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