hen they wonder why some of us
guys that went to France holler about the way we find things when we
come home."

He pushed his skiff away into the gloom that rested upon the Cove.

The _Bluebird_ was packed with salmon to her hatch covers. There had
been a fresh run. The trollers were averaging fifty fish to a man daily.
MacRae put Vincent Ferrara aboard the _Blackbird_, himself took over the
loaded vessel, and within the hour was clear of Squitty's dusky
headlands, pointing a course straight down the middle of the Gulf. His
man turned in to sleep. MacRae stood watch alone, listening to the
ka-_choof_, ka-_choof_ of the exhaust, the murmuring swash of calm water
cleft by the _Bluebird's_ stem. Away to starboard the Ballenas light
winked and blinked its flaming eye to seafaring men as it had done in
his father's time. Miles to port the Sand Heads lightship swung to its
great hawsers off the Fraser River shoals.

MacRae smiled contentedly. There was a long run ahead. But he felt that
he had beaten Gower in this first definite brush. Moving in devious
channels to a given end Gower had closed the natural markets to MacRae.

But there was no law against the export of raw salmon to a foreign
country. MacRae could afford to smile. Over in Bellingham there were
salmon packers who, like Folly Bay, were hungry for fish to feed their
great machines. But--unlike Folly Bay--they were willing to pay the
price, any price in reason, for a supply of salmon. Their own carriers
later in the season would invade Canadian waters, so many thorns in the
ample sides of the British Columbia packers. "The damned Americans!"
they sometimes growled, and talked about legislation to keep American
fish buyers out. Because the American buyer and canner alike would spend
a dollar to make a dollar. And the British Columbia packers wanted a
cinch, a monopoly, which in a measure they had. They were an
anachronism, MacRae felt. They regarded the salmon and the salmon waters
of the British Columbia coast as the feudal barons of old jealously
regarded their special prerogatives. MacRae could see them growling and
grumbling, he could see most clearly the scowl that would spread over
the face of Mr. Horace A. Gower, when he learned that ten to twenty
thousand Squitty Island salmon were passing down the Gulf each week to
an American cannery; that a smooth-faced boy out of the Air Service was
putting a crimp in the ancient order of things so far as one particu