the hot sun without shade or cover, stripped to undershirt and duck trousers, many of them barefooted, brown arms bare, wet lines gleaming. Wherever a man looked some fisherman hauled a line. And everywhere the mirror of the sea was broken by leaping salmon, silver crescents flashing in the sun.

"Say, what do you know about it?" Vin smiled at MacRae. "Old Gower is trolling."

"Trolling!"

"Rowboat. Plugging around the Rock. He was at it when daylight came. He sold me fifteen fish. Think of it. Old H.A. rowboat trolling. Selling his fish to you."

Vincent chuckled. His eyes rested curiously on Jack's face.

"Haughty spirit that goes before destruction, as Dolly used to say," he rambled on. "Some come-down for him. He must be broke flat as a flounder."

"He sold you his salmon?"

"Sure. Nobody else to sell 'em to, is there? Said he was trying his hand. Seemed good-natured about it. Kinda pleased, in fact, because he had one more than Doug Sproul. He started joshin' Doug. You know what a crab old Doug is. He got crusty as blazes. Old Gower just grinned at him and rowed off."

MacRae made no comment, and their talk turned into other channels until Vin hauled his hook and bore away. MacRae saw to dropping the Blanco's anchor. He would lie there till dusk. Then he sat in the shade again, looking up at the Gower cottage.

Gower was finished as an exploiter. There was no question about that. When a man as big as he went down the crash set tongues wagging. All the current talk reached MacRae through Stubby. That price-war had been Gower's last kick, an incomprehensible, ill-judged effort to reestablish his hold on the Squitty grounds, so it was said.

"He never was such a terribly big toad in the cannery puddle," Stubby recited, "and I guess he has made his last splash. They always cut a wide swath in town, and that sort of thing can sure eat up coin. I'm kind of sorry for Betty. Still, she'll probably marry somebody with money. I know two or three fellows who would be tickled to death to get her."

"Why don't you go to the rescue?" MacRae had suggested, with an irony that went wide of the mark.

Stubby looked reflectively at his crippled arm.

"Last summer I would have," he said. "But she couldn't see me with a microscope. And I've found a girl who seems to think a winged duck is worth while."

"You'll be able to get hold of that ranch of yours again, probably," Stubby had also said. "The chances are old H.A. will raise what cash he can and try to make a fresh start. It seems there has been friction in the family, and his wife refused to come through with any of her available cash. Seems kind of a complicated hole he got into. He's cleaned, anyway. Robbin-Steele got all his cannery tenders and took over several thousand cases of salmon. I hear he still has a few debts to be settled when the cannery is sold. Why don't you figure a way of getting hold of that cannery, Jack?"

"I'm no cannery man," MacRae replied. "Why don't you? I thought you made him an offer."

"I withdrew it," Stubby said. "I have my hands full without that. You've knocked about a hundred per cent off its value anyway."

"If I can get my father's land back I'll be satisfied," MacRae had said.

He was thinking about that now. He had taken the first steps toward that end, which a year ago had seemed misty and rather hopeless. Gower rich, impregnable, would hold that land for his own pleasure and satisfaction. Beaten in the commercial scramble he might be forced to let it go. And MacRae was ready to pay any price in reason to get it back. That seemed a debt he owed old Donald MacRae, apart from his own craving to sometime carry out plans they had made together long before he went away to France. The lives of some men are rooted in the soil where they were born, where they grow to manhood. Jack MacRae was of that type. He loved the sea in all its moods and colors, its quiet calm and wildest storms. But the sea was only his second love. He was a landsman at heart. All seamen are. They come ashore when they are old and feeble, to give their bodies at last to the earth. MacRae loved the sea, but he loved better to stand on the slopes running back from Squitty's cliffs, to look at those green meadows and bits of virgin forest and think that it would all be his again, to have and to hold.

So he had set a firm in Vancouver the task of approaching Gower, to sound him, to see if he would sell, while he kept in the background. He believed that it was necessary for him to remain in the background. He believed that Gower would never willingly relinquish that land into his hands.

