A Renewal of Hostilities
The pussy willows had put out their fuzzy catkins and shed them for
delicate foliage when MacRae came back to Squitty Cove. The alder, the
maple and the wild cherry, all the spring-budding trees and shrubs, were
making thicket and foreshore dainty green and full of pleasant smells.
Jack wakened the first morning at daybreak to the muted orchestration of
mating birds, the song of a thousand sweet-voiced, unseen warblers. The
days were growing warm, full of sunshine. Distant mountain ranges stood
white-capped and purple against sapphire skies. The air was full of the
ancient magic of spring.
Yet MacRae himself, in spite of these pleasant sights and sounds and
smells, in spite of his books and his own rooftree, found the Cove
haunted by the twin ghosts he dreaded most, discontent and loneliness.
He was more isolated than he had ever been in his life. There was no one
in the Cove save an old, unkempt Swede, Doug Sproul, who slept eighteen
hours a day in his cabin while he waited for the salmon to run again, a
withered Portuguese who sat in the sun and muttered while he mended
gear. They were old men, human driftwood, beached in their declining
years, crabbed and sour, looking always backward with unconscious
regret.
Vin Ferrara was away with the _Bluebird_, still plying his fish venture.
Dolly and Norman Gower were married, and Dolly was back on the Knob in
the middle of Squitty Island, keeping house for her husband and Uncle
Peter and Long Tom Spence while they burrowed in the earth to uncover a
copper-bearing lead that promised a modest fortune for all three. Peter
Ferrara's house at the Cove stood empty and deserted in the spring sun.
People had to shift, to grasp opportunities as they were presented,
MacRae knew. They could not take root and stand still in one spot like
the great Douglas firs. But he missed the familiar voices, the sight of
friendly faces. He had nothing but his own thoughts to keep him company.
A man of twenty-five, a young and lusty animal of abounding vitality,
needs more than his own reflections to fill his days. Denied the outlet
of purposeful work in which to release pent-up energy, MacRae brooded
over shadows, suffered periods of unaccountable depression. Nature had
not designed him for either a hermit or a celibate. Something in him
cried out for affection, for companionship, for a woman's tenderness
bestowed unequivocally. The mating instinct was driving him, as it drove
the birds. But its urge was not the general, unspecified longing which
turns a man's eyes upon any desirable woman. Very clearly, imperiously,
this dominant instinct in MacRae had centered upon Betty Gower.
He was at war with his instincts. His mind stipulated that he could not
have her without a revolutionary overturning of his convictions,
inhibitions, soundly made and passionately cherished plans of reprisal
for old injustices. That peculiar tenacity of idea and purpose which was
inherent with him made him resent, refuse soberly to consider any
deviation from the purpose which had taken form with such bitter
intensity when he kindled to his father's account of those drab years
which Horace Gower had laid upon him.
Jack MacRae was no angel. Under his outward seeming his impulses were
primitive, like the impulses of all strong men. He nursed a vision of
beating Gower at Gower's own game. He hugged to himself the ultimate
satisfaction of that. Even when he was dreaming of Betty, he was
mentally setting her aside until he had beaten her father to his knees
under the only sort of blows he could deal. Until he had made Gower know
grief and disappointment and helplessness, and driven him off the south
end of Squitty landless and powerless, he would go on as he had elected.
When he got this far Jack would sometimes say to himself in a spirit of
defiant recklessness that there were plenty of other women for whom
ultimately he could care as much. But he knew also that he would not say
that, nor even think it, whenever Betty Gower was within reach of his
hand or sound of his voice.
He walked sometimes over to Point Old and stared at the cottage, snowy
white against the tender green, its lawn growing rank with uncut grass,
its chimney dead. There were times when he wished he could see smoke
lifting from that chimney and know that he could find Betty somewhere
along the beach. But these were only times when his spirits were very
low.
Also he occasionally wondered if it were true, as Stubby Abbott
declared, that Gower had fallen into a financial hole. MacRae doubted
that. Men like Gower always got out of a hole. They were fierce and
remorseless pursuers of the main chance. When they were cast down they
climbed up straightway over the backs of lesser men. He thought of
Robbin-Steele. A man like that would die with the harness of the
money-game on his back, reaching for more. Gower was of the same type,
skillful in all the tricks of the game, ruthless, greedy for power and
schooled to grasp it in a bewildering variety of ways.
No, he rather doubted that Gower was broke, or even in any danger of
going broke. He hoped this might be true, in spite of his doubts, for it
meant that Gower would be compelled to sacrifice this six hundred acres
of MacRae land. The sooner the better. It was a pain to MacRae to see it
going wild. The soil Donald MacRae had cleared and turned to meadow, to
small fields of grain, was growing up to ferns and scrub. It had been a
source of pride to old Donald. He had visualized for his son more than
once great fields covered with growing crops, a rich and fruitful area,
with a big stone house looking out over the cliffs where ultimate
generations of MacRaes should live. If luck had not gone against old
Donald he would have made this dream come true. But life and Gower had
beaten him.
Jack MacRae knew this. It maddened him to think that this foundation of
a dream had become the plaything of his father's enemy, a neglected
background for a summer cottage which he only used now and then.
There might, however, be something in the statements Stubby had made.
MacRae recalled that Gower had not replaced the _Arrow_. The
underwriters had raised and repaired the mahogany cruiser, and she had
passed into other hands. When Betty and her father came to Cradle Bay
they came on a cannery tender or a hired launch. MacRae hoped it might
be true that Gower was slipping, that he had helped to start him on this
decline.
Presently the loneliness of the Cove was broken by the return of
Vincent Ferrara. They skidded the _Bluebird_ out on the beach at the
Cove's head and overhauled her inside and out, hull and machinery. That
brought them well into April. The new carrier was complete from truck to
keelson. She had been awaiting only MacRae's pleasure for her maiden
sea-dip. So now, with the _Bluebird_ sleeked with new paint, he went
down for the launching.
There was a little ceremony over that.
"It's bad luck, the very worst sort of luck, to launch a boat without
christening her in the approved manner," Nelly Abbott declared. "I
insist on being sponsor. Do let me, Jack."
So the new sixty-footer had a bottle of wine from the Abbott cellar
broken over her brass-bound stemhead as her bows sliced into the salt
water, and Nelly's clear treble chanted:
"I christen thee _Agua Blanco_."
Vin Ferrara's dark eyes gleamed, for _agua blanco_ means "white water"
in the Spanish tongue.
The Terminal Fish Company's new coolers were yawning for fish when the
first blueback run of commercial size showed off Gray Rock and the
Ballenas. All the Squitty boats went out as soon as the salmon came.
MacRae skippered the new and shining _Blanco_, brave in white paint and
polished brass on her virgin trip. He followed the main fleet, while the
_Bluebird_ scuttled about to pick up stray trollers' catches and to tend
the rowboat men. She would dump a day's gathering on the _Blanco's_
deck, and the two crews would dress salmon till their hands were sore.
But it saved both time and fuel to have that great carrying capacity,
and the freezing plant which automatically chilled the fish. MacRae
could stay on the grounds till he was fully loaded. He could slash
through to Vancouver at nine knots instead of seven. A sea that would
toss the old wrecked _Blackbird_ like a dory and keep her low decks
continually awash let the _Blanco_ pass with only a moderate pitch and
roll.
MacRae worked hard. He found ease in work. When the last salmon was
dressed and stowed below, many times under the glow of electric bulbs
strung along the cargo boom, he would fall into his bunk and sleep
dreamlessly. Decks streaming with blood and offal, plastered with slime
and clinging scales--until such time as they were washed down--ceased to
annoy him. No man can make omelettes without breaking eggs. Only the
fortunate few can make money without soiling their hands. There is no
room in the primary stages of taking salmon for those who shrink from
sweat and strain, from elemental stress. The white-collared and the
lily-fingered cannot function there. The pink meat my lady toys with on
Limoges china comes to her table by ways that would appal her. Only the
men who toil aboard the fishing boats, with line and gear and gutting
knife know in what travail this harvest of the sea is reaped.
MacRae played fair, according to his conception of fair play. He based
his payments on a decent profit, without which he could not carry on.
Running heavier cargoes at less cost he raised the price to the
fishermen as succeeding runs of blueback salmon were made up of larger,
heavier fish. Other buyers came, lingered awhile, cursed him and went
away. They could not run to Vancouver with small quantities of salmon
and meet his price. But MacRae in the _Blanco_ could take six, eight,
ten thousand salmon profitably on a margin which the other buyers said
was folly.
The trolling fleet swelled in numbers. The fish were there. The
old-timers had prophesied a big blueback year, and for once their
prophecy was by way of being fulfilled. The fish schooled in great
shoals off Nanaimo, around Gray Rock, the Ballenas, passed on to
Sangster and Squitty. And the fleet followed a hundred strong, each day
increasing,--Indians, Greeks, Japanese, white men, raking the salmon
grounds with glittering spoon hooks, gathering in the fish.
In early June MacRae was delivering eighteen thousand salmon a week to
the Terminal Fish Company. He was paying forty cents a fish, more than
any troller in the Gulf of Georgia had ever got for June bluebacks, more
than any buyer had ever paid before the opening of the canneries
heightened the demand. He was clearing nearly a thousand dollars a week
for himself, and he was putting unheard-of sums in the pockets of the
fishermen. MacRae believed these men understood how this was possible,
that they had a feeling of coöperating with him for their common good.
They had sold their catches on a take-it-or-leave-it basis for years. He
had put a club in their hands as well as money in their pockets. They
would stand with him against less scrupulous, more remorseless
exploiters of their labor. They would see that he got fish. They told
him that.
"If somebody else offered sixty cents you'd sell to him, wouldn't you?"
MacRae asked a dozen of them sitting on the _Blanco's_ deck one
afternoon. They had been talking about canneries and competition.
"Not if he was boosting the price up just to make you quit, and then cut
it in two when he had everything to himself," one man said. "That's been
done too often."
"Remember that when the canneries open, then," MacRae said dryly.
"There is not going to be much, of a price for humps and dog salmon this
fall. But there is going to be a scramble for the good canning fish. I
can pay as much as salmon are worth, but I can't go any further. If I
should have to pull my boats off in mid-season you can guess what
they'll pay around Squitty."
MacRae was not crying "wolf." There were signs and tokens of uneasiness
and irritation among those who still believed it was their right and
privilege to hold the salmon industry in the hollows of their grasping
hands. Stubby Abbott was a packer. He had the ears of the other packers.
They were already complaining to Stubby, grouching about MacRae, unable
to understand that Stubby listened to them with his tongue in his cheek,
that one of their own class should have a new vision of industrial
processes, a vision that was not like their own.
"They're cultivating quite a grievance about the price you're paying,"
Stubby told Jack in confidence. "They say you are a damned fool. You
could get those fish for thirty cents and you are paying forty. The
fishermen will want the earth when the canneries open. They hint around
that something will drop with a loud bang one of these days. I think
it's just hot air. They can't hurt either of us. I'll get a fair pack at
Crow Harbor, and I'll have this plant loaded. I've got enough money to
carry on. It makes me snicker to myself to imagine how they'll squirm
and squeal next winter when I put frozen salmon on the market ten cents
a pound below what they figure on getting. Oh, yes, our friends in the
fish business are going to have a lot of grievances. But just now they
are chiefly grouching at you."
MacRae seldom set foot ashore those crowded days. But he passed within
sight of Squitty Cove and Poor Man's Rock once at least in each
forty-eight hours. For weeks he had seen smoke drifting blue from the
cottage chimney in Cradle Bay. He saw now and then the flutter of
something white or blue on the lawn that he knew must be Betty. Part of
the time a small power boat swung to the mooring in the bay where the
shining _Arrow_ nosed to wind and tide in other days. He heard current
talk among the fishermen concerning the Gowers. Gower himself was
spending his time between the cottage and Folly Bay.
The cannery opened five days in advance of the sockeye season on the
Fraser. When the Gower collecting boats made their first round MacRae
knew that he had a fight on his hands. Gower, it seemed to him, had
bared his teeth at last.
The way of the blueback salmon might have furnished a theme for Solomon.
In all the years during which these fish had run in the Gulf of Georgia
neither fishermen, canners, nor the government ichthyologists were
greatly wiser concerning their nature or habits or life history. Grounds
where they swarmed one season might prove barren the next. Where they
came from, out of what depths of the far Pacific those silvery hordes
marshaled themselves, no man knew. Nor, when they vanished in late
August, could any man say whither they went. They did not ascend the
streams. No blueback was ever taken with red spawn in his belly. They
were a mystery which no man had unraveled, no matter that he took them
by thousands in order that he himself might subsist upon their flesh.
