eck 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 o