Poor Man's Rock Part 9

They shook hands to bind the bargain, grinning at each other a trifle self-consciously.

"Have you a suitable boat?" Stubby asked after a little.

"No," MacRae admitted. "But I have been looking around. I find that I can charter one cheaper than I can build--until such time as I make enough to build a fast, able carrier."

"I'll charter you one," Stubby offered. "That's where part of our money is uselessly tied up, in expensive boats that never carried their weight in salmon. I'm going to sell two fifty-footers and a seine boat. There's one called the _Blackbird_, fast, seaworthy rig, you can have at a nominal rate."

"All right," MacRae nodded. "By chartering I have enough cash in hand to finance the buying. I'm going to start as soon as the bluebacks come and run fresh fish, if I can make suitable connections."

Stubby grinned.

"I can fix that too," he said. "I happen to own some shares in the Terminal Fish Company. The pater organized it to give Vancouver people cheap fish, but somehow it didn't work as he intended. It's a fairly strong concern. I'll introduce you. They'll buy your salmon, and they'll treat you right."

"And now," Stubby rose and stretched his one good arm and the other that was visibly twisted and scarred between wrist and elbow, above his head, "let's go downstairs and prattle. I see a car in front, and I hear twittering voices."

Halfway down the stairs Stubby halted and laid a hand on MacRae's arm.

"Old Horace is a two-fisted old buccaneer," he said. "And I don't go much on Norman. But I'll say Betty Gower is some girl. What do you think, Silent John?"

And Jack MacRae had to admit that Betty was. Oddly enough, Stubby Abbott had merely put into words an impression to which MacRae himself was slowly and reluctantly subscribing.

CHAPTER VII

Sea Boots and Salmon

From November to April the British Columbian coast is a region of weeping skies, of intermittent frosts and fog, and bursts of sleety snow. The frosts, fogs, and snow squalls are the punctuation points, so to speak, of the eternal rain. Murky vapors eddy and swirl along the coast. The sun hides behind gray banks of cloud, the s.h.i.+ning face of him a rare miracle bestowed upon the sight of men as a promise that bright days and blossoming flowers will come again. When they do come the coast is a pleasant country. The mountains reveal themselves, duskily green upon the lower slopes, their sky-piercing summits crowned with snow caps which endure until the sun comes to his full strength in July. The Gulf is a vista of purple-distant sh.o.r.e and island, of s.h.i.+mmering sea. And the fishermen come out of winter quarters to overhaul boats and gear against the first salmon run.

The blueback, a lively and toothsome fish, about which rages an ichthyological argument as to whether he is a distant species of the salmon tribe or merely a half-grown coho, is the first to show in great schools. The spring salmon is always in the Gulf, but the spring is a finny mystery with no known rule for his comings and goings, nor his numbers. All the others, the blueback, the sockeye, the hump, the coho, and the dog salmon, run in the order named. They can be reckoned on as a man reckons on changes of the moon. These are the mainstay of the salmon canners. Upon their taking fortunes have been built--and squandered--men have lived and died, loved and hated, gone hungry and dressed their women in silks and furs. The can of pink meat some inland chef dresses meticulously with parsley and sauces may have cost some fisherman his life; a multiplicity of cases of salmon may have produced a divorce in the packer's household. We eat this fine red fish and heave its container into the garbage tin, with no care for the tragedy or humors that have attended its getting for us.

In the spring, when life takes on a new prompting, the blueback salmon shows first in the Gulf. He cannot be taken by net or bait,--unless the bait be a small live herring. He may only be taken in commercial quant.i.ties by a spinner or a wobbling spoon hook of silver or bra.s.s or copper drawn through the water at slow speed. The dainty gear of the trout spinner gave birth to the trolling fleets of the Pacific Coast.

At first the schools pa.s.s into the Straits of San Juan. Here the joint fleets of British Columbia and of Puget Sound begin to harry them. A week or ten days later the vanguard will be off Nanaimo. And in another week they will be breaking water like trout in a still pool around the rocky base of the Ballenas Light and the kelp beds and reefs of Squitty Island.

By the time they were there, in late April, there were twenty local power boats to begin taking them, for Jack MacRae made the rounds of Squitty to tell the fishermen that he was putting on a carrier to take the first run of blueback to Vancouver markets.

They were a trifle pessimistic. Other buyers had tried it, men gambling on a shoestring for a stake in the fish trade, buyers unable to make regular trips, whereby there was a tale of many salmon rotted in waiting fish holds, through depending on a carrier that did not come. What was the use of burning fuel, of tearing their fingers with the gear, of catching fish to rot? Better to let them swim.

But since the Folly Bay cannery never opened until the fish ran to greater size and number, the fishermen, chafing against inaction after an idle winter, took a chance and trolled for Jack MacRae.

To the trailers' surprise they found themselves dealing with a new type of independent buyer,--a man who could and did make his market trips with clocklike precision. If MacRae left Squitty with a load on Monday, saying that he would be at Squitty Cove or Jenkins Island or Scottish Bay by Tuesday evening, he was there.

He managed it by grace of an able sea boat, engined to drive through sea and wind, and by the nerve and endurance to drive her in any weather.

