From the Bottom Up
MacRae did nothing but mark time until he found himself a plain
citizen once more. He could have remained in the service for months
without risk and with much profit to himself. But the fighting was over.
The Germans were whipped. That had been the goal. Having reached it,
MacRae, like thousands of other young men, had no desire to loaf in a
uniform subject to military orders while the politicians wrangled.
But even when he found himself a civilian again, master of his
individual fortunes, he was still a trifle at a loss. He had no definite
plan. He was rather at sea, because all the things he had planned on
doing when he came home had gone by the board. So many things which had
seemed good and desirable had been contingent upon his father. Every
plan he had ever made for the future had included old Donald MacRae and
those wide acres across the end of Squitty. He had been deprived of
both, left without a ready mark to shoot at. The flood of war had
carried him far. The ebb of it had set him back on his native
shores,--stranded him there, so to speak, to pick up the broken threads
of his old life as best he could.
He had no quarrel with that. But he did have a feud with circumstance, a
profound resentment with the past for its hard dealing with his father,
for the blankness of old Donald's last year or two on earth. And a good
deal of this focused on Horace Gower and his works.
"He might have let up on the old man," Jack MacRae would say to himself
resentfully. He would lie awake in the dark thinking about this. "We
were doing our bit. He might have stopped putting spokes in our wheel
while the war was on."
The fact of the matter is that young MacRae was deeply touched in his
family pride as well as his personal sense of injustice. Gower had
deeply injured his father, therefore it was any MacRae's concern. It
made no difference that the first blow in this quarrel had been struck
before he was born. He smarted under it and all that followed. His only
difficulty was to discern a method of repaying in kind, which he was
thoroughly determined to do.
He saw no way, if the truth be told. He did not even contemplate
inflicting physical injury on Horace Gower. That would have been absurd.
But he wanted to hurt him, to make him squirm, to heap trouble on the
man and watch him break down under the load. And he did not see how he
possibly could. Gower was too well fortified. Four years of war
experience, which likewise embraced a considerable social experience,
had amply shown Jack MacRae the subtle power of money, of political
influence, of family connections, of commercial prestige.
All these things were on Gower's side. He was impregnable. MacRae was
not a fool. Neither was he inclined to pessimism. Yet so far as he could
see, the croakers were not lying when they said that here at home the
war had made the rich richer and the poor poorer. It was painfully true
in his own case. He had given four years of himself to his country,
gained an honorable record, and lost everything else that was worth
having.
What he had lost in a material way he meant to get back. How, he had not
yet determined. His brain was busy with that problem. And the dying down
of his first keen resentment and grief over the death of his father, and
that dead father's message to him, merely hardened into a cold resolve
to pay off his father's debt to the Gowers and Mortons. MacRae ran true
to the traditions of his Highland blood when he lumped them all
together.
In this he was directed altogether by the promptings of emotion, and he
never questioned the justice of his attitude. But in the practical
adjustment of his life to conditions as he found them he adopted a
purely rational method.
He took stock of his resources. They were limited enough. A few hundred
dollars in back pay and demobilization gratuities; a sound body, now
that his injured eye was all but healed; an abounding confidence in
himself,--which he had earned the right to feel. That was all. Ambition
for place, power, wealth, he did not feel as an imperative urge. He
perceived the value and desirability of these things. Only he saw no
short straight road to any one of them.
For four years he had been fed, clothed, directed, master of his own
acts only in supreme moments. There was an unconscious reaction from
that high pitch. Being his own man again and a trifle uncertain what to
do, he did nothing at all for a time. He made one trip to Vancouver, to
learn by just what legal processes the MacRae lands had passed into the
Gower possession. He found out what he wanted to know easily enough.
Gower had got his birthright for a song. Donald MacRae had borrowed six
thousand dollars through a broker. The land was easily worth double,
even at wild-land valuation. But old Donald's luck had run true to form.
He had not been able to renew the loan. The broker had discounted the
mortgage in a pinch. A financial house had foreclosed and sold the place
to Gower,--who had been trying to buy it for years, through different
agencies. His father's papers told young MacRae plainly enough through
what channels the money had gone. Chance had functioned on the wrong
side for his father.
So Jack went back to Squitty and stayed in the old house, talked with
the fishermen, spent a lot of his time with old Peter Ferrara and Dolly.
Always he was casting about for a course of action which would give him
scope for two things upon which his mind was set: to get the title to
that six hundred acres revested in the MacRae name, and, in Jack's own
words to Dolores Ferrara, to take a fall out of Horace Gower that would
jar the bones of his ancestors.
With Christmas the Ferrara clan gathered at the Cove, all the stout and
able company of Dolly Ferrara's menfolk. It had seemed to MacRae a
curious thing that Dolly was the only woman of all the Ferraras. There
had been mothers in the Ferrara family, or there could not have been so
many capable uncles and cousins. But in MacRae's memory there had never
been any mothers or sisters or daughters save Dolly.
There were nine male Ferraras when Jack MacRae went to France. Dolores'
father was dead. Uncle Peter was a bachelor. He had two brothers, and
each brother had bred three sons. Four of these sons had left their
boats and gear to go overseas. Two of them would never come back. The
other two were home,--one after a whiff of gas at Ypres, the other with
a leg shorter by two inches than when he went away. These two made
nothing of their disabilities, however; they were home and they were
nearly as good as ever. That was enough for them. And with the younger
boys and their fathers they came to old Peter's house for a week at
Christmas, after an annual custom. These gatherings in the old days had
always embraced Donald MacRae and his son. And his son was glad that it
included him now. He felt a little less alone.
