“Thought you were ashore,” Gower grunted.

“Oh, the rest of the crowd went off on a hike into the woods, so we came out here to look around.  Nelly hasn’t seen the Arrow inside since it was done over,” Betty replied.

“I’m going to Folly Bay,” Gower said.  “Will you go ashore?”

“Far from such,” Betty returned.  “I’d as soon go to the cannery as anywhere.  Can’t we, daddy?”

“Oh, yes.  Bit of a swell though.  You may be sick.”

Betty laughed.  That was a standing joke between them.  She had never been seasick.  Nelly Abbott declared that if there was anything she loved it was to ride the dead swell that ran after a storm.  They came up out of the cabin to watch the mooring line cast off, and to wave handkerchiefs at the empty cottage porches as the Arrow backed and straightened and swept out of the bay.

The Arrow was engined to justify her name.  But the swell was heavier than it looked from shore.  No craft, even a sixty-footer built for speed, finds her speed lines a thing of comfort in heavy going.  Until the Arrow passed into the lee of an island group halfway along Squitty she made less time than a fishing boat, and she rolled and twisted uncomfortably.  If Horace Gower had a mind to reach Folly Bay before the Blackbird he could not have done so.  However, he gave no hint of such intention.  He kept to the deck.  The girls stayed below until the big cruiser struck easier going and a faster gait.  Then they joined Gower.

The three of them stood by the rail just abaft the pilot house when the Arrow turned into the half-mile breadth of Folly Bay.  The cannery loomed white on shore, with a couple of purse seiners and a tender or two tied at the slips.  And four hundred yards off the cannery wharf the Blackbird had dropped anchor and lay now, a dozen trolling boats clustered about her to deliver fish.

“Slow up and stop abreast of that buyer,” Gower ordered.

The Arrow’s skipper brought his vessel to a standstill within a boat-length of the Blackbird.

“Why, that’s Jack MacRae,” Nelly Abbott exclaimed.  “Hoo-hoo, Johnny!”

She waved both hands for good measure.  MacRae, bareheaded, sleeves rolled above his elbows, standing in hip boots of rubber on a deck wet and slippery with water and fish slime, amid piles of gleaming salmon, recognized her easily enough.  He waved greeting, but his gaze only for that one recognizing instant left the salmon that were landing flop, flop on the Blackbird’s deck out of a troller’s fish well.  He made out a slip, handed the troller some currency.  There was a brief exchange of words between them.  The man nodded, pushed off his boat.  Instantly another edged into the vacant place.  Salmon began to fall on the deck, heaved up on a picaroon.  At the other end of the fish hold another of the Ferrara boys was tallying in fish.