"So thick and fast they came at last,
And more and more and more."
He sat watching them pass, wondering why the great trek. The trolling fleet normally shifted by pairs and dozens. This was a squadron movement, the Grand Fleet steaming to some appointed rendezvous. MacRae watched till the sun dipped behind the hills, and the reddish tint left the sea to linger briefly on the summit of the Coast Range flanking the mainland shore. The fish boats were still coming, one behind the other, lurching and swinging in the trough of the sea, rising and falling, with wheeling gulls crying above them. On each deck a solitary fisherman humped over his steering gear. From each cleaving stem the bow-wave curled in white foam.
There was something in the wind. MacRae felt it like a premonition. He left his boulder and hurried back toward the Cove.
The trolling boats were packed about the Blanco so close that MacRae left his dinghy on the outer fringe and walked across their decks to the deck of his own vessel. The Blanco loomed in the midst of these lesser craft like a hen over her brood of chicks. The fishermen had gathered on the nearest boats. A dozen had clambered up and taken seats on the Blanco's low bulwarks. MacRae gained his own deck and looked at them.
"What's coming off?" he asked quietly. "You fellows holding a convention of some sort?"
One of the men sitting on the big carrier's rail spoke.
"Folly Bay's quit—shut down," he said sheepishly. "We come to see if you'd start buying again."
MacRae sat down on one sheave of his deck winch. He took out a cigarette and lighted it, swung one foot back and forth. He did not make haste to reply. An expectant hush fell on the crowd. In the slow-gathering dusk there was no sound but the creak of rubbing gunwales, the low snore of the sea breaking against the cliffs, and the chug-chug of the last stragglers beating into the shelter of the Cove.
"He shut down the cannery," the fishermen's spokesman said at last. "We ain't seen a buyer or collector for three days. The water's full of salmon, an' we been suckin' our thumbs an' watching 'em play. If you won't buy here again we got to go where there is buyers. And we'd rather not do that. There's no place on the Gulf as good fishin' as there is here now."
"What was the trouble?" MacRae asked absently. "Couldn't you supply him with fish?"