Poor Man's Rock Part 14

"Well, it has paid me. And it has been highly profitable to you, hasn't it?" MacRae said. "You've had a hundred thousand salmon to pack which you would not otherwise have had."

"Certainly," Stubby agreed. "I'm not questioning your logic. In this case it has paid us both, and the fisherman as well. But suppose everybody did it?"

"If you can pay sixty cents a fish, and fifteen per cent, on top of that and pack profitably, why can't other canneries? Why can't Folly Bay meet that compet.i.tion? Rather, why won't they?"

"Matter of policy, maybe," Stubby hazarded. "Matter of keeping costs down. Apart from a few little fresh-fish buyers, you are the only operator on the Gulf who is cutting any particular ice. Gower may figure that he will eventually get these fish at his own price. If I were eliminated, he would."

"I'd still be on the job," MacRae ventured.

"Would you, though?" Stubby asked doubtfully.

"Yes." MacRae made his reply positive in tone. "You could buy all right. That Squitty Island bunch of trollers seem convinced you are the whole noise in the salmon line. But without Crow Harbor where could you unload such quant.i.ties of fish?"

It struck MacRae that there was something more than mere casual speculation in Stubby's words. But he did not attempt to delve into motives.

"A good general," he said with a dry smile, "doesn't advertise his plan of campaign in advance. Without Crow Harbor as a market I could not have done what I have done this season. But Crow Harbor could shut down to-morrow--and I'd go on just the same."

Stubby poked thoughtfully with a pencil at the blotter on his desk.

"Well, Jack, I may as well be quite frank with you," he said at last. "I have had hints that may mean something. The big run will be over at Squitty in another month. I don't believe I can be dictated to on short notice. But I cannot positively say. If you can see your way to carry on, it will be quite a relief to me. Another season it may be different."

"I think I can."

But though MacRae said this confidently, he was privately not so sure.

From the very beginning he had expected pressure to come on Stubby, as the active head of Crow Harbor. It was as Stubby said. Unless 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 had not been deceived by the smoothness of his operations so far. Below the clear horizon there was a storm gathering. A man like Gower did not lie down and submit pa.s.sively to being beaten at his own game.

But MacRae believed he had gone too far to be stopped now, even if his tactics did not please the cannery interests. They could have squelched him easily enough in the beginning, when he had no funds to speak of, when his capital was mostly a capacity for hard, dirty work and a willingness to take chances. Already he had run his original shoestring to fifteen thousand dollars cash in 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 anxious that he should prosper, because they felt that they were sharing in that prosperity. Ninety per cent. of these men had a grievance against the canneries. And he had the good will of these men with sun-browned faces and hook-scarred hands. The human equation in industrial processes is a highly important one, as older, wiser men than Jack MacRae had been a longer time discovering.

He did not try to pin Stubby to a more definite statement. A hint was enough for MacRae. Stubby Abbott could also be depended upon to see things beyond the horizon. If a storm broke Stubby was the most vulnerable, because in a sense he was involved with the cannery 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 be reached, the Abbott family had property, a standard of living that stood for comfort, appearance, luxury almost. There are always plenty of roads open to a flank attack on people like that; many levers, financial and otherwise, can be pulled for or against them.

So MacRae, knowing that Stubby must protect himself in a showdown, set about fortifying his own approaches.

For a first move he hired an engineer, put Steve Ferrara in charge of the _Blackbird_, and started him back to Squitty. Then MacRae took the next train to Bellingham, a cannery town which looks out on the southern end of the Gulf of Georgia from the American side of the boundary. He extended his journey to Seattle. Altogether, he was gone three days.

When he came back he made a series of calls,--at the Vancouver offices of three different canneries and one of the biggest cold-storage concerns on the Pacific Coast. He got a courteous but unsatisfactory reception from the cannery men. He fared a little better with the manager of the cold-storage plant. This gentleman was tentatively agreeable in the matter of purchasing salmon, but rather vague in the way of terms.

"Beginning with May next I can deliver any quant.i.ty up to two thousand a day, perhaps more, for a period of about four months," MacRae stated.

"What I should like to know is the percentage over the up-coast price you would pay."

But he could not pin the man down to anything definite. He would only speak pleasantly of the market and possible arrangements, utter vague commonplaces in business terminology. MacRae rose.

"I'm wasting your time and my own," he said. "You don't want my fish.

Why not say so?"

"We always want fish," the man declared, bending a shrewdly appraising eye on MacRae. "Bring in the salmon and we will do business."

"On your own terms when my carriers are tied to your dock with a capacity load which I must sell or throw overboard within forty-eight hours," MacRae smiled. "No, I don't intend to go up against any take-it-or-leave proposition like that. I don't have to."

"Well, we might allow you five per cent. That's about the usual thing on salmon. And we would rather have salmon now than a promise of them next season."

"Oh, rats!" MacRae snorted. "I'm in the business to make money--not simply to create dividends for your Eastern stockholders while I eke out a living and take all the risks. Come again."

The cold storage man smiled.

