Under cover of the night the fishermen took pattern from the seiner’s example.  A gill net is nine hundred feet long, approximately twenty feet deep.  They stripped the cork floats off one and hung it to the lead-line of another.  Thus with a web forty feet deep they went stealthily up to the mouth of the Solomon.  With a four-oared skiff manning each end of the nine hundred-foot length they swept their net around the Jew’s Mouth, closed it like a purse seine, and hauled it out into the shallows of a small beach.  They stood in the shallow water with sea boots on and forked the salmon into their rowboats and laid the rowboats alongside the Blackbird to deliver,—­all in the dark without a lantern flicker, with muffled oarlocks and hushed voices.  Three times they swept the bay.

At five in the morning, before it was lightening in the east, the Blackbird rode four inches below her load water line with a mixed cargo of coho and dog salmon, the heaviest cargo ever stowed under her hatches,—­and eight fishermen divided two thousand dollars share and share alike for their night’s work.

MacRae battened his hatch covers, started his engine, heaved up the hook, and hauled out of the bay.

In the Gulf the obscuring clouds parted to lay a shaft of silver on smooth, windless sea.  The Blackbird wallowed down the moon-trail.  MacRae stood at the steering wheel.  Beside him Steve Ferrara leaned on the low cabin.

“She’s getting day,” Steve said, after a long silence.  He chuckled.  “Some raid.  If they can keep that lick up those boys will all have new boats for next season.  You’ll break old Gower if you keep on, Jack.”

The thought warmed MacRae.  To break Gower, to pull him down to where he must struggle for a living like other common men, to deprive him of the power he had abused, to make him suffer as such a man would suffer under that turn of fortune,—­that would help to square accounts.  It would be only a measure of justice.  To be dealt with as he had dealt with others,—­MacRae asked no more than that for himself.

But it was not likely, he reflected.  One bad season would not seriously involve a wary old bird like Horace Gower.  He was too secure behind manifold bulwarks.  Still in the end,—­more spectacular things had come to pass in the affairs of men on this kaleidoscopic coast.  MacRae’s face was hard in the moonlight.  His eyes were somber.  It was an ugly feeling to nurse.  For thirty years that sort of impotent bitterness must have rankled in his father’s breast—­with just cause, MacRae told himself moodily.  No wonder old Donald had been a grave and silent man; a just, kindly, generous man, too.  Other men had liked him, respected him.  Gower alone had been implacable.

Well into the red and yellow dawn MacRae stood at the wheel, thinking of this, an absent look in eyes which still kept keen watch ahead.  He was glad when it came time for Steve’s watch on deck, and he could lie down and let sleep drive it out of his mind.  He did not live solely to revenge himself upon Horace Gower.  He had his own way to make and his own plans—­even if they were still a bit nebulous—­to fulfill.  It was only now and then that the past saddened him and made him bitter.