Poor Man's Rock Part 6

"I think I understand," she said evenly,--when in truth she did not understand at all. "But after a while you'll be glad. I know I should be if I were in the army, although of course no matter how horrible it all was it had to be done. For a long time I wanted to go to France myself, to do _something_. I was simply wild to go. But they wouldn't let me."

"And I," MacRae said slowly, "didn't want to go at all--and I had to go."

"Oh," she remarked with a peculiar interrogative inflection. Her eyebrows lifted. "Why did you have to? You went over long before the draft was thought of."

"Because I'd been taught that my flag and country really meant something," he said. "That was all; and it was quite enough in the way of compulsion for a good many like myself who didn't hanker to stick bayonets through men we'd never seen, nor shoot them, nor blow them up with hand grenades, nor kill them ten thousand feet in the air and watch them fall, turning over and over like a winged duck. But these things seemed necessary. They said a country worth living in was worth fighting for."

"And isn't it?" Betty Gower challenged promptly.

MacRae looked at her and at the white cottage, at the great Gulf seas smas.h.i.+ng on the rocks below, at the far vista of sea and sky and the sh.o.r.e line faintly purple in the distance. His gaze turned briefly to the leafless tops of maple and alder rising out of the hollow in which his father's body lay--in a corner of the little plot that was left of all their broad acres--and came back at last to this fair daughter of his father's enemy.

"The country is, yes," he said. "Anything that's worth having is worth fighting for. But that isn't what they meant, and that isn't the way it has worked out."

He was not conscious of the feeling in his voice. He was thinking with exaggerated bitterness that the Germans in Belgium had dealt less hardly with a conquered people than this girl's father had dealt with his.

"I'm afraid I don't quite understand what you mean by that," she remarked. Her tone was puzzled. She looked at him, frankly curious.

But he could not tell her what he meant. He had a feeling that she was in no way responsible. He had an instinctive aversion to rudeness. And while he was absolving himself of any intention to make war on her he was wondering if her mother, long ago, had been anything like Miss Betty Gower. It seemed odd to think that this level-eyed girl's mother might have been _his_ mother,--if she had been made of stiffer metal, or if the west wind had blown that afternoon.

He wondered if she knew. Not likely, he decided. It wasn't a story either Horace Gower or his wife would care to tell their children.

So he did not try to tell her what he meant. He withdrew into his sh.e.l.l.

And when Betty Gower seated herself on a rock and evinced an inclination to quiz him about things he did not care to be quizzed about, he lifted his cap, bade her a courteous good-by, and walked back toward the Cove.

CHAPTER V

From the Bottom Up

MacRae did nothing but mark time until he found himself a plain citizen once more. He could have remained in the service for months without risk and with much profit to himself. But the fighting was over.

The Germans were whipped. That had been the goal. Having reached it, MacRae, like thousands of other young men, had no desire to loaf in a uniform subject to military orders while the politicians wrangled.

But even when he found himself a civilian again, master of his individual fortunes, he was still a trifle at a loss. He had no definite plan. He was rather at sea, because all the things he had planned on doing when he came home had gone by the board. So many things which had seemed good and desirable had been contingent upon his father. Every plan he had ever made for the future had included old Donald MacRae and those wide acres across the end of Squitty. He had been deprived of both, left without a ready mark to shoot at. The flood of war had carried him far. The ebb of it had set him back on his native sh.o.r.es,--stranded him there, so to speak, to pick up the broken threads of his old life as best he could.

He had no quarrel with that. But he did have a feud with circ.u.mstance, a profound resentment with the past for its hard dealing with his father, for the blankness of old Donald's last year or two on earth. And a good deal of this focused on Horace Gower and his works.

"He might have let up on the old man," Jack MacRae would say to himself resentfully. He would lie awake in the dark thinking about this. "We were doing our bit. He might have stopped putting spokes in our wheel while the war was on."

The fact of the matter is that young MacRae was deeply touched in his family pride as well as his personal sense of injustice. Gower had deeply injured his father, therefore it was any MacRae's concern. It made no difference that the first blow in this quarrel had been struck before he was born. He smarted under it and all that followed. His only difficulty was to discern a method of repaying in kind, which he was thoroughly determined to do.

