"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 Pa.s.s.

Salmon everywhere."

They sat in the shade of the _Blanco's_ pilot house. The sun beat mercilessly, a dog-day sun blazing upon gla.s.sy 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 c.o.c.kpit 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. n.o.body 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 ash.o.r.e 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 pa.s.s. Donald MacRae had felt his first abiding grief there and cried his hurt to a windy sky. He had lived his last years s.n.a.t.c.hing 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 pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sed close by the _Blanco_ but MacRae gave him scant heed. His eyes were all for the girl ash.o.r.e. Betty sat on a log, bareheaded in the sun. MacRae had a feeling that she looked at him. And she would be thinking,--G.o.d 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 pa.s.sion 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.