Inheritance
On a morning four days later Jack MacRae sat staring into the coals on the hearth. It was all over and done with, the house empty and still, Dolly Ferrara gone back to her uncle's home. Even the Cove was bare of fishing craft. He was alone under his own rooftree, alone with an oppressive silence and his own thoughts.
These were not particularly pleasant thoughts. There was nothing mawkish about Jack MacRae. He had never been taught to shrink from the inescapable facts of existence. Even if he had, the war would have cured him of that weakness. As it was, twelve months in the infantry, nearly three years in the air, had taught him that death is a commonplace after a man sees about so much of it, that it is many times a welcome relief from suffering either of the body or the spirit. He chose to believe that it had proved so to his father. So his feelings were not that strange mixture of grief and protest which seizes upon those to whom death is the ultimate tragedy, the irrevocable disaster, when it falls upon some one near and dear.
No, Jack MacRae, brooding by his fire, was lonely and saddened and heavy-hearted. But beneath these neutral phases there was slowly gathering a flood of feeling unrelated to his father's death, more directly based indeed upon Donald MacRae's life, upon matters but now revealed to him, which had their root in that misty period when his father was a young man like himself.
On the table beside him lay an inch-thick pile of note paper all closely written upon in the clear, small pen-script of his father.
My son: [MacRae had written] I have a feeling lately that I may never see you again. Not that I fear you will be killed. I no longer have that fear. I seem to have an unaccountable assurance that having come through so much you will go on safely to the end. But I'm not so sure about myself. I'm aging too fast. I've been told my heart is bad. And I've lost heart lately. Things have gone against me. There is nothing new in that. For thirty years I've been losing out to a greater or less extent in most of the things I undertook—that is, the important things.Perhaps I didn't bring the energy and feverish ambition I might have to my undertakings. Until you began to grow up I accepted things more or less passively as I found them.Until you have a son of your own, until you observe closely other men and their sons, my boy, you will scarcely realize how close we two have been to each other. We've been what they call good chums. I've taken a secret pride in seeing you grow and develop into a man. And while I tried to give you an education—broken into, alas, by this unending war—such as would enable you to hold your own in a world which deals harshly with the ignorant, the incompetent, the untrained, it was also my hope to pass on to you something of material value.This land which runs across Squitty Island from the Cove to Cradle Bay and extending a mile back—in all a trifle over six hundred acres—was to be your inheritance. You were born here. I know that no other place means quite so much to you as this old log house with the meadow behind it, and the woods, and the sea grumbling always at our doorstep. Long ago this place came into my hands at little more cost than the taking. It has proved a refuge to me, a stronghold against all comers, against all misfortune. I have spent much labor on it, and most of it has been a labor of love. It has begun to grow valuable. In years to come it will be of far greater value. I had hoped to pass it on to you intact, unencumbered, an inheritance of some worth. Land, you will eventually discover, Johnny, is the basis of everything. A man may make a fortune in industry, in the market. He turns to land for permanence, stability. All that is sterling in our civilization has its foundation in the soil.Out of this land of ours, which I have partially and half-heartedly reclaimed from the wilderness, you should derive a comfortable livelihood, and your children after you.But I am afraid I must forego that dream and you, my son, your inheritance. It has slipped away from me. How this has come about I wish to make clear to you, so that you will not feel unkindly toward me that you must face the world with no resources beyond your own brain and a sound young body. If it happens that the war ends soon and you come home while I am still alive to welcome you, we can talk this over man to man. But, as I said, my heart is bad. I may not be here. So I am writing all this for you to read. There are many things which you should know—or at least which I should like you to know.Thirty years ago—
My son: [MacRae had written] I have a feeling lately that I may never see you again. Not that I fear you will be killed. I no longer have that fear. I seem to have an unaccountable assurance that having come through so much you will go on safely to the end. But I'm not so sure about myself. I'm aging too fast. I've been told my heart is bad. And I've lost heart lately. Things have gone against me. There is nothing new in that. For thirty years I've been losing out to a greater or less extent in most of the things I undertook—that is, the important things.
Perhaps I didn't bring the energy and feverish ambition I might have to my undertakings. Until you began to grow up I accepted things more or less passively as I found them.
Until you have a son of your own, until you observe closely other men and their sons, my boy, you will scarcely realize how close we two have been to each other. We've been what they call good chums. I've taken a secret pride in seeing you grow and develop into a man. And while I tried to give you an education—broken into, alas, by this unending war—such as would enable you to hold your own in a world which deals harshly with the ignorant, the incompetent, the untrained, it was also my hope to pass on to you something of material value.
This land which runs across Squitty Island from the Cove to Cradle Bay and extending a mile back—in all a trifle over six hundred acres—was to be your inheritance. You were born here. I know that no other place means quite so much to you as this old log house with the meadow behind it, and the woods, and the sea grumbling always at our doorstep. Long ago this place came into my hands at little more cost than the taking. It has proved a refuge to me, a stronghold against all comers, against all misfortune. I have spent much labor on it, and most of it has been a labor of love. It has begun to grow valuable. In years to come it will be of far greater value. I had hoped to pass it on to you intact, unencumbered, an inheritance of some worth. Land, you will eventually discover, Johnny, is the basis of everything. A man may make a fortune in industry, in the market. He turns to land for permanence, stability. All that is sterling in our civilization has its foundation in the soil.
