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By the time Jack MacRae was writing August on his sales slips he was conscious of an important fact; namely, that nearly a hundred gas-boat fishermen, trolling Squitty Island, the Ballenas, Gray Rock, even farther afield to Yellow Rock Light and Lambert Channel, were compactly behind him. They were still close to a period when they had been remorselessly exploited. They were all for MacRae.
It was like an honest man restrained by a policeman's club from taking food when he is hungry, and seeing a thief fill his pockets and walk off unmolested. "Four thousand salmon that shot," Dave Mullen said, the same Mullen who had talked to MacRae in Squitty one night. "Say, why should we stand for that? We can get salmon that way too." He spoke directly to MacRae.
So the Blackbird ran down Squitty, rolling and yawing through a following sea, and turned into Squitty Cove to rest till night and calm settled on the Gulf. When her mudhook was down in that peaceful nook, Steve Ferrara turned into his bunk to get a few hours' sleep against the long night watch.
"Who is this this woman?" she demanded. "Dolly," Betty whispered under her breath. "Miss Dolores Ferrara of Squitty Cove," Norman answered imperturbably. "A foreigner besides. Great Heavens! Horace," Mrs. Gower appealed to her husband, "have you no influence whatever with your son?" "Mamma," Betty put in, "I assure you you are making a tremendous fuss about nothing.
"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."
He would bring in boatloads of salmon, and the dealers would squeeze him, all but the Terminal Fish Company. And if the market could be controlled, if the men behind could dictate the Crow Harbor policy, they might also bring the Terminal into line. Even if they did not the Terminal could only handle a minor portion of the salmon he could get while the big run swirled around Squitty Island.
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.
And because for many years old men, men with lean purses, men with a rowboat, a few dollars, and a hunger for independence, had camped in Squitty Cove and fished the Squitty headlands and seldom failed to take salmon around the Rock, the name had clung to that brown hummock of granite lifting out of the sea at half tide.
Then you can pay up to seventy-five cents and I'll allow you five cents a fish commission. I don't believe he'll dare pay more than that before late in July. If he does, why, we'll see what we can do." MacRae went back to Squitty. He could make money with the Blanco on a five-cent commission, if he could get the salmon within the price limit.
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.
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