Poor Man's Rock Part 31

He was swinging at anchor there one day when a rowboat from the cannery put out to the _Blanco_. The man in it told MacRae that Gower would like to see him. MacRae's first impulse was to grin and ignore the request.

Then he changed his mind, and taking his own dinghy rowed ash.o.r.e. Some time or other he would have to meet his father's enemy, face him, talk to him, listen to what he might say, tell him things. Curiosity was roused in him a little now. He desired to know what Gower had to say. He wondered if Gower was weakening; what he could want.

He found Gower in a cubby-hole of an office behind the cannery store.

"You wanted to see me," MacRae said curtly.

He was in sea boots, bareheaded. His s.h.i.+rt sleeves were rolled above sun-browned forearms. He stood before Gower with his hands thrust in the pockets of duck overalls speckled with fish scales, smelling of salmon.

Gower stared at him silently, critically, it seemed to MacRae, for a matter of seconds.

"What's the sense in our cutting each other's throats over these fish?"

Gower asked at length. "I've been wanting to talk to you for quite a while. Let's get together. I--"

MacRae's temper flared.

"If that's what you want," he said, "I'll see you in h.e.l.l first."

He turned on his heel and walked out of the office. When he stepped into his dinghy he glanced up at the wharf towering twenty feet above his head. Betty Gower was sitting on a pile head. She was looking down at him. But she was not smiling. And she did not speak. MacRae rowed back to the _Blanco_ in an ugly mood.

In the next forty-eight hours Folly Bay jumped the price of bluebacks to ninety cents, to ninety-five, to a dollar. The _Blanco_ wallowed down to Crow Harbor with a load which represented to MacRae a dead loss of four hundred dollars cash.

"He must be crazy," Stubby fumed. "There's no use canning salmon at a loss."

"Has he reached the loss point yet?" MacRae inquired.

"He's shaving close. No cannery can make anything worth reckoning at a dollar or so a case profit."

"Is ninety cents and five cents' commission your limit?" MacRae demanded.

"Just about," Stubby grunted. "Well"--reluctantly--"I can stand a dollar. That's the utmost limit, though. I can't go any further."

"And if he gets them all at a dollar or more, he'll be canning at a dead loss, eh?"

"He certainly will," Stubby declared. "Unless he cans 'em heads, tails, and scales, and gets a bigger price per case than has been offered yet."

MacRae went back to Squitty with a definite idea in his mind. Gower had determined to have the salmon. Very well, then, he should have them. But he would have to take them at a loss, in so far as MacRae could inflict loss upon him. He knew of no other way to hurt effectively such a man as Gower. Money was life blood to him, and it was not of great value to MacRae as yet. With deliberate calculation he decided to lose the greater part of what he had made, if for every dollar he lost himself he could inflict equal or greater loss on Gower.

The trailers who combed the Squitty waters were taking now close to five thousand salmon a day. Approximately half of these went to Folly Bay.

MacRae took the rest. In this battle of giants the fishermen had lost sight of the outcome. They ceased to care who got fish. They only watched eagerly for him who paid the biggest price. They were making thirty, forty, fifty dollars a day. They no longer held salmon--only a few of the old-timers--for MacRae's carriers. It was nothing to them who made a profit or suffered a loss. Only a few of the older men wondered privately how long MacRae could stand it and what would happen when he gave up.

MacRae met every raise Folly Bay made. He saw bluebacks go to a dollar ten, then to a dollar fifteen. He ran cargo after cargo to Crow Harbor and dropped from three to seven hundred dollars on each load, until even Stubby lost patience with him.

"What's the sense in bucking him till you go broke? I'm in too deep to stand any loss myself. Quit. Tie up your boats, Jack. Let him have the salmon. Let those blockheads of fishermen see what he'll do to 'em once you stop."

