on the lawn that he knew must be Betty. Part of
the time a small power boat swung to the mooring in the bay where the
shining _Arrow_ nosed to wind and tide in other days. He heard current
talk among the fishermen concerning the Gowers. Gower himself was
spending his time between the cottage and Folly Bay.

The cannery opened five days in advance of the sockeye season on the
Fraser. When the Gower collecting boats made their first round MacRae
knew that he had a fight on his hands. Gower, it seemed to him, had
bared his teeth at last.

The way of the blueback salmon might have furnished a theme for Solomon.
In all the years during which these fish had run in the Gulf of Georgia
neither fishermen, canners, nor the government ichthyologists were
greatly wiser concerning their nature or habits or life history. Grounds
where they swarmed one season might prove barren the next. Where they
came from, out of what depths of the far Pacific those silvery hordes
marshaled themselves, no man knew. Nor, when they vanished in late
August, could any man say whither they went. They did not ascend the
streams. No blueback was ever taken with red spawn in his belly. They
were a mystery which no man had unraveled, no matter that he took them
by thousands in order that he himself might subsist upon their flesh.
One thing the trollers did know,--where the small feed swarmed, in shoal
water or deep, those myriads of tiny fish, herring and nameless smaller
ones, there the blueback would appear, and when he did so appear he
could be taken by a spoon hook.

Away beyond the Sisters--three gaunt gray rocks rising out of the sea
miles offshore in a fairway down which passed all the Alaska-bound
steamers, with a lone lighthouse on the middle rock--away north of Folly
Bay there opened wide trolling grounds about certain islands which lay
off the Vancouver Island shore,--Hornby, Lambert Channel, Yellow Rock,
Cape Lazo. In other seasons the blueback runs lingered about Squitty for
a while and then passed on to those kelp-grown and reef-strewed grounds.
This season these salmon appeared first far south of Squitty. The
trolling scouts, the restless wanderers of the fleet, who could not
abide sitting still and waiting in patience for the fish to come, first
picked them up by the Gulf Islands, very near that great highway to the
open sea known as the Strait of San Juan. The blueback pushed on the
Gray Rock to the Ballenas, as if the blackfish and seal