wer had debts and no assets save his land on the
Squitty cliffs and the closed cannery at Folly Bay. The cannery was a
white elephant, without takers in the market. No cannery man would touch
it unless he could first make a contract with MacRae for the bluebacks.
They had approached him with such propositions. Like wolves, MacRae
thought, seeking to pick the bones of one of their own pack who had
fallen.

And if MacRae needed other evidence concerning Gower, he had it daily
before his eyes. To labor at the oars, to troll early and late in
drizzling rain or scorching sunshine, a man only does that because he
must. MacRae's father had done it. As a matter of course, without
complaint, with unprotesting patience.

So did Gower. That did not fit Jack MacRae's conception of the man. If
he had not known Gower he would have set him down as a fat,
good-natured, kindly man with an infinite capacity for hard,
disagreeable work.

He never attempted to talk to MacRae. He spoke now and then. But there
was no hint of rancor in his silences. It was simply as if he understood
that MacRae did not wish to talk to him, and that he conceded this to be
a proper attitude. He talked with the fishermen. He joked with them. If
one slammed out at him now and then with a touch of the old resentment
against Folly Bay he laughed as if he understood and bore no malice. He
baffled MacRae. How could this man who had walked on fishermen's faces
for twenty years, seeking and exacting always his own advantage, playing
the game under harsh rules of his own devising which had enabled him to
win--until this last time--how could he see the last bit of prestige
wrested from him and still be cheerful? How could he earn his daily
bread in the literal sweat of his brow, endure blistered hands and sore
muscles and the sting of slime-poison in fingers cut by hooks and
traces, with less outward protest than men who had never known anything
else?

MacRae could find no answer to that. He could only wonder. He only knew
that some shift of chance had helped him to put Gower where Gower had
put his father. And there was no satisfaction in the achievement, no
sense of victory. He looked at the man and felt sorry for him, and was
uncomfortably aware that Gower, taking salmon for his living with other
poor men around Poor Man's Rock, was in no need of pity. This podgy man
with the bright blue eyes and heavy jaw, who had been Donald MacRae's
jealous Nemesis, had lost e