He saw no way, if the truth be told. He did not even contemplate inflicting physical injury on Horace Gower. That would have been absurd.

But he wanted to hurt him, to make him squirm, to heap trouble on the man and watch him break down under the load. And he did not see how he possibly could. Gower was too well fortified. Four years of war experience, which likewise embraced a considerable social experience, had amply shown Jack MacRae the subtle power of money, of political influence, of family connections, of commercial prestige.

All these things were on Gower's side. He was impregnable. MacRae was not a fool. Neither was he inclined to pessimism. Yet so far as he could see, the croakers were not lying when they said that here at home the war had made the rich richer and the poor poorer. It was painfully true in his own case. He had given four years of himself to his country, gained an honorable record, and lost everything else that was worth having.

What he had lost in a material way he meant to get back. How, he had not yet determined. His brain was busy with that problem. And the dying down of his first keen resentment and grief over the death of his father, and that dead father's message to him, merely hardened into a cold resolve to pay off his father's debt to the Gowers and Mortons. MacRae ran true to the traditions of his Highland blood when he lumped them all together.

In this he was directed altogether by the promptings of emotion, and he never questioned the justice of his att.i.tude. But in the practical adjustment of his life to conditions as he found them he adopted a purely rational method.

He took stock of his resources. They were limited enough. A few hundred dollars in back pay and demobilization gratuities; a sound body, now that his injured eye was all but healed; an abounding confidence in himself,--which he had earned the right to feel. That was all. Ambition for place, power, wealth, he did not feel as an imperative urge. He perceived the value and desirability of these things. Only he saw no short straight road to any one of them.

For four years he had been fed, clothed, directed, master of his own acts only in supreme moments. There was an unconscious reaction from that high pitch. Being his own man again and a trifle uncertain what to do, he did nothing at all for a time. He made one trip to Vancouver, to learn by just what legal processes the MacRae lands had pa.s.sed into the Gower possession. He found out what he wanted to know easily enough.

Gower had got his birthright for a song. Donald MacRae had borrowed six thousand dollars through a broker. The land was easily worth double, even at wild-land valuation. But old Donald's luck had run true to form.

He had not been able to renew the loan. The broker had discounted the mortgage in a pinch. A financial house had foreclosed and sold the place to Gower,--who had been trying to buy it for years, through different agencies. His father's papers told young MacRae plainly enough through what channels the money had gone. Chance had functioned on the wrong side for his father.

So Jack went back to Squitty and stayed in the old house, talked with the fishermen, spent a lot of his time with old Peter Ferrara and Dolly.

Always he was casting about for a course of action which would give him scope for two things upon which his mind was set: to get the t.i.tle to that six hundred acres revested in the MacRae name, and, in Jack's own words to Dolores Ferrara, to take a fall out of Horace Gower that would jar the bones of his ancestors.

With Christmas the Ferrara clan gathered at the Cove, all the stout and able company of Dolly Ferrara's menfolk. It had seemed to MacRae a curious thing that Dolly was the only woman of all the Ferraras. There had been mothers in the Ferrara family, or there could not have been so many capable uncles and cousins. But in MacRae's memory there had never been any mothers or sisters or daughters save Dolly.

There were nine male Ferraras when Jack MacRae went to France. Dolores'

father was dead. Uncle Peter was a bachelor. He had two brothers, and each brother had bred three sons. Four of these sons had left their boats and gear to go overseas. Two of them would never come back. The other two were home,--one after a whiff of gas at Ypres, the other with a leg shorter by two inches than when he went away. These two made nothing of their disabilities, however; they were home and they were nearly as good as ever. That was enough for them. And with the younger boys and their fathers they came to old Peter's house for a week at Christmas, after an annual custom. These gatherings in the old days had always embraced Donald MacRae and his son. And his son was glad that it included him now. He felt a little less alone.

They were of the sea, these Ferraras, Castilian Spanish, tempered and diluted by three generations in North America. Their forebears might have sailed in caravels. They knew the fis.h.i.+ng grounds of the British Columbia coast as a schoolboy knows his _a, b, c_'s. They would never get rich, but they were independent fishermen, making a good living. And they were as clannish as the Scotch. All of them had chipped in to send Dolly to school in Vancouver. Old Peter could never have done that, MacRae knew, on what he could make trolling around Poor Man's Rock.

Peter had been active with gill net and seine when Jack MacRae was too young to take thought of the commercial end of salmon fis.h.i.+ng. He was about sixty-five now, a lean, hardy old fellow, but he seldom went far from Squitty Cove. There was Steve and Frank and Vincent and Manuel of the younger generation, and Manuel and Peter and Joaquin of the elder.

Those three had been contemporary with Donald MacRae. They esteemed old Donald. Jack heard many things about his father's early days on the Gulf that were new to him, that made his blood tingle and made him wish he had lived then too. Thirty years back the Gulf of Georgia was no place for any but two-handed men.

He heard also, in that week of casual talk among the Ferraras, certain things said, statements made that suggested a possibility which never seemed to have occurred to the Ferraras themselves.

"The Folly Bay pack of blueback was a whopper last summer," Vincent Ferrara said once. "They must have cleaned up a barrel of money."

Folly Bay was Gower's cannery.

"Well, he didn't make much of it out of us," old Manuel grunted. "We should worry."

"Just the same, he ought to be made to pay more for his fish. He ought to pay what they're worth, for a change," Vincent drawled. "He makes about a hundred trollers eat out of his hand the first six weeks of the season. If somebody would put on a couple of good, fast carriers, and start buying fish as soon as he opens his cannery, I'll bet he'd pay more than twenty-five cents for a five-pound salmon."

"Maybe. But that's been tried and didn't work. Every buyer that ever cut in on Gower soon found himself up against the Packers' a.s.sociation when he went into the open market with his fish. And a wise man," old Manuel grinned, "don't even figure on monkeying with a buzz saw, sonny."

Not long afterward Jack MacRae got old Manuel in a corner and asked him what he meant.

"Well," he said, "it's like this. When the bluebacks first run here in the spring, they're pretty small, too small for canning. But the fresh fish markets in town take 'em and palm 'em off on the public for salmon trout. So there's an odd fresh-fish buyer cruises around here and picks up a few loads of salmon between the end of April and the middle of June. The Folly Bay cannery opens about then, and the buyers quit. They go farther up the coast. Partly because there's more fish, mostly because n.o.body has ever made any money bucking Gower for salmon on his own grounds."

"Why?" MacRae asked bluntly.

"n.o.body knows _exactly_ why," Manuel replied. "A feller can guess, though. You know the fisheries department has the British Columbia coast cut up into areas, and each area is controlled by some packer as a concession. Well, Gower has the Folly Bay license, and a couple of purse-seine licenses, and that just about gives him the say-so on all the waters around Squitty, besides a couple of good bays on the Vancouver Island side and the same on the mainland. He belongs to the Packers' a.s.sociation. They ain't supposed to control the local market.

But the way it works out they really do. At least, when an independent fish buyer gets to cuttin' in strong on a packer's territory, he generally finds himself in trouble to sell in Vancouver unless he's got a cast-iron contract. That is, he can't sell enough to make any money.

Any d.a.m.n fool can make a living.

"At the top of the island here there's a bunch that has homesteads. They troll in the summer. They deal at the Folly Bay cannery store. Generally they're in the hole by spring. Even if they ain't they have to depend on Folly Bay to market their catch. The cannery's a steady buyer, once it opens. They can't always depend on the fresh-fish buyer, even if he pays a few cents more. So once the cannery opens, Gower has a bunch of trollers ready to deliver salmon, at most any price he cares to name.

And he generally names the lowest price on the coast. He don't have no compet.i.tion for a month or so. If there is a little there's ways of killin' it. So he sets his own price. The trollers can take it or leave it."

Old Manuel stopped to light his pipe.

"For three seasons," said he, "Gower has bought blueback salmon the first month of the season for twenty-five cents or less--fish that run three to four pounds. And there hasn't been a time when salmon could be bought in a Vancouver fresh-fish market for less than twenty-five cents a pound."