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Updated: May 26, 2025
"It is our policy to know, in a general way, what goes on in the salmon industry," Robbin-Steele assented. MacRae waited for him to continue. "You have a good deal of both energy and ability," Robbin-Steele went on. "It is obvious that you have pretty well got control of the blueback situation around Squitty Island. You must, however, have an outlet for your fish.
And he rather fancied he could do that. Last of all on the list of these men who approached him in this fashion came Stubby Abbott. Stubby did not ask him to call. He came to the Granada in search of Jack and haled him, nothing loth, out to the stone house in the West End. It happened that Betty Gower, Etta Robbin-Steele, and two gilded youths, whom MacRae did not know, were there.
But I paid the fishermen more than they ever got for salmon a great deal more than they would have got if I hadn't broken into the game. Abbott made money on the salmon I delivered him. So everybody was satisfied, except Gower who perhaps feels that he is ordained by the Almighty to get cheap salmon." "You're spoiling those men," Robbin-Steele declared irritably.
"You are laboring under the common error about cannery profits," Robbin-Steele declared pointedly. "Considering the capital invested, the total of the pack, the risk and uncertainty of the business, our returns are not excessive." MacRae smiled amusedly. "That all depends on what you regard as excessive. But there is nothing to be gained by an argument on that subject.
No amount of it, cash in hand, would purchase happiness, perhaps, but lack of it made a man fall an easy victim to dire misfortunes. Without money a man was less than the dirt beneath the feet of such as Robbin-Steele and Hurley and Gower, because their criterion of another man's worth was his ability to get money, to beat the game they all played.
Robbin-Steele was a Scotchman of tolerably good family who had come to British Columbia with an inherited fortune and made that fortune grow to vast proportions in the salmon trade. He had two pretty and clever daughters, and three of his sons had been notable fighters overseas. MacRae knew them all, liked them well enough. But he had never come much in contact with the head of the family.
"We can send our own carriers there to buy at far less cost." MacRae smiled. "You can send your carriers," he drawled, "but I doubt if you would get many fish. I don't think you quite grasp the Squitty situation." "Yes, I think I do," Robbin-Steele returned. "Gower had things pretty much his own way until you cut in on his grounds.
The more you pay a fisherman, the more he wants. We must keep prices down. That is to your interest, too." "No," MacRae disagreed. "I think it is to my interest to pay the fishermen top prices, so long as I make a profit on the deal. I don't want the earth only a moderate share of it." "Twenty per cent. on Folly Bay prices is too uncertain a basis." Robbin-Steele changed his tactics.
Robbin-Steele, Senior, was tall, thin, sixty years of age, sandy-haired, with a high, arched nose. His eyes, MacRae thought, were disagreeably like the eyes of a dead fish, lusterless and sunken; a cold man with a suave manner seeking his own advantage.
He wondered if that was why Robbin-Steele was so keen on getting a contract for those Squitty bluebacks, why Hurley of the Northwest wanted to make a deal for salmon; if they reckoned that Gower had ceased to be a factor and that Jack MacRae held the Squitty Island business in the hollow of his hand. MacRae smiled to himself.
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