MacRae sat on the Blanco's deck, nursing his chin in his palms, staring at Poor Man's Rock with a grim satisfaction. About that lonely headland strange things had come to pass. Donald MacRae had felt his first abiding grief there and cried his hurt to a windy sky. He had lived his last years snatching a precarious living from the seas that swirled about the Rock. The man who had been the club with which fate bludgeoned old Donald was making his last stand in sight of the Rock, just as Donald MacRae had done. And when they were all dead and gone, Poor Man's Rock would still bare its brown hummock of a head between tides, the salmon would still play along the kelp beds, in the eddies about the Rock. Other men would ply the gear and take the silver fish. It would all be as if it had never happened. The earth and the sea endured and men were passing shadows.

Afternoon waned. Faint, cool airs wavered off the land, easing the heat and the sun-glare. MacRae saw Betty and her father come down to the beach. She helped him slide his rowboat afloat. Then Gower joined the rowers who were putting out to the Rock for the evening run. He passed close by the Blanco but MacRae gave him scant heed. His eyes were all for the girl ashore. Betty sat on a log, bareheaded in the sun. MacRae had a feeling that she looked at him. And she would be thinking,—God only knew what.

In MacRae's mind arose the inevitable question,—one that he had choked back dozens of times: Was it worth while to hurt her so, and himself, because their fathers had fought, because there had been wrongs and injustices? MacRae shook himself impatiently. He was backsliding. Besides that unappeasable craving for her, vivid images of her with tantalizing mouth, wayward shining hair, eyes that answered the passion in his own, besides these luring pictures of her which troubled him sometimes both in waking hours and sleeping, there was a strange, deep-seated distrust of Betty because she was the daughter of her father. That was irrational, and Jack MacRae knew it was irrational. But he could not help it. It colored his thought of her. It had governed his reactions.

MacRae himself could comprehend all too clearly the tragedy of his father's life. But he doubted if any one else could. He shrank from unfolding it even to Betty,—even to make clear to her why his hand must be against her father. MacRae knew, or thought he knew—he had reasoned the thing out many times in the last few months—that Betty would not turn to him against her own flesh and blood without a valid reason. He could not, even, in the name of love, cut her off from all that she had been, from all that had made her what she was, and make her happy. And MacRae knew that if they married and Betty were not happy and contented, they would both be tigerishly miserable. There was only one possible avenue, one he could not take. He could not seek peace with Gower, even for Betty's sake.

MacRae considered moodily, viewing the matter from every possible angle. He could not see where he could do other than as he was doing: keep Betty out of his mind as much as possible and go on determinedly making his fight to be top dog in a world where the weak get little mercy and even the strong do not always come off unscarred.

Jack MacRae was no philosopher, nor an intellectual superman, but he knew that love did not make the world go round. It was work. Work and fighting. Men spent most of their energies in those two channels.

This they could not escape. Love only shot a rosy glow across life. It did not absolve a man from weariness or scars. By it, indeed, he might suffer greater stress and deeper scars. To MacRae, love, such as had troubled his father's life and his own, seemed to be an emotion pregnant with sorrow. But he could not deny the strange power of this thing called love, when it stirred men and women.

His deck hand, who was also cook, broke into MacRae's reflections with a call to supper. Jack went down the companion steps into a forepeak stuffy with the heat of the sun and a galley stove, a cramped place where they ate heartily despite faint odors of distillate and burned lubricating oil from the engine room and bilge water that smelled of fish.

A troller's boat was rubbing against the Blanco's fenders when they came on deck again. Others were hoisting the trolling poles, coming in to deliver. The sun was gone. The long northern twilight cast a pearly haze along far shores. MacRae threw open his hatches and counted the salmon as they came flipping off the point of a picaroon. For over an hour he stood at one hatch and his engineer at the other, counting fish, making out sale slips, paying out money. It was still light—light enough to read. But the bluebacks had stopped biting. The rowboat men quit last of all. They sidled up to the Blanco, one after the other, unloaded, got their money, and tied their rowboats on behind for a tow around to the Cove.

