Poor Man's Rock Part 13

"It isn't quite so simple as that," she sighed. "Norman's w--this woman presently got tired of him. Evidently she had no scruples about getting what she wanted, nor how. She went away with another man. Norman is getting a divorce--the decree absolute will be granted in March next. He wants me to marry him."

"Will you?"

Dolly looked up to meet MacRae's wondering stare. She nodded.

"You're a triple-plated fool," he said roughly.

"I don't know," she replied thoughtfully. "Norman certainly has been.

Perhaps I am too. We should get on--a pair of fools together."

The bitterness in her voice stung MacRae.

"You really should have loved me," he said, "and I you."

"But you don't, Jack. You have never thought of that before."

"I could, quite easily."

Dolly considered this a moment.

"No," she said. "You like me. I know that, Johnny. I like you, too. You are a man, and I'm a woman. But if you weren't bursting with sympathy you wouldn't have thought of that. If Norman had some of your backbone--but it wouldn't make any difference. If you know what it is that draws a certain man and woman together in spite of themselves, in spite of things they can see in each other that they don't quite like, I dare say you'd understand. I don't think I do. Norman Gower has made me dreadfully unhappy. But I loved him before he went away, and I love him yet. I want him just the same. And he says--he says--that he never stopped caring for me--that it was like a bad dream. I believe him. I'm sure of it. He didn't lie to me. And I can't hate him. I can't punish him without punishing myself. I don't want to punish him, any more than I would want to punish a baby, if I had one, for a naughtiness it couldn't help."

"So you'll marry him eventually?" MacRae asked.

Dolly nodded.

"If he doesn't change his mind," she murmured. "Oh, I shouldn't say ugly things like that. It sounds cheap and mean."

"But it hurts, it hurts me so to think of it," she broke out pa.s.sionately. "I can forgive him, because I can see how it happened.

Still it hurts. I feel cheated--cheated!"

She lay back in her chair, fingers locked together, red lips parted over white teeth that were clenched together. Her eyes glowed somberly, looking away through distant s.p.a.ces.

And MacRae, conscious that she had said her say, feeling that she wanted to be alone, as he himself always wanted to fight a grief or a hurt alone and in silence, walked out into the sunshine, where the westerly droned high above in the swaying fir tops.

He went up the path around the Cove's head to the porch of his own house, sat down on the top step, and cursed the Gowers, root and branch.

He hated them, everything of the name and blood, at that moment, with a profound and active hatred.

They were like a blight, as their lives touched the lives of other people. They sat in the seats of the mighty, and for their pleasure or their whims others must sweat and suffer. So it seemed to Jack MacRae.

Home, these crowded, hurrying days, was aboard the _Blackbird_. It was pleasant now to sit on his own doorstep and smell the delicate perfume of the roses and the balsamy odors from the woods behind. But the rooms depressed him when he went in. They were dusty and silent, abandoned to that forsaken air which rests upon uninhabited dwellings. MacRae went out again, to stride aimlessly along the cliffs past the mouth of the Cove.

Beyond the lee of the island the westerly still lashed the Gulf. The white horses galloped on a gray-green field. MacRae found a gra.s.sy place in the shade of an arbutus, and lay down to rest and watch. Sunset would bring calm, a dying wind, new colors to sea and sky and mountains. It would send him away on the long run to Crow Harbor, driving through the night under the cool stars.

No matter what happened people must be fed. Food was vital. Men lost their lives at the fishing, but it went on. Hearts might be torn, but hands still plied the gear. Life had a bad taste in Jack MacRae's mouth as he lay there under the red-barked tree. He was moody. It seemed a struggle without mercy or justice, almost without reason, a blind obedience to the will-to-live. A tooth-and-toenail contest. He surveyed his own part in it with cynical detachment. So long as salmon ran in the sea they would be taken for profit in the markets and the feeding of the hungry. And the salmon would run and men would pursue them, and the game would be played without slackening for such things as broken faith or aching hearts or a woman's tears.

MacRae grew drowsy puzzling over things like that. Life was a jumble beyond his understanding, he concluded at last. Men strove to a G.o.dlike mastery of circ.u.mstances,--and achieved three meals a day and a squalid place to sleep. Sometimes, when they were pluming themselves on having beaten the game, Destiny was laughing in her sleeve and spreading a snare for their feet. A man never knew what was coming next. It was just a d.a.m.ned scramble! A disorderly scramble in which a man could be sure of getting hurt.

He wondered if that were really true.

