The Springboard
With a basic knowledge to start from, any reasonably clever man can
digest an enormous amount of information about any given industry in a
very brief time. Jack MacRae spent three weeks in Vancouver as a one-man
commission, self-appointed, to inquire into the fresh-salmon trade. He
talked to men who caught salmon and to men who sold them, both wholesale
and retail. He apprised himself of the ins and outs of salmon canning,
and of the independent fish collector who owned his own boat, financed
himself, and chanced the market much as a farmer plants his seed, trusts
to the weather, and makes or loses according to the yield and
market,--two matters over which he can have no control.
MacRae learned before long that old Manuel Ferrara was right when he
said no man could profitably buy salmon unless he had a cast-iron
agreement either with a cannery or a big wholesaler. MacRae soon saw
that the wholesaler stood like a wall between the fishermen and those
who ate fish. They could make or break a buyer. MacRae was not long
running afoul of the rumor that the wholesale fish men controlled the
retail price of fresh fish by the simple method of controlling the
supply, which they managed by coöperation instead of competition among
themselves. He heard this stated. And more,--that behind the big dealers
stood the shadowy figure of the canning colossus. This was told him
casually by fishermen. Fish buyers repeated it, sometimes with a touch
of indignation. That was one of their wails,--the fish combine. It was
air-tight, they said. The packers had a strangle hold on the fishing
waters, and the big local fish houses had the same unrelenting grip on
the market.
Therefore the ultimate consumer--whose exploitation was the prize plum
of commercial success--paid thirty cents per pound for spring salmon
that a fisherman chivied about in the tumbling Gulf seas fifty miles
up-coast had to take fourteen cents for. As for the salmon packers, the
men who pack the good red fish in small round tins which go to all the
ends of the earth to feed hungry folk,--well, no one knew _their_
profits. Their pack was all exported. The back yards of Europe are
strewn with empty salmon cans bearing a British Columbia label. But they
made money enough to be a standing grievance to those unable to get in
on this bonanza.
MacRae, however, was chiefly concerned with the local trade in fresh
salmon. His plan didn't look quite so promising as when he mulled over
it at Squitty Cove. He put out feelers and got no hold. A fresh-fish
buyer operating without approved market connections might make about
such a living as the fishermen he bought from. To Jack MacRae, eager and
sanguine, making a living was an inconspicuous detail. Making a
living,--that was nothing to him. A more definite spur roweled his
flank.
It looked like an air-tight proposition, he admitted, at last. But, he
said to himself, anything air-tight could be punctured. And undoubtedly
a fine flow of currency would result from such a puncture. So he kept
on looking about, asking casual questions, listening. In the language of
the street he was getting wise.
Incidentally he enjoyed himself. The battle ground had been transferred
to Paris. The pen, the typewriter, and the press dispatch, with immense
reserves of oratory and printer's ink, had gone into action. And the
soldiers were coming home,--officers of the line and airmen first, since
to these leave and transportation came easily, now that the guns were
silent. MacRae met fellows he knew. A good many of them were well off,
had homes in Vancouver. They were mostly young and glad the big show was
over. And they had the social instinct. During intervals of fighting
they had rubbed elbows with French and British people of consequence.
They had a mind to enjoy themselves.
MacRae had a record in two squadrons. He needed no press-agenting when
he met another R.A.F. man. So he found himself invited to homes, the
inside of which he would otherwise never have seen, and to pleasant
functions among people who would never have known of his existence save
for the circumstance of war. Pretty, well-bred girls smiled at him,
partly because airmen with notable records were still a novelty, and
partly because Jack MacRae was worth a second look from any girl who was
fancy-free. Matrons were kind to him because their sons said he was the
right sort, and some of these same matrons mothered him because he was
like boys they knew who had gone away to France and would never come
back.
This was very pleasant. MacRae was normal in every respect. He liked to
dance. He liked glittering lights and soft music. He liked nice people.
He liked people who were nice to him. But he seldom lost sight of his
objective. These people could relax and give themselves up to enjoyment
because they were "heeled"--as a boy lieutenant slangily put it--to
MacRae.