Gower had rowed back and forth for three hours. MacRae had seen him swing around the Rock, up under the cliffs and back again, pulling slow and steady. He was last to haul in his gear. He came up to the carrier and lay alongside Doug Sproul while that crabbed ancient chucked his salmon on deck. Then he moved into the place Sproul vacated. The bottom of his boat was bright with salmon. He rested one hand on the Blanco's guard rail and took the pipe out of his mouth with the other.

"Hello, MacRae," he said, as casually as a man would address another with whom he had slight acquaintance. "I've got some fish. D'you want 'em?"

MacRae looked down at him. He did not want Gower's fish or anything that was Gower's. He did not want to see him or talk to him. He desired, in so far as he was conscious of any desire in the matter, that Gower should keep his distance. But he had a horror of meanness, of petty spite. He could knock a man down with a good heart, if occasion arose. It was not in him to kick a fallen enemy.

"Chuck them up," he said.

He counted them silently as they flipped over the bulwark and fell into the chilly hold, marked a slip, handed Gower the money for them. The hand that took the money, a pudgy hand all angry red from beating sun, had blisters in the palm. Gower's face, like his hands, was brick red. Already shreds of skin were peeling from his nose and cheeks. August sun on the Gulf. MacRae knew its bite and sting. So had his father known. He wondered if Gower ever thought about that now.

But there was in Gower's expression no hint of any disturbing thought. He uttered a brief "thanks" and pocketed his money. He sat down and took his oars in hand, albeit a trifle gingerly. And he said to old Doug Sproul, almost jovially:

"Well, Doug, I got as many as you did, this trip."

"Didja?" Sproul snarled. "Kain't buy 'em cheap enough, no more, huh? Gotta ketch 'em yourself, huh?"

"Hard-boiled old crab, aren't you, Doug?" Gower rumbled in his deep voice. But he laughed. And he rowed away to the beach before his house. MacRae watched. Betty came down to meet him. Together they hauled the heavy rowboat out on skids, above the tide mark.

Nearly every day after that he saw Gower trolling around the Rock, sometimes alone, sometimes with Betty sitting forward, occasionally relieving him at the oars. No matter what the weather, if a rowboat could work a line Gower was one of them. Rains came, and he faced them in yellow oilskins. He sweltered under that fiery sun. If his life had been soft and easy, softness and ease did not seem to be wholly necessary to his existence, not even to his peace of mind. For he had that. MacRae often wondered at it, knowing the man's history. Gower joked his way to acceptance among the rowboat men, all but old Doug Sproul, who had forgotten what it was to speak pleasantly to any one.

He caught salmon for salmon with these old men who had fished all their lives. He sold his fish to the Blanco or the Bluebird, whichever was on the spot. The run held steady at the Cove end of Squitty, a phenomenal abundance of salmon at that particular spot, and the Blanco was there day after day.

And MacRae could not help pondering over Gower and his ways. He was puzzled, not alone about Gower, but about himself. He had dreamed of a fierce satisfaction in beating this man down, in making him know poverty and work and privation,—rubbing his nose in the dirt, he had said to himself.

He had managed it. Gower had joined the ranks of broken men. He was finished as a figure in industry, a financial power. MacRae knew that, beyond a doubt. Gower had debts and no assets save his land on the Squitty cliffs and the closed cannery at Folly Bay. The cannery was a white elephant, without takers in the market. No cannery man would touch it unless he could first make a contract with MacRae for the bluebacks. They had approached him with such propositions. Like wolves, MacRae thought, seeking to pick the bones of one of their own pack who had fallen.

And if MacRae needed other evidence concerning Gower, he had it daily before his eyes. To labor at the oars, to troll early and late in drizzling rain or scorching sunshine, a man only does that because he must. MacRae's father had done it. As a matter of course, without complaint, with unprotesting patience.

So did Gower. That did not fit Jack MacRae's conception of the man. If he had not known Gower he would have set him down as a fat, good-natured, kindly man with an infinite capacity for hard, disagreeable work.

