Thrust and Counterthrust
By the time Jack MacRae was writing August on his sales slips he was
conscious of an important fact; namely, that nearly a hundred gas-boat
fishermen, trolling Squitty Island, the Ballenas, Gray Rock, even
farther afield to Yellow Rock Light and Lambert Channel, were compactly
behind him. They were still close to a period when they had been
remorselessly exploited. They were all for MacRae. Prices being equal,
they preferred that he should have their fish. It was still vivid in
their astonished minds that he had shared profits with them without
compulsion, that he had boosted prices without competition, had put a
great many dollars in their pockets. Only those who earn a living as
precariously, as riskily and with as much patient labor as a salmon
fisherman, can so well value a dollar. They had an abiding confidence,
by this time, in Jack MacRae. They knew he was square, and they said so.
In the territory his two carriers covered, MacRae was becoming the
uncrowned salmon king. Other buyers cut in from time to time. They did
not fare well. The trollers would hold their salmon, even when some
sporting independent offered to shade the current price. They would
shake their heads if they knew either of the _Bird_ boats would be there
to take the fish. For when MacRae said he would be there, he was always
there. In the old days they had been compelled to play one buyer
against another. They did not have to do that with MacRae.
The Folly Bay collectors fared little better than outside buyers. In
July Gower met MacRae's price by two successive raises. He stopped at
that. MacRae did not. Each succeeding run of salmon averaged greater
poundage. They were worth more. MacRae paid fifty, fifty-five cents.
When Gower stood pat at fifty-five, MacRae gave up a fourth of his
contract percentage and paid sixty. It was like draw poker with the
advantage of the last raise on his side.
The salmon were worth the price. They were worth double to a cannery
that lay mostly idle for lack of fish. The salmon, now, were running
close to six pounds each. The finished product was eighteen dollars a
case in the market. There are forty-eight one-pound cans in a case. To a
man familiar with packing costs it is a simple sum. MacRae often
wondered why Gower stubbornly refused to pay more, when his collecting
boats came back to the cannery so often with a few scattered salmon in
their holds. They were primitive folk, these salmon trollers. They
jeered the unlucky collectors. Gower was losing his fishermen as well as
his fish. For the time, at least, the back of his long-held monopoly was
broken.
MacRae got a little further light on this attitude from Stubby Abbott.
"He's figuring on making out a season's pack with cohoes, humps, and dog
salmon," Stubby told MacRae at the Crow Harbor cannery. "He expects to
work his purse seiners overtime, and to hell with the individual
fisherman. Norman was telling me. Old Horace has put Norman in charge at
Folly Bay, you know."
MacRae nodded. He knew about that.
"The old boy is sore as a boil at you and me," Stubby chuckled. "I
don't blame him much. He has had a cinch there so long he thinks it's
his private pond. You've certainly put a crimp in the Folly Bay blueback
pack--to my great benefit. I don't suppose any one but you could have
done it either."
"Any one could," MacRae declared, "if he knew the waters, the men, and
was wise enough to play the game square. The trouble has been that each
buyer wanted to make a clean-up on each trip. He wanted easy money. The
salmon fisherman away up the coast practically has to take what is
offered him day by day, or throw his fish overboard. Canneries and
buyers alike have systematically given him the worst of the deal. You
don't cut your cannery hands' pay because on certain days your pack
falls off."
"Hardly."
"But canneries and collectors and every independent buyer have always
used any old pretext to cut the price to the fisherman out on the
grounds. And while a fisherman has to take what he is offered he doesn't
have to keep on taking it. He can quit, and try something else. Lots of
them have done that. That's why there are three Japanese to every white
salmon fisherman on the British Columbia coast. That is why we have an
Oriental problem. The Japs are making the canneries squeal, aren't
they?"
"Rather." Stubby smiled. "They are getting to be a bit of a problem."
"The packers got them in here as cheap labor in the salmon fishing,"
MacRae went on. "The white fisherman was too independent. He wanted all
he could get out of his work. He was a kicker, as well as a good
fisherman. The packers thought they could keep wages down and profits
up by importing the Jap--cheap labor with a low standard of living. And
the Jap has turned the tables on the big fellows. They hang together, as
aliens always do in a strange country, and the war has helped them
freeze the white fisherman out on one hand and exact more and more from
the canneries on the other. And that would never have happened if this
had been kept a white man's country, and the white fisherman had got a
square deal."
"To buy as cheaply as you can and sell for as much as you can," Stubby
reminded him, "is a fundamental of business. You can't get away from it.
My father abandoned that maxim the last two years of his life, and it
nearly broke us. He was a public-spirited man. He took war and war-time
conditions to heart. In a period of jumping food costs he tried to give
people cheaper food. As I said, he nearly went broke trying to do a
public service, because no one else in the same business departed from
the business rule of making all they could. In fact, men in the same
business, I have since learned, were the first to sharpen their knives
for him. He was establishing a bad precedent. I don't know but their
attitude is sound, after all. In sheer self-defense a man must make all
he can when he has a chance. You cannot indulge in philanthropy in a
business undertaking these days, Silent John."
"Granted," MacRae made answer. "I don't propose to be a philanthropist
myself. But you will get farther with a salmon fisherman, or any other
man whose labor you must depend on, if you accept the principle that he
is entitled to make a dollar as well as yourself, if you don't stretch
every point to take advantage of his necessity. These fellows who fish
around Squitty have been gouged and cheated a lot. They aren't fools.
They know pretty well who makes the long profit, who pile up moderate
fortunes while they get only a living, and not a particularly good
living at that."
"Are you turning Bolshevik?" Stubby inquired with mock solicitude.
MacRae smiled.
"Hardly. Nor are the fishermen. They know I'm making money. But they
know also that they are getting more out of it than they ever got
before, and that if I were not on the job they would get a lot less."
"They certainly would," Abbott drawled. "You have been, and are now,
paying more for blueback salmon than any buyer on the Gulf."
"Well, it has paid me. And it has been highly profitable to you, hasn't
it?" MacRae said. "You've had a hundred thousand salmon to pack which
you would not otherwise have had."
"Certainly," Stubby agreed. "I'm not questioning your logic. In this
case it has paid us both, and the fisherman as well. But suppose
everybody did it?"
"If you can pay sixty cents a fish, and fifteen per cent, on top of that
and pack profitably, why can't other canneries? Why can't Folly Bay meet
that competition? Rather, why won't they?"
"Matter of policy, maybe," Stubby hazarded. "Matter of keeping costs
down. Apart from a few little fresh-fish buyers, you are the only
operator on the Gulf who is cutting any particular ice. Gower may figure
that he will eventually get these fish at his own price. If I were
eliminated, he would."
"I'd still be on the job," MacRae ventured.
"Would you, though?" Stubby asked doubtfully.
"Yes." MacRae made his reply positive in tone. "You could buy all
right. That Squitty Island bunch of trollers seem convinced you are the
whole noise in the salmon line. But without Crow Harbor where could you
unload such quantities of fish?"
It struck MacRae that there was something more than mere casual
speculation in Stubby's words. But he did not attempt to delve into
motives.
"A good general," he said with a dry smile, "doesn't advertise his plan
of campaign in advance. Without Crow Harbor as a market I could not have
done what I have done this season. But Crow Harbor could shut down
to-morrow--and I'd go on just the same."
Stubby poked thoughtfully with a pencil at the blotter on his desk.
"Well, Jack, I may as well be quite frank with you," he said at last. "I
have had hints that may mean something. The big run will be over at
Squitty in another month. I don't believe I can be dictated to on short
notice. But I cannot positively say. If you can see your way to carry
on, it will be quite a relief to me. Another season it may be
different."
"I think I can."
But though MacRae said this confidently, he was privately not so sure.
From the very beginning he had expected pressure to come on Stubby, as
the active head of Crow Harbor. It was as Stubby said. Unless
he--MacRae--had a market for his fish, he could not buy. And within the
limits of British Columbia the salmon market was subject to control; by
just what means MacRae had got inklings here and there. He had not been
deceived by the smoothness of his operations so far. Below the clear
horizon there was a storm gathering. A man like Gower did not lie down
and submit passively to being beaten at his own game.
But MacRae believed he had gone too far to be stopped now, even if his
tactics did not please the cannery interests. They could have squelched
him easily enough in the beginning, when he had no funds to speak of,
when his capital was mostly a capacity for hard, dirty work and a
willingness to take chances. Already he had run his original shoestring
to fifteen thousand dollars cash in hand. It scarcely seemed possible.
It gave him a startling vision of the profits in the salmon industry,
and it was not a tenable theory that men who had controlled such a
source of profits would sit idle while he undermined their monopoly.
Nevertheless he had made that much money in four months. He had at his
back a hundred fishermen who knew him, liked him, trusted him, who were
anxious that he should prosper, because they felt that they were sharing
in that prosperity. Ninety per cent. of these men had a grievance
against the canneries. And he had the good will of these men with
sun-browned faces and hook-scarred hands. The human equation in
industrial processes is a highly important one, as older, wiser men than
Jack MacRae had been a longer time discovering.
He did not try to pin Stubby to a more definite statement. A hint was
enough for MacRae. Stubby Abbott could also be depended upon to see
things beyond the horizon. If a storm broke Stubby was the most
vulnerable, because in a sense he was involved with the cannery
interests in general, and they would consider him an apostate and knife
him without mercy,--if they could. If the Abbott estate had debts,
obligations which could be manipulated, if through the financial
convolutions of marketing the Crow Harbor pack Stubby could be reached,
the Abbott family had property, a standard of living that stood for
comfort, appearance, luxury almost. There are always plenty of roads
open to a flank attack on people like that; many levers, financial and
otherwise, can be pulled for or against them.
So MacRae, knowing that Stubby must protect himself in a showdown, set
about fortifying his own approaches.
For a first move he hired an engineer, put Steve Ferrara in charge of
the _Blackbird_, and started him back to Squitty. Then MacRae took the
next train to Bellingham, a cannery town which looks out on the southern
end of the Gulf of Georgia from the American side of the boundary. He
extended his journey to Seattle. Altogether, he was gone three days.
When he came back he made a series of calls,--at the Vancouver offices
of three different canneries and one of the biggest cold-storage
concerns on the Pacific Coast. He got a courteous but unsatisfactory
reception from the cannery men. He fared a little better with the
manager of the cold-storage plant. This gentleman was tentatively
agreeable in the matter of purchasing salmon, but rather vague in the
way of terms.
"Beginning with May next I can deliver any quantity up to two thousand a
day, perhaps more, for a period of about four months," MacRae stated.
"What I should like to know is the percentage over the up-coast price
you would pay."
But he could not pin the man down to anything definite. He would only
speak pleasantly of the market and possible arrangements, utter vague
commonplaces in business terminology. MacRae rose.
"I'm wasting your time and my own," he said. "You don't want my fish.
Why not say so?"
"We always want fish," the man declared, bending a shrewdly appraising
eye on MacRae. "Bring in the salmon and we will do business."
"On your own terms when my carriers are tied to your dock with a
capacity load which I must sell or throw overboard within forty-eight
hours," MacRae smiled. "No, I don't intend to go up against any
take-it-or-leave proposition like that. I don't have to."
"Well, we might allow you five per cent. That's about the usual thing on
salmon. And we would rather have salmon now than a promise of them next
season."
"Oh, rats!" MacRae snorted. "I'm in the business to make money--not
simply to create dividends for your Eastern stockholders while I eke out
a living and take all the risks. Come again."
The cold storage man smiled.
"Come and see me in the spring. Meantime, when you have a cargo of
salmon, you might run them in to us. We'll pay market prices. It's up to
you to protect yourself in the buying."
MacRae went on about his business. He had not expected much
encouragement locally, so he did not suffer disappointment. He knew
quite well what he could expect in Vancouver if Crow Harbor canceled his
contract. He would bring in boatloads of salmon, and the dealers would
squeeze him, all but the Terminal Fish Company. And if the market could
be controlled, if the men behind could dictate the Crow Harbor policy,
they might also bring the Terminal into line. Even if they did not the
Terminal could only handle a minor portion of the salmon he could get
while the big run swirled around Squitty Island.
But MacRae was not downcast. He was only sober and thoughtful, which had
become characteristic of him in the last four months. He was forgetting
how to laugh, to be buoyant, to see the world through the rose-colored
glasses of sanguine youth. He was becoming a living exampler of his
nickname. Even Stubby Abbott marked this when Jack came back from
Bellingham.
"Come on out to the house," Stubby urged. "Your men can handle the job a
day or two longer. Forget the grind for once. It's getting you."
"No, I don't think it is," MacRae denied. "But a man can't play and
produce at the same time. I have to keep going."
He did go out to Abbott's one evening, however, and suffered a good deal
of teasing from Nelly over his manhandling of Sam Kaye. A lot of other
young people happened to foregather there. They sang and flirted and
presently moved the rugs off the living-room floor and danced to a
phonograph. MacRae found himself a little out of it, by inclination. He
was tired, without knowing quite what was the matter with him. A man,
even a young and sturdy man, cannot work like a horse for months on end,
eating his meals anyhow and sleeping when he can, without losing
temporarily the zest for careless fun. For another thing, he found
himself looking at these immaculate young people as any hard-driven
worker must perforce look upon drones.