"It's a great game, Jack, if you don't weaken," he said. "But a fellow
can't play it through on a uniform and a war record. I'm having a
top-hole time, but it'll be different when I plant myself at a desk in
some broker's office at a hundred and fifty a month. It's mixed pickles,
for a fact. You can't buy your way into this sort of thing. And you
can't stay in it without a bank roll."
Which was true enough. Only the desire to "see it through" socially was
not driving Jack MacRae. He had a different target, and his eye did not
wander far from the mark. And perhaps because of this, chance and his
social gadding about gave him the opening he sought when he least
expected to find one.
To be explicit, he happened to be one of an after-theater party at an
informal supper dance in the Granada, which is to Vancouver what the
Biltmore is to New York or the Fairmont to San Francisco,--a place where
one can see everybody that is anybody if one lingers long enough. And
almost the first man he met was a stout, ruddy-faced youngster about his
own age. They had flown in the same squadron until "Stubby" Abbott came
a cropper and was invalided home.
Stubby fell upon Jack MacRae, pounded him earnestly on the back, and
haled him straight to a table where two women were sitting.
"Mother," he said to a plump, middle-aged woman, "here's Silent John
MacRae."
Her eyes lit up pleasantly.
"I've heard of you," she said, and her extended hand put the pressure
of the seal of sincerity on her words. "I've wanted to thank you. You
can scarcely know what you did for us. Stubby's the only man in the
family, you know."
MacRae smiled.
"Why," he said easily, "little things like that were part of the game.
Stubb used to pull off stuff like that himself now and then."
"Anyway, we can thank God it's over," Mrs. Abbott said fervently.
"Pardon me,--my daughter, Mr. MacRae."
Nelly Abbott was small, tending to plumpness like her mother. She was
very fair with eyes of true violet, a baby-doll sort of young woman, and
she took possession of Jack MacRae as easily and naturally as if she had
known him for years. They drifted away in a dance, sat the next one out
together with Stubby and a slim young thing in orange satin whose talk
ran undeviatingly upon dances and sports and motor trips, past and
anticipated. Listening to her, Jack MacRae fell dumb. Her father was
worth half a million. Jack wondered how much of it he would give to
endow his daughter with a capacity for thought. A label on her program
materialized to claim her presently. Stubby looked after her and
grinned. MacRae looked thoughtful. The girl was pretty, almost
beautiful. She looked like Dolores Ferrara, dark, creamy-skinned,
seductive. And MacRae was comparing the two to Dolores' advantage.
Nelly Abbott was eying MacRae.
"Tessie bores you, eh?" she said bluntly.
MacRae smiled. "Her flow of profound utterance carries me out of my
depth, I'm afraid," said he. "I can't follow her."
"She'd lead you a chase if you tried," Stubby grinned and sauntered
away to smoke.
"Is that sarcasm?" Nelly drawled. "I wonder if you are called Silent
John because you stop talking now and then to think? Most of us don't,
you know. Tell me," she changed the subject abruptly, "did you know
Norman Gower overseas?"
"He was an officer in the battalion I went over with," MacRae replied.
"I went over in the ranks, you see. So I couldn't very well know him.
And I never met him after I transferred to the air service."
"I just wondered," Nelly went on. "I know Norman rather well. It has
been whispered about that he pulled every string to keep away from the
front,--that all he has done over there is to hold down cushy jobs in
England. Did you ever hear any such talk?"
"We were too busy to gossip about the boys at home, except to envy
them." MacRae evaded direct reply, and Nelly did not follow it up.
"I see his sister over there. Betty is a dear girl. That's she talking
to Stubby. Come over and meet her. They've been up on their island for a
long time, while the flu raged."
MacRae couldn't very well avoid it without seeming rude or making an
explanation which he did not intend to make to any one. His grudge
against the Gower clan was focused on Horace Gower. His feeling had not
abated a jot. But it was a personal matter, something to remain locked
in his own breast. So he perforce went with Nelly Abbott and was duly
presented to Miss Elizabeth Gower. And he had the next dance with her,
also for convention's sake.
While they stood chatting a moment, the four of them, Stubby said to
MacRae:
"Who are you with, Jack?"
"The Robbin-Steeles."