He never attempted to talk to MacRae. He spoke now and then. But there was no hint of rancor in his silences. It was simply as if he understood that MacRae did not wish to talk to him, and that he conceded this to be a proper attitude. He talked with the fishermen. He joked with them. If one slammed out at him now and then with a touch of the old resentment against Folly Bay he laughed as if he understood and bore no malice. He baffled MacRae. How could this man who had walked on fishermen's faces for twenty years, seeking and exacting always his own advantage, playing the game under harsh rules of his own devising which had enabled him to win—until this last time—how could he see the last bit of prestige wrested from him and still be cheerful? How could he earn his daily bread in the literal sweat of his brow, endure blistered hands and sore muscles and the sting of slime-poison in fingers cut by hooks and traces, with less outward protest than men who had never known anything else?

MacRae could find no answer to that. He could only wonder. He only knew that some shift of chance had helped him to put Gower where Gower had put his father. And there was no satisfaction in the achievement, no sense of victory. He looked at the man and felt sorry for him, and was uncomfortably aware that Gower, taking salmon for his living with other poor men around Poor Man's Rock, was in no need of pity. This podgy man with the bright blue eyes and heavy jaw, who had been Donald MacRae's jealous Nemesis, had lost everything that was supposed to make life worth living to men of his type. And he did not seem to care. He seemed quite content to smoke a pipe and troll for salmon. He seemed to be a stranger to suffering. He did not even seem to be aware of discomfort, or of loss.

MacRae had wanted to make him suffer. He had imagined that poverty and hard, dirty work would be the fittest requital he could bestow. If Jack MacRae had been gifted with omnipotence when he read that penned history of his father's life, he would have devised no fitter punishment, no more fitting vengeance for Gower than that he should lose his fortune and his prestige and spend his last years getting his bread upon the waters by Poor Man's Rock in sun and wind and blowy weather.

And MacRae was conscious that if there were any suffering involved in this matter now, it rested upon him, not upon Gower. Most men past middle age, who have drunk deeply the pleasant wine of material success, shrink from the gaunt specter of poverty. They have shot their bolt. They cannot stand up to hard work. They cannot endure privation. They lose heart. They go about seeking sympathy, railing against the fate. They lie down and the world walks unheeding over their prone bodies.

Gower was not doing that. If he had done so, MacRae would have sneered at him with contempt. As it was, in spite of the rancor he had nursed, the feeling which had driven him to reprisal, he found himself sorry—sorry for himself, sorry for Betty. He had set out to bludgeon Gower, to humiliate him, and the worst arrows he could sling had blunted their points against the man's invulnerable spirit.

Betty had been used to luxury. It had not spoiled her. MacRae granted that. It had not made her set great store by false values. MacRae was sure of that. She had loved him simply and naturally, with an almost primitive directness. Spoiled daughters of the leisure class are not so simple and direct. MacRae began to wonder if she could possibly escape resenting his share in the overturning of her father's fortunes, whereby she herself must suffer.

By the time MacRae came slowly to these half-formed, disturbing conclusions he was already upon the verge of other disturbing discoveries in the realm of material facts.

For obvious reasons he could not walk up to Gower's house and talk to Betty. At least he did not see how he could, although there were times when he was tempted. When he did see her he was acutely sensitive to a veiled reproach in her eyes, a courteous distance in her speech. She came off the beach one day alone, a few minutes after MacRae dropped anchor in the usual spot. She had a dozen salmon in the boat. When she came alongside MacRae set foot over the bulwark with intent to load them himself. She forestalled him by picking the salmon up and heaving them on the Blanco's deck. She was dressed for the work, in heavy nailed shoes, a flannel blouse, a rough tweed skirt.

"Oh, say, take the picaroon, won't you?" He held it out to her, the six-foot wooden shaft with a slightly curving point of steel on the end.

She turned on him with a salmon dangling by the gills from her fingers.

"You don't think I'm afraid to get my hands dirty, do you?" she asked. "Me—a fisherman's daughter. Besides, I'd probably miss the salmon and jab that pointed thing through the bottom of the boat."

She laughed lightly, with no particular mirth in her voice. And MacRae was stricken dumb. She was angry. He knew it, felt it intuitively. Angry at him, warning him to keep his distance. He watched her dabble her hands in the salt chuck, dry them coolly on a piece of burlap. She took the money for the fish with a cool "thanks" and rowed back to shore.