"Come and see me in the spring. Meantime, when you have a cargo of salmon, you might run them in to us. We'll pay market prices. It's up to you to protect yourself in the buying."

MacRae went on about his business. He had not expected much encouragement locally, so he did not suffer disappointment. He knew quite well what he could expect in Vancouver if Crow Harbor canceled his 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 Harbor policy, they might also bring the Terminal into line. Even if they did not the Terminal could only handle a minor portion of the salmon he could get while the big run swirled around Squitty Island.

But MacRae was not downcast. He was only sober and thoughtful, which had become characteristic of him in the last four months. He was forgetting how to laugh, to be buoyant, to see the world through the rose-colored gla.s.ses of sanguine youth. He was becoming a living exampler of his nickname. Even Stubby Abbott marked this when Jack came back from Bellingham.

"Come on out to the house," Stubby urged. "Your men can handle the job a day or two longer. Forget the grind for once. It's getting you."

"No, I don't think it is," MacRae denied. "But a man can't play and produce at the same time. I have to keep going."

He did go out to Abbott's one evening, however, and suffered a good deal of teasing from Nelly over his manhandling of Sam Kaye. A lot of other young people happened to foregather there. They sang and flirted and presently moved the rugs off the 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 st.u.r.dy man, cannot work like a horse for months on end, eating his meals anyhow and sleeping when he can, without losing temporarily the zest for careless fun. For another thing, he found himself looking at these immaculate young people as any hard-driven worker must perforce look upon drones.

They were sons and daughters of the well-to-do, divorced from all uncouthness, with pretty manners and good clothes. They seemed serene in the a.s.surance--MacRae got this impression 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 important and satisfying thing in the world. They moved in an atmosphere of considering these things their due, a birthright, their natural and proper condition of well-being.

And MacRae found himself wondering what they gave or ever expected to give in return for this pleasant security of mind and body. Some one had to pay for it, the silks and georgettes and white flannels, furs and strings of pearls and gold trinkets, the good food, the motor cars, and the fun.

He knew a little about every one he met that evening, for in Vancouver as in any other community which has developed a social life beyond the purely primitive stages of a.s.sociation, people gravitate into sets and cliques. They lived in good homes, they had servants, they week-ended here and there. Of the dozen or more young men and women present, only himself and Stubby Abbott made any pretense at work.

Yet somebody paid for all they had and did. Men in offices, in shops, in fishing boats and mines and logging camps worked and sweated 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 sea that this sort of thing should remain the inviolate privilege of just such people as these. It was not an inspiring conclusion.

He smiled to himself. How they would stare if he should voice these stray thoughts in plain English. They would cry out that he was a Bolshevik. Absolutely! He wondered why he should think such things. He wasn't disgruntled. He wanted a great many things which these young people of his own age had gotten from fairy G.o.dmothers,--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. But nothing would be handed him on a silver salver. Fortune would not be bestowed upon him in any easy, soft-handed fashion. He would have to render an equivalent for what he got. He wondered if the security of success so gained would have any greater value for him than it would have for those who took their blessings so lightly.

This kink of a.n.a.lytical reasoning was new to MacRae, and it kept him from entering whole-heartedly into the joyous frivolity which functioned in the 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, and he could not help thinking. He had a curious sense of detachment from what was going on, even while he was a part of it. So he did not linger late.

The _Blackbird_ had discharged at Crow Harbor late in the afternoon. She lay now at a Vancouver slip. By eleven o'clock he was aboard in his bunk, still thinking when he should have been asleep, staring wide-eyed at dim deck beams, his mind flitting restlessly 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 through deck openings. Gradually the softened medley of harbor noises lulled MacRae into a dreamless sleep. He only wakened at the clank of the engine and the shudder of the _Blackbird's_ timbers as Steve backed her out of her berth in the first faint gleam of dawn.

The _Blackbird_ made her trip and a second and a third, which brought the date late in August. On his delivery, when the salmon in her hold had been picarooned to the cannery floor, MacRae went up to the office.

Stubby had sent for him. He looked uncomfortable when Jack came in.

"What's on your mind now?" MacRae asked genially.

"Something d.a.m.ned unpleasant," Stubby growled.

"Shoot," MacRae said. He sat down and lit a cigarette.

"I didn't think they could do it," Abbott said slowly. "But it seems they can. I guess you'll have to lay off the Gower territory after all, Jack."

"You mean _you_ will," MacRae replied. "I've been rather expecting that.

Can Gower hurt you?"

"Not personally. But the banks--export control--there are so many angles to the cannery situation. There's nothing openly threatened. But it has been made perfectly clear to me that I'll be hampered and hara.s.sed till I won't know whether I'm afoot or on horseback, if I go on paying a few cents more for salmon in order to keep my plant working efficiently.

d.a.m.n 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 a man who would have worked at your pitch and carried things off the way you have. If I had this pack marketed, I could snap my fingers at them. But I haven't. There's the rub. I hate to ditch you in order to insure myself--get in line at somebody else's dictation."