CHAPTER X

Thrust and Counterthrust

By the time Jack MacRae was writing August on his sales slips he was conscious of an important fact; namely, that nearly a hundred gas-boat fishermen, trolling Squitty Island, the Ballenas, Gray Rock, even farther afield to Yellow Rock Light and Lambert Channel, were compactly behind him. They were still close to a period when they had been remorselessly exploited. They were all for MacRae. Prices being equal, they preferred that he should have their fish. It was still vivid in their astonished minds that he had shared profits with them without compulsion, that he had boosted prices without compet.i.tion, 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 becoming the uncrowned salmon king. Other buyers cut in from time to time. They did not fare well. The trollers would hold their salmon, even when some sporting independent offered to shade the current price. They would shake their heads if they knew either of the _Bird_ boats would be there to take the fish. For when MacRae said he would be there, he was always there. In the old days they had been compelled to play one buyer against another. They did not have to do that with MacRae.

The Folly Bay collectors fared little better than outside buyers. In July Gower met MacRae's price by two successive raises. He stopped at that. MacRae 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 fifty-five, MacRae gave up a fourth of his contract percentage and paid sixty. It was like draw poker with the advantage of the last raise on his side.

The salmon were worth the price. They were worth double to a cannery that lay mostly idle for lack of fish. The salmon, now, were running close to six pounds each. The finished product was eighteen dollars a case in the market. There are 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 scattered salmon in their holds. They were primitive folk, these salmon trollers. They jeered the unlucky collectors. Gower was losing his fishermen as well as his fish. For the time, at least, the back of his long-held monopoly was broken.

MacRae got a little further light on this att.i.tude from Stubby Abbott.

"He's figuring on making out a season's pack with cohoes, humps, and dog salmon," Stubby told MacRae at the Crow Harbor cannery. "He expects to work his purse seiners overtime, and to h.e.l.l with the individual fisherman. Norman was telling me. Old Horace has put Norman in charge at Folly Bay, you know."

MacRae nodded. He knew about that.

"The old boy is sore as a boil at you and me," Stubby chuckled. "I don't blame him much. He has had a cinch there so long he thinks it's his private pond. You've certainly put a crimp in the Folly Bay blueback pack--to my great benefit. I don't suppose any one but you could have done it either."

"Any one could," MacRae declared, "if he knew the waters, the men, and was wise enough to play the game square. The trouble has been that each buyer wanted to make a 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 overboard. Canneries and buyers alike have systematically given him the worst of the deal. You don't cut your cannery hands' pay because on certain days your pack falls off."

"Hardly."

"But canneries and collectors and every independent buyer have always used any old pretext to cut the price to the fisherman out on the grounds. And while a fisherman 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.a.panese to every white salmon fisherman on the British Columbia coast. That is why we have an Oriental problem. The j.a.ps are making the canneries squeal, aren't they?"

"Rather." Stubby smiled. "They are getting to be a bit of a problem."

"The packers got them in here as cheap labor in the salmon fishing,"

MacRae went on. "The white fisherman was too independent. He wanted all he could get out of his work. He was a kicker, as well as a good fisherman. The packers thought they could keep wages down and profits up by importing the j.a.p--cheap labor with a low standard of living. And the j.a.p has turned the tables on the big fellows. They hang together, as aliens always do in a strange country, and the war has helped them freeze the white fisherman out on one hand and exact more and more from the canneries on the other. And that would never have happened if this had been kept a white man's country, and the white fisherman had got a square deal."

"To buy as cheaply as you can and sell for as much as you can," Stubby reminded him, "is a fundamental of business. You can't get away from it.

My father abandoned that maxim the last two years of his life, and it nearly broke us. He was a public-spirited man. He took war and war-time conditions 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 learned, were the first to sharpen their knives for him. He was establishing a bad precedent. I don't know but their att.i.tude is sound, after all. In sheer self-defense a man must make all he can when he has a chance. You cannot indulge in philanthropy in a business undertaking these days, Silent John."

"Granted," MacRae made answer. "I don't propose to be a philanthropist myself. But you will get farther with a salmon fisherman, or any other man whose labor you must depend on, if you accept the principle that he is ent.i.tled 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 gouged and cheated a lot. They aren't fools.

They know pretty well who makes the long profit, who pile up moderate fortunes while they get only a living, and not a particularly good living at that."

"Are you turning Bolshevik?" Stubby inquired with mock solicitude.

MacRae smiled.

"Hardly. Nor are the fishermen. They know I'm making money. But they know also that they are getting more out of it than they ever got before, and that if I were not on the job they would get a lot less."

"They certainly would," Abbott drawled. "You have been, and are now, paying more for blueback salmon than any buyer on the Gulf."