“Chuck them up,” he said.

He counted them silently as they flipped over the bulwark and fell into the chilly hold, marked a slip, handed Gower the money for them.  The hand that took the money, a pudgy hand all angry red from beating sun, had blisters in the palm.  Gower’s face, like his hands, was brick red.  Already shreds of skin were peeling from his nose and cheeks.  August sun on the Gulf.  MacRae knew its bite and sting.  So had his father known.  He wondered if Gower ever thought about that now.

But there was in Gower’s expression no hint of any disturbing thought.  He uttered a brief “thanks” and pocketed his money.  He sat down and took his oars in hand, albeit a trifle gingerly.  And he said to old Doug Sproul, almost jovially: 

“Well, Doug, I got as many as you did, this trip.”

“Didja?” Sproul snarled.  “Kain’t buy ’em cheap enough, no more, huh?  Gotta ketch ’em yourself, huh?”

“Hard-boiled old crab, aren’t you, Doug?” Gower rumbled in his deep voice.  But he laughed.  And he rowed away to the beach before his house.  MacRae watched.  Betty came down to meet him.  Together they hauled the heavy rowboat out on skids, above the tide mark.

Nearly every day after that he saw Gower trolling around the Rock, sometimes alone, sometimes with Betty sitting forward, occasionally relieving him at the oars.  No matter what the weather, if a rowboat could work a line Gower was one of them.  Rains came, and he faced them in yellow oilskins.  He sweltered under that fiery sun.  If his life had been soft and easy, softness and ease did not seem to be wholly necessary to his existence, not even to his peace of mind.  For he had that.  MacRae often wondered at it, knowing the man’s history.  Gower joked his way to acceptance among the rowboat men, all but old Doug Sproul, who had forgotten what it was to speak pleasantly to any one.

He caught salmon for salmon with these old men who had fished all their lives.  He sold his fish to the Blanco or the Bluebird, whichever was on the spot.  The run held steady at the Cove end of Squitty, a phenomenal abundance of salmon at that particular spot, and the Blanco was there day after day.

And MacRae could not help pondering over Gower and his ways.  He was puzzled, not alone about Gower, but about himself.  He had dreamed of a fierce satisfaction in beating this man down, in making him know poverty and work and privation,—­rubbing his nose in the dirt, he had said to himself.

He had managed it.  Gower had joined the ranks of broken men.  He was finished as a figure in industry, a financial power.  MacRae knew that, beyond a doubt.  Gower had debts and no assets save his land on the Squitty cliffs and the closed cannery at Folly Bay.  The cannery was a white elephant, without takers in the market.  No cannery man would touch it unless he could first make a contract with MacRae for the bluebacks.  They had approached him with such propositions.  Like wolves, MacRae thought, seeking to pick the bones of one of their own pack who had fallen.