hed and shouted as they worked. The gill-net
fishermen watched silently, scowling. It was like taking bread out of
their mouths. It was like an honest man restrained by a policeman's club
from taking food when he is hungry, and seeing a thief fill his pockets
and walk off unmolested.

"Four thousand salmon that shot," Dave Mullen said, the same Mullen who
had talked to MacRae in Squitty one night. "Say, why should we stand for
that? We can get salmon that way too."

He spoke directly to MacRae.

"What's sauce for the goose ought to be sauce for the gander," MacRae
replied. "I'll take the fish if you get them."

"You aren't afraid of getting in wrong yourself?" the man asked him.

MacRae shook his head. He did not lean to lawlessness. But the cannery
men had framed this law. They cried loudly and continually for its
strict enforcement. And they violated it flagrantly themselves, or
winked at its violation when that meant an added number of cases to
their pack. Not alone in the Jew's Mouth; all along the British Columbia
coast the purse seiners forgot the law when the salmon swarmed in a
stream mouth and they could make a killing. Only canneries could hold a
purse-seine license. If the big men would not honor their own law, why
should the lesser? So MacRae felt and said.

The men in the half-dozen boats about his stern had dealt all the season
with MacRae. They trusted him. They neither liked nor trusted Folly Bay.
Folly Bay was not only breaking the law in the Jew's Mouth, but in
breaking the law they were making it hard for these men to earn a dollar
legitimately. Superior equipment, special privilege, cold-blooded
violation of law because it was safe and profitable, gave the purse
seiner an unfair advantage. The men gathered in a little knot on the
deck of one boat. They put their heads together and lowered their
voices. MacRae knew they were angry, that they had reached the point of
fighting fire with fire. And he smiled to himself. He did not know what
they were planning, but he could guess. It would not be the first time
the individual fishermen had kicked over the traces and beaten the purse
seiners at their own game. They did not include him in their council. He
was a buyer. It was not his function to inquire how they took their
fish. If they could take salmon which otherwise the _No. 5_ would take,
so much the worse for Folly Bay,--and so much the better for the
fishermen, who earned their living precarious