One thing the trollers did know,--where the small feed swarmed, in shoal
water or deep, those myriads of tiny fish, herring and nameless smaller
ones, there the blueback would appear, and when he did so appear he
could be taken by a spoon hook.
Away beyond the Sisters--three gaunt gray rocks rising out of the sea
miles offshore in a fairway down which passed all the Alaska-bound
steamers, with a lone lighthouse on the middle rock--away north of Folly
Bay there opened wide trolling grounds about certain islands which lay
off the Vancouver Island shore,--Hornby, Lambert Channel, Yellow Rock,
Cape Lazo. In other seasons the blueback runs lingered about Squitty for
a while and then passed on to those kelp-grown and reef-strewed grounds.
This season these salmon appeared first far south of Squitty. The
trolling scouts, the restless wanderers of the fleet, who could not
abide sitting still and waiting in patience for the fish to come, first
picked them up by the Gulf Islands, very near that great highway to the
open sea known as the Strait of San Juan. The blueback pushed on the
Gray Rock to the Ballenas, as if the blackfish and seal and shark that
hung always about the schools to prey were herding them to some given
point. Very shortly after they could be taken in the shadow of the
Ballenas light the schools swarmed about the Cove end of Squitty Island,
between the Elephant on Sangster and Poor Man's Rock. For days on end
the sea was alive with them. In the gray of dawn and the reddened dusk
they played upon the surface of the sea as far as the eye reached. And
always at such times they struck savagely at a glittering spoon hook.
Beyond Squitty they vanished. Fifty and sixty salmon daily to a boat off
the Squitty headlands dwindled to fifteen and twenty at the Folly Bay
end. Those restless trollers who crossed the Gulf to Hornby and Yellow
Rock Light got little for their pains. Between Folly Bay and the
swirling tide races off the desolate head of Cape Mudge the blueback
disappeared. But at Squitty the runs held constant. There were off days,
but the fish were always there. The trollers hung at the south end,
sheltering at night in the Cove, huddled rubstrake to rubstrake and bow
to stern, so many were they in that little space, on days when the
southeaster made the cliffs shudder under the shock of breaking seas. If
fishing slackened for a day or two they did not scatter as in other
days. There would be another run hard on the heels of the last. And
there was.
MacRae ran the _Blanco_ into Squitty Cove one afternoon and made fast
alongside the _Bluebird_ which lay to fore and aft moorings in the
narrow gut of the Cove. The Gulf outside was speckled with trollers, but
there were many at anchor, resting, or cooking food.
One of the mustard pots was there, a squat fifty-foot carrier painted a
gaudy yellow--the Folly Bay house color--flying a yellow flag with a
black C in the center. She was loading fish from two trollers, one lying
on each side. One or two more were waiting, edging up.
"He came in yesterday afternoon after you left," Vin Ferrara told Jack.
"And he offered forty-five cents. Some of them took it. To-day he's
paying fifty and hinting more if he has to."
MacRae laughed.
"We'll match Gower's price till he boosts us out of the bidding," he
said. "And he won't make much on his pack if he does that."
"Say, Folly Bay," Jack called across to the mustard-pot carrier, "what
are you paying for bluebacks?"
The skipper took his eye off the tallyman counting in fish.
"Fifty cents," he answered in a voice that echoed up and down the Cove.
"That must sound good to the fishermen," MacRae called back pleasantly.
"Folly Bay's getting generous in its declining years."
It was the off period between tides. There were forty boats at rest in
the Cove and more coming in. The ripple of laughter that ran over the
fleet was plainly audible. They could appreciate that. MacRae sat down
on the _Blanco's_ after cabin and lit a cigarette.
"Looks like they mean to get the fish," Vin hazarded. "Can you tilt that
and make anything?"
"Let them do the tilting," MacRae answered. "If the fish run heavy I can
make a little, even if prices go higher. If he boosts them to
seventy-five, I'd have to quit. At that price only the men who catch the
fish will make anything. I really don't know how much we will be able to
pay when Crow Harbor opens up."
"We'll have some fun anyway." Vin's black eyes sparkled.
It took MacRae three days to get a load. Human nature functions pretty
much the same among all men. The trollers distrusted Folly Bay. They
said to one another that if Gower could kill off competition he would
cut the price to the bone. He had done that before. But when a fisherman
rises wearily from his bunk at three in the morning and spends the bulk
of the next eighteen hours hauling four one hundred and fifty foot
lines, each weighted with from six to fifteen pounds of lead, he feels
that he is entitled to every cent he can secure for his day's labor.
The Gower boats got fish. The mustard pot came back next day, paying
fifty-five cents. A good many trollers sold him their fish before they
learned that MacRae was paying the same. And the mustard pot evidently
had his orders, for he tilted the price to sixty, which forced MacRae to
do the same.
When the _Blanco_ unloaded her cargo of eight-thousand-odd salmon into
the Terminal and MacRae checked his receipts and expenditures for that
trip, he discovered that he had neither a profit nor a loss.
He went to see Stubby, explained briefly the situation.
"You can't get any more cheap salmon for cold storage until the seiners
begin to take coho, that's certain," he declared. "How far can you go in
this price fight when you open the cannery?"
"Gower appears to have gone a bit wild, doesn't he?" Stubby ruminated.
"Let's see. Those fish are running about five pounds now. They'll get a
bit heavier as we go along. Well, I can certainly pack as cheaply as he
can. I tell you, go easy for a week, till I get Crow Harbor under way.
Then you can pay up to seventy-five cents and I'll allow you five cents
a fish commission. I don't believe he'll dare pay more than that before
late in July. If he does, why, we'll see what we can do."
MacRae went back to Squitty. He could make money with the _Blanco_ on a
five-cent commission,--if he could get the salmon within the price
limit. So for the next trip or two he contented himself with meeting
Gower's price and taking what fish came to him. The Folly Bay mustard
pots--three of them great and small--scurried here and there among the
trollers, dividing the catch with the _Bluebird_ and the _Blanco_. There
was always a mustard-pot collector in sight. The weather was getting
hot. Salmon would not keep in a troller's hold. Part of the old guard
stuck tight to MacRae. But there were new men fishing; there were
Japanese and illiterate Greeks. It was not to be expected that these men
should indulge in far-sighted calculations. But it was a trifle
disappointing to see how readily any troller would unload his catch into
a mustard pot if neither of MacRae's carriers happened to be at hand.
"Why don't you tie up your boats, Jack?" Vin asked angrily. "You know
what would happen. Gower would drop the price with a bang. You'd think
these damned idiots would know that. Yet they're feeding him fish by the
thousand. They don't appear to care a hoot whether you get any or not. I
used to think fishermen had some sense. These fellows can't see an inch
past their cursed noses. Pull off your boats for a couple of weeks and
let them get their bumps."
"What do you expect?" MacRae said lightly. "It's a scramble, and they
are acting precisely as they might be expected to act. I don't blame
them. They're under the same necessity as the rest of us--to get it
while they can. Did you think they'd sell me fish for sixty if somebody
else offered sixty-five? You know how big a nickel looks to a man who
earns it as hard as these fellows do."
"No, but they don't seem to care who gets their salmon," Vin growled.
"Even when you're paying the same, they act like they'd just as soon
Gower got 'em as you. You paid more than Folly Bay all last season. You
put all kinds of money in their pockets that you didn't have to."
"And when the pinch comes, they'll remember that," MacRae said. "You
watch, Vin. The season is young yet. Gower may beat me at this game, but
he won't make any money at it."
MacRae kept abreast of Folly Bay for ten days and emerged from that
period with a slight loss, because at the close he was paying more than
the salmon were worth at the Terminal warehouse. But when he ran his
first load into Crow Harbor Stubby looked over the pile of salmon his
men were forking across the floor and drew Jack into his office.
"I've made a contract for delivery of my entire sockeye and blueback
pack," he said. "I know precisely where I stand. I can pay up to ninety
cents for all July fish. I want all the Squitty bluebacks you can get.
Go after them, Jack."