But MacRae held on till the first hot days of August were at hand and his money was dwindling to the vanis.h.i.+ng point. Then he ran the _Blanco_ and the _Bluebird_ into Squitty Cove and tied them to permanent moorings in shoal water near the head. For a day or two the salmon had s.h.i.+fted mysteriously to the top end, around Folly Bay and the Siwash Islands and Jenkins Pa.s.s. The bulk of the fleet had followed them. Only a few stuck to the Cove and Poor Man's Rock. To these and the rowboat trollers MacRae said:

"Sell your fish to Folly Bay. I'm through."

Then he lay down in his bunk in the airy pilot house of the _Blanco_ and slept the clock around, the first decent rest he had taken in two months. He had not realized till then how tired he was.

When he wakened he washed, ate, changed his clothes and went for a walk along the cliffs to stretch his legs. Vin had gone up to the k.n.o.b to see Dolly and Uncle Peter. His helper on the _Bluebird_ was tinkering about his engine. MacRae's two men loafed on the clean-slushed deck. They were none of them company for MacRae in his present mood. He sought the cliffs to be alone.

Gower had beaten him, it would seem. And MacRae did not take kindly to being beaten. But he did not think this was the end yet. Gower would do as he had done before. When he felt himself secure in his monopoly he would squeeze the fishermen, squeeze them hard. And as soon as he did that MacRae would buy again. He could not make any money himself, perhaps. But he could make Gower operate at a loss. That would be something accomplished.

MacRae walked along the cliffs until he saw the white cottage, and saw also that some one sat on the steps in the sun. Whereupon he turned back. He didn't want to see Betty. He conceived that to be an ended chapter in his experiences. He had hurt her, and she had put on her armor against another such hurt. There was a studied indifference about her now, when he met her, which hurt him terribly. He supposed that in addition to his own incomprehensible att.i.tude which she resented, she took sides with her father in this obvious commercial warfare which was bleeding them both financially. Very likely she saw in this only the open workings of his malice toward Gower. In which MacRae admitted she would be quite correct. He had not been able to discover in that flaring-up of pa.s.sion for Betty any reason for a burial of his feud with Gower. There was in him some curious insistence upon carrying this to the bitter end. And his hatred of Gower was something alive, vital, coloring his vision somberly. The shadow of the man lay across his life.

He could not ignore this, and his instinct was for reprisal. The fighting instinct in MacRae lurked always very near the surface.

He spent a good many hours during the next three or four days lying in the shade of a gnarly arbutus which gave on the cliffs. He took a book up there with him, but most of the time he lay staring up at the blue sky through the leaves, or at the sea, or distant sh.o.r.e lines, thinking always in circles which brought him despairingly out where he went in.

He saw a mustard pot slide each day into the Cove and pa.s.s on about its business. There was not a great deal to be got in the Cove. The last gas boat had scuttled away to the top end, where the blueback were schooling in vast numbers. There were still salmon to be taken about Poor Man's Rock. The rowboat men took a few fish each day and hoped for another big run.

There came a day when the mustard pot failed to show in the Cove. The rowboat men had three hundred salmon, and they cursed Folly Bay with a fine flow of epithet as they took their rotting fish outside the Cove and dumped them in the sea. Nor did a Gower collector come, although there was nothing in the wind or weather to stop them. The rowboat trollers fumed and stewed and took their troubles to Jack MacRae. But he could neither inform nor help them.

Then upon an evening when the sun rested on the serrated backbone of Vancouver Island, a fiery ball against a sky of burnished copper, flinging a red haze down on a slow swell that furrowed the Gulf, Jack MacRae, perched on a mossy boulder midway between the Cove and Point Old, saw first one boat and then another come slipping and lurching around Poor Man's Rock. Converted Columbia River sailboats, Cape Flattery trollers, double-enders, all the variegated craft that fishermen use and traffic with, each rounded the Rock and struck his course for the Cove, broadside on to the rising swell, their twenty-foot trolling poles lashed aloft against a stumpy mast and swinging in a great arc as they rolled. One, ten, a dozen, an endless procession, sometimes three abreast, again a string in single file. MacRae was reminded of the march of the oysters--

"So thick and fast they came at last, And more and more and more."

