Chapter VIII: Vested Rights

A small balcony over the porch of Gower's summer cottage commanded a wide sweep of the Gulf south and east. That was one reason he had built there. He liked to overlook the sea, the waters out of which he had taken a fortune, the highway of his collecting boats. He had to keep in touch with the Folly Bay cannery while the rush of the pack was on. But he was getting more fastidious as he grew older, and he no longer relished the odors of the cannery. There were other places nearer the cannery than Cradle Bay, if none more sightly, where he could have built a summer house. People wondered why he chose the point that frowned over Poor Man's Rock. Even his own family had questioned his judgment. Particularly his wife. She complained of the isolation. She insisted on a houseful of people when she was there, and as Vancouver was full of eligible week-enders of both sexes her wish was always gratified. And no one except Betty Gower ever knew that merely to sit looking out on the Gulf from that vantage point afforded her father some inscrutable satisfaction.

On a day in mid-July Horace Gower stepped out on this balcony. He carried in his hand a pair of prism binoculars. He took a casual look around. Then he put the glasses to his eyes and scanned the Gulf with a slow, searching sweep. At first sight it seemed empty. Then far eastward toward Vancouver his glass picked up two formless dots which alternately showed and disappeared.

Gower put down the glasses, seated himself in a grass chair, lighted a cigar and leaned back, looking impersonally down on Point Old and the Rock. A big, slow swell rolled up off the Gulf, breaking with a precisely spaced _boom_ along the cliffs. For forty-eight hours a southeaster had swept the sea, that rare phenomenon of a summer gale which did not blow itself out between suns. This had been a wild tantrum, driving everything of small tonnage to the nearest shelter, even delaying the big coasters.

One of these, trailing black smoke from two funnels, lifting white superstructure of cabins high above her main deck, standing bold and clear in the mellow sunshine, steamed out of the fairway between Squitty and Vancouver Island. But she gained scant heed from Gower. His eyes kept turning to where those distant specks showed briefly between periods in the hollows of the sea. They drew nearer. Gower finished his cigar in leisurely fashion. He focused the glass again. He grunted something unintelligible. They were what he fully expected to behold as soon as the southeaster ceased to whip the Gulf,--the _Bluebird_ and the _Blackbird_, Jack MacRae's two salmon carriers. They were walking up to Squitty in eight-knot boots. Through his glass Gower watched them lift and fall, lurch and yaw, running with short bursts of speed on the crest of a wave, laboring heavily in the trough, plowing steadily up through uneasy waters to take the salmon that should go to feed the hungry machines at Folly Bay.

Gower laid aside the glasses. He smoked a second cigar down to a stub, resting his plump hands on his plump stomach. He resembled a thoughtful Billiken in white flannels, a round-faced, florid, middle-aged Billiken. By that time the two _Bird_ boats had come up and parted on the head of Squitty. The _Bluebird_, captained by Vin Ferrara, headed into the Cove. The _Blackbird_, slashing along with a bone in her teeth, rounded Poor Man's Rock, cut across the mouth of Cradle Bay, and stood on up the western shore.

"He knows every pot-hole where a troller can lie. He's not afraid of wind or sea or work. No wonder he gets the fish. Those damned--"

Gower cut his soliloquy off in the middle to watch the _Blackbird_ slide out of sight behind a point. He knew all about Jack MacRae's operations, the wide swath he was cutting in the matter of blueback salmon. The Folly Bay showing to date was a pointed reminder. Gower's cannery foreman and fish collectors gave him profane accounts of MacRae's indefatigable raiding,--as it suited them to regard his operations. What Gower did not know he made it his business to find out. He sat now in his grass chair, a short, compact body of a man, with a heavy-jawed, powerful face frowning in abstraction. Gower looked younger than his fifty-six years. There was little gray in his light-brown hair. His blue eyes were clear and piercing. The thick roundness of his body was not altogether composed of useless tissue. Even considered superficially he looked what he really was, what he had been for many years,--a man accustomed to getting things done according to his desire. He did not look like a man who would fight with crude weapons--such as a pike pole--but nevertheless there was the undeniable impression of latent force, of aggressive possibilities, of the will and the ability to rudely dispose of things which might become obstacles in his way. And the current history of him in the Gulf of Georgia did not belie such an impression.