Out of this land of ours, which I have partially and half-heartedly reclaimed from the wilderness, you should derive a comfortable livelihood, and your children after you.
But I am afraid I must forego that dream and you, my son, your inheritance. It has slipped away from me. How this has come about I wish to make clear to you, so that you will not feel unkindly toward me that you must face the world with no resources beyond your own brain and a sound young body. If it happens that the war ends soon and you come home while I am still alive to welcome you, we can talk this over man to man. But, as I said, my heart is bad. I may not be here. So I am writing all this for you to read. There are many things which you should know—or at least which I should like you to know.
Thirty years ago—
Donald MacRae's real communication to his son began at that point in the long ago when theGulloutsailed his sloop and youngHorace Gower, smarting with jealousy, struck that savage blow with a pike pole at a man whose fighting hands were tied by a promise. Bit by bit, incident by incident, old Donald traced out of a full heart and bitter memories all the passing years for his son to see and understand. He made Elizabeth Morton, the Morton family, Horace Gower and the Gower kin stand out in bold relief. He told how he, Donald MacRae, a nobody from nowhere, for all they knew, adventuring upon the Pacific Coast, questing carelessly after fortune, had fallen in love with this girl whose family, with less consideration for her feelings and desires than for mutual advantages of land and money and power, favored young Gower and saw nothing but impudent presumption in MacRae.
Young Jack sat staring into the coals, seeing much, understanding more. It was all there in those written pages, a powerful spur to a vivid imagination.
No MacRae had ever lain down unwhipped. Nor had Donald MacRae, his father. Before his bruised face had healed—and young Jack remembered well the thin white scar that crossed his father's cheek bone—Donald MacRae was again pursuing his heart's desire. But he was forestalled there. He had truly said to Elizabeth Morton that she would never have another chance. By force or persuasion or whatsoever means were necessary they had married her out of hand to Horace Gower.
"That must have been she sitting on the couch," Jack MacRae whispered to himself, "that middle-aged woman with the faded rose-leaf face. Lord, Lord, how things get twisted!"
Though they so closed the avenue to a mésalliance, still their pridemust have smarted because of that clandestine affection, that boldly attempted elopement. Most of all, young Gower must have hated MacRae—with almost the same jealous intensity that Donald MacRae must for a time have hated him—because Gower apparently never forgot and never forgave. Long after Donald MacRae outgrew that passion Gower had continued secretly to harass him. Certain things could not be otherwise accounted for, Donald MacRae wrote to his son. Gower functioned in the salmon trade, in timber, in politics. In whatever MacRae set on foot, he ultimately discerned the hand of Gower, implacable, hidden, striking at him from under cover.
And so in a land and during a period when men created fortunes easily out of nothing, or walked carelessly over golden opportunities, Donald MacRae got him no great store of worldly goods, whereas Horace Gower, after one venture in which he speedily dissipated an inherited fortune, drove straight to successful outcome in everything he touched. By the time young Jack MacRae outgrew the Island teachers and must go to Vancouver for high school and then to the University of British Columbia, old Donald had been compelled to borrow money on his land to meet these expenses.
Young Jack, sitting by the fire, winced when he thought of that. He had taken things for granted. The war had come in his second year at the university,—and he had gone to the front as a matter of course.
Failing fish prices, poor seasons, other minor disasters had followed,—and always in the background, as old Donald saw it, the Gower influence, malign, vindictive, harboring that ancient grudge.
Whereas in the beginning MacRae had confidently expected by one resource and another to meet easily the obligation he had incurred, the end of it was the loss, during the second year of the war, of all the MacRae lands on Squitty,—all but a rocky corner of a few acres which included the house and garden. Old Donald had segregated that from his holdings when he pledged the land, as a matter of sentiment, not of value. All the rest—acres of pasture, cleared and grassed, stretches of fertile ground, blocks of noble timber still uncut—had passed through the hands of mortgage holders, through bank transfers, by devious and tortuous ways, until the title rested in Horace Gower,—who had promptly built the showy summer house on Cradle Bay to flaunt in his face, so old Donald believed and told his son.
It was a curious document, and it made a profound impression on Jack MacRae. He passed over the underlying motive, a man justifying himself to his son for a failure which needed no justifying. He saw now why his father tabooed all things Gower, why indeed he must have hated Gower as a man who does things in the open hates an enemy who strikes only from cover.
Strangely enough, Jack managed to grasp the full measure of what his father's love for Elizabeth Morton must have been without resenting the secondary part his mother must have played. For old Donald was frank in his story. He made it clear that he had loved Bessie Morton with an all-consuming passion, and that when this burned itself out he had never experienced so headlong an affection again. He spoke with kindly regard for his wife, but she played little or no part in his account. And Jack had only a faint memory of his mother, for she had died when he was seven. His father filled his eyes. His father's enemies were his. Family ties superimposed on clan clannishness, which is the blood heritage of the Highland Scotch, made it impossible for him to feel otherwise. That blow with a pike pole was a blow directed at his own face. He took up his father's feud instinctively, not even stopping to consider whether that was his father's wish or intent.
He got up out of his chair at last and went outside, down to where the Cove waters, on a rising tide, lapped at the front of a rude shed. Under this shed, secure on a row of keel-blocks, rested a small knockabout-rigged boat, stowed away from wind and weather, her single mast, boom, and gaff unshipped and slung to rafters, her sail and running gear folded and coiled and hung beyond the wood-rats' teeth. Beside this sailing craft lay a long blue dugout, also on blocks, half filled with water to keep it from checking.
These things belonged to him. He had left them lying about when he went away to France. And old Donald had put them here safely against his return. Jack stared at them, blinking. He was full of a dumb protest. It didn't seem right. Nothing seemed right. In young MacRae's mind there was nothing terrible about death. He had become used to that. But he had imagination. He could see his father going on day after day, month after month, year after year, enduring, uncomplaining. Gauged by what his father had written, by what Dolly Ferrara had supplied when he questioned her, these last months must have been gray indeed. And he had died without hope or comfort or a sight of his son.
That was what made young MacRae blink and struggle with a lump in his throat. It hurt.
He walked away around the end of the Cove without definite objective. He was suddenly restless, seeking relief in movement. Sitting still and thinking had become unbearable. He found himselfon the path that ran along the cliffs and followed that, coming out at last on the neck of Point Old where he could look down on the broken water that marked Poor Man's Rock.
The lowering cloud bank of his home-coming day had broken in heavy rain. That had poured itself out and given place to a southeaster. The wind was gone now, the clouds breaking up into white drifting patches with bits of blue showing between, and the sun striking through in yellow shafts which lay glittering areas here and there on the Gulf. The swell that runs after a blow still thundered all along the southeast face of Squitty, burstingboom—boom—boomagainst the cliffs, shooting spray in white cascades. Over the Rock the sea boiled.
There were two rowboats trolling outside the heavy backwash from the cliffs. MacRae knew them both. Peter Ferrara was in one, Long Tom Spence in the other. They did not ride those gray-green ridges for pleasure, nor drop sidling into those deep watery hollows for joy of motion. They were out for fish, which meant to them food and clothing. That was their work.
They were the only fisher folk abroad that morning. The gasboat men had flitted to more sheltered grounds. MacRae watched these two lift and fall in the marching swells. It was cold. Winter sharpened his teeth already. The rowers bent to their oars, tossing and lurching. MacRae reflected upon their industry. In France he had eaten canned salmon bearing the Folly Bay label, salmon that might have been taken here by the Rock, perhaps by the hands of these very men, by his own father. Still, that was unlikely. Donald MacRae had never sold a fish to a Gower collector. Nor would he himself,young MacRae swore under his breath, looking sullenly down upon the Rock.
Day after day, month after month, his father had tugged at the oars, hauled on the line, rowing around and around Poor Man's Rock, skirting the kelp at the cliff's foot, keeping body and soul together with unremitting labor in sun and wind and rain, trying to live and save that little heritage of land for his son.
Jack MacRae sat down on a rock beside a bush and thought about this sadly. He could have saved his father much if he had known. He could have assigned his pay. There was a government allowance. He could have invoked the War Relief Act against foreclosure. Between them they could have managed. But he understood quite clearly why his father made no mention of his difficulties. He would have done the same under the same circumstances himself, played the game to its bitter end without a cry.
But Donald MacRae had made a long, hard fight only to lose in the end, and his son, with full knowledge of the loneliness and discouragement and final hopelessness that had been his father's lot, was passing slowly from sadness to a cumulative anger. That cottage amid its green grounds bright in a patch of sunshine did not help to soften him. It stood on land reclaimed from the forest by his father's labor. It should have belonged to him, and it had passed into hands that already grasped too much. For thirty years Gower had made silent war on Donald MacRae because of a woman. It seemed incredible that a grudge born of jealousy should run so deep, endure so long. But there were the facts. Jack MacRae accepted them; he could not do otherwise. He came of a breed which has handed its feuds from generation to generation, interpreting literally the code of an eye for an eye.
So that as he sat there brooding, it was perhaps a little unfortunate that the daughter of a man whom he was beginning to regard as a forthright enemy should have chosen to come to him, tripping soundlessly over the moss.
He did not hear Betty Gower until she was beside him. Her foot clicked on a stone and he looked up. Betty was all in white, a glow in her cheeks and in her eyes, bareheaded, her reddish-brown hair shining in a smooth roll above her ears.
"I hear you have lost your father," she said simply. "I'm awfully sorry."
Some peculiar quality of sympathy in her tone touched MacRae deeply. His eyes shifted for a moment to the uneasy sea. The lump in his throat troubled him again. Then he faced her again.
"Thanks," he said slowly. "I dare say you mean it, although I don't know why you should. But I'd rather not talk about that. It's done."
"I suppose that's the best way," she agreed, although she gave him a doubtful sort of glance, as if she scarcely knew how to take part of what he said. "Isn't it lovely after the storm? Pretty much all the civilized world must feel a sort of brightness and sunshine to-day, I imagine."
"Why?" he asked. It seemed to him a most uncalled-for optimism.
