utely sensitive to a
veiled reproach in her eyes, a courteous distance in her speech. She
came off the beach one day alone, a few minutes after MacRae dropped
anchor in the usual spot. She had a dozen salmon in the boat. When she
came alongside MacRae set foot over the bulwark with intent to load them
himself. She forestalled him by picking the salmon up and heaving them
on the _Blanco's_ deck. She was dressed for the work, in heavy nailed
shoes, a flannel blouse, a rough tweed skirt.

"Oh, say, take the picaroon, won't you?" He held it out to her, the
six-foot wooden shaft with a slightly curving point of steel on the end.

She turned on him with a salmon dangling by the gills from her fingers.

"You don't think I'm afraid to get my hands dirty, do you?" she asked.
"Me--a fisherman's daughter. Besides, I'd probably miss the salmon and
jab that pointed thing through the bottom of the boat."

She laughed lightly, with no particular mirth in her voice. And MacRae
was stricken dumb. She was angry. He knew it, felt it intuitively. Angry
at him, warning him to keep his distance. He watched her dabble her
hands in the salt chuck, dry them coolly on a piece of burlap. She took
the money for the fish with a cool "thanks" and rowed back to shore.

Jack lay in his bunk that night blasted by a gloomy sense of futility in
everything. He had succeeded in his undertaking beyond all the
expectations which had spurred him so feverishly in the beginning. But
there was no joy in it; not when Betty Gower looked at him with that
cold gleam in her gray eyes. Yet he told himself savagely that if he had
to take his choice he would not have done otherwise. And when he had
accomplished the last move in his plan and driven Gower off the island,
then he would have a chance to forget that such people had ever existed
to fill a man's days with unhappiness. That, it seemed to him, must be
the final disposition of this problem which his father and Horace Gower
and Elizabeth Morton had set for him years before he was born.

There came a burst of afternoon westerlies which blew small hurricanes
from noon to sundown. But there was always fishing under the broad lee
of the cliffs. The _Bluebird_ continued to scuttle from one outlying
point to another, and the _Blanco_ wallowed down to Crow Harbor every
other day with her hold crammed. When she was not under way and the sea
was fit the big carrier rode at anchor in the kelp close by Poor Man's
Rock,