ly at best.

It was dusk when the purse seiner finished loading her catch and stowed
the great net in a dripping heap on the turntable aft. At daylight or
before, a cannery tender would empty her, and she would sweep the Jew's
Mouth bare of salmon again.

With dusk also the fishermen were busy over their nets, still riding to
the _Blackbird's_ stern. Then they moved off in the dark. MacRae could
hear nets paying out. He saw lanterns set to mark the outer end of each
net. Silence fell on the bay. A single riding light glowed at the _No.
5's_ masthead. Her cabin lights blinked out. Her crew sprawled in their
bunks, sound asleep.

Under cover of the night the fishermen took pattern from the seiner's
example. A gill net is nine hundred feet long, approximately twenty feet
deep. They stripped the cork floats off one and hung it to the lead-line
of another. Thus with a web forty feet deep they went stealthily up to
the mouth of the Solomon. With a four-oared skiff manning each end of
the nine hundred-foot length they swept their net around the Jew's
Mouth, closed it like a purse seine, and hauled it out into the shallows
of a small beach. They stood in the shallow water with sea boots on and
forked the salmon into their rowboats and laid the rowboats alongside
the _Blackbird_ to deliver,--all in the dark without a lantern flicker,
with muffled oarlocks and hushed voices. Three times they swept the bay.

At five in the morning, before it was lightening in the east, the
_Blackbird_ rode four inches below her load water line with a mixed
cargo of coho and dog salmon, the heaviest cargo ever stowed under her
hatches,--and eight fishermen divided two thousand dollars share and
share alike for their night's work.

MacRae battened his hatch covers, started his engine, heaved up the
hook, and hauled out of the bay.

In the Gulf the obscuring clouds parted to lay a shaft of silver on
smooth, windless sea. The _Blackbird_ wallowed down the moon-trail.
MacRae stood at the steering wheel. Beside him Steve Ferrara leaned on
the low cabin.

"She's getting day," Steve said, after a long silence. He chuckled.
"Some raid. If they can keep that lick up those boys will all have new
boats for next season. You'll break old Gower if you keep on, Jack."

The thought warmed MacRae. To break Gower, to pull him down to where he
must struggle for a living like other common men, to deprive him of the
power he had abused, to make him suffer as s