, 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 t