Poor Man's Rock

nd Count

in their astonished minds that he had shared profits with them without compulsion, that he had boosted prices without competition, had put a great many dollars in their pockets. Only those who earn a living as precariously, as riskily and with as much patient labor as a salmon fisherman, can so well value a dollar. They had an abiding confidence, by this time, in Jack MacRae. They knew he was square, and they said so. In the territory his two carriers covered, MacRae was beco

e did not. Each succeeding run of salmon averaged greater poundage. They were worth more. MacRae paid fifty, fifty-five cents. When Gower stood pat at

e forty-eight one-pound cans in a case. To a man familiar with packing costs it is a simple sum. MacRae often wondered why Gower stubbornly refused to pay more, when his collecting boats came back to the cannery so often with a few scat

ther light on this atti

at the Crow Harbor cannery. "He expects to work his purse seiners overtime, and to hell with the indi

ed. He knew

d a cinch there so long he thinks it's his private pond. You've certainly put a crimp in the Folly

clean-up on each trip. He wanted easy money. The salmon fisherman away up the coast practically has to take what is offered him day by day, or throw his fish overboar

rdl

n has to take what he is offered he doesn't have to keep on taking it. He can quit, and try something else. Lots of them have done that. That's why there are three J

. "They are getting to

hey could keep wages down and profits up by importing the Jap-cheap labor with a low standard of living. And the Jap has turned the tables on the big fellows. They hang together, as aliens always do in a strange country, and the war has h

to heart. In a period of jumping food costs he tried to give people cheaper food. As I said, he nearly went broke trying to do a public service, because no one else in the same business departed from the business rule of making all they could. In fact, men in the same business, I have since learn

he principle that he is entitled to make a dollar as well as yourself, if you don't stretch every point to take advantage of his necessity. These fellows who fish around Squitty have been gouge

evik?" Stubby inquired

ae s

know also that they are getting more out of it than they ever got b

u have been, and are now, paying more for b

o you, hasn't it?" MacRae said. "You've had a hundred thou

our logic. In this case it has paid us both, and t

op of that and pack profitably, why can't other canneries? Why

fresh-fish buyers, you are the only operator on the Gulf who is cutting any particular ice. Gower m

on the job," M

ugh?" Stubby as

uitty Island bunch of trollers seem convinced you are the whole noise in the sal

than mere casual speculation in Stubby's word

in advance. Without Crow Harbor as a market I could not have done what I have done

lly with a pencil at t

ig run will be over at Squitty in another month. I don't believe I can be dictated to on short notice. But I cannot po

ink I

he-MacRae-had a market for his fish, he could not buy. And within the limits of British Columbia the salmon market was subject to control; by just what means MacRae had got inklings here and there. He h

hand. It scarcely seemed possible. It gave him a startling vision of the profits in the salmon industry, and it was not a tenable theory that men who had controlled such a source of profits would sit idle while he undermined their monopoly. Nevertheless he had made that much money in four months. He had at his back a hundred fishermen who knew him, liked him, trusted him, who were a

y interests in general, and they would consider him an apostate and knife him without mercy,-if they could. If the Abbott estate had debts, obligations which could be manipulated, if through the financial convolutions of marketing the Crow Harbor pack Stubby could

protect himself in a showdown, set

. Then MacRae took the next train to Bellingham, a cannery town which looks out on the southern end of the Gulf of G

erns on the Pacific Coast. He got a courteous but unsatisfactory reception from the cannery men. He fared a little better with the manager

, perhaps more, for a period of about four months," MacRae stated. "What I s

d only speak pleasantly of the market and possible arrangements

y own," he said. "You don't

ding a shrewdly appraising eye on MacRae. "B

I must sell or throw overboard within forty-eight hours," MacRae smiled. "No, I don't

ut the usual thing on salmon. And we would rather h

y-not simply to create dividends for your Eastern stockholder

storage m

argo of salmon, you might run them in to us. We'll pay mark

contract. He would bring in boatloads of salmon, and the dealers would squeeze him, all but the Terminal Fish Company. And if the market could be controlled, if the men behind could dictate the Crow Ha

onths. He was forgetting how to laugh, to be buoyant, to see the world through the rose-colored glasses of sanguine yout

ur men can handle the job a day or two longer

ed. "But a man can't play and produce

e living-room floor and danced to a phonograph. MacRae found himself a little out of it, by inclination. He was tired, without knowing quite what was the matter with him. A man, even a young and sturdy man, cannot work like a horse for months o

ression for the first time in his social contact with them-that wearing good clothes, behaving well, giving themselves whole-heartedly to having a good time, was the most i

asant security of mind and body. Some one had to pay for it, the silks and georgettes and white f

nd the purely primitive stages of association, people gravitate into sets and cliques. They lived in good homes, they had servants, the

ed to pay for all this well-being in which they could have no part. MacRae even suspected that a great many men had died across the

