ding a little
matter of twelve thousand dollars. In brief, he had to replace the
_Blackbird_, and he was replacing her with a carrier of double the
capacity, of greater speed, equipped with special features of his own
choosing. The new boat was designed to carry ten thousand salmon. There
was installed in her holds an ammonia refrigerating plant which would
free him from the labor and expense and uncertainty of crushed ice.
Science bent to the service of money-making. MacRae grinned to himself
when he surveyed the coiled pipes, the pumping engine. His new boat was
a floating, self-contained cold-storage plant. He could maintain a
freezing temperature so long as he wished by chemico-mechanical means.
That meant a full load every trip, since he could follow the trollers
till he got a load, if it took a week, and his salmon would still be
fresh.

He wondered why this had not been done before. Stubby enlightened him.

"Partly because it's a costly rig to install. But mostly because salmon
and ice have always been both cheap and plentiful, and people have got
into a habit of doing things in the same old way. You know. Until the
last season or two salmon have been so cheap that neither canneries nor
buyers bothered about anything so up-to-date. If they lost their ice in
hot weather and the fish rotted--why, there were plenty more fish. There
have been times when the Fraser River stunk with rotten salmon. They
used to pay the fishermen ten cents apiece for six-pound sockeyes and
limit them to two hundred fish to the boat if there was a big run. The
gill-netter would take five hundred in one drift, come in to the cannery
loaded to the guards, find himself up against a limit. He would sell the
two hundred and dump more than that overboard. And the Fraser River
canneries wonder why sockeye is getting scarce. My father used to rave
about the waste. Criminal, he used to say."

"When the fishermen were getting only ten cents apiece for sockeyes,
salmon was selling at fifteen cents a pound tin," MacRae observed.

"Oh, the canneries made barrels of money." Stubby shrugged his
shoulders. "They thought the salmon would always run in millions, no
matter how many they destroyed. Some of 'em think so yet."

"We're a nation of wasters, compared to Europe," MacRae said
thoughtfully. "The only thing they are prodigal with over there is human
flesh and blood. That is cheap and plentiful. But they take care of
their natural resources. We d