or ten days and emerged from that
period with a slight loss, because at the close he was paying more than
the salmon were worth at the Terminal warehouse. But when he ran his
first load into Crow Harbor Stubby looked over the pile of salmon his
men were forking across the floor and drew Jack into his office.

"I've made a contract for delivery of my entire sockeye and blueback
pack," he said. "I know precisely where I stand. I can pay up to ninety
cents for all July fish. I want all the Squitty bluebacks you can get.
Go after them, Jack."

And MacRae went after them. Wherever a Folly Bay collector went either
the _Blanco_ or the _Bluebird_ was on his heels. MacRae could cover more
ground and carry more cargo, and keep it fresh, than any mustard pot.
The _Bluebird_ covered little outlying nooks, the stragglers, the
rowboat men in their beach camps. The _Blanco_ kept mostly in touch with
the main fleet patrolling the southeastern end of Squitty like a naval
flotilla, wheeling and counterwheeling over the grounds where the
blueback played. MacRae forced the issue. He raised the price to
sixty-five, to seventy, to seventy-five, to eighty, and the boats under
the yellow house flag had to pay that to get a fish. MacRae crowded them
remorselessly to the limit. So long as he got five cents a fish he could
make money. He suspected that it cost Gower a great deal more than five
cents a salmon to collect what he got. And he did not get so many now.
With the opening of the sockeye season on the Fraser and in the north
the Japs abandoned trolling for the gill net. The white trollers
returned to their first love because he courted them assiduously. There
was always a MacRae carrier in the offing. It cost MacRae his sleep and
rest, but he drove himself tirelessly. He could leave Squitty at dusk,
unload his salmon at Crow Harbor, and be back at sunrise. He did it many
a time, after tallying fish all day. Three hours' sleep was like a gift
from the gods. 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_. The man in it told MacRae that Gower would like
to see him. MacRae's first impulse was to grin and ignore the request.
Then he