There were times when the Gulf spread placid as a mill pond. There were trips when he drove through with three thousand salmon under battened hatches, his decks awash from boarding seas, ten and twelve and fourteen hours of rough-and-tumble work that brought him into the Narrows and the docks inside with smarting eyes and tired muscles, his head splitting from the pound and clank of the engine and the fumes of gas and burned oil.

It was work, strain of mind and body, long hours filled with discomfort.

But MacRae had never shrunk from things like that. He was aware that few things worth while come easy. The world, so far as he knew, seldom handed a man a fortune done up in tissue paper merely because he happened to crave its possession. He was young and eager to do. There was a reasonable satisfaction in the doing, even of the disagreeable, dirty tasks necessary, in beating the risks he sometimes had to run.

There was a secret triumph in overcoming difficulties as they arose. And he had an object, which, if it did not always lie in the foreground of his mind, he was nevertheless keen on attaining.

The risks and work and strain, perhaps because he put so much of himself into the thing, paid from the beginning more than he had dared hope. He made a hundred dollars his first trip, paid the trollers five cents a fish more on the second trip and cleared a hundred and fifty. In the second week of his venture he struck a market almost bare of fresh salmon with thirty-seven hundred s.h.i.+ning bluebacks in his hold. He made seven hundred dollars on that single cargo.

A Greek buyer followed the _Blackbird_ out through the Narrows that trip. MacRae beat him two hours to the trolling fleet at Squitty, a fleet that was growing in numbers.

"Bluebacks are thirty-five cents," he said to the first man who ranged alongside to deliver. "And I want to tell you something that you can talk over with the rest of the crowd. I have a market for every fish this bunch can catch. If I can't handle them with the _Blackbird_, I'll put on another boat. I'm not here to buy fish just till the Folly Bay cannery opens. I'll be making regular trips to the end of the salmon season. My price will be as good as anybody's, better than some. If Gower gets your bluebacks this season for twenty-five cents, it will be because you want to make him a present. Meantime, there's another buyer an hour behind me. I don't know what he'll pay. But whatever he pays there aren't enough salmon being caught here yet to keep two carriers running. You can figure it out for yourself."

MacRae thought he knew his men. Nor was his judgment in error. The Greek hung around. In twenty-four hours he got three hundred salmon. MacRae loaded nearly three thousand.

Once or twice after that he had compet.i.tive buyers in Squitty Cove and the various rendezvous of the trolling fleet. But the fishermen had a loyalty born of shrewd reckoning. They knew from experience the way of the itinerant buyer. They knew MacRae. Many of them had known his father. If Jack MacRae had a market for all the salmon he could buy on the Gower grounds all season, they saw where Folly Bay would buy no fish in the old take-it-or-leave it fas.h.i.+on. They were keenly alive to the fact that they were getting mid-July prices in June, that Jack MacRae was the first buyer who had not tried to hold down prices by pulling a poor mouth and telling fairy tales of poor markets in town. He had jumped prices before there was any compet.i.tive spur. They admired young MacRae. He had nerve; he kept his word.

Wherefore it did not take them long to decide that he was a good man to keep going. As a result of this decision other casual buyers got few fish even when they met MacRae's price.

When he had run a little over a month MacRae took stock. He paid the Crow Harbor Canning Company, which was Stubby Abbott's trading name, two hundred and fifty a month for charter of the _Blackbird_. He had operating outlay for gas, oil, crushed ice, and wages for Vincent Ferrara, whom he took on when he reached the limit of single-handed endurance. Over and above these expenses he had cleared twenty-six hundred dollars.

That was only a beginning he knew,--only a beginning of profits and of work. He purposely thrust the taking of salmon on young Ferrara, let him handle the cash, tally in the fish, watched Vincent nonchalantly chuck out overripe salmon that careless trollers would as nonchalantly heave in for fresh ones if they could get away with it. For Jack MacRae had it in his mind to go as far and as fast as he could while the going was good. That meant a second carrier on the run as soon as the Folly Bay cannery opened, and it meant that he must have in charge of the second boat an able man whom he could trust. There was no question about trusting Vincent Ferrara. It was only a matter of his ability to handle the job, and that he demonstrated to MacRae's complete satisfaction.

Early in June MacRae went to Stubby Abbott.

"Have you sold the _Bluebird_ yet?" he asked.

"I want to let three of those _Bird_ boats go," Stubby told him. "I don't need 'em. They're dead capital. But I haven't made a sale yet."

"Charter me the _Bluebird_ on the same terms," Jack proposed.

"You're on. Things must be going good."

"Not too bad," MacRae admitted.

"Folly Bay opens the twentieth. We open July first," Stubby said abruptly. "How many bluebacks are you going to get for us?"

"Just about all that are caught around Squitty Island," MacRae said quietly. "That's why I want another carrier."

"Huh!" Stubby grunted. His tone was slightly incredulous. "You'll have to go some. Wish you luck though. More you get the better for me."

"I expect to deliver sixty thousand bluebacks to Crow Harbor in July,"

MacRae said.

Stubby stared at him. His eyes twinkled.

"If you can do that in July, and in August too," he said, "I'll _give_ you the _Bluebird_."

"No," MacRae smiled. "I'll buy her."

"Where will Folly Bay get off if you take that many fish away?" Stubby reflected.

"Don't know. And I don't care a hoot." MacRae shrugged his shoulders.