And MacRae went after them. Wherever a Folly Bay collector went either
the _Blanco_ or the _Bluebird_ was on his heels. MacRae could cover more
ground and carry more cargo, and keep it fresh, than any mustard pot.
The _Bluebird_ covered little outlying nooks, the stragglers, the
rowboat men in their beach camps. The _Blanco_ kept mostly in touch with
the main fleet patrolling the southeastern end of Squitty like a naval
flotilla, wheeling and counterwheeling over the grounds where the
blueback played. MacRae forced the issue. He raised the price to
sixty-five, to seventy, to seventy-five, to eighty, and the boats under
the yellow house flag had to pay that to get a fish. MacRae crowded them
remorselessly to the limit. So long as he got five cents a fish he could
make money. He suspected that it cost Gower a great deal more than five
cents a salmon to collect what he got. And he did not get so many now.
With the opening of the sockeye season on the Fraser and in the north
the Japs abandoned trolling for the gill net. The white trollers
returned to their first love because he courted them assiduously. There
was always a MacRae carrier in the offing. It cost MacRae his sleep and
rest, but he drove himself tirelessly. He could leave Squitty at dusk,
unload his salmon at Crow Harbor, and be back at sunrise. He did it many
a time, after tallying fish all day. Three hours' sleep was like a gift
from the gods. But he kept it up. He had a sense of some approaching
crisis.
By the third week in July MacRae was taking three fourths of the
bluebacks caught between the Ballenas and Folly Bay. He would lie
sometimes within a stone's throw of Gower's cannery, loading salmon.
He was swinging at anchor there one day when a rowboat from the cannery
put out to the _Blanco_. The man in it told MacRae that Gower would like
to see him. MacRae's first impulse was to grin and ignore the request.
Then he changed his mind, and taking his own dinghy rowed ashore. Some
time or other he would have to meet his father's enemy, face him, talk
to him, listen to what he might say, tell him things. Curiosity was
roused in him a little now. He desired to know what Gower had to say. He
wondered if Gower was weakening; what he could want.
He found Gower in a cubby-hole of an office behind the cannery store.
"You wanted to see me," MacRae said curtly.
He was in sea boots, bareheaded. His shirt sleeves were rolled above
sun-browned forearms. He stood before Gower with his hands thrust in the
pockets of duck overalls speckled with fish scales, smelling of salmon.
Gower stared at him silently, critically, it seemed to MacRae, for a
matter of seconds.
"What's the sense in our cutting each other's throats over these fish?"
Gower asked at length. "I've been wanting to talk to you for quite a
while. Let's get together. I--"
MacRae's temper flared.
"If that's what you want," he said, "I'll see you in hell first."
He turned on his heel and walked out of the office. When he stepped into
his dinghy he glanced up at the wharf towering twenty feet above his
head. Betty Gower was sitting on a pile head. She was looking down at
him. But she was not smiling. And she did not speak. MacRae rowed back
to the _Blanco_ in an ugly mood.
In the next forty-eight hours Folly Bay jumped the price of bluebacks to
ninety cents, to ninety-five, to a dollar. The _Blanco_ wallowed down to
Crow Harbor with a load which represented to MacRae a dead loss of four
hundred dollars cash.
"He must be crazy," Stubby fumed. "There's no use canning salmon at a
loss."
"Has he reached the loss point yet?" MacRae inquired.
"He's shaving close. No cannery can make anything worth reckoning at a
dollar or so a case profit."
"Is ninety cents and five cents' commission your limit?" MacRae
demanded.
"Just about," Stubby grunted. "Well"--reluctantly--"I can stand a
dollar. That's the utmost limit, though. I can't go any further."
"And if he gets them all at a dollar or more, he'll be canning at a dead
loss, eh?"
"He certainly will," Stubby declared. "Unless he cans 'em heads, tails,
and scales, and gets a bigger price per case than has been offered yet."
MacRae went back to Squitty with a definite idea in his mind. Gower had
determined to have the salmon. Very well, then, he should have them. But
he would have to take them at a loss, in so far as MacRae could inflict
loss upon him. He knew of no other way to hurt effectively such a man as
Gower. Money was life blood to him, and it was not of great value to
MacRae as yet. With deliberate calculation he decided to lose the
greater part of what he had made, if for every dollar he lost himself he
could inflict equal or greater loss on Gower.