"If I don't get a chance to talk to you again, come out to the house
to-morrow," Stubby said. "The mater said so, and I want to talk to you
about something."
The music began and MacRae and Betty Gower slid away in the one-step,
that most conversational of dances. But Jack couldn't find himself
chatty with Betty Gower. She was graceful and clear-eyed, a vigorously
healthy girl with a touch of color in her cheeks that came out of
Nature's rouge pot. But MacRae was subtly conscious of a stiffness
between them.
"After all," Betty said abruptly, when they had circled half the room,
"it was worth fighting for, don't you really think?"
For a second MacRae looked down at her, puzzled. Then he remembered.
"Good Heavens!" he said, "is that still bothering you? Do you take
everything a fellow says so seriously as that?"
"No. It wasn't so much what you said as the way you said it," she
replied. "You were uncompromisingly hostile that day, for some reason.
Have you acquired a more equable outlook since?"
"I'm trying," he answered.
"You need coaching in the art of looking on the bright side of things,"
she smiled.
"Such as clusters of frosted lights, cut glass, diamonds, silk dresses
and ropes of pearls," he drawled. "Would you care to take on the
coaching job, Miss Gower?"
"I might be persuaded." She looked him frankly in the eyes.
But MacRae would not follow that lead, whatever it might mean. Betty
Gower was nice,--he had to admit it. To glide around on a polished floor
with his arm around her waist, her soft hand clasped in his, and her
face close to his own, her grayish-blue eyes, which were so very like
his own, now smiling and now soberly reflective, was not the way to
carry on an inherited feud. He couldn't subject himself to that
peculiarly feminine attraction which Betty Gower bore like an aura and
nurse a grudge. In fact, he had no grudge against Betty Gower except
that she was the daughter of her father. And he couldn't explain to her
that he hated her father because of injustice and injury done before
either of them was born. In the genial atmosphere of the Granada that
sort of thing did not seem nearly so real, so vivid, as when he stood on
the cliffs of Squitty listening to the pound of the surf. Then it welled
up in him like a flood,--the resentment for all that Gower had made his
father suffer, for those thirty years of reprisal which had culminated
in reducing his patrimony to an old log house and a garden patch out of
all that wide sweep of land along the southern face of Squitty. He
looked at Betty and wished silently that she were,--well, Stubby
Abbott's sister. He could be as nice as he wanted to then. Whereupon,
instinctively feeling himself upon dangerous ground, he diverged from
the personal, talked without saying much until the music stopped and
they found seats. And when another partner claimed Betty, Jack as a
matter of courtesy had to rejoin his own party.
The affair broke up at length. MacRae slept late the next morning. By
the time he had dressed and breakfasted and taken a flying trip to Coal
Harbor to look over a forty-five-foot fish carrier which was advertised
for sale, he bethought himself of Stubby Abbott's request and, getting
on a car, rode out to the Abbott home. This was a roomy stone house
occupying a sightly corner in the West End,--that sharply defined
residential area of Vancouver which real estate agents unctuously speak
of as "select." There was half a block of ground in green lawn bordered
with rosebushes. The house itself was solid, homely, built for use, and
built to endure, all stone and heavy beams, wide windows and deep
porches, and a red tile roof lifting above the gray stone walls.
Stubby permitted MacRae a few minutes' exchange of pleasantries with his
mother and sister.
"I want to extract some useful information from this man," Stubby said
at length. "You can have at him later, Nell. He'll stay to dinner."
"How do you know he will?" Nelly demanded. "He hasn't said so, yet."
"Between you and me, he can't escape," Stubby said cheerfully and led
Jack away upstairs into a small cheerful room lined with bookshelves,
warmed by glowing coals in a grate, and with windows that gave a look
down on a sandy beach facing the Gulf.
Stubby pushed two chairs up to the fire, waved Jack to one, and extended
his own feet to the blaze.
"I've seen the inside of a good many homes in town lately," MacRae
observed. "This is the homiest one yet."
"I'll say it is," Stubby agreed. "A place that has been lived in and
cared for a long time gets that way, though. Remember some of those old,
old places in England and France? This is new compared to that country.
