"Don't know. And I don't care a hoot." MacRae shrugged his shoulders. "I'm fairly sure I can do it. You don't care?"

"Do I? I'll shout to the world I don't," Stubby replied. "It's self-preservation with me. Let old Horace look out for himself. He had his fingers in the pie while we were in France. I don't have to have four hundred per cent profit to do business. Get the fish if you can, Jack, old boy, even if it busts old Horace. Which it won't—and, as I told you, lack of them may bust me."

"By the way," Stubby said as MacRae rose to go, "don't you ever have an hour to spare in town? You haven't been out at the house for six weeks."

MacRae held out his hands. They were red and cut and scarred, roughened, and sore from salt water and ice-handling and fish slime.

"Wouldn't they look well clasping a wafer and a teacup," he laughed. "I'm working, Stub. When I have an hour to spare I lie down and sleep. If I stopped to play every time I came to town—do you think you'd get your sixty thousand bluebacks in July?"

Stubby looked at MacRae a second, at his work-torn hands and weary eyes.

"I guess you're right," he said slowly. "But the old stone house will still be up on the corner when the salmon run is over. Don't forget that."

MacRae went off to Coal Harbor to take over the second carrier. And he wondered as he went if it would all be such clear sailing, if it were possible that at the first thrust he had found an open crack in Gower's armor through which he could prick the man and make him squirm.

He looked at his hands. When they fingered death as a daily task they had been soft, white, delicate,—dainty instruments equally fit for the manipulation of aerial controls, machine guns or teacups. Why should honest work prevent a man from meeting pleasant people amid pleasant surroundings? Well, it was not the work itself, it was simply the effects of that gross labor. On the American continent, at least, a man did not lose caste by following any honest occupation,—only he could not work with the workers and flutter with the butterflies. MacRae, walking down the street, communing with himself, knew that he must pay a penalty for working with his hands. If he were a drone in uniform—necessarily a drone since the end of war—he could dance and play, flirt with pretty girls, be a welcome guest in great houses, make the heroic past pay social dividends.

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