"Why, haven't you heard that the war is over?" she smiled. "Surely some one has told you?"
He shook his head.
"It is a fact," she declared. "The armistice was signed yesterday at eleven. Aren't you glad?"
MacRae reflecteda second. A week earlier he would have thrown up his cap and whooped. Now the tremendously important happening left him unmoved, unbelievably indifferent. He was not stirred at all by the fact of acknowledged victory, of cessation from killing.
"I should be, I suppose," he muttered. "I know a lot of fellows will be—and their people. So far as I'm concerned—right now—"
He made a quick gesture with his hands. He couldn't explain how he felt—that the war had suddenly and imperiously been relegated to the background for him. Temporarily or otherwise, as a spur to his emotions, the war had ceased to function. He didn't want to talk. He wanted to be let alone, to think.
Yet he was conscious of a wish not to offend, to be courteous to this clear-eyed young woman who looked at him with frank interest. He wondered why he should be of any interest to her. MacRae had never been shy. Shyness is nearly always born of acute self-consciousness. Being free from that awkward inturning of the mind Jack MacRae was not thoroughly aware of himself as a likable figure in any girl's sight. Four years overseas had set a mark on many such as himself. A man cannot live through manifold chances of death, face great perils, do his work under desperate risks and survive, without some trace of his deeds being manifest in his bearing. Those tried by fire are sure of themselves, and it shows in their eyes. Besides, Jack MacRae was twenty-four, clear-skinned, vigorous, straight as a young fir tree, a handsome boy in uniform. But he was not quick to apprehend that these things stirred a girl's fancy, nor did he know that the gloomy something which clouded his eyes made Betty Gower want to comfort him.
"I think I understand," she said evenly,—when in truth she did not understand at all. "But after a while you'll be glad. I know I should be if I were in the army, although of course no matter how horrible it all was it had to be done. For a long time I wanted to go to France myself, to dosomething. I was simply wild to go. But they wouldn't let me."
"And I," MacRae said slowly, "didn't want to go at all—and I had to go."
"Oh," she remarked with a peculiar interrogative inflection. Her eyebrows lifted. "Why did you have to? You went over long before the draft was thought of."
"Because I'd been taught that my flag and country really meant something," he said. "That was all; and it was quite enough in the way of compulsion for a good many like myself who didn't hanker to stick bayonets through men we'd never seen, nor shoot them, nor blow them up with hand grenades, nor kill them ten thousand feet in the air and watch them fall, turning over and over like a winged duck. But these things seemed necessary. They said a country worth living in was worth fighting for."
"And isn't it?" Betty Gower challenged promptly.
MacRae looked at her and at the white cottage, at the great Gulf seas smashing on the rocks below, at the far vista of sea and sky and the shore line faintly purple in the distance. His gaze turned briefly to the leafless tops of maple and alder rising out of the hollow in which his father's body lay—in a corner of the little plot that was left of all their broad acres—and came back at last to this fair daughter ofhis father's enemy.
"The country is, yes," he said. "Anything that's worth having is worth fighting for. But that isn't what they meant, and that isn't the way it has worked out."
He was not conscious of the feeling in his voice. He was thinking with exaggerated bitterness that the Germans in Belgium had dealt less hardly with a conquered people than this girl's father had dealt with his.
"I'm afraid I don't quite understand what you mean by that," she remarked. Her tone was puzzled. She looked at him, frankly curious.
But he could not tell her what he meant. He had a feeling that she was in no way responsible. He had an instinctive aversion to rudeness. And while he was absolving himself of any intention to make war on her he was wondering if her mother, long ago, had been anything like Miss Betty Gower. It seemed odd to think that this level-eyed girl's mother might have beenhismother,—if she had been made of stiffer metal, or if the west wind had blown that afternoon.
He wondered if she knew. Not likely, he decided. It wasn't a story either Horace Gower or his wife would care to tell their children.
So he did not try to tell her what he meant. He withdrew into his shell. And when Betty Gower seated herself on a rock and evinced an inclination to quizhim about things he did not care to be quizzed about, he lifted his cap, bade her a courteous good-by, and walked back toward the Cove.
From the Bottom Up
MacRaedid nothing but mark time until he found himself a plain citizen once more. He could have remained in the service for months without risk and with much profit to himself. But the fighting was over. The Germans were whipped. That had been the goal. Having reached it, MacRae, like thousands of other young men, had no desire to loaf in a uniform subject to military orders while the politicians wrangled.
But even when he found himself a civilian again, master of his individual fortunes, he was still a trifle at a loss. He had no definite plan. He was rather at sea, because all the things he had planned on doing when he came home had gone by the board. So many things which had seemed good and desirable had been contingent upon his father. Every plan he had ever made for the future had included old Donald MacRae and those wide acres across the end of Squitty. He had been deprived of both, left without a ready mark to shoot at. The flood of war had carried him far. The ebb of it had set him back on his native shores,—stranded him there, so to speak, to pick up the broken threads of his old life as best he could.
He had no quarrel with that. But he did have a feud with circumstance, a profound resentment with the past for its hard dealing with his father, for the blankness of old Donald's last year or two on earth. And a good deal of this focused on Horace Gower and his works.