The trailers who combed the Squitty waters were taking now close to five
thousand salmon a day. Approximately half of these went to Folly Bay.
MacRae took the rest. In this battle of giants the fishermen had lost
sight of the outcome. They ceased to care who got fish. They only
watched eagerly for him who paid the biggest price. They were making
thirty, forty, fifty dollars a day. They no longer held salmon--only a
few of the old-timers--for MacRae's carriers. It was nothing to them who
made a profit or suffered a loss. Only a few of the older men wondered
privately how long MacRae could stand it and what would happen when he
gave up.
MacRae met every raise Folly Bay made. He saw bluebacks go to a dollar
ten, then to a dollar fifteen. He ran cargo after cargo to Crow Harbor
and dropped from three to seven hundred dollars on each load, until even
Stubby lost patience with him.
"What's the sense in bucking him till you go broke? I'm in too deep to
stand any loss myself. Quit. Tie up your boats, Jack. Let him have the
salmon. Let those blockheads of fishermen see what he'll do to 'em once
you stop."
But MacRae held on till the first hot days of August were at hand and
his money was dwindling to the vanishing point. Then he ran the _Blanco_
and the _Bluebird_ into Squitty Cove and tied them to permanent
moorings in shoal water near the head. For a day or two the salmon had
shifted mysteriously to the top end, around Folly Bay and the Siwash
Islands and Jenkins Pass. The bulk of the fleet had followed them. Only
a few stuck to the Cove and Poor Man's Rock. To these and the rowboat
trollers MacRae said:
"Sell your fish to Folly Bay. I'm through."
Then he lay down in his bunk in the airy pilot house of the _Blanco_ and
slept the clock around, the first decent rest he had taken in two
months. He had not realized till then how tired he was.
When he wakened he washed, ate, changed his clothes and went for a walk
along the cliffs to stretch his legs. Vin had gone up to the Knob to see
Dolly and Uncle Peter. His helper on the _Bluebird_ was tinkering about
his engine. MacRae's two men loafed on the clean-slushed deck. They were
none of them company for MacRae in his present mood. He sought the
cliffs to be alone.
Gower had beaten him, it would seem. And MacRae did not take kindly to
being beaten. But he did not think this was the end yet. Gower would do
as he had done before. When he felt himself secure in his monopoly he
would squeeze the fishermen, squeeze them hard. And as soon as he did
that MacRae would buy again. He could not make any money himself,
perhaps. But he could make Gower operate at a loss. That would be
something accomplished.
MacRae walked along the cliffs until he saw the white cottage, and saw
also that some one sat on the steps in the sun. Whereupon he turned
back. He didn't want to see Betty. He conceived that to be an ended
chapter in his experiences. He had hurt her, and she had put on her
armor against another such hurt. There was a studied indifference about
her now, when he met her, which hurt him terribly. He supposed that in
addition to his own incomprehensible attitude which she resented, she
took sides with her father in this obvious commercial warfare which was
bleeding them both financially. Very likely she saw in this only the
open workings of his malice toward Gower. In which MacRae admitted she
would be quite correct. He had not been able to discover in that
flaring-up of passion for Betty any reason for a burial of his feud with
Gower. There was in him some curious insistence upon carrying this to
the bitter end. And his hatred of Gower was something alive, vital,
coloring his vision somberly. The shadow of the man lay across his life.
He could not ignore this, and his instinct was for reprisal. The
fighting instinct in MacRae lurked always very near the surface.
He spent a good many hours during the next three or four days lying in
the shade of a gnarly arbutus which gave on the cliffs. He took a book
up there with him, but most of the time he lay staring up at the blue
sky through the leaves, or at the sea, or distant shore lines, thinking
always in circles which brought him despairingly out where he went in.
He saw a mustard pot slide each day into the Cove and pass on about its
business. There was not a great deal to be got in the Cove. The last gas
boat had scuttled away to the top end, where the blueback were schooling
in vast numbers. There were still salmon to be taken about Poor Man's
Rock. The rowboat men took a few fish each day and hoped for another big
run.