,-in the shape of pioneer parents who had skimmed the cream off the resources of a developing frontier and handed it on to their children, and who themselves so frequently kept in the background, a little in awe of their gilded offspring. MacRae meant to beat the game as it was being played. He felt that he was beating it. Bu

Abbott home that evening. He had never found himself in that critical mood before. He did not want to prattle nonsense. He did not want to think, a

from one thing to another. Steve Ferrara lay in the opposite bunk, wheezing his breath in and out of lungs seared by poison gas in Flanders. Smells of seaweed and tide-flat wafted in through open hatch and portholes. A full moon thrust silver fingers throug

On his delivery, when the salmon in her hold had been picarooned to the cannery floor, MacR

mind now?" MacRa

ed unpleasant,"

id. He sat down an

owly. "But it seems they can. I guess you'll have

plied. "I've been rather expec

I go on paying a few cents more for salmon in order to keep my plant working efficiently. Damn it, I hate it. But I'm in no position to clash with the rest of the cannery crowd and the banks too. I hate to let you down. You've pulled me out of a hole. I don't know

he bank advanced me any funds. You are not responsible for what I do. And neither Gower nor the Packers' Association nor the

terly. "I tell you there isn't a cannery on the Gulf will pay you a cent mo

ot attempt t

. That, I gather, is the chief object. I suppose they know as much about your busines

eral policy may be subject to dictation, but not the petty det

MacRae suggested. "You had them up for sale, anyway. Tha

each," Stubby

And I can use ten thousand do

can cease worrying over me, Stub. You've been square, and I've made money on the deal. You would be fool

be in shape to show them something. They will not bother about the Terminal, because the Terminal is small. All the salmon they could take from you wouldn't hurt Gower. What they want is to enable Gower to get up his usual fall pack. It has taken him this long

"And if it is any satisfaction to you personally, Stub, I ca

looked

something up

fed club, either. It's loaded. Y

ensely of Horace Gower and the past, or of Gower's various shifts to defeat him in what he undertook. He had anticipated this mov

"about as much as our fellows used to like Fritz when he

ell, you'll transfer that registry-when? I wa

h you now, if you li

ancouver was a smoky smudge on a far horizon. At dusk he passed in the narrow mouth of Squitty Cove. The Bluebird was swinging about to go when her sister ship ranged alongside. Vincent Ferrara dropped his hook again. There

losed, so far as Crow Harbor is concerned. If I can't sell salmon I can't

in the yellow lantern light, at each other. They

e wen

o run them farther, and you fellows will have to wait a bit for me now and then, perhaps. The cannery men hang together. They are making it bad for me because I'm paying a few cents more for salmon. They have choked off Crow Harbor. Gower is hungry for cheap salmon

eem apprehensive that Folly Bay would get salmon for forty cents. MacRae had said he would still buy. For them that settled it. They would not have to sell their catch to Folly Bay for whatever price

ay and gone fishing. Mullen had seen two years in the trenches. He sat in his

grab. Folly Bay made barrels of coin while the war was on. Why can't they give us fellers a show to make a little now? But they don't give a damn

ay into the gloom that

r was clear of Squitty's dusky headlands, pointing a course straight down the middle of the Gulf. His man turned in to sleep. MacRae stood watch alone, listening to the ka-choof, ka-choof of the exhaust, the murmuring swash of calm water cleft

t he had beaten Gower in this first definite brush. Moving in devious

bia packers. "The damned Americans!" they sometimes growled, and talked about legislation to keep American fish buyers out. Because the American buyer and canner alike would spend a dollar to make a dollar. And the British Columbia packers wanted a cinch, a monopoly, which in a measure they had. They were an anachronism, MacRae felt. They regarded the salmon and the salmon waters of the British Columbia coast as the feudal barons of old jealous

outh and passed in among the nets and lights of the sockeye fleet drifting, a thousand strong, on the broad bosom of the Gulf. Then he had to stand up