Jack lay in his bunk that night blasted by a gloomy sense of futility in everything. He had succeeded in his undertaking beyond all the expectations which had spurred him so feverishly in the beginning. But there was no joy in it; not when Betty Gower looked at him with that cold gleam in her gray eyes. Yet he told himself savagely that if he had to take his choice he would not have done otherwise. And when he had accomplished the last move in his plan and driven Gower off the island, then he would have a chance to forget that such people had ever existed to fill a man's days with unhappiness. That, it seemed to him, must be the final disposition of this problem which his father and Horace Gower and Elizabeth Morton had set for him years before he was born.

There came a burst of afternoon westerlies which blew small hurricanes from noon to sundown. But there was always fishing under the broad lee of the cliffs. The Bluebird continued to scuttle from one outlying point to another, and the Blanco wallowed down to Crow Harbor every other day with her hold crammed. When she was not under way and the sea was fit the big carrier rode at anchor in the kelp close by Poor Man's Rock, convenient for the trollers to come alongside and deliver when they chose. There were squalls that blew up out of nowhere and drove them all to cover. There were days when a dead swell rolled and the trolling boats dipped and swung and pointed their bluff bows skyward as they climbed the green mountains,—for the salmon strike when a sea is on, and a troller runs from heavy weather only when he can no longer handle his gear.

MacRae was much too busy to brood long at a time. The phenomenal run of blueback still held, with here and there the hook-nosed coho coming in stray schools. He had a hundred and forty fishermen to care for in the matter of taking their catch, keeping them supplied with fuel, bringing them foodstuffs such as they desired. The Blanco came up from Vancouver sometimes as heavily loaded as when she went down. But he welcomed the work because it kept him from too intense thinking. He shepherded his seafaring flock for his profit and theirs alike and poured salmon by tens of thousands into the machines at Crow Harbor,—red meat to be preserved in tin cans which in months to come should feed the hungry in the far places of the earth.

MacRae sometimes had the strange fancy of being caught in a vast machine for feeding the world, a machine which did not reckon such factors as pain and sorrow in its remorseless functioning. Men could live without love or ease or content. They could not survive without food.

He came up to Squitty one bright afternoon when the sea was flat and still, unharassed by the westerly. The Cove was empty. All the fleet was scattered over a great area. The Bluebird was somewhere on her rounds. MacRae dropped the Blanco's hook in the middle of Cradle Bay, a spot he seldom chose for anchorage. But he had a purpose in this. When the bulky carrier swung head to the faint land breeze MacRae was sitting on his berth in the pilot house, glancing over a letter he held in his hand. It was from a land-dealing firm in Vancouver. One paragraph is sufficiently illuminating:

In regard to the purchase of this Squitty Island property we beg to advise you that Mr. Gower, after some correspondence, states distinctly that while he is willing to dispose of this property he will only deal directly with a bona fide purchaser.

We therefore suggest that you take the matter up with Mr. Gower personally.

MacRae put the sheet back in its envelope. He stared thoughtfully through an open window which gave on shore and cottage. He could see Gower sitting on the porch, the thick bulk of the man clean-cut against the white wall. As he looked he saw Betty go across the untrimmed lawn, up the path that ran along the cliffs, and pass slowly out of sight among the stunted, wind-twisted firs.

He walked to the after deck, laid hold of the dinghy, and slid it overboard. Five minutes later he had beached it and was walking up the gravel path to the house.

He was conscious of a queer irritation against Gower. If he were willing to sell the place, why did he sit like a spider in his web and demand that victims come to him? MacRae was wary, distrustful, suspicious, as he walked up the slope. Some of the old rancor revived in him. Gower might have a shaft in his quiver yet, and the will to use it.



CHAPTER XX

The Dead and Dusty Past

Gower sat in a deep grass chair, a pipe sagging one corner of his mouth, his slippered feet crossed on a low stool. His rubber sea boots lay on the porch floor as if he had but discarded them. MacRae took in every detail of his appearance in one photographic glance, as a man will when his gaze rests upon another with whom he may be about to clash.

