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Updated: June 20, 2025
The cannery isn't giving but fifteen cents a basket this year and it's got to be a full five-eighths basket, too, for they weigh 'em." Hiram looked at him with a quizzical smile. "So you set about thirty-six hundred and forty plants to the acre?" he said. "I reckon so." "And you'll have five acres of tomatoes?" "Yep. So Dad says. He has contracted for that many.
Gower had debts and no assets save his land on the Squitty cliffs and the closed cannery at Folly Bay. The cannery was a white elephant, without takers in the market. No cannery man would touch it unless he could first make a contract with MacRae for the bluebacks. They had approached him with such propositions.
Gregory turned again to his work, but found it hard to keep his mind from the Italian's veiled threat. It angered him. Mascola had appeared so sure of his ground. His irritation grew as his eye fell again on the Lang contract. If he only had some one with whom he could talk. Some one who knew something about fishing or running a cannery. Some one who would understand what he was up against.
But he kept it up. He had a sense of some approaching crisis. By the third week in July MacRae was taking three fourths of the bluebacks caught between the Ballenas and Folly Bay. He would lie sometimes within a stone's throw of Gower's cannery, loading salmon. He was swinging at anchor there one day when a rowboat from the cannery put out to the Blanco.
He covered the plant like a ferret; he showed such powers of adaptability and assimilation as to excite the girl's wonder; his grasp of detail was instant; his retentive faculty tenacious; he never seemed to rest. "Why, you already know more about a cannery than a superintendent does," she remarked, after nearly a week of this. "I believe you could build one yourself." He smiled.
While she talked on concerning the re-opening of the cannery, Gregory wondered to what extent her opinion of McCoy's ability was based by personal prejudice. Of course it was nothing to him what Dickie Lang thought of McCoy or of himself either, for that matter. He decided to look McCoy up at once. "Then you have to get your labor," she went on. "And that isn't as easy, I have found, as it seems.
And in the middle of the Jew's Mouth, which was a scant six hundred yards across at its widest, the Folly Bay No. 5 swung on her anchor chain. A tubby cannery tender lay alongside. The crews were busy with picaroons forking salmon out of the seiner into the tender's hold. The flip-flop of the fish sounded distinctly in that quiet place.
"Halibut mostly, some barracuda. Haven't tried for sardines or albacore since your cannery shut down." The Petrel rolled lazily in the trough of the swell as she sped down the coast. Suddenly the darkness ahead was blurred by an indistinct shape and the man at the wheel put the vessel over sharply.
"I can pay a little more, because the cannery I'm supplying is satisfied with a little less profit than most. Stubby Abbott is not a hog, and neither am I. I can pay seventy-five cents and make money. I have told you before that it is to your interest as well as mine to keep me running. I will always pay as much as salmon are worth. But I cannot pay more.
A friend of mine, who is in charge of a salmon-cannery on the coast of British Columbia, is going to put us up for a day or two, and he has arranged that we shall cross over on the cannery steamer, the Transfer, which leaves so early that we'll have to be up at half-past four in the morning. Ugh, I'm sleepy! But I see the sun is already up and shining in a cloudless sky.
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