Still, my father built this house when the West End was covered with
virgin timber."
"How'd you like to be born and grow up in a house that your father
built with a vision of future generations of his blood growing up in,"
Stubby murmured, "and come home crippled after three years in the red
mill and find you stood a fat chance of losing it?"
"I wouldn't like it much," MacRae agreed.
But he did not say that he had already undergone the distasteful
experience Stubby mentioned as a possibility. He waited for Stubby to go
on.
"Well, it's a possibility," Stubby continued, quite cheerfully, however.
"I don't propose to allow it to happen. Hang it, I wouldn't blat this to
any one but you, Jack. The mater has only a hazy idea of how things
stand, and she's an incurable optimist anyway. Nelly and the Infant--you
haven't met the Infant yet--don't know anything about it. I tell you it
put the breeze up when I got able to go into our affairs and learned how
things stood. I thought I'd get mended and then be a giddy idler for a
year or so. But it's up to me. I have to get into the collar. Otherwise
I should have stayed south all winter. You know we've just got home. I
had to loaf in the sun for practically a year. Now I have to get busy. I
don't mean to say that the poorhouse stares us in the face, you know,
but unless a certain amount of revenue is forthcoming, we simply can't
afford to keep up this place.
"And I'd damn well like to keep it going." Stubby paused to light a
cigarette. "I like it. It's our home. We'd be deucedly sore at seeing
anybody else hang up his hat and call it home. So behold in me an active
cannery operator when the season opens, a conscienceless profiteer for
sentiment's sake. You live up where the blueback salmon run, don't you,
Jack?"
MacRae nodded.
"How many trollers fish those waters?"
"Anywhere from forty to a hundred, from ten to thirty rowboats."
"The Folly Bay cannery gets practically all that catch?"
MacRae nodded again.
"I'm trying to figure a way of getting some of those blueback salmon,"
Abbott said crisply. "How can it best be done?"
MacRae thought a minute. A whole array of possibilities popped into his
mind. He knew that the Abbotts owned the Crow Harbor cannery, in the
mouth of Howe Sound just outside Vancouver Harbor. When he spoke he
asked a question instead of giving an answer.
"Are you going to buck the Packers' Association?"
"Yes and no," Stubby chuckled. "You do know something about the cannery
business, don't you?"
"One or two things," MacRae admitted. "I grew up in the Gulf, remember,
among salmon fishermen."
"Well, I'll be a little more explicit," Stubby volunteered. "Briefly, my
father, as you know, died while I was overseas. We own the Crow Harbor
cannery. I will say that while I was still going to school he started in
teaching me the business, and he taught me the way he learned it
himself--in the cannery and among fishermen. If I do say it, I know the
salmon business from gill net and purse seine to the Iron Chink and bank
advances on the season's pack. But Abbott, senior, it seems, wasn't a
profiteer. He took the war to heart. His patriotism didn't consist of
buying war bonds in fifty-thousand dollar lots and calling it square. He
got in wrong by trying to keep the price of fresh fish down locally, and
the last year he lived the Crow Harbor cannery only made a normal
profit. Last season the plant operated at a loss in the hands of hired
men. They simply didn't get the fish. The Fraser River run of sockeye
has been going downhill. The river canneries get the fish that do run.
Crow Harbor, with a manager who wasn't up on his toes, got very few. I
don't believe we will ever see another big sockeye run in the Fraser
anyway. So we shall have to go up-coast to supplement the Howe Sound
catch and the few sockeyes we can get from gill-netters.
"The Packers' Association can't hurt me--much. For one thing, I'm a
member. For another, I can still swing enough capital so they would
hesitate about using pressure. You understand. I've got to make that
Crow Harbor plant pay. I must have salmon to do so. I have to go outside
my immediate territory to get them. If I could get enough blueback to
keep full steam from the opening of the sockeye season until the coho
run comes--there's nothing to it. I've been having this matter looked
into pretty thoroughly. I can pay twenty per cent. over anything Gower
has ever paid for blueback and coin money. The question is, how can I
get them positively and in quantity?"
"Buy them," MacRae put in softly.
