Kaye was simply trying to do him out of fifteen dollars.  MacRae knew it.  He knew that the fishermen knew it,—­and he had a suspicion that Folly Bay might not be unaware, or averse, to Sam Kaye taking a fall out of him.  Folly Bay had tried other unpleasant tricks.

“That doesn’t go for you, Kaye,” he said quietly.  “I know your game.  Get off my boat and take your fish with you.”

Sam Kaye glowered threateningly.  He had cowed men before with the fierceness of his look.  He was long-armed and raw-boned, and he rather fancied himself in a rough and tumble.  He was quite blissfully ignorant that Jack MacRae was stewing under his outward calmness.  Kaye took a step forward, with an intimidating thrust of his jaw.

MacRae smashed him squarely in the mouth with a straight left, and hooked him somewhere on the chin with a wicked right cross.  Either blow was sufficient to knock any ordinary man down.  There was a deceptive power in MacRae’s slenderness, which was not so much slenderness as perfect bodily symmetry.  He weighed within ten pounds as much as Sam Kaye, although he did not look it, and he was as quick as a playful kitten.  Kaye went down, as told before.  He lifted a dazed countenance above the cockpit as MacRae shoved his craft clear.

The fishermen broke the silence with ribald laughter.  They knew Kaye’s game too.

MacRae left Folly Bay later in the afternoon, poorer by many dollars paid for rotten salmon.  He wasn’t in a particularly genial mood.  The Sam Kaye affair had come at an inopportune moment.  He didn’t care to stand out as a bruiser.  Still, he asked himself irritably, why should he care because Nelly Abbott and Betty Gower had seen him using his fists?  He was perfectly justified.  Indeed, he knew very well he could have done nothing else.  The trailers had chortled over the outcome.  These were matters they could understand and appreciate.  Even Steve Ferrara looked at him enviously.

“It makes me wish I’d dodged the gas,” Steve said wistfully.  “It’s hell to wheeze your breath in and out.  By jiminy, you’re wicked with your hands, Jack.  Did you box much in France?”

“Quite a lot,” MacRae replied.  “Some of the fellows in our squadron were pretty clever.  We used the gloves quite a bit.”

“And you’re naturally quick,” Steve drawled.  “Now, me, the gas has cooked my goose.  I’d have to bat Kaye over the head with an oar.  Gee, he sure got a surprise.”

They both laughed.  Even upon his bloody face—­as he rose out of his own fish hold—­bewildered astonishment had been Sam Kaye’s chief expression.

The Blackbird went her rounds.  At noon the next day she met Vincent Ferrara with her sister ship, and the two boats made one load for the Blackbird.  She headed south.  With high noon, too, came the summer westerly, screeching and whistling and lashing the Gulf to a brief fury.

It was the regular summer wind, a yachtsman’s gale.  Four days out of six its cycle ran the same, a breeze rising at ten o’clock, stiffening to a healthy blow, a mere sigh at sundown.  Midnight would find the sea smooth as a mirror, the heaving swell killed by changing tides.