"He might have let up on the old man," Jack MacRae would say to himself resentfully. He would lie awake in the dark thinking about this. "We were doing our bit. He might have stopped putting spokes in our wheel while the war was on."
The fact of the matter is that young MacRae was deeply touched in his family pride as well as his personal sense of injustice. Gower had deeply injured his father, therefore it was any MacRae's concern. It made no difference that the first blow in this quarrel had been struck before he was born. He smarted under it and all that followed. His only difficulty was to discern a method of repaying in kind, which he was thoroughly determined to do.
He saw no way, if the truth be told. He did not even contemplate inflicting physical injury on Horace Gower. That would have been absurd. But he wanted to hurt him, to make him squirm, to heap trouble on the man and watch him break down under the load. And he did not see how he possibly could. Gower was too well fortified. Four years of war experience, which likewise embraced a considerable social experience, had amply shown Jack MacRae the subtle power of money, of political influence, of family connections, of commercial prestige.
All these things were on Gower's side. He was impregnable. MacRae was not a fool. Neither was he inclined to pessimism. Yet so far as he could see, the croakers were not lying when they said that here at home the war had made the rich richer and the poor poorer. It was painfully true in his own case. He had given four years of himself to his country, gained an honorable record, and lost everything else that was worth having.
What he had lost in a material way he meant to get back. How, he had not yet determined. His brain was busy with that problem. And the dying down of his first keen resentment and grief over the death of his father, and that dead father's message to him, merely hardened into a cold resolve to pay off his father's debt to the Gowers and Mortons. MacRae ran true to the traditions of his Highland blood when he lumped them all together.
In this he was directed altogether by the promptings of emotion, and he never questioned the justice of his attitude. But in the practical adjustment of his life to conditions as he found them he adopted a purely rational method.
He took stock of his resources. They were limited enough. A few hundred dollars in back pay and demobilization gratuities; a sound body, now that his injured eye was all but healed; an abounding confidence in himself,—which he had earned the right to feel. That was all. Ambition for place, power, wealth, he did not feel as an imperative urge. He perceived the value and desirability of these things. Only he saw no short straight road to any one of them.
For four years he had been fed, clothed, directed, master of his own acts only in supreme moments. There was an unconscious reaction fromthat high pitch. Being his own man again and a trifle uncertain what to do, he did nothing at all for a time. He made one trip to Vancouver, to learn by just what legal processes the MacRae lands had passed into the Gower possession. He found out what he wanted to know easily enough. Gower had got his birthright for a song. Donald MacRae had borrowed six thousand dollars through a broker. The land was easily worth double, even at wild-land valuation. But old Donald's luck had run true to form. He had not been able to renew the loan. The broker had discounted the mortgage in a pinch. A financial house had foreclosed and sold the place to Gower,—who had been trying to buy it for years, through different agencies. His father's papers told young MacRae plainly enough through what channels the money had gone. Chance had functioned on the wrong side for his father.
So Jack went back to Squitty and stayed in the old house, talked with the fishermen, spent a lot of his time with old Peter Ferrara and Dolly. Always he was casting about for a course of action which would give him scope for two things upon which his mind was set: to get the title to that six hundred acres revested in the MacRae name, and, in Jack's own words to Dolores Ferrara, to take a fall out of Horace Gower that would jar the bones of his ancestors.
With Christmas the Ferrara clan gathered at the Cove, all the stout and able company of Dolly Ferrara's menfolk. It had seemed to MacRae a curious thing that Dolly was the only woman of all the Ferraras. There had been mothers in the Ferrara family, or there could not have been so many capable uncles and cousins. But in MacRae's memory there had never been any mothers or sisters or daughters save Dolly.
There were nine male Ferraras when Jack MacRae went to France. Dolores' father was dead. Uncle Peter was a bachelor. He had two brothers, and each brother had bred three sons. Four of these sons had left their boats and gear to go overseas. Two of them would never come back. The other two were home,—one after a whiff of gas at Ypres, the other with a leg shorter by two inches than when he went away. These two made nothing of their disabilities, however; they were home and they were nearly as good as ever. That was enough for them. And with the younger boys and their fathers they came to old Peter's house for a week at Christmas, after an annual custom. These gatherings in the old days had always embraced Donald MacRae and his son. And his son was glad that it included him now. He felt a little less alone.
They were of the sea, these Ferraras, Castilian Spanish, tempered and diluted by three generations in North America. Their forebears might have sailed in caravels. They knew the fishing grounds of the British Columbia coast as a schoolboy knows hisa, b, c's. They would never get rich, but they were independent fishermen, making a good living. And they were as clannish as the Scotch. All of them had chipped in to send Dolly to school in Vancouver. Old Peter could never have done that, MacRae knew, on what he could make trolling around Poor Man's Rock. Peter had been active with gill net and seine when Jack MacRae was too young to take thought of the commercial end of salmon fishing. He was about sixty-five now, a lean, hardy old fellow, but he seldom went far from Squitty Cove. There was Steve and Frank and Vincent and Manuel of the younger generation, and Manuel and Peter and Joaquin of the elder. Those three had been contemporary with Donald MacRae. They esteemed old Donald. Jack heard many things about his father's early days on the Gulf that were new to him, that made his blood tingle and made him wish he had lived then too. Thirty years back the Gulf of Georgia was no place for any but two-handed men.
