se for a week at
Christmