Chapter VI: The Springboard

With a basic knowledge to start from, any reasonably clever man can digest an enormous amount of information about any given industry in a very brief time. Jack MacRae spent three weeks in Vancouver as a one-man commission, self-appointed, to inquire into the fresh-salmon trade. He talked to men who caught salmon and to men who sold them, both wholesale and retail. He apprised himself of the ins and outs of salmon canning, and of the independent fish collector who owned his own boat, financed himself, and chanced the market much as a farmer plants his seed, trusts to the weather, and makes or loses according to the yield and market,--two matters over which he can have no control.

MacRae learned before long that old Manuel Ferrara was right when he said no man could profitably buy salmon unless he had a cast-iron agreement either with a cannery or a big wholesaler. MacRae soon saw that the wholesaler stood like a wall between the fishermen and those who ate fish. They could make or break a buyer. MacRae was not long running afoul of the rumor that the wholesale fish men controlled the retail price of fresh fish by the simple method of controlling the supply, which they managed by coöperation instead of competition among themselves. He heard this stated. And more,--that behind the big dealers stood the shadowy figure of the canning colossus. This was told him casually by fishermen. Fish buyers repeated it, sometimes with a touch of indignation. That was one of their wails,--the fish combine. It was air-tight, they said. The packers had a strangle hold on the fishing waters, and the big local fish houses had the same unrelenting grip on the market.

Therefore the ultimate consumer--whose exploitation was the prize plum of commercial success--paid thirty cents per pound for spring salmon that a fisherman chivied about in the tumbling Gulf seas fifty miles up-coast had to take fourteen cents for. As for the salmon packers, the men who pack the good red fish in small round tins which go to all the ends of the earth to feed hungry folk,--well, no one knew _their_ profits. Their pack was all exported. The back yards of Europe are strewn with empty salmon cans bearing a British Columbia label. But they made money enough to be a standing grievance to those unable to get in on this bonanza.

MacRae, however, was chiefly concerned with the local trade in fresh salmon. His plan didn't look quite so promising as when he mulled over it at Squitty Cove. He put out feelers and got no hold. A fresh-fish buyer operating without approved market connections might make about such a living as the fishermen he bought from. To Jack MacRae, eager and sanguine, making a living was an inconspicuous detail. Making a living,--that was nothing to him. A more definite spur roweled his flank.

It looked like an air-tight proposition, he admitted, at last. But, he said to himself, anything air-tight could be punctured. And undoubtedly a fine flow of currency would result from such a puncture. So he kept on looking about, asking casual questions, listening. In the language of the street he was getting wise.

Incidentally he enjoyed himself. The battle ground had been transferred to Paris. The pen, the typewriter, and the press dispatch, with immense reserves of oratory and printer's ink, had gone into action. And the soldiers were coming home,--officers of the line and airmen first, since to these leave and transportation came easily, now that the guns were silent. MacRae met fellows he knew. A good many of them were well off, had homes in Vancouver. They were mostly young and glad the big show was over. And they had the social instinct. During intervals of fighting they had rubbed elbows with French and British people of consequence. They had a mind to enjoy themselves.

MacRae had a record in two squadrons. He needed no press-agenting when he met another R.A.F. man. So he found himself invited to homes, the inside of which he would otherwise never have seen, and to pleasant functions among people who would never have known of his existence save for the circumstance of war. Pretty, well-bred girls smiled at him, partly because airmen with notable records were still a novelty, and partly because Jack MacRae was worth a second look from any girl who was fancy-free. Matrons were kind to him because their sons said he was the right sort, and some of these same matrons mothered him because he was like boys they knew who had gone away to France and would never come back.

This was very pleasant. MacRae was normal in every respect. He liked to dance. He liked glittering lights and soft music. He liked nice people. He liked people who were nice to him. But he seldom lost sight of his objective. These people could relax and give themselves up to enjoyment because they were "heeled"--as a boy lieutenant slangily put it--to MacRae.

"It's a great game, Jack, if you don't weaken," he said. "But a fellow can't play it through on a uniform and a war record. I'm having a top-hole time, but it'll be different when I plant myself at a desk in some broker's office at a hundred and fifty a month. It's mixed pickles, for a fact. You can't buy your way into this sort of thing. And you can't stay in it without a bank roll."

Which was true enough. Only the desire to "see it through" socially was not driving Jack MacRae. He had a different target, and his eye did not wander far from the mark. And perhaps because of this, chance and his social gadding about gave him the opening he sought when he least expected to find one.

To be explicit, he happened to be one of an after-theater party at an informal supper dance in the Granada, which is to Vancouver what the Biltmore is to New York or the Fairmont to San Francisco,--a place where one can see everybody that is anybody if one lingers long enough. And almost the first man he met was a stout, ruddy-faced youngster about his own age. They had flown in the same squadron until "Stubby" Abbott came a cropper and was invalided home.

Stubby fell upon Jack MacRae, pounded him earnestly on the back, and haled him straight to a table where two women were sitting.

"Mother," he said to a plump, middle-aged woman, "here's Silent John MacRae."

Her eyes lit up pleasantly.

"I've heard of you," she said, and her extended hand put the pressure of the seal of sincerity on her words. "I've wanted to thank you. You can scarcely know what you did for us. Stubby's the only man in the family, you know."

MacRae smiled.

"Why," he said easily, "little things like that were part of the game. Stubb used to pull off stuff like that himself now and then."

"Anyway, we can thank God it's over," Mrs. Abbott said fervently. "Pardon me,--my daughter, Mr. MacRae."

Nelly Abbott was small, tending to plumpness like her mother. She was very fair with eyes of true violet, a baby-doll sort of young woman, and she took possession of Jack MacRae as easily and naturally as if she had known him for years. They drifted away in a dance, sat the next one out together with Stubby and a slim young thing in orange satin whose talk ran undeviatingly upon dances and sports and motor trips, past and anticipated. Listening to her, Jack MacRae fell dumb. Her father was worth half a million. Jack wondered how much of it he would give to endow his daughter with a capacity for thought. A label on her program materialized to claim her presently. Stubby looked after her and grinned. MacRae looked thoughtful. The girl was pretty, almost beautiful. She looked like Dolores Ferrara, dark, creamy-skinned, seductive. And MacRae was comparing the two to Dolores' advantage.

Nelly Abbott was eying MacRae.

"Tessie bores you, eh?" she said bluntly.

MacRae smiled. "Her flow of profound utterance carries me out of my depth, I'm afraid," said he. "I can't follow her."

"She'd lead you a chase if you tried," Stubby grinned and sauntered away to smoke.

"Is that sarcasm?" Nelly drawled. "I wonder if you are called Silent John because you stop talking now and then to think? Most of us don't, you know. Tell me," she changed the subject abruptly, "did you know Norman Gower overseas?"

"He was an officer in the battalion I went over with," MacRae replied. "I went over in the ranks, you see. So I couldn't very well know him. And I never met him after I transferred to the air service."

"I just wondered," Nelly went on. "I know Norman rather well. It has been whispered about that he pulled every string to keep away from the front,--that all he has done over there is to hold down cushy jobs in England. Did you ever hear any such talk?"

"We were too busy to gossip about the boys at home, except to envy them." MacRae evaded direct reply, and Nelly did not follow it up.

"I see his sister over there. Betty is a dear girl. That's she talking to Stubby. Come over and meet her. They've been up on their island for a long time, while the flu raged."

MacRae couldn't very well avoid it without seeming rude or making an explanation which he did not intend to make to any one. His grudge against the Gower clan was focused on Horace Gower. His feeling had not abated a jot. But it was a personal matter, something to remain locked in his own breast. So he perforce went with Nelly Abbott and was duly presented to Miss Elizabeth Gower. And he had the next dance with her, also for convention's sake.

While they stood chatting a moment, the four of them, Stubby said to MacRae:

"Who are you with, Jack?"

"The Robbin-Steeles."

"If I don't get a chance to talk to you again, come out to the house to-morrow," Stubby said. "The mater said so, and I want to talk to you about something."

The music began and MacRae and Betty Gower slid away in the one-step, that most conversational of dances. But Jack couldn't find himself chatty with Betty Gower. She was graceful and clear-eyed, a vigorously healthy girl with a touch of color in her cheeks that came out of Nature's rouge pot. But MacRae was subtly conscious of a stiffness between them.

"After all," Betty said abruptly, when they had circled half the room, "it was worth fighting for, don't you really think?"

For a second MacRae looked down at her, puzzled. Then he remembered.

"Good Heavens!" he said, "is that still bothering you? Do you take everything a fellow says so seriously as that?"

"No. It wasn't so much what you said as the way you said it," she replied. "You were uncompromisingly hostile that day, for some reason. Have you acquired a more equable outlook since?"

"I'm trying," he answered.

"You need coaching in the art of looking on the bright side of things," she smiled.

"Such as clusters of frosted lights, cut glass, diamonds, silk dresses and ropes of pearls," he drawled. "Would you care to take on the coaching job, Miss Gower?"

"I might be persuaded." She looked him frankly in the eyes.