They were sons and daughters of the well-to-do, divorced from all
uncouthness, with pretty manners and good clothes. They seemed serene in
the assurance--MacRae got this impression for the first time in his
social contact with them--that wearing good clothes, behaving well,
giving themselves whole-heartedly to having a good time, was the most
important and satisfying thing in the world. They moved in an atmosphere
of considering these things their due, a birthright, their natural and
proper condition of well-being.
And MacRae found himself wondering what they gave or ever expected to
give in return for this pleasant security of mind and body. Some one had
to pay for it, the silks and georgettes and white flannels, furs and
strings of pearls and gold trinkets, the good food, the motor cars, and
the fun.
He knew a little about every one he met that evening, for in Vancouver
as in any other community which has developed a social life beyond the
purely primitive stages of association, people gravitate into sets and
cliques. They lived in good homes, they had servants, they week-ended
here and there. Of the dozen or more young men and women present, only
himself and Stubby Abbott made any pretense at work.
Yet somebody paid for all they had and did. Men in offices, in shops, in
fishing boats and mines and logging camps worked and sweated to pay for
all this well-being in which they could have no part. MacRae even
suspected that a great many men had died across the sea that this sort
of thing should remain the inviolate privilege of just such people as
these. It was not an inspiring conclusion.
He smiled to himself. How they would stare if he should voice these
stray thoughts in plain English. They would cry out that he was a
Bolshevik. Absolutely! He wondered why he should think such things. He
wasn't disgruntled. He wanted a great many things which these young
people of his own age had gotten from fairy godmothers,--in the shape of
pioneer parents who had skimmed the cream off the resources of a
developing frontier and handed it on to their children, and who
themselves so frequently kept in the background, a little in awe of
their gilded offspring. MacRae meant to beat the game as it was being
played. He felt that he was beating it. But nothing would be handed him
on a silver salver. Fortune would not be bestowed upon him in any easy,
soft-handed fashion. He would have to render an equivalent for what he
got. He wondered if the security of success so gained would have any
greater value for him than it would have for those who took their
blessings so lightly.
This kink of analytical reasoning was new to MacRae, and it kept him
from entering whole-heartedly into the joyous frivolity which functioned
in the Abbott home that evening. He had never found himself in that
critical mood before. He did not want to prattle nonsense. He did not
want to think, and he could not help thinking. He had a curious sense of
detachment from what was going on, even while he was a part of it. So he
did not linger late.
The _Blackbird_ had discharged at Crow Harbor late in the afternoon. She
lay now at a Vancouver slip. By eleven o'clock he was aboard in his
bunk, still thinking when he should have been asleep, staring wide-eyed
at dim deck beams, his mind flitting restlessly from one thing to
another. Steve Ferrara lay in the opposite bunk, wheezing his breath in
and out of lungs seared by poison gas in Flanders. Smells of seaweed and
tide-flat wafted in through open hatch and portholes. A full moon thrust
silver fingers through deck openings. Gradually the softened medley of
harbor noises lulled MacRae into a dreamless sleep. He only wakened at
the clank of the engine and the shudder of the _Blackbird's_ timbers as
Steve backed her out of her berth in the first faint gleam of dawn.
The _Blackbird_ made her trip and a second and a third, which brought
the date late in August. On his delivery, when the salmon in her hold
had been picarooned to the cannery floor, MacRae went up to the office.
Stubby had sent for him. He looked uncomfortable when Jack came in.
"What's on your mind now?" MacRae asked genially.
"Something damned unpleasant," Stubby growled.
"Shoot," MacRae said. He sat down and lit a cigarette.
"I didn't think they could do it," Abbott said slowly. "But it seems
they can. I guess you'll have to lay off the Gower territory after all,
Jack."
"You mean _you_ will," MacRae replied. "I've been rather expecting that.
Can Gower hurt you?"
"Not personally. But the banks--export control--there are so many angles
to the cannery situation. There's nothing openly threatened. But it has
been made perfectly clear to me that I'll be hampered and harassed till
I won't know whether I'm afoot or on horseback, if I go on paying a few
cents more for salmon in order to keep my plant working efficiently.