There came a day when the mustard pot failed to show in the Cove. The
rowboat men had three hundred salmon, and they cursed Folly Bay with a
fine flow of epithet as they took their rotting fish outside the Cove
and dumped them in the sea. Nor did a Gower collector come, although
there was nothing in the wind or weather to stop them. The rowboat
trollers fumed and stewed and took their troubles to Jack MacRae. But he
could neither inform nor help them.
Then upon an evening when the sun rested on the serrated backbone of
Vancouver Island, a fiery ball against a sky of burnished copper,
flinging a red haze down on a slow swell that furrowed the Gulf, Jack
MacRae, perched on a mossy boulder midway between the Cove and Point
Old, saw first one boat and then another come slipping and lurching
around Poor Man's Rock. Converted Columbia River sailboats, Cape
Flattery trollers, double-enders, all the variegated craft that
fishermen use and traffic with, each rounded the Rock and struck his
course for the Cove, broadside on to the rising swell, their twenty-foot
trolling poles lashed aloft against a stumpy mast and swinging in a
great arc as they rolled. One, ten, a dozen, an endless procession,
sometimes three abreast, again a string in single file. MacRae was
reminded of the march of the oysters--
"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?"
"Nobody knows. There was plenty of salmon. He cut the price the day
after you tied up. He cut it to six bits. Then he shut down. Anyway, we
don't care why he shut down. It don't make no difference. What we want
is for you to start buyin' again. Hell, we're losin' money from daylight
to dark! The water's alive with salmon. An' the season's short. Be a
sport, MacRae."
MacRae laughed.
"Be a sport, eh?" he echoed with a trace of amusement in his tone. "I
wonder how many of you would have listened to me if I'd gone around to
you a week ago and asked you to give me a sporting chance?"
No one answered. MacRae threw away his half-smoked cigarette. He stood
up.
"All right, I'll buy salmon again," he said quietly. "And I won't ask
you to give me first call on your catch or a chance to make up some of
the money I lost bucking Folly Bay, or anything like that. But I want to
tell you something. You know it as well as I do, but I want to jog your
memory with it."
He raised his voice a trifle.
"You fellows know that I've always given you a square deal. You aren't
fishing for sport. You're at this to make a living, to make money if you
can. So am I. You are entitled to all you can get. You earn it. You work
for it. So am I entitled to what I can make. I work, I take certain
chances. Neither of us is getting something for nothing. But there is a
limit to what either of us can get. We can't dodge that. You fellows
have been dodging it. Now you have to come back to earth.
"No fisherman can get the prices you have had lately. No cannery can
pack salmon at those prices. Sockeye, the finest canning salmon that
swims in the sea, is bringing eighty cents on the Fraser. Bluebacks are
sixty-five cents at Nanaimo, sixty at Cape Mudge, sixty at the
Euclataws.
"I can do a little better than that," MacRae hesitated a second. "I can
pay a little more, because the cannery I'm supplying is satisfied with a
little less profit than most. Stubby Abbott is not a hog, and neither am
I. I can pay seventy-five cents and make money. I have told you before
that it is to your interest as well as mine to keep me running. I will
always pay as much as salmon are worth. But I cannot pay more. If your
appreciation of Folly Bay's past kindness to you is so keen that you
would rather sell him your fish, why, that's your privilege."
"Aw, that's bunk," a man called. "You know blamed well we wouldn't. Not
after him blowin' up like this."
"How do I know?" MacRae laughed. "If Gower opened up to-morrow again and
offered eighty or ninety cents, he'd get the salmon--even if you knew he
would make you take thirty once he got you where he wanted you."
"Would he?" another voice uprose. "The next time a mustard pot gets any
salmon from me, it'll be because there's no other buyer and no other
grounds to fish."
A growled chorus backed this reckless statement.
"That's all right," MacRae said good-naturedly. "I don't blame you for
picking up easy money. Only easy money isn't always so good as it
looks. Fly at it in the morning, and I'll take the fish at the price
I've said. If Folly Bay gets into the game again, it's up to you."
When the lights were doused and every fisherman was stretched in his
bunk, falling asleep to the slow beat of a dead swell breaking in the
Cove's mouth, Vin Ferrara stood up to seek his own bed.
"I wonder," he said to Jack, "I wonder why Gower shut down at this stage
of the game?"
MacRae shook his head. He was wondering that himself.