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The Treasury was empty save for the much-quoted 12s. 6d. The Government £1 bluebacks were selling at 1s. Civil servants' salaries were months in arrear.
When I have an hour to spare I lie down and sleep. If I stopped to play every time I came to town do you think you'd get your sixty thousand bluebacks in July?" Stubby looked at MacRae a second, at his work-torn hands and weary eyes. "I guess you're right," he said slowly. "But the old stone house will still be up on the corner when the salmon run is over. Don't forget that."
Strident voices arose in the wilderness of contention crying for a fresh deal, a clean-up, a new dispensation. When MacRae first began to run bluebacks there were a few returned soldiers fishing salmon, men like the Ferrara boys who had been fishermen before they were soldiers, who returned to their old calling when they put off the uniform.
The fisherman in it put half a dozen bluebacks on the deck and clambered up himself. "You owe me for thirty besides them," he announced. "How's that?" MacRae asked coolly. But he was not cool inside.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
"Do you want those salmon?" MacRae asked. "Sure I want them. I want them as soon as they begin to run big enough to be legally taken for sale," Stubby declared. "I'm going to rush that cold-storage construction. By the time you begin collecting bluebacks I'll have a place for them, all you can buy. I'll have storage for three hundred thousand fish.
"I tell you there isn't a cannery on the Gulf will pay you a cent more than they pay the fishermen. What's the use of buying if you can't sell?" MacRae did not attempt to answer that. "Let's sum it up," he said. "You can't take any more bluebacks from Gower's territory. That, I gather, is the chief object. I suppose they know as much about your business as you know yourself.
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