No, he rather doubted that Gower was broke, or even in any danger of going broke.  He hoped this might be true, in spite of his doubts, for it meant that Gower would be compelled to sacrifice this six hundred acres of MacRae land.  The sooner the better.  It was a pain to MacRae to see it going wild.  The soil Donald MacRae had cleared and turned to meadow, to small fields of grain, was growing up to ferns and scrub.  It had been a source of pride to old Donald.  He had visualized for his son more than once great fields covered with growing crops, a rich and fruitful area, with a big stone house looking out over the cliffs where ultimate generations of MacRaes should live.  If luck had not gone against old Donald he would have made this dream come true.  But life and Gower had beaten him.

Jack MacRae knew this.  It maddened him to think that this foundation of a dream had become the plaything of his father’s enemy, a neglected background for a summer cottage which he only used now and then.

There might, however, be something in the statements Stubby had made.  MacRae recalled that Gower had not replaced the Arrow.  The underwriters had raised and repaired the mahogany cruiser, and she had passed into other hands.  When Betty and her father came to Cradle Bay they came on a cannery tender or a hired launch.  MacRae hoped it might be true that Gower was slipping, that he had helped to start him on this decline.

Presently the loneliness of the Cove was broken by the return of Vincent Ferrara.  They skidded the Bluebird out on the beach at the Cove’s head and overhauled her inside and out, hull and machinery.  That brought them well into April.  The new carrier was complete from truck to keelson.  She had been awaiting only MacRae’s pleasure for her maiden sea-dip.  So now, with the Bluebird sleeked with new paint, he went down for the launching.

There was a little ceremony over that.

“It’s bad luck, the very worst sort of luck, to launch a boat without christening her in the approved manner,” Nelly Abbott declared.  “I insist on being sponsor.  Do let me, Jack.”

So the new sixty-footer had a bottle of wine from the Abbott cellar broken over her brass-bound stemhead as her bows sliced into the salt water, and Nelly’s clear treble chanted: 

“I christen thee Agua Blanco.”

Vin Ferrara’s dark eyes gleamed, for agua blanco means “white water” in the Spanish tongue.

The Terminal Fish Company’s new coolers were yawning for fish when the first blueback run of commercial size showed off Gray Rock and the Ballenas.  All the Squitty boats went out as soon as the salmon came.  MacRae skippered the new and shining Blanco, brave in white paint and polished brass on her virgin trip.  He followed the main fleet, while the Bluebird scuttled about to pick up stray trollers’ catches and to tend the rowboat men.  She would dump a