ndustry. The farmer saves wheat for his next year's
seeding, instead of selling the last bushel to the millers. No man
willfully kills the goose that lays him golden eggs. But the salmon
hunter, eagerly pursuing the nimble dollar, sometimes grows rapacious in
the chase and breaks laws of his own devising,--if a big haul promises
and no Fisheries Inspector is by to restrain him. The cannery purse
seiners are the most frequent offenders. They can make their haul
quickly in forbidden waters and get away. Folly Bay, shrewdly paying its
seine crews a bonus per fish on top of wages, had always been notorious
for crowding the law.

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

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

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

When the tender drew clear and passed out of the bay she rode deep with
the weight of salmon aboard. Without the Jew's Mouth, around the
_Blackbird_ and the fish boats and the _No. 5_ the salmon were threshing
water. _Klop._ A flash of silver. Bubbles. A series of concentric rings
that ran away in ripples, till they merged into other widening rings.
They were ev