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.

So the Blackbird ran down Squitty, rolling and yawing through a following sea, and turned into Squitty Cove to rest till night and calm settled on the Gulf.

When her mudhook was down in that peaceful nook, Steve Ferrara turned into his bunk to get a few hours' sleep against the long night watch. MacRae stirred wakeful on the sun-hot deck, slushing it down with buckets of sea water to save his ice and fish. He coiled ropes, made his vessel neat, and sat him down to think. Squitty Cove always stirred him to introspection. His mind leaped always to the manifold suggestions of any well-remembered place. He could shut his eyes and see the old log house behind its leafy screen of alder and maple at the Cove's head. The rosebushes before it were laden with bloom now. At his hand were the gray cliffs backed by grassy patches, running away inland to virgin forest. He felt dispossessed of those noble acres. He was always seeing them through his father's eyes, feeling as Donald MacRae must have felt in those last, lonely years of which he had written in simple language that had wrung his son's heart.

But it never occurred to Jack MacRae that his father, pouring out the tale of those troubled years, had bestowed upon him an equivocal heritage.

He slid overboard the small skiff the Blackbird carried and rowed 

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