Gower no longer resembled the well-fed plutocrat. He scarcely seemed the same man who, nearly two years before, had absently bestowed upon MacRae a dollar for an act of simple courtesy. He wore nondescript trousers which betrayed a shrunken abdominal line, a blue flannel shirt that bared his short, thick neck. And in that particular moment, at least, the habitual sullenness of his heavy face was not in evidence. He looked placid in spite of the fiery redness which sun and wind had burned into his skin. He betrayed no surprise at MacRae's coming. The placidity of his blue eyes did not alter in any degree.

"Hello, MacRae," he said.

"How d' do," MacRae answered. "I came to speak to you about a little matter of business."

"Yes?" Gower rumbled. "I've been sort of expecting you."

"Oh?" MacRae failed to conceal altogether his surprise at this statement. "I understand you are willing to sell this place. I want to buy it."

"It was yours once, wasn't it?"

The words were more of a comment than a question, but MacRae answered:

"You know that, I think."

"And you want it back?"

"Naturally."

"If that's what you want," Gower said slowly. "I'll see you in——"

He cut off the sentence. His round stomach—less round by far than it had been two months earlier—shook with silent laughter. His eyes twinkled. His thick, stubby fingers drummed on the chair arm.

MacRae's face grew hot. He recognized the unfinished sentence as one of his own, words he had flung in Gower's face not so long since. If that was the way of it he could save his breath. He turned silently.

"Wait."

He faced about at the changed quality of Gower's tone. The amused expression had vanished. Gower leaned forward a little. There was something very like appeal in his expression. MacRae was suddenly conscious of facing a still different man,—an oldish, fat man with thinning hair and tired, wistful eyes.

"I just happened to think of what you said to me not long ago," Gower explained. "It struck me as funny. But that isn't how I feel. If you want this land you can have it. Take a chair. Sit down. I want to talk to you."

"There is nothing the matter with my legs," MacRae said shortly. "I do want this land. I will pay you the price you paid for it, in cash, when you execute a legal transfer. Is that satisfactory?"

"What about this house?" Gower asked casually. "It's worth something, isn't it?"

"Not to me," MacRae replied. "I don't want the house. You can take it away with you, if you like."

Gower looked at him thoughtfully.

"The Scotch," he said, "cherish a grudge like a family heirloom."

"Perhaps they do," MacRae answered. "Why not? If you knock a man down you don't expect him to jump up and shake hands with you. You had your inning. It was a long one."

"I wonder," Gower said slowly, "why old Donald MacRae kept his mouth closed to you about trouble between us until he was ready to die?"

"How do you know he did that?" MacRae demanded harshly.

"The night you came to ask for the Arrow to take him to town you had no such feeling against me as you have had since," Gower said. "I know you didn't. You wouldn't have come if you had. I cut no figure in your eyes, one way or the other, until after he was dead. So he must have told you at the very last. What did he tell you? Why did he have to pass that old poison on to another generation?"

"Why shouldn't he?" MacRae demanded. "You made his life a failure. You put a scar on his face—I can remember when I was a youngster wondering how he got that mark—I remember how it stood like a ridge across his cheek bone when he was dead. You put a scar upon his soul that no one but himself ever saw or felt—except as I have been able to feel it since I knew. You weren't satisfied with that. You had to keep on throwing your weight against him for thirty years. You didn't even stop when the war made everything seem different. You might have let up then. We were doing our bit. But you didn't. You kept on until you had deprived him of everything but the power to row around the Rock day after day and take a few salmon in order to live. You made a pauper of him and sat here gloating over it. It preyed on his mind to think that I should come back from France and find myself a beggar because he was unable to cope with you. He lived his life without whimpering to me, except to say he did not like you. He only wrote this down for me to read—when he began to feel that he would never see me again—the reasons why he had failed in everything, lost everything. When I pieced out the story, from the day you used your pike pole to knock down a man whose fighting hands were tied by a promise to a woman he loved, from then till the last cold-blooded maneuver by which you got this land of ours, I hated you, and I set out to pay you back in your own coin.