And MacRae suddenly lunged forward, as if propelled by some invisible spring of tremendous force. With incredible swiftness his left hand and then his right shot at the man's face. The two blows sounded like two open-handed smacks. But the fisherman sagged, went lurching backward.

His heels caught on the _Blackbird's_ bulwark and he pitched backward head-first into the hold of his own boat.

MacRae picked up the salmon and flung them one by one after the man, with no great haste, but with little care where they fell, for one or two spattered against the fellow's face as he clawed up out of his own hold. There was a smear of red on his lips.

"Oh! My goodness gracious, sakes alive!"

Nelly Abbott grasped Betty by the arm and murmured these expletives as much in a spirit of deviltry as of shock. Her eyes danced.

"Did you see that?" she whispered. "I never saw two men fight before.

I'd hate to have Jack MacRae hit _me_."

But Betty was holding her breath, for MacRae had picked up a twelve-foot pike pole, a thing with an ugly point and a hook of iron on its tip. He only used it, however, to shove away the boat containing the man he had so savagely smashed. And while he did that Gower curtly issued an order, and the _Arrow_ slid on to the cannery wharf.

Nelly went below for something. Betty stood by the rail, staring back thoughtfully, unaware that her father was keenly watching the look on her face, with an odd expression in his own eyes.

"You saw quite a lot of young MacRae last spring, didn't you?" he asked abruptly. "Do you like him?"

A faint touch of color leaped into her cheeks. She met her father's glance with an inquiring one of her own.

"Well--yes. Rather," she said at last. "He's a nice boy."

"Better not," Gower rumbled. His frown grew deeper. His teeth clamped a cigar in one corner of his mouth at an aggressive angle. "Granted that he is what you call a nice boy. I'll admit he's good-looking and that he dances well. And he seems to pack a punch up his sleeve. I'd suggest that you don't cultivate any romantic fancy for him. Because he's making himself a nuisance in my business--and I'm going to smash him."

Gower turned away. If he had lingered he might have observed unmistakable signs of temper. Betty flew storm signals from cheek and eye. She looked after her father with something akin to defiance, likewise with an air of astonishment.

"As if I--" she left the whispered sentence unfinished.

She perched herself on the mahogany-capped rail, and while she waited for Nelly Abbott she gave herself up to thinking of herself and her father and her father's amazing warning which carried a veiled threat,--an open threat so far as Jack MacRae was concerned. Why should he cut loose like that on her?

She stared thoughtfully at the _Blackbird_, marked the trollers slipping in from the grounds and cl.u.s.tering around the chunky carrier.

It might have interested Mr. Horace Gower could he have received a verbatim report of his daughter's reflections for the next five minutes.

But whether it would have pleased him it is hard to say.

CHAPTER IX

The Complexity of Simple Matters

The army, for a period extending over many months, had imposed a rigid discipline on Jack MacRae. The Air Service had bestowed upon him a less rigorous discipline, but a far more exacting self-control. He was not precisely aware of it, but those four years had saved him from being a firebrand of sorts in his present situation, because there resided in him a fiery temper and a capacity for pa.s.sionate extremes, and those years in the King's uniform, whatever else they may have done for him, had placed upon his headlong impulses manifold checks, taught him the vital necessity of restraint, the value of restraint.

If the war had made human life seem a cheap and perishable commodity, it had also worked to give men like MacRae a high sense of honor, to accentuate a natural distaste for lying and cheating, for anything that was mean, petty, ign.o.ble. Perhaps the Air Service was unique in that it was at once the most dangerous and the most democratic and the most individual of all the organizations that fought the Germans. It had high standards. The airmen were all young, the pick of the nations, clean, eager, vigorous boys whose ideals were still undimmed. They lived and--as it happened--died in big moments. They trained with the G.o.ds in airy s.p.a.ces and became men, those who survived.

And the G.o.ds may launch destroying thunderbolts, but they do not lie or cheat or steal. An honest man may respect an honest enemy, and be roused to murderous fury by a common rascal's trickery.

When MacRae dropped his hook in Folly Bay he was two days overdue, for the first time in his fish-running venture. The trollers had promised to hold their fish. The first man alongside to deliver reminded him of this.

"Southeaster held you up, eh?" said he. "We fished in the lee off the top end. But we might as well have laid in. Held 'em too long for you."

"They spoiled before you could slough them on the cannery, eh?" MacRae observed.

"Most of mine did. They took some."

"How many of your fish went bad?" Jack asked.

"About twenty-five, I guess."

MacRae finished checking the salmon the fisherman heaved up on the deck.

He made out two slips and handed the man his money.

"I'm paying you for the lost fish," he said. "I told you to hold them for me. I want you to hold them. If I can't get here on time, it's my loss, not yours."

The fisherman looked at the money in his hand and up at MacRae.

"Well," he said, "you're the first buyer I ever seen do that. You're all right, all right."

There were variations of this. Some of the trollers, weatherwise old sea-dogs, had foreseen that the _Blackbird_ could not face that blow, and they had sold their fish. Others had held on. These, who were all men MacRae knew, he paid according to their own estimate of loss. He did not argue. He accepted their word. It was an astonishing experience for the trolling fleet. They had never found a buyer willing to make good a loss of that kind.

But there were other folk afloat besides simple, honest fishermen who would not lie for the price of one salmon or forty. When the _Arrow_ drew abreast and stopped, a boat had pushed in beside the _Blackbird_.

The fisherman in it put half a dozen bluebacks on the deck and clambered up himself.

"You owe me for thirty besides them," he announced.

"How's that?" MacRae asked coolly.

But he was not cool inside. He knew the man, a preemptor of Folly Bay, a truckler to the cannery because he was always in debt to the cannery,--and a quarrelsome individual besides, who took advantage of his size and strength to browbeat less able men.

MacRae had got few salmon off Sam Kaye since the cannery opened. He had never asked Kaye to hold fish for him. He knew instantly what was in Kaye's mind; it had flitted from one boat to another that MacRae was making good the loss of salmon held for him, and Kaye was going to get in on this easy money if he could bluff it through.

He stood on the _Blackbird's_ deck, snarlingly demanding payment for thirty fish. MacRae looked at him silently. He hated brawling, acrimonious dispute. He was loth to a common row at that moment, because he was acutely conscious of the two girls watching. But he was even more conscious of Gower's stare and the curious expectancy of the fishermen cl.u.s.tered about his stern.

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 c.o.c.kpit 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 h.e.l.l to wheeze your breath in and out. By jiminy, you're wicked with your hands, Jack. Did you box much in France?"