netters operating
on Gower's territory to give him fair cargoes. Every salmon he could
divert from the cans at Folly Bay meant,--well, he did not often stop to
ask precisely what that did mean to him. But he never passed Poor Man's
Rock, bleak and brown at low tide, or with seas hissing over it when the
tide was at flood, without thinking of his father, of the days and
months and years old Donald MacRae had lived and worked in sight of the
Rock,--a life at the last lonely and cheerless and embittered by the
sight of his ancient enemy preening his feathers in Cradle Bay. Old
Donald had lived for thirty years unable to return a blow which had
scarred his face and his heart in the same instant. But his son felt
that he was making better headway. It is unlikely that Donald MacRae
ever looked at Gower's cottage nestling like a snowflake in the green
lee of Point Old, or cast his eyes over that lost estate of his, with
more unchristian feelings than did his son. In Jack MacRae's mind the
Golden Rule did not apply to Horace Gower, nor to aught in which Gower
was concerned.

So he stayed on Folly Bay territory with a dual purpose: to make money
for himself, and to deprive Gower of profit where he could. He was wise
enough to know that was the only way he could hurt a man like Gower. And
he wanted to hurt Gower. The intensity of that desire grew. It was a
point of honor, the old inborn clan pride that never compromised an
injury or an insult or an injustice, which neither forgave nor forgot.

For weeks MacRae in the _Blackbird_ and Vin Ferrara in her sister ship
flitted here and there. The purse seiners hunted the schooling salmon,
the cohoes and humps. The gill-netters hung on the seiner's heels,
because where the purse seine could get a haul so could they. And the
carriers and buyers sought the fishermen wherever they went, to buy and
carry away their catch.

Folly Bay suffered bad luck from the beginning. Gower had four
purse-seine boats in commission. Within a week one broke a crankshaft in
half a gale off Sangster Island. The wind put her ashore under the nose
of the sandstone Elephant and the seas destroyed her.

Fire gutted a second not long after, so that for weeks she was laid up
for repairs. That left him but two efficient craft. One operated on his
concessions along the mainland shore. The other worked three stream
mouths on Vancouver Island, straight across from Folly Bay.

Still, Gower's cannery was getting sal