He left the balcony at last. He appeared next moving, with the stumpy, ungraceful stride peculiar to the short and thick-bodied, down the walk to a float. From this he hailed the _Arrow_, and a boy came in, rowing a dinghy.

When Gower reached the cruiser's deck he cocked his ear at voices in the after cabin. He put his head through the companion hatch. Betty Gower and Nelly Abbott were curled up on a berth, chuckling to each other over some exchange of confidences.

"Thought you were ashore," Gower grunted.

"Oh, the rest of the crowd went off on a hike into the woods, so we came out here to look around. Nelly hasn't seen the _Arrow_ inside since it was done over," Betty replied.

"I'm going to Folly Bay," Gower said. "Will you go ashore?"

"Far from such," Betty returned. "I'd as soon go to the cannery as anywhere. Can't we, daddy?"

"Oh, yes. Bit of a swell though. You may be sick."

Betty laughed. That was a standing joke between them. She had never been seasick. Nelly Abbott declared that if there was anything she loved it was to ride the dead swell that ran after a storm. They came up out of the cabin to watch the mooring line cast off, and to wave handkerchiefs at the empty cottage porches as the _Arrow_ backed and straightened and swept out of the bay.

The _Arrow_ was engined to justify her name. But the swell was heavier than it looked from shore. No craft, even a sixty-footer built for speed, finds her speed lines a thing of comfort in heavy going. Until the _Arrow_ passed into the lee of an island group halfway along Squitty she made less time than a fishing boat, and she rolled and twisted uncomfortably. If Horace Gower had a mind to reach Folly Bay before the _Blackbird_ he could not have done so. However, he gave no hint of such intention. He kept to the deck. The girls stayed below until the big cruiser struck easier going and a faster gait. Then they joined Gower.

The three of them stood by the rail just abaft the pilot house when the _Arrow_ turned into the half-mile breadth of Folly Bay. The cannery loomed white on shore, with a couple of purse seiners and a tender or two tied at the slips. And four hundred yards off the cannery wharf the _Blackbird_ had dropped anchor and lay now, a dozen trolling boats clustered about her to deliver fish.

"Slow up and stop abreast of that buyer," Gower ordered.

The _Arrow's_ skipper brought his vessel to a standstill within a boat-length of the _Blackbird_.

"Why, that's Jack MacRae," Nelly Abbott exclaimed. "Hoo-hoo, Johnny!"

She waved both hands for good measure. MacRae, bareheaded, sleeves rolled above his elbows, standing in hip boots of rubber on a deck wet and slippery with water and fish slime, amid piles of gleaming salmon, recognized her easily enough. He waved greeting, but his gaze only for that one recognizing instant left the salmon that were landing _flop, flop_ on the _Blackbird's_ deck out of a troller's fish well. He made out a slip, handed the troller some currency. There was a brief exchange of words between them. The man nodded, pushed off his boat. Instantly another edged into the vacant place. Salmon began to fall on the deck, heaved up on a picaroon. At the other end of the fish hold another of the Ferrara boys was tallying in fish.

"Old crab," Nelly Abbott murmured. "He doesn't even look at us."

"He's counting salmon, silly," Betty explained. "How can he?"

There was no particular inflection in her voice. Nevertheless Horace Gower shot a sidelong glance at his daughter. She also waved a hand pleasantly to Jack MacRae, who had faced about now.

"Why don't you say you're glad to see us, old dear?" Nelly Abbott suggested bluntly, and smiling so that all her white teeth gleamed and her eyes twinkled mischievously.

"Tickled to death," MacRae called back. He went through the pantomime of shaking hands with himself. His lips parted in a smile. "But I'm the busiest thing afloat right now. See you later."

"Nerve," Horace Gower muttered under his breath.

"Not if we see you first," Nelly Abbott retorted.

"It's not likely you will," MacRae laughed.

He turned back to his work. The fisherman alongside was tall and surly looking, a leathery-faced individual with a marked scowl. He heaved half a dozen salmon up on the _Blackbird_. Then he climbed up himself. He towered over Jack MacRae, and MacRae was not exactly a small man. He said something, his hands on his hips. MacRae looked at him. He seemed to be making some reply. And he stepped back from the man. Every other fisherman turned his face toward the _Blackbird's_ deck. Their clattering talk stopped short.

The man leaned forward. His hands left his hips, drew into doubled fists, extended threateningly. He took a step toward MacRae.

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 clustering 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.