her father's amazing warning which carried a veiled
threat,--an open threat so far as Jack MacRae was concerned. Why should
he cut loose like that on her?

She stared thoughtfully at the _Blackbird_, marked the trollers slipping
in from the grounds and clustering around the chunky carrier.

It might have interested Mr. Horace Gower could he have received a
verbatim report of his daughter's reflections for the next five minutes.
But whether it would have pleased him it is hard to say.

CHAPTER IX

The Complexity of Simple Matters

The army, for a period extending over many months, had imposed a rigid
discipline on Jack MacRae. The Air Service had bestowed upon him a less
rigorous discipline, but a far more exacting self-control. He was not
precisely aware of it, but those four years had saved him from being a
firebrand of sorts in his present situation, because there resided in
him a fiery temper and a capacity for passionate extremes, and those
years in the King's uniform, whatever else they may have done for him,
had placed upon his headlong impulses manifold checks, taught him the
vital necessity of restraint, the value of restraint.

If the war had made human life seem a cheap and perishable commodity, it
had also worked to give men like MacRae a high sense of honor, to
accentuate a natural distaste for lying and cheating, for anything that
was mean, petty, ignoble. Perhaps the Air Service was unique in that it
was at once the most dangerous and the most democratic and the most
individual of all the organizations that fought the Germans. It had high
standards. The airmen were all young, the pick of the nations, clean,
eager, vigorous boys whose ideals were still undimmed. They lived
and--as it happened--died in big moments. They trained with the gods in
airy spaces and became men, those who survived.

And the gods may launch destroying thunderbolts, but they do not lie or
cheat or steal. An honest man may respect an honest enemy, and be roused
to murderous fury by a common rascal's trickery.

When MacRae dropped his hook in Folly Bay he was two days overdue, for
the first time in his fish-running venture. The trollers had promised to
hold their fish. The first man alongside to deliver reminded him of
this.

"Southeaster held you up, eh?" said he. "We fished in the lee off the
top end. But we might as well have laid in. Held 'em too long for you."

"They spoiled before you could slough them on the