Poor Man's Rock

ots an

ides 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 slope

thers, 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 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 o

in to harry them. A week or ten days later the vanguard will be off Nanaimo. And in another week they will be breaking w

gin taking them, for Jack MacRae made the rounds of Squitty to tell the fishermen tha

to make regular trips, whereby there was a tale of many salmon rotted in waiting fish holds, through depending on a carrier that did

o greater size and number, the fishermen, chafing against inactio

uld and did make his market trips with clocklike precision. If MacRae left Squitty with a load on Monday,

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

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

dred 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

rows that trip. MacRae beat him two hours to the trollin

d, 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 bluebacks this season for twenty-five ce

rror. The Greek hung around. In twenty-four hours he got

own 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 J

good man to keep going. As a result of this decision other c

o hundred and fifty a month for charter of the Blackbird. He had operating outlay for gas, oil, crushed ice, and wages for Vincent Ferrara,

ould 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

MacRae went to

the Bluebird

Stubby told him. "I don't need 'em. They're

ebird on the same t

hings must be

ad," MacRa

uly first," Stubby said abruptly. "How ma

d Squitty Island," MacRae said quietl

incredulous. "You'll have to go some. Wish yo

thousand bluebacks to Crow

at him. His

and in August too," he said,

smiled. "I'

ff if you take that many fi

MacRae shrugged his shoulders. "I'm f

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

"don't you ever have an hour to spare in town? Y

d cut and scarred, roughened, and sore from

Stub. When I have an hour to spare I lie down and sleep. If I stopped to play every

a second, at his work-to

old stone house will still be up on the corner

f it would all be such clear sailing, if it were possible that at the first thrust he had fo

ings? 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 str

y nice people who could not quite understand why an officer and a gentleman should do work that wasn'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 straini

was involved in getting back all that broad sweep of land which his father had claimed from the wilderness, that he must exact an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. That was the why of his unceasing energy, his uncomplaining endu

y did not seem to him particularly formidable. The Scotch had been credited with uncanny knowledge of the future. Jack MacRae, however, though his Highland