MacRae met every raise Folly Bay made.  He saw bluebacks go to a dollar ten, then to a dollar fifteen.  He ran cargo after cargo to Crow Harbor and dropped from three to seven hundred dollars on each load, until even Stubby lost patience with him.

“What’s the sense in bucking him till you go broke?  I’m in too deep to stand any loss myself.  Quit.  Tie up your boats, Jack.  Let him have the salmon.  Let those blockheads of fishermen see what he’ll do to ’em once you stop.”

But MacRae held on till the first hot days of August were at hand and his money was dwindling to the vanishing point.  Then he ran the Blanco and the Bluebird into Squitty Cove and tied them to permanent moorings in shoal water near the head.  For a day or two the salmon had shifted mysteriously to the top end, around Folly Bay and the Siwash Islands and Jenkins Pass.  The bulk of the fleet had followed them.  Only a few stuck to the Cove and Poor Man’s Rock.  To these and the rowboat trollers MacRae said: 

“Sell your fish to Folly Bay.  I’m through.”

Then he lay down in his bunk in the airy pilot house of the Blanco and slept the clock around, the first decent rest he had taken in two months.  He had not realized till then how tired he was.

When he wakened he washed, ate, changed his clothes and went for a walk along the cliffs to stretch his legs.  Vin had gone up to the Knob to see Dolly and Uncle Peter.  His helper on the Bluebird was tinkering about his engine.  MacRae’s two men loafed on the clean-slushed deck.  They were none of them company for MacRae in his present mood.  He sought the cliffs to be alone.

Gower had beaten him, it would seem.  And MacRae did not take kindly to being beaten.  But he did not think this was the end yet.  Gower would do as he had done before.  When he felt himself secure in his monopoly he would squeeze the fishermen, squeeze them hard.  And as soon as he did that MacRae would buy again.  He could not make any money himself, perhaps.  But he could make Gower operate at a loss.  That would be something accomplished.

MacRae walked along the cliffs until he saw the white cottage, and saw also that some one sat on the steps in the sun.  Whereupon he turned back.  He didn’t want to see Betty.  He conceived that to be an ended chapter in his experiences.  He had hurt her, and she had put on her armor against another such hurt.  There was a studied indifference about her now, when he met her, which hurt him terribly.  He supposed that in addition to his own incomprehensible attitude which she resented, she took sides with her father in this obvious commercial warfare which was bleeding them both financially.  Very likely she saw in this only the open workings of his malice toward Gower.  In which MacRae admitted she would be quite correct.  He had not been able to discover in that flaring-up of passion for Betty any reason for a burial of his feud with Gower.  There was in him some curious insistence upon carrying this to the bitter end.  And his hatred of Gower was something alive, vital, coloring his vision somberly.  The shadow of the man lay across his life.  He could not ignore this, and his instinct was for reprisal.  The fighting instinct in MacRae lurked always very near the surface.