He heard also, in that week of casual talk among the Ferraras, certain things said, statements made that suggested a possibility which never seemed to have occurred to the Ferraras themselves.
"The Folly Bay pack of blueback was a whopper last summer," Vincent Ferrara said once. "They must have cleaned up a barrel of money."
Folly Bay was Gower's cannery.
"Well, he didn't make much of it out of us," old Manuel grunted. "We should worry."
"Just the same, he ought to be made to pay more for his fish. He ought to pay what they're worth, for a change," Vincent drawled. "He makes about a hundred trollers eat out of his hand the first six weeks of the season. If somebody would put on a couple of good, fast carriers, and start buying fish as soon as he opens his cannery, I'll bet he'd pay more than twenty-five cents for a five-pound salmon."
"Maybe. But that's been tried and didn't work. Every buyer that ever cut in on Gower soon found himself up against the Packers' Association when he went into the open market with his fish. And a wise man," old Manuel grinned, "don't even figure on monkeying with a buzz saw, sonny."
Not long afterward Jack MacRae got old Manuel in a corner and asked him what he meant.
"Well," he said, "it's like this. When the bluebacks first run here in the spring, they're pretty small, too small for canning. But the fresh fish markets in town take 'em and palm 'em off on the public for salmon trout. So there's an odd fresh-fish buyer cruises around here and picks up a few loads of salmon between the end of April and the middle of June. The Folly Bay cannery opens about then, and the buyers quit. They go farther up the coast. Partly because there's more fish, mostly because nobody has ever made any money bucking Gower for salmon on his own grounds."
"Why?" MacRae asked bluntly.
"Nobody knowsexactlywhy," Manuel replied. "A feller can guess, though. You know the fisheries department has the British Columbia coast cut up into areas, and each area is controlled by some packer as a concession. Well, Gower has the Folly Bay license, and a couple of purse-seine licenses, and that just about gives him the say-so on all the waters around Squitty, besides a couple of good bays on the Vancouver Island side and the same on the mainland. He belongs to the Packers' Association. They ain't supposed to control the local market. But the way it works out they really do. At least, when an independent fish buyer gets to cuttin' in strong on a packer's territory, he generally finds himself in trouble to sell in Vancouver unless he's got a cast-iron contract. That is, he can't sell enough to make any money. Any damn fool can make a living.
"At the top of the island here there's a bunch that has homesteads. They troll in the summer. They deal at the Folly Bay cannery store. Generally they're in the hole by spring. Even if they ain't they have to depend on Folly Bay to market their catch. The cannery's a steady buyer, once it opens. They can't always depend on the fresh-fish buyer, even if he pays a few cents more. So once the cannery opens, Gower has a bunch of trollers ready to deliver salmon, at most any price he cares to name. And he generally names the lowest price on the coast. He don't have nocompetition for a month or so. If there is a little there's ways of killin' it. So he sets his own price. The trollers can take it or leave it."
Old Manuel stopped to light his pipe.
"For three seasons," said he, "Gower has bought blueback salmon the first month of the season for twenty-five cents or less—fish that run three to four pounds. And there hasn't been a time when salmon could be bought in a Vancouver fresh-fish market for less than twenty-five cents a pound."
"Huh!" MacRae grunted.
It set him thinking. He had a sketchy knowledge of the salmon packer's monopoly of cannery sites and pursing licenses and waters. He had heard more or less talk among fishermen of agreements in restraint of competition among the canneries. But he had never supposed it to be quite so effective as Manuel Ferrara believed.
Even if it were, a gentleman's agreement of that sort, being a matter of profit rather than principle, was apt to be broken by any member of the combination who saw a chance to get ahead of the rest.
MacRae took passage for Vancouver the second week in January with a certain plan weaving itself to form in his mind,—a plan which promised action and money and other desirable results if he could carry it through.
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 knewtheirprofits. 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 lieutenantslangily 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. Youcan 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 youabout 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 houseoccupying 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 plungehe 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 thatwas 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 theBlackbird, fast, seaworthy rig, you can have at anominal 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.
Sea Boots and Salmon
From November to April the British Columbian coast is a region of weeping skies, of intermittent frosts and fog, and bursts of sleety snow. The frosts, fogs, and snow squalls are the punctuation points, so to speak, of the eternal rain. Murky vapors eddy and swirl along the coast. The sun hides behind gray banks of cloud, the shining face of him a rare miracle bestowed upon the sight of men as a promise that bright days and blossoming flowers will come again. When they do come the coast is a pleasant country. The mountains reveal themselves, duskily green upon the lower slopes, their sky-piercing summits crowned with snow caps which endure until the sun comes to his full strength in July. The Gulf is a vista of purple-distant shore and island, of shimmering sea. And the fishermen come out of winter quarters to overhaul boats and gear against the first salmon run.
