he Straits of San Juan. Here the joint
fleets of British Columbia and of Puget Sound begin to harry them. A
week or ten days later the vanguard will be off Nanaimo. And in another
week they will be breaking water like trout in a still pool around the
rocky base of the Ballenas Light and the kelp beds and reefs of Squitty
Island.

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. Other buyers had tried it, men gambling
on a shoestring for a stake in the fish trade, buyers unable to make
regular trips, whereby there was a tale of many salmon rotted in waiting
fish holds, through depending on a carrier that did not come. What was
the use of burning fuel, of tearing their fingers with the gear, of
catching fish to rot? Better to let them swim.

But since the Folly Bay cannery never opened until the fish ran to
greater size and number, the fishermen, chafing against inaction after
an idle winter, took a chance and trolled for Jack MacRae.

To the trailers' surprise they found themselves dealing with a new type
of independent buyer,--a man who could and did make his market trips
with clocklike precision. 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. There were
trips when he drove through with three thousand salmon under battened
hatches, his decks awash from boarding seas, ten and twelve and fourteen
hours of rough-and-tumble work that brought him into the Narrows and the
docks inside with smarting eyes and tired muscles, his head splitting
from the pound and clank of the engine and the fumes of gas and burned
oil.

It was work, strain of mind and body, long hours filled with discomfort.
But MacRae had never shrunk from things like that. He was aware that few
things worth while come easy. The world, so far as he knew, seldom
handed a man a fortune done up in tissue paper merely because he
happened to crave its possession. He was young and eager to do. There
was a reasonable sat