They were of the sea, these Ferraras, Castilian Spanish, tempered and
diluted by three generations in North America. Their forebears might
have sailed in caravels. They knew the fishing grounds of the British
Columbia coast as a schoolboy knows his _a, b, c_'s. They would never
get rich, but they were independent fishermen, making a good living. And
they were as clannish as the Scotch. All of them had chipped in to send
Dolly to school in Vancouver. Old Peter could never have done that,
MacRae knew, on what he could make trolling around Poor Man's Rock.
Peter had been active with gill net and seine when Jack MacRae was too
young to take thought of the commercial end of salmon fishing. He was
about sixty-five now, a lean, hardy old fellow, but he seldom went far
from Squitty Cove. There was Steve and Frank and Vincent and Manuel of
the younger generation, and Manuel and Peter and Joaquin of the elder.
Those three had been contemporary with Donald MacRae. They esteemed old
Donald. Jack heard many things about his father's early days on the Gulf
that were new to him, that made his blood tingle and made him wish he
had lived then too. Thirty years back the Gulf of Georgia was no place
for any but two-handed men.
He heard also, in that week of casual talk among the Ferraras, certain
things said, statements made that suggested a possibility which never
seemed to have occurred to the Ferraras themselves.
"The Folly Bay pack of blueback was a whopper last summer," Vincent
Ferrara said once. "They must have cleaned up a barrel of money."
Folly Bay was Gower's cannery.
"Well, he didn't make much of it out of us," old Manuel grunted. "We
should worry."
"Just the same, he ought to be made to pay more for his fish. He ought
to pay what they're worth, for a change," Vincent drawled. "He makes
about a hundred trollers eat out of his hand the first six weeks of the
season. If somebody would put on a couple of good, fast carriers, and
start buying fish as soon as he opens his cannery, I'll bet he'd pay
more than twenty-five cents for a five-pound salmon."
"Maybe. But that's been tried and didn't work. Every buyer that ever cut
in on Gower soon found himself up against the Packers' Association when
he went into the open market with his fish. And a wise man," old Manuel
grinned, "don't even figure on monkeying with a buzz saw, sonny."
Not long afterward Jack MacRae got old Manuel in a corner and asked him
what he meant.
"Well," he said, "it's like this. When the bluebacks first run here in
the spring, they're pretty small, too small for canning. But the fresh
fish markets in town take 'em and palm 'em off on the public for salmon
trout. So there's an odd fresh-fish buyer cruises around here and picks
up a few loads of salmon between the end of April and the middle of
June. The Folly Bay cannery opens about then, and the buyers quit. They
go farther up the coast. Partly because there's more fish, mostly
because nobody has ever made any money bucking Gower for salmon on his
own grounds."
"Why?" MacRae asked bluntly.
"Nobody knows _exactly_ why," Manuel replied. "A feller can guess,
though. You know the fisheries department has the British Columbia coast
cut up into areas, and each area is controlled by some packer as a
concession. Well, Gower has the Folly Bay license, and a couple of
purse-seine licenses, and that just about gives him the say-so on all
the waters around Squitty, besides a couple of good bays on the
Vancouver Island side and the same on the mainland. He belongs to the
Packers' Association. They ain't supposed to control the local market.
But the way it works out they really do. At least, when an independent
fish buyer gets to cuttin' in strong on a packer's territory, he
generally finds himself in trouble to sell in Vancouver unless he's got
a cast-iron contract. That is, he can't sell enough to make any money.
Any damn fool can make a living.
"At the top of the island here there's a bunch that has homesteads. They
troll in the summer. They deal at the Folly Bay cannery store. Generally
they're in the hole by spring. Even if they ain't they have to depend on
Folly Bay to market their catch. The cannery's a steady buyer, once it
opens. They can't always depend on the fresh-fish buyer, even if he pays
a few cents more. So once the cannery opens, Gower has a bunch of
trollers ready to deliver salmon, at most any price he cares to name.
And he generally names the lowest price on the coast. He don't have no
competition for a month or so. If there is a little there's ways of
killin' it. So he sets his own price. The trollers can take it or leave
it."
Old Manuel stopped to light his pipe.
"For three seasons," said he, "Gower has bought blueback salmon the
first month of the season for twenty-five cents or less--fish that run
three to four pounds. And there hasn't been a time when salmon could be
bought in a Vancouver fresh-fish market for less than twenty-five cents
a pound."
"Huh!" MacRae grunted.
It set him thinking. He had a sketchy knowledge of the salmon packer's
monopoly of cannery sites and pursing licenses and waters. He had heard
more or less talk among fishermen of agreements in restraint of
competition among the canneries. But he had never supposed it to be
quite so effective as Manuel Ferrara believed.
Even if it were, a gentleman's agreement of that sort, being a matter of
profit rather than principle, was apt to be broken by any member of the
combination who saw a chance to get ahead of the rest.
MacRae took passage for Vancouver the second week in January with a
certain plan weaving itself to form in his mind,--a plan which promised
action and money and other desirable results if he could carry it
through.