cannery, eh?" MacRae
observed.

"Most of mine did. They took some."

"How many of your fish went bad?" Jack asked.

"About twenty-five, I guess."

MacRae finished checking the salmon the fisherman heaved up on the deck.
He made out two slips and handed the man his money.

"I'm paying you for the lost fish," he said. "I told you to hold them
for me. I want you to hold them. If I can't get here on time, it's my
loss, not yours."

The fisherman looked at the money in his hand and up at MacRae.

"Well," he said, "you're the first buyer I ever seen do that. You're all
right, all right."

There were variations of this. Some of the trollers, weatherwise old
sea-dogs, had foreseen that the _Blackbird_ could not face that blow,
and they had sold their fish. Others had held on. These, who were all
men MacRae knew, he paid according to their own estimate of loss. He did
not argue. He accepted their word. It was an astonishing experience for
the trolling fleet. They had never found a buyer willing to make good a
loss of that kind.

But there were other folk afloat besides simple, honest fishermen who
would not lie for the price of one salmon or forty. When the _Arrow_
drew abreast and stopped, a boat had pushed in beside the _Blackbird_.
The fisherman in it put half a dozen bluebacks on the deck and clambered
up himself.

"You owe me for thirty besides them," he announced.

"How's that?" MacRae asked coolly.

But he was not cool inside. He knew the man, a preemptor of Folly Bay, a
truckler to the cannery because he was always in debt to the
cannery,--and a quarrelsome individual besides, who took advantage of
his size and strength to browbeat less able men.

MacRae had got few salmon off Sam Kaye since the cannery opened. He had
never asked Kaye to hold fish for him. He knew instantly what was in
Kaye's mind; it had flitted from one boat to another that MacRae was
making good the loss of salmon held for him, and Kaye was going to get
in on this easy money if he could bluff it through.

He stood on the _Blackbird's_ deck, snarlingly demanding payment for
thirty fish. MacRae looked at him silently. He hated brawling,
acrimonious dispute. He was loth to a common row at that moment, because
he was acutely conscious of the two girls watching. But he was even more
conscious of Gower's stare and the curious expectancy of the fishermen
clustered about his stern.

Kaye was simply trying to do him out of fifteen dollars.