He sat watching them pa.s.s, wondering why the great trek. The trolling fleet normally s.h.i.+fted by pairs and dozens. This was a squadron movement, the Grand Fleet steaming to some appointed rendezvous. MacRae watched till the sun dipped behind the hills, and the reddish tint left the sea to linger briefly on the summit of the Coast Range flanking the mainland sh.o.r.e. The fish boats were still coming, one behind the other, lurching and swinging in the trough of the sea, rising and falling, with wheeling gulls crying above them. On each deck a solitary fisherman humped over his steering gear. From each cleaving stem the bow-wave curled in white foam.

There was something in the wind. MacRae felt it like a premonition. He left his boulder and hurried back toward the Cove.

The trolling boats were packed about the _Blanco_ so close that MacRae left his dinghy on the outer fringe and walked across their decks to the deck of his own vessel. The _Blanco_ loomed in the midst of these lesser craft like a hen over her brood of chicks. The fishermen had gathered on the nearest boats. A dozen had clambered up and taken seats on the _Blanco's_ low bulwarks. MacRae gained his own deck and looked at them.

"What's coming off?" he asked quietly. "You fellows holding a convention of some sort?"

One of the men sitting on the big carrier's rail spoke.

"Folly Bay's quit--shut down," he said sheepishly. "We come to see if you'd start buying again."

MacRae sat down on one sheave of his deck winch. He took out a cigarette and lighted it, swung one foot back and forth. He did not make haste to reply. An expectant hush fell on the crowd. In the slow-gathering dusk there was no sound but the creak of rubbing gunwales, the low snore of the sea breaking against the cliffs, and the chug-chug of the last stragglers beating into the shelter of the Cove.

"He shut down the cannery," the fishermen's spokesman said at last. "We ain't seen a buyer or collector for three days. The water's full of salmon, an' we been suckin' our thumbs an' watching 'em play. If you won't buy here again we got to go where there is buyers. And we'd rather not do that. There's no place on the Gulf as good fis.h.i.+n' as there is here now."

"What was the trouble?" MacRae asked absently. "Couldn't you supply him with fish?"

"n.o.body knows. There was plenty of salmon. He cut the price the day after you tied up. He cut it to six bits. Then he shut down. Anyway, we don't care why he shut down. It don't make no difference. What we want is for you to start buyin' again. h.e.l.l, we're losin' money from daylight to dark! The water's alive with salmon. An' the season's short. Be a sport, MacRae."

MacRae laughed.

"Be a sport, eh?" he echoed with a trace of amus.e.m.e.nt in his tone. "I wonder how many of you would have listened to me if I'd gone around to you a week ago and asked you to give me a sporting chance?"

No one answered. MacRae threw away his half-smoked cigarette. He stood up.

"All right, I'll buy salmon again," he said quietly. "And I won't ask you to give me first call on your catch or a chance to make up some of the money I lost bucking Folly Bay, or anything like that. But I want to tell you something. You know it as well as I do, but I want to jog your memory with it."

He raised his voice a trifle.

"You fellows know that I've always given you a square deal. You aren't fis.h.i.+ng for sport. You're at this to make a living, to make money if you can. So am I. You are ent.i.tled to all you can get. You earn it. You work for it. So am I ent.i.tled to what I can make. I work, I take certain chances. Neither of us is getting something for nothing. But there is a limit to what either of us can get. We can't dodge that. You fellows have been dodging it. Now you have to come back to earth.

"No fisherman can get the prices you have had lately. No cannery can pack salmon at those prices. Sockeye, the finest canning salmon that swims in the sea, is bringing eighty cents on the Fraser. Bluebacks are sixty-five cents at Nanaimo, sixty at Cape Mudge, sixty at the Euclataws.