MacRae considered moodily, viewing the matter from every possible angle.  He could not see where he could do other than as he was doing:  keep Betty out of his mind as much as possible and go on determinedly making his fight to be top dog in a world where the weak get little mercy and even the strong do not always come off unscarred.

Jack MacRae was no philosopher, nor an intellectual superman, but he knew that love did not make the world go round.  It was work.  Work and fighting.  Men spent most of their energies in those two channels.

This they could not escape.  Love only shot a rosy glow across life.  It did not absolve a man from weariness or scars.  By it, indeed, he might suffer greater stress and deeper scars.  To MacRae, love, such as had troubled his father’s life and his own, seemed to be an emotion pregnant with sorrow.  But he could not deny the strange power of this thing called love, when it stirred men and women.

His deck hand, who was also cook, broke into MacRae’s reflections with a call to supper.  Jack went down the companion steps into a forepeak stuffy with the heat of the sun and a galley stove, a cramped place where they ate heartily despite faint odors of distillate and burned lubricating oil from the engine room and bilge water that smelled of fish.

A troller’s boat was rubbing against the Blanco’s fenders when they came on deck again.  Others were hoisting the trolling poles, coming in to deliver.  The sun was gone.  The long northern twilight cast a pearly haze along far shores.  MacRae threw open his hatches and counted the salmon as they came flipping off the point of a picaroon.  For over an hour he stood at one hatch and his engineer at the other, counting fish, making out sale slips, paying out money.  It was still light—­light enough to read.  But the bluebacks had stopped biting.  The rowboat men quit last of all.  They sidled up to the Blanco, one after the other, unloaded, got their money, and tied their rowboats on behind for a tow around to the Cove.

Gower had rowed back and forth for three hours.  MacRae had seen him swing around the Rock, up under the cliffs and back again, pulling slow and steady.  He was last to haul in his gear.  He came up to the carrier and lay alongside Doug Sproul while that crabbed ancient chucked his salmon on deck.  Then he moved into the place Sproul vacated.  The bottom of his boat was bright with salmon.  He rested one hand on the Blanco’s guard rail and took the pipe out of his mouth with the other.

“Hello, MacRae,” he said, as casually as a man would address another with whom he had slight acquaintance.  “I’ve got some fish.  D’you want ’em?”

MacRae looked down at him.  He did not want Gower’s fish or anything that was Gower’s.  He did not want to see him or talk to him.  He desired, in so far as he was conscious of any desire in the matter, that Gower should keep his distance.  But he had a horror of meanness, of petty spite.  He could knock a man down with a good heart, if occasion arose.  It was not in him to kick a fallen enemy.