Damn it, I hate it. But I'm in no position to clash with the rest of the
cannery crowd and the banks too. I hate to let you down. You've pulled
me out of a hole. I don't know a man who would have worked at your pitch
and carried things off the way you have. If I had this pack marketed, I
could snap my fingers at them. But I haven't. There's the rub. I hate to
ditch you in order to insure myself--get in line at somebody else's
dictation."
"Don't worry about me," MacRae said gently. "I have no cannery and no
pack to market through the regular channels. Nor has the bank advanced
me any funds. You are not responsible for what I do. And neither Gower
nor the Packers' Association nor the banks can stop me from buying
salmon so long as I have the money to pay the fishermen and carriers to
haul them, can they?"
"No, but the devil of it is they can stop you _selling_," Stubby
lamented bitterly. "I tell you there isn't a cannery on the Gulf will
pay you a cent more than they pay the fishermen. What's the use of
buying if you can't sell?"
MacRae did not attempt to answer that.
"Let's sum it up," he said. "You can't take any more bluebacks from
Gower's territory. That, I gather, is the chief object. I suppose they
know as much about your business as you know yourself. Am I to be
deprived of the two boat charters into the bargain?"
"No, by the Lord," Stubby swore. "Not if you want them. My general
policy may be subject to dictation, but not the petty details of my
business. There's a limit. I won't stand for that."
"Put a fair price on the _Birds_, and I'll buy 'em both," MacRae
suggested. "You had them up for sale, anyway. That will let you out, so
far as my equipment is concerned."
"Five thousand each," Stubby said promptly.
"They're good value at that. And I can use ten thousand dollars to
advantage, right now."
"I'll give you a check. I want the registry transferred to me at once,"
MacRae continued. "That done, you can cease worrying over me, Stub.
You've been square, and I've made money on the deal. You would be
foolish to fight unless you have a fighting chance. Oh, another thing.
Will the Terminal shut off on me, too?"
"No," Stubby declared. "The Terminal is one of the weapons I intend
ultimately to use as a club on the heads of this group of gentlemen who
want to make a close corporation of the salmon industry on the British
Columbia coast. If I get by this season, I shall be in shape to show
them something. They will not bother about the Terminal, because the
Terminal is small. All the salmon they could take from you wouldn't hurt
Gower. What they want is to enable Gower to get up his usual fall pack.
It has taken him this long to get things shaped so he could call me off.
He can't reach a local concern like the Terminal. No, the Terminal will
continue to buy salmon from you, Jack. But you know they haven't the
facilities to handle a fourth of the salmon you have been running
lately."
"I'll see they get whatever they can use," MacRae declared. "And if it
is any satisfaction to you personally, Stub, I can assure you that I
shall continue to do business as usual."
Stubby looked curious.
"You've got something up your sleeve?"
"Yes," MacRae admitted. "No stuffed club, either. It's loaded. You wait
and keep your ears open."
MacRae's face twisted into a mirthless smile. His eyes glowed with the
fire that always blazed up in them when he thought too intensely of
Horace Gower and the past, or of Gower's various shifts to defeat him in
what he undertook. He had anticipated this move. He was angrily
determined that Gower should not get one more salmon, or buy what he got
a cent cheaper, by this latest strategy.
"You appear to like old Horace," Stubby said thoughtfully, "about as
much as our fellows used to like Fritz when he dropped high explosives
on supposedly bomb-proof shelters."
"Just about as much," MacRae said shortly. "Well, you'll transfer that
registry--when? I want to get back to Squitty as soon as possible."
"I'll go to town with you now, if you like," Stubby offered.
They acted on that. Within two hours MacRae was the owner of two motor
launches under British registry. Payment in full left him roughly with
five thousand dollars working capital, enough by only a narrow margin.
At sunset Vancouver was a smoky smudge on a far horizon. At dusk he
passed in the narrow mouth of Squitty Cove. The _Bluebird_ was swinging
about to go when her sister ship ranged alongside. Vincent Ferrara
dropped his hook again. There were forty trollers in the Cove. MacRae
called to them. They came in skiffs and dinghys, and when they were all
about his stern and some perched in sea boots along the _Blackbird's_
low bulwarks, MacRae said what he had to say.
"Gower has come alive. My market for fish bought in Gower's territory is
closed, so far as Crow Harbor is concerned. If I can't sell salmon I
can't buy them from you. How much do you think Folly Bay will pay for
your fish?"
