Poor Man's Rock

he Bot

out risk and with much profit to himself. But the fighting was over. The Germans were whipped. That had been the goal. Having reached it

y 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 depr

ent with the past for its hard dealing with his father, for the blankness of old Donald's

tfully. He would lie awake in the dark thinking about this. "We were doing ou

red 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.

uirm, 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, whi

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

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

r questioned the justice of his attitude. But in the practical adjustment of

jured 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

d 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 l

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 acre

e 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 h

ck. 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 wit

ed 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 a

ertain things said, statements made that suggested a possibility

r last summer," Vincent Ferrara said once. "

was Gower'

of it out of us," old Manue

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

d himself up against the Packers' Association when he went into the open market with his fish.

ae got old Manuel in a corne

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 op

cRae aske

censes, 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

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 p

topped to li

twenty-five cents or less-fish that run three to four pounds. And there hasn't been a time when

MacRae

g licenses and waters. He had heard more or less talk among fishermen of agreements in restraint of competi

ter of profit rather than principle, was apt to be broken by any m

tain plan weaving itself to form in his mind,-a plan which promised act