The blueback, a lively and toothsome fish, about which rages an ichthyological argument as to whether he is a distant species of the salmon tribe or merely a half-grown coho, is the first to show in great schools. The spring salmon is always in the Gulf, but the spring is a finny mystery with no known rule for his comings and goings, nor his numbers. All the others, the blueback, the sockeye, the hump, the coho, and the dog salmon, run in the order named. They can be reckoned on as a man reckons on changes of the moon. These are the mainstay of the salmon canners. Upon their taking fortunes have been built—and squandered—men have lived and died, loved and hated, gone hungry and dressed their women in silks and furs. The can of pink meat some inland chef dresses meticulously with parsley and sauces may have cost some fisherman his life; a multiplicity of cases of salmon may have produced a divorce in the packer's household. We eat this fine red fish and heave its container into the garbage tin, with no care for the tragedy or humors that have attended its getting for us.
In the spring, when life takes on a new prompting, the blueback salmon shows first in the Gulf. He cannot be taken by net or bait,—unless the bait be a small live herring. He may only be taken in commercial quantities by a spinner or a wobbling spoon hook of silver or brass or copper drawn through the water at slow speed. The dainty gear of the trout spinner gave birth to the trolling fleets of the Pacific Coast.
At first the schools pass into the Straits of San Juan. Here the joint fleets of British Columbia and of Puget Sound begin to harry them. A week or ten days later the vanguard will be off Nanaimo. And in another week they will be breaking water like trout in a still pool around the rocky base of the Ballenas Light and the kelp beds and reefs of Squitty Island.
By the time they were there, in late April, there were twenty local power boats to begin taking them, for Jack MacRae made the rounds of Squitty to tell the fishermen that he was putting on a carrier to take the first run of blueback to Vancouver markets.
They were a trifle pessimistic. Other buyers had tried it, men gambling on a shoestring for a stake in the fish trade, buyers unable to make regular trips, whereby there was a tale of many salmon rotted in waiting fish holds, through depending on a carrier that did not come. What was the use of burning fuel, of tearing their fingers with the gear, of catching fish to rot? Better to let them swim.
But since the Folly Bay cannery never opened until the fish ran to greater size and number, the fishermen, chafing against inaction after an idle winter, took a chance and trolled for Jack MacRae.
To the trailers' surprise they found themselves dealing with a new type of independent buyer,—a man who could and did make his market trips with clocklike precision. If MacRae left Squitty with a load on Monday, saying that he would be at Squitty Cove or Jenkins Island or Scottish Bay by Tuesday evening, he was there.
He managed it by grace of an able sea boat, engined to drive through sea and wind, and by the nerve and endurance to drive her in any weather. There were times when the Gulf spread placid as a mill pond. There were trips when he drove through with three thousand salmon under battened hatches, his decks awash from boarding seas, ten and twelve and fourteen hours of rough-and-tumble work that brought him into the Narrows and the docks inside with smarting eyes and tired muscles, his head splitting from the pound and clank of the engine and the fumes of gas and burned oil.
It was work, strain of mind and body, long hours filled with discomfort.But MacRae had never shrunk from things like that. He was aware that few things worth while come easy. The world, so far as he knew, seldom handed a man a fortune done up in tissue paper merely because he happened to crave its possession. He was young and eager to do. There was a reasonable satisfaction in the doing, even of the disagreeable, dirty tasks necessary, in beating the risks he sometimes had to run. There was a secret triumph in overcoming difficulties as they arose. And he had an object, which, if it did not always lie in the foreground of his mind, he was nevertheless keen on attaining.
The risks and work and strain, perhaps because he put so much of himself into the thing, paid from the beginning more than he had dared hope. He made a hundred dollars his first trip, paid the trollers five cents a fish more on the second trip and cleared a hundred and fifty. In the second week of his venture he struck a market almost bare of fresh salmon with thirty-seven hundred shining bluebacks in his hold. He made seven hundred dollars on that single cargo.
A Greek buyer followed theBlackbirdout through the Narrows that trip. MacRae beat him two hours to the trolling fleet at Squitty, a fleet that was growing in numbers.
"Bluebacks are thirty-five cents," he said to the first man who ranged alongside to deliver. "And I want to tell you something that you can talk over with the rest of the crowd. I have a market for every fish this bunch can catch. If I can't handle them with theBlackbird, I'll put on another boat. I'm not here to buy fish just till the Folly Bay cannery opens. I'll be making regular trips to the end of the salmon season. My price will be as good as anybody's, better than some. If Gower gets your bluebacksthis season for twenty-five cents, it will be because you want to make him a present. Meantime, there's another buyer an hour behind me. I don't know what he'll pay. But whatever he pays there aren't enough salmon being caught here yet to keep two carriers running. You can figure it out for yourself."
MacRae thought he knew his men. Nor was his judgment in error. The Greek hung around. In twenty-four hours he got three hundred salmon. MacRae loaded nearly three thousand.
Once or twice after that he had competitive buyers in Squitty Cove and the various rendezvous of the trolling fleet. But the fishermen had a loyalty born of shrewd reckoning. They knew from experience the way of the itinerant buyer. They knew MacRae. Many of them had known his father. If Jack MacRae had a market for all the salmon he could buy on the Gower grounds all season, they saw where Folly Bay would buy no fish in the old take-it-or-leave it fashion. They were keenly alive to the fact that they were getting mid-July prices in June, that Jack MacRae was the first buyer who had not tried to hold down prices by pulling a poor mouth and telling fairy tales of poor markets in town. He had jumped prices before there was any competitive spur. They admired young MacRae. He had nerve; he kept his word.