But MacRae would not follow that lead, whatever it might mean. Betty Gower was nice,--he had to admit it. To glide around on a polished floor with his arm around her waist, her soft hand clasped in his, and her face close to his own, her grayish-blue eyes, which were so very like his own, now smiling and now soberly reflective, was not the way to carry on an inherited feud. He couldn't subject himself to that peculiarly feminine attraction which Betty Gower bore like an aura and nurse a grudge. In fact, he had no grudge against Betty Gower except that she was the daughter of her father. And he couldn't explain to her that he hated her father because of injustice and injury done before either of them was born. In the genial atmosphere of the Granada that sort of thing did not seem nearly so real, so vivid, as when he stood on the cliffs of Squitty listening to the pound of the surf. Then it welled up in him like a flood,--the resentment for all that Gower had made his father suffer, for those thirty years of reprisal which had culminated in reducing his patrimony to an old log house and a garden patch out of all that wide sweep of land along the southern face of Squitty. He looked at Betty and wished silently that she were,--well, Stubby Abbott's sister. He could be as nice as he wanted to then. Whereupon, instinctively feeling himself upon dangerous ground, he diverged from the personal, talked without saying much until the music stopped and they found seats. And when another partner claimed Betty, Jack as a matter of courtesy had to rejoin his own party.

The affair broke up at length. MacRae slept late the next morning. By the time he had dressed and breakfasted and taken a flying trip to Coal Harbor to look over a forty-five-foot fish carrier which was advertised for sale, he bethought himself of Stubby Abbott's request and, getting on a car, rode out to the Abbott home. This was a roomy stone house occupying a sightly corner in the West End,--that sharply defined residential area of Vancouver which real estate agents unctuously speak of as "select." There was half a block of ground in green lawn bordered with rosebushes. The house itself was solid, homely, built for use, and built to endure, all stone and heavy beams, wide windows and deep porches, and a red tile roof lifting above the gray stone walls.

Stubby permitted MacRae a few minutes' exchange of pleasantries with his mother and sister.

"I want to extract some useful information from this man," Stubby said at length. "You can have at him later, Nell. He'll stay to dinner."

"How do you know he will?" Nelly demanded. "He hasn't said so, yet."

"Between you and me, he can't escape," Stubby said cheerfully and led Jack away upstairs into a small cheerful room lined with bookshelves, warmed by glowing coals in a grate, and with windows that gave a look down on a sandy beach facing the Gulf.

Stubby pushed two chairs up to the fire, waved Jack to one, and extended his own feet to the blaze.

"I've seen the inside of a good many homes in town lately," MacRae observed. "This is the homiest one yet."

"I'll say it is," Stubby agreed. "A place that has been lived in and cared for a long time gets that way, though. Remember some of those old, old places in England and France? This is new compared to that country. Still, my father built this house when the West End was covered with virgin timber."

"How'd you like to be born and grow up in a house that your father built with a vision of future generations of his blood growing up in," Stubby murmured, "and come home crippled after three years in the red mill and find you stood a fat chance of losing it?"

"I wouldn't like it much," MacRae agreed.

But he did not say that he had already undergone the distasteful experience Stubby mentioned as a possibility. He waited for Stubby to go on.

"Well, it's a possibility," Stubby continued, quite cheerfully, however. "I don't propose to allow it to happen. Hang it, I wouldn't blat this to any one but you, Jack. The mater has only a hazy idea of how things stand, and she's an incurable optimist anyway. Nelly and the Infant--you haven't met the Infant yet--don't know anything about it. I tell you it put the breeze up when I got able to go into our affairs and learned how things stood. I thought I'd get mended and then be a giddy idler for a year or so. But it's up to me. I have to get into the collar. Otherwise I should have stayed south all winter. You know we've just got home. I had to loaf in the sun for practically a year. Now I have to get busy. I don't mean to say that the poorhouse stares us in the face, you know, but unless a certain amount of revenue is forthcoming, we simply can't afford to keep up this place.

"And I'd damn well like to keep it going." Stubby paused to light a cigarette. "I like it. It's our home. We'd be deucedly sore at seeing anybody else hang up his hat and call it home. So behold in me an active cannery operator when the season opens, a conscienceless profiteer for sentiment's sake. You live up where the blueback salmon run, don't you, Jack?"

MacRae nodded.

"How many trollers fish those waters?"

"Anywhere from forty to a hundred, from ten to thirty rowboats."

"The Folly Bay cannery gets practically all that catch?"

MacRae nodded again.

"I'm trying to figure a way of getting some of those blueback salmon," Abbott said crisply. "How can it best be done?"

