This kink of analytical reasoning was new to MacRae, and it kept him from entering whole-heartedly into the joyous frivolity which functioned in the Abbott home that evening. He had never found himself in that critical mood before. He did not want to prattle nonsense. He did not want to think, and he could not help thinking. He had a curious sense of detachment from what was going on, even while he was a part of it. So he did not linger late.

The Blackbird had discharged at Crow Harbor late in the afternoon. She lay now at a Vancouver slip. By eleven o'clock he was aboard in his bunk, still thinking when he should have been asleep, staring wide-eyed at dim deck beams, his mind flitting restlessly from one thing to another. Steve Ferrara lay in the opposite bunk, wheezing his breath in and out of lungs seared by poison gas in Flanders. Smells of seaweed and tide-flat wafted in through open hatch and portholes. A full moon thrust silver fingers through deck openings. Gradually the softened medley of harbor noises lulled MacRae into a dreamless sleep. He only wakened at the clank of the engine and the shudder of the Blackbird's timbers as Steve backed her out of her berth in the first faint gleam of dawn.

The Blackbird made her trip and a second and a third, which brought the date late in August. On his delivery, when the salmon in her hold had been picarooned to the cannery floor, MacRae went up to the office. Stubby had sent for him. He looked uncomfortable when Jack came in.

"What's on your mind now?" MacRae asked genially.

"Something damned unpleasant," Stubby growled.

"Shoot," MacRae said. He sat down and lit a cigarette.

"I didn't think they could do it," Abbott said slowly. "But it seems they can. I guess you'll have to lay off the Gower territory after all, Jack."

"You mean you will," MacRae replied. "I've been rather expecting that. Can Gower hurt you?"

"Not personally. But the banks—export control—there are so many angles to the cannery situation. There's nothing openly threatened. But it has been made perfectly clear to me that I'll be hampered and harassed till I won't know whether I'm afoot or on horseback, if I go on paying a few cents more for salmon in order to keep my plant working efficiently. Damn it, I hate it. But I'm in no position to clash with the rest of the cannery crowd and the banks too. I hate to let you down. You've pulled me out of a hole. I don't know a man who would have worked 

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