He waited a minute. The fishermen looked at him in the yellow lantern
light, at each other. They shifted uneasily. No one answered his
question.
MacRae went on.
"You can guess what will happen. You will be losers. So will I. I don't
like the idea of being frozen out of the salmon-buying business, now
that I have got my hand in. I don't intend to be. As long as I can
handle a load of salmon I'll make the run. But I've got to run them
farther, and you fellows will have to wait a bit for me now and then,
perhaps. The cannery men hang together. They are making it bad for me
because I'm paying a few cents more for salmon. They have choked off
Crow Harbor. Gower is hungry for cheap salmon. He'll get them, too, if
you let him head off outside buyers. Since I'm the only buyer covering
these grounds, it's up to you, more than ever, to see that I keep
coming. That's all. Tell the rest of the fishermen what I say whenever
you happen to run across them."
They became articulate. They plied MacRae with questions. He answered
tersely, as truthfully as he could. They cursed Folly Bay and the
canneries in general. But they were not downcast. They did not seem
apprehensive that Folly Bay would get salmon for forty cents. MacRae had
said he would still buy. For them that settled it. They would not have
to sell their catch to Folly Bay for whatever price Gower cared to set.
Presently they began to drift away to their boats, to bed, for their
work began in that gray hour between dawn and sunrise when the schooling
salmon best strike the trolling spoon.
One lingered, a returned soldier named Mullen, who had got his discharge
in May and gone fishing. Mullen had seen two years in the trenches. He
sat in his skiff, scowling up at MacRae, talking about the salmon
packers, about fishing.
"Aw, it's the same everywhere," he said cynically. "They all want a
cinch, easy money, big money. Looks like the more you have, the more you
can grab. Folly Bay made barrels of coin while the war was on. Why can't
they give us fellers a show to make a little now? But they don't give a
damn, so long as they get theirs. And then they wonder why some of us
guys that went to France holler about the way we find things when we
come home."
He pushed his skiff away into the gloom that rested upon the Cove.
The _Bluebird_ was packed with salmon to her hatch covers. There had
been a fresh run. The trollers were averaging fifty fish to a man daily.
MacRae put Vincent Ferrara aboard the _Blackbird_, himself took over the
loaded vessel, and within the hour was clear of Squitty's dusky
headlands, pointing a course straight down the middle of the Gulf. His
man turned in to sleep. MacRae stood watch alone, listening to the
ka-_choof_, ka-_choof_ of the exhaust, the murmuring swash of calm water
cleft by the _Bluebird's_ stem. Away to starboard the Ballenas light
winked and blinked its flaming eye to seafaring men as it had done in
his father's time. Miles to port the Sand Heads lightship swung to its
great hawsers off the Fraser River shoals.
MacRae smiled contentedly. There was a long run ahead. But he felt that
he had beaten Gower in this first definite brush. Moving in devious
channels to a given end Gower had closed the natural markets to MacRae.
But there was no law against the export of raw salmon to a foreign
country. MacRae could afford to smile. Over in Bellingham there were
salmon packers who, like Folly Bay, were hungry for fish to feed their
great machines. But--unlike Folly Bay--they were willing to pay the
price, any price in reason, for a supply of salmon. Their own carriers
later in the season would invade Canadian waters, so many thorns in the
ample sides of the British Columbia packers. "The damned Americans!"
they sometimes growled, and talked about legislation to keep American
fish buyers out. Because the American buyer and canner alike would spend
a dollar to make a dollar. And the British Columbia packers wanted a
cinch, a monopoly, which in a measure they had. They were an
anachronism, MacRae felt. They regarded the salmon and the salmon waters
of the British Columbia coast as the feudal barons of old jealously
regarded their special prerogatives. MacRae could see them growling and
grumbling, he could see most clearly the scowl that would spread over
the face of Mr. Horace A. Gower, when he learned that ten to twenty
thousand Squitty Island salmon were passing down the Gulf each week to
an American cannery; that a smooth-faced boy out of the Air Service was
putting a crimp in the ancient order of things so far as one particular
cannery was concerned.
This notion amused MacRae, served to while away the hours of monotonous
plowing over an unruffled sea, until he drove down abreast the Fraser
River's mouth and passed in among the nets and lights of the sockeye
fleet drifting, a thousand strong, on the broad bosom of the Gulf. Then
he had to stand up to his steering wheel and keep a sharp lookout, lest
he foul his propellor in a net or cut down some careless fisherman who
did not show a riding light.