"Of course," Stubby agreed. "But buying direct means collecting. I have
the carriers, true. But where am I going to find men to whom I can turn
over a six-thousand-dollar boat and a couple of thousand dollars in cash
and say to him, 'Go buy me salmon'? His only interest in the matter is
his wage."
"Bonus the crew. Pay 'em percentage on what salmon they bring in."
"I've thought of that," Stubby said between puffs. "But--"
"Or," MacRae made the plunge he had been coming to while Stubby talked,
"I'll get them for you. I was going to buy bluebacks around Squitty
anyway for the fresh-fish market in town if I can make a sure-delivery
connection. I know those grounds. I know a lot of fishermen. If you'll
give me twenty per cent. over Gower prices for bluebacks delivered at
Crow Harbor I'll get them."
"This grows interesting." Stubby straightened in his chair. "I thought
you were going to ranch it! Lord, I remember the night we sat watching
for the bombers to come back from a raid and you first told me about
that place of yours on Squitty Island. Seems ages ago--yet it isn't
long. As I remember, you were planning all sorts of things you and your
father would do."
"I can't," MacRae said grimly. "You've been in California for months.
You wouldn't hear any mention of my affairs, anyway, if you'd been home.
I got back three days before the armistice. My father died of the flu
the night I got home. The ranch, or all of it but the old log house I
was born in and a patch of ground the size of a town lot, has gone the
way you mentioned your home might go if you don't buck up the business.
Things didn't go well with us lately. I have no land to turn to. So I'm
for the salmon business as a means to get on my feet."
"Gower got your place?" Abbott hazarded.
"Yes. How did you know?"
"Made a guess. I heard he had built a summer home on the southeast end
of Squitty. In fact Nelly was up there last summer for a week or so.
Hurts, eh, Jack? That little trip to France cost us both something."
MacRae sprang up and walked over to a window. He stood for half a minute
staring out to sea, looking in that direction by chance, because the
window happened to face that way, to where the Gulf haze lifted above a
faint purple patch that was Squitty Island, very far on the horizon.
"I'm not kicking," he said at last. "Not out loud, anyway."
"No," Stubby said affectionately, "I know you're not, old man. Nor am I.
But I'm going to get action, and I have a hunch you will too. Now about
this fish business. If you think you can get them, I'll certainly go you
on that twenty per cent. proposition--up to the point where Gower boosts
me out of the game, if that is possible. We shall have to readjust our
arrangement then."
"Will you give me a contract to that effect?" MacRae asked.
"Absolutely. We'll get together at the office to-morrow and draft an
agreement."
They shook hands to bind the bargain, grinning at each other a trifle
self-consciously.
"Have you a suitable boat?" Stubby asked after a little.
"No," MacRae admitted. "But I have been looking around. I find that I
can charter one cheaper than I can build--until such time as I make
enough to build a fast, able carrier."
"I'll charter you one," Stubby offered. "That's where part of our money
is uselessly tied up, in expensive boats that never carried their weight
in salmon. I'm going to sell two fifty-footers and a seine boat. There's
one called the _Blackbird_, fast, seaworthy rig, you can have at a
nominal rate."
"All right," MacRae nodded. "By chartering I have enough cash in hand to
finance the buying. I'm going to start as soon as the bluebacks come
and run fresh fish, if I can make suitable connections."
Stubby grinned.
"I can fix that too," he said. "I happen to own some shares in the
Terminal Fish Company. The pater organized it to give Vancouver people
cheap fish, but somehow it didn't work as he intended. It's a fairly
strong concern. I'll introduce you. They'll buy your salmon, and they'll
treat you right."
"And now," Stubby rose and stretched his one good arm and the other that
was visibly twisted and scarred between wrist and elbow, above his head,
"let's go downstairs and prattle. I see a car in front, and I hear
twittering voices."
Halfway down the stairs Stubby halted and laid a hand on MacRae's arm.
"Old Horace is a two-fisted old buccaneer," he said. "And I don't go
much on Norman. But I'll say Betty Gower is some girl. What do you
think, Silent John?"
And Jack MacRae had to admit that Betty was. Oddly enough, Stubby Abbott
had merely put into words an impression to which MacRae himself was
slowly and reluctantly subscribing.