"Fooling him?"
"That's so. He put some money into Merril's business, and it's quite likely he knows a little of his hand. Eleanor has made up her mind to know it, too."
Jimmy flushed. "The thing must be stopped."
"Well," said Jordan ruefully, "that's how I feel, but the trouble is I don't quite know how it can be done. For one thing, I'm going to run up against that Toronto man, though I don't expect Eleanor to be nice to me after it."
"You can't think she has any liking for him?"
Jordan turned on him with a snap in his eyes. "I don't. If I did, I should not have mentioned it to you. Guess I'd stake my life any time on Eleanor's doing the straight thing by me. It's what those—hotel slouches will say about her I don't like to think of; and you have to remember she'd go through fire to bring down the man who ruined your father. In one way, that's natural—but the thing has been worrying me."
Just then there was a splash of approaching oars, and Jordan rose. "That's the mate with your papers, and I guess I'll go," he said. "Get every case of that salmon—and remember what I've told you if you hear of any trouble between Eleanor and me. It won't be due to jealousy, but because I've spoiled her hand."
He left Jimmy, who remembered what he had seen in Eleanor's face the night she had talked to him of Merril, thoughtful when he rowed away. It appeared very probable that she would make things distinctly unpleasant for her suitor if he rashly ventured to interfere with any project she might have in view. Jimmy, in fact, felt tempted to sympathize with Jordan.
In a few minutes, however, he proceeded to take the Shasta out, and drove her hard all that night into a short head-sea. She had left the comparative shelter of Vancouver Island behind, and was rolling out with whirling propeller flung clear every now and then, head on to the big, white-topped combers, when as he stood dripping on his bridge a schooner running hard materialized out of the rain and spray. Jimmy pulled the whistle lanyard, and the man behind him hauled his wheel over a spoke or two; but the schooner came on heading almost for him, and rolling until her mastheads swung over the froth to weather. Her mainboom was down on her quarter, and she had only her foresail set and a little streaming jib.
She drove the latter into the back of a big gray-and-white sea as she went by, and when she hove it high once more while the water sluiced along her deck, Jimmy, who could look down at her from his bridge, recognized her as a vessel that had once belonged to his father. She drove past with a drenched object clinging desperately to her wheel, and Jimmy smiled as she vanished into the rain again, for it seemed to him that, as his comrade had said, fortune favored the little man now and then. Merril had evidently sent two schooners up to the cannery, but the Tyee was some sixty miles astern of the Shasta, and it was clear that the skipper of the other vessel could no longer thrash her to windward in that weather. There was, he believed, a good deal of salmon at the cannery, and all he had to do was to take the Shasta there.