The week following brought great runs of salmon to the Jew’s Mouth.  Of these the Folly Bay No. 5 somehow failed to get the lion’s share.  The gill-net men laughed in their soiled sleeves and furtively swept the bay clear each night and all night, and the daytime haul of the seine fell far below the average.  The Blackbird and the Bluebird waddled down a placid Gulf with all they could carry.

And although there was big money-making in this short stretch, and the secret satisfaction of helping put another spoke in Gower’s wheel, MacRae did not neglect the rest of his territory nor the few trollers that still worked Squitty Island.  He ran long hours to get their few fish.  It was their living, and MacRae would not pass them up because their catch meant no profit compared to the time he spent and the fuel he burned making this round.  He would drive straight up the Gulf from Bellingham to Squitty, circle the Island and then across to the mouth of the Solomon.  The weather was growing cool now.  Salmon would keep unspoiled a long time in a trailer’s hold.  It did not matter to him whether it was day or night around Squitty.  He drove his carrier into any nook or hole where a troller might lie waiting with a few salmon.

The Blackbird came pitching and diving into a heavy southeast swell up along the western side of Squitty at ten o’clock in the black of an early October night.  There was a storm brewing, a wicked one, reckoned by the headlong drop of the aneroid.  MacRae had a hundred or so salmon aboard for all his Squitty round, and he had yet to pick up those on the boats in the Cove.  He cocked his eye at a cloud-wrack streaking above, driving before a wind which had not yet dropped to the level of the Gulf, and he said to himself that it would be wise to stay in the Cove that night.  A southeast gale, a beam sea, and the tiny opening of the Jew’s Mouth was a bad combination to face in a black night.  As he stood up along Squitty he could hear the swells break along the shore.  Now and then a cold puff of air, the forerunner of the big wind, struck him.  Driving full speed the Blackbird dipped her bow deep in each sea and rose dripping to the next.  He passed Cradle Bay at last, almost under the steep cliffs, holding in to round Poor Man’s Rock and lay a compass course to the mouth of Squitty Cove.

And as he put his wheel over and swept around the Rock and came clear of Point Old a shadowy thing topped by three lights in a red and green and white triangle seemed to leap at him out of the darkness.  The lights showed, and under the lights white water hissing.  MacRae threw his weight on the wheel.  He shouted to Steve Ferrara, lying on his bunk in the little cabin aft.