place
in the shade of an arbutus, and lay down to rest and watch. Sunset would
bring calm, a dying wind, new colors to sea and sky and mountains. It
would send him away on the long run to Crow Harbor, driving through the
night under the cool stars.

No matter what happened people must be fed. Food was vital. Men lost
their lives at the fishing, but it went on. Hearts might be torn, but
hands still plied the gear. Life had a bad taste in Jack MacRae's mouth
as he lay there under the red-barked tree. He was moody. It seemed a
struggle without mercy or justice, almost without reason, a blind
obedience to the will-to-live. A tooth-and-toenail contest. He surveyed
his own part in it with cynical detachment. So long as salmon ran in the
sea they would be taken for profit in the markets and the feeding of the
hungry. And the salmon would run and men would pursue them, and the game
would be played without slackening for such things as broken faith or
aching hearts or a woman's tears.

MacRae grew drowsy puzzling over things like that. Life was a jumble
beyond his understanding, he concluded at last. Men strove to a godlike
mastery of circumstances,--and achieved three meals a day and a squalid
place to sleep. Sometimes, when they were pluming themselves on having
beaten the game, Destiny was laughing in her sleeve and spreading a
snare for their feet. A man never knew what was coming next. It was
just a damned scramble! A disorderly scramble in which a man could be
sure of getting hurt.

He wondered if that were really true.

CHAPTER X

Thrust and Counterthrust

By the time Jack MacRae was writing August on his sales slips he was
conscious of an important fact; namely, that nearly a hundred gas-boat
fishermen, trolling Squitty Island, the Ballenas, Gray Rock, even
farther afield to Yellow Rock Light and Lambert Channel, were compactly
behind him. They were still close to a period when they had been
remorselessly exploited. They were all for MacRae. Prices being equal,
they preferred that he should have their fish. It was still vivid in
their astonished minds that he had shared profits with them without
compulsion, that he had boosted prices without competition, had put a
great many dollars in their pockets. Only those who earn a living as
precariously, as riskily and with as much patient labor as a salmon
fisherman, can so well value a dollar. They had an abiding confidence,
by this time, in Jack MacRae. They k