MacRae’s sympathy turned more to those whose struggle was to make a living, or a little more if they could, than to men who already had more than they needed, men who had no use for more money except to pile it up, to keep piling it up.  MacRae was neither an idealist nor a philanthropic dreamer.  But he knew the under dog of the great industrial scramble.  In his own business he would go out of his way to add another hundred dollars a year to a fisherman’s earnings.  He did not know quite clearly why he felt like that.  It was more or less instinctive.  He expected to make money out of his business, he was eager to make money, but he saw very clearly that it was only in and through the tireless labor of the fishermen that he could reap a profit.  And he was young enough to be generous in his impulses.  He was not afraid, like the older men, that if those who worked with their hands got a little more than sufficient to live on from season to season they would grow fat and lazy and arrogant, and refuse to produce.

Money was a necessity.  Without it, without at least a reasonable amount of money, a man could not secure any of the things essential to well-being of either body or mind.  The moneyless man was a slave so long as he was moneyless.  MacRae smiled at those who spoke slightingly of the power of money.  He knew they were mistaken.  Money was king.  No amount of it, cash in hand, would purchase happiness, perhaps, but lack of it made a man fall an easy victim to dire misfortunes.  Without money a man was less than the dirt beneath the feet of such as Robbin-Steele and Hurley and Gower, because their criterion of another man’s worth was his ability to get money, to beat the game they all played.

MacRae put himself and Stubby Abbott in a different category.  They wanted to get on.  They were determined to get on.  But their programme of getting on, MacRae felt, was a better one for themselves and for other men than the mere instinct to grab everything in sight.  MacRae was not exactly a student of economics or sociology, but he had an idea that the world, and particularly his group-world, was suffering from the grab-instinct functioning without control.  He had a theory that society would have to modify that grab-instinct by legislation and custom before the world was rid of a lot of its present ills.  And both his reason and his instinct was to modify it himself, in his dealings with his fellows, more particularly when those he dealt with were simple, uneducated men who worked as hard and complained as little as salmon fishermen.

He talked with Stubby in the den until late in the afternoon, and then walked downtown.  When he reached the Granada he loafed uneasily in the billiard room until dinner.  His mind persistently turned from material considerations of boats and gear and the season’s prospects to dwell upon Betty Gower.  This wayward questing of his mind irritated him.  But he could not help it.  Whenever he met her,