MacRae thought a minute. A whole array of possibilities popped into his mind. He knew that the Abbotts owned the Crow Harbor cannery, in the mouth of Howe Sound just outside Vancouver Harbor. When he spoke he asked a question instead of giving an answer.

"Are you going to buck the Packers' Association?"

"Yes and no," Stubby chuckled. "You do know something about the cannery business, don't you?"

"One or two things," MacRae admitted. "I grew up in the Gulf, remember, among salmon fishermen."

"Well, I'll be a little more explicit," Stubby volunteered. "Briefly, my father, as you know, died while I was overseas. We own the Crow Harbor cannery. I will say that while I was still going to school he started in teaching me the business, and he taught me the way he learned it himself--in the cannery and among fishermen. If I do say it, I know the salmon business from gill net and purse seine to the Iron Chink and bank advances on the season's pack. But Abbott, senior, it seems, wasn't a profiteer. He took the war to heart. His patriotism didn't consist of buying war bonds in fifty-thousand dollar lots and calling it square. He got in wrong by trying to keep the price of fresh fish down locally, and the last year he lived the Crow Harbor cannery only made a normal profit. Last season the plant operated at a loss in the hands of hired men. They simply didn't get the fish. The Fraser River run of sockeye has been going downhill. The river canneries get the fish that do run. Crow Harbor, with a manager who wasn't up on his toes, got very few. I don't believe we will ever see another big sockeye run in the Fraser anyway. So we shall have to go up-coast to supplement the Howe Sound catch and the few sockeyes we can get from gill-netters.

"The Packers' Association can't hurt me--much. For one thing, I'm a member. For another, I can still swing enough capital so they would hesitate about using pressure. You understand. I've got to make that Crow Harbor plant pay. I must have salmon to do so. I have to go outside my immediate territory to get them. If I could get enough blueback to keep full steam from the opening of the sockeye season until the coho run comes--there's nothing to it. I've been having this matter looked into pretty thoroughly. I can pay twenty per cent. over anything Gower has ever paid for blueback and coin money. The question is, how can I get them positively and in quantity?"

"Buy them," MacRae put in softly.

"Of course," Stubby agreed. "But buying direct means collecting. I have the carriers, true. But where am I going to find men to whom I can turn over a six-thousand-dollar boat and a couple of thousand dollars in cash and say to him, 'Go buy me salmon'? His only interest in the matter is his wage."

"Bonus the crew. Pay 'em percentage on what salmon they bring in."

"I've thought of that," Stubby said between puffs. "But--"

"Or," MacRae made the plunge he had been coming to while Stubby talked, "I'll get them for you. I was going to buy bluebacks around Squitty anyway for the fresh-fish market in town if I can make a sure-delivery connection. I know those grounds. I know a lot of fishermen. If you'll give me twenty per cent. over Gower prices for bluebacks delivered at Crow Harbor I'll get them."

"This grows interesting." Stubby straightened in his chair. "I thought you were going to ranch it! Lord, I remember the night we sat watching for the bombers to come back from a raid and you first told me about that place of yours on Squitty Island. Seems ages ago--yet it isn't long. As I remember, you were planning all sorts of things you and your father would do."

"I can't," MacRae said grimly. "You've been in California for months. You wouldn't hear any mention of my affairs, anyway, if you'd been home. I got back three days before the armistice. My father died of the flu the night I got home. The ranch, or all of it but the old log house I was born in and a patch of ground the size of a town lot, has gone the way you mentioned your home might go if you don't buck up the business. Things didn't go well with us lately. I have no land to turn to. So I'm for the salmon business as a means to get on my feet."

"Gower got your place?" Abbott hazarded.

"Yes. How did you know?"

"Made a guess. I heard he had built a summer home on the southeast end of Squitty. In fact Nelly was up there last summer for a week or so. Hurts, eh, Jack? That little trip to France cost us both something."

MacRae sprang up and walked over to a window. He stood for half a minute staring out to sea, looking in that direction by chance, because the window happened to face that way, to where the Gulf haze lifted above a faint purple patch that was Squitty Island, very far on the horizon.

"I'm not kicking," he said at last. "Not out loud, anyway."

"No," Stubby said affectionately, "I know you're not, old man. Nor am I. But I'm going to get action, and I have a hunch you will too. Now about this fish business. If you think you can get them, I'll certainly go you on that twenty per cent. proposition--up to the point where Gower boosts me out of the game, if that is possible. We shall have to readjust our arrangement then."

"Will you give me a contract to that effect?" MacRae asked.

"Absolutely. We'll get together at the office to-morrow and draft an agreement."

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.