Wherefore it did not take them long to decide that he was a good man to keep going. As a result of this decision other casual buyers got few fish even when they met MacRae's price.
When he had run a little over a month MacRae took stock. He paid the Crow Harbor Canning Company, which was Stubby Abbott's trading name, two hundred and fifty a month for charter of theBlackbird. He had operating outlay for gas, oil, crushed ice, and wages for Vincent Ferrara, whom he took on when he reached the limit of single-handed endurance. Over and above these expenses he had cleared twenty-six hundred dollars.
That was only a beginning he knew,—only a beginning of profits and of work. He purposely thrust the taking of salmon on young Ferrara, let himhandle the cash, tally in the fish, watched Vincent nonchalantly chuck out overripe salmon that careless trollers would as nonchalantly heave in for fresh ones if they could get away with it. For Jack MacRae had it in his mind to go as far and as fast as he could while the going was good. That meant a second carrier on the run as soon as the Folly Bay cannery opened, and it meant that he must have in charge of the second boat an able man whom he could trust. There was no question about trusting Vincent Ferrara. It was only a matter of his ability to handle the job, and that he demonstrated to MacRae's complete satisfaction.
Early in June MacRae went to Stubby Abbott.
"Have you sold theBluebirdyet?" he asked.
"I want to let three of thoseBirdboats go," Stubby told him. "I don't need 'em. They're dead capital. But I haven't made a sale yet."
"Charter me theBluebirdon the same terms," Jack proposed.
"You're on. Things must be going good."
"Not too bad," MacRae admitted.
"Folly Bay opens the twentieth. We open July first," Stubby said abruptly. "How many bluebacks are you going to get for us?"
"Just about all that are caught around Squitty Island," MacRae said quietly. "That's why I want another carrier."
"Huh!" Stubby grunted. His tone was slightly incredulous. "You'll have to go some. Wish you luck though. More you get the better for me."
"I expect to deliver sixty thousand bluebacks to Crow Harbor in July," MacRae said.
Stubby stared at him. His eyes twinkled.
"If you can do that in July, and in August too," he said, "I'llgiveyou theBluebird."
"No," MacRae smiled. "I'll buy her."
"Where will Folly Bay get off if you take that many fish away?" Stubby reflected.
"Don't know. And I don't care a hoot." MacRae shrugged his shoulders. "I'm fairly sure I can do it. You don't care?"
"Do I? I'll shout to the world I don't," Stubby replied. "It's self-preservation with me. Let old Horace look out for himself. He had his fingers in the pie while we were in France. I don't have to have four hundred per cent profit to do business. Get the fish if you can, Jack, old boy, even if it busts old Horace. Which it won't—and, as I told you, lack of them may bust me."
"By the way," Stubby said as MacRae rose to go, "don't you ever have an hour to spare in town? You haven't been out at the house for six weeks."
MacRae held out his hands. They were red and cut and scarred, roughened, and sore from salt water and ice-handling and fish slime.
"Wouldn't they look well clasping a wafer and a teacup," he laughed. "I'm working, Stub. When I have an hour to spare I lie down and sleep. If I stopped to play every time I came to town—do you think you'd get your sixty thousand bluebacks in July?"
Stubby looked at MacRae a second, at his work-torn hands and weary eyes.
"I guess you're right," he said slowly. "But the old stone house will still be up on the corner when the salmon run is over. Don't forget that."
MacRae went off to Coal Harbor to take over the second carrier. And he wondered as he went if it would all be such clear sailing, if it were possible that at the first thrust he had found an open crack in Gower's armor through which he could prick the man and make him squirm.
He looked at his hands. When they fingered death as a daily task they had been soft, white, delicate,—dainty instruments equally fit for the manipulation of aerial controls, machine guns or teacups. Why should honest work prevent a man from meeting pleasant people amid pleasant surroundings? Well, it was not the work itself, it was simply the effects of that gross labor. On the American continent, at least, a man did not lose caste by following any honest occupation,—only he could not work with the workers and flutter with the butterflies. MacRae, walking down the street, communing with himself, knew that he must pay a penalty for working with his hands. If he were a drone in uniform—necessarily a drone since the end of war—he could dance and play, flirt with pretty girls, be a welcome guest in great houses, make the heroic past pay social dividends.
It took nearly as much courage and endurance to work as it had taken to fight; indeed it took rather more, at times, to keep on working. Theoretically he should not lose caste. Yet MacRae knew he would,—unless he made a barrel of money. There had been stray straws in the past month. There were, it seemed, very nice people who could not quite understand why an officer and a gentleman should do work thatwasn't,—well, not even clean. Not clean in the purely objective, physical sense, like banking or brokerage, or teaching, or any of those semi-genteel occupations which permit people to make a living without straining their backs or soiling their hands. He wasn't even sure that Stubby Abbott—MacRae was ashamed of his cynicism when he got that far. Stubby was a real man. Even if he needed a man or a man's activities in his business Stubby wouldn't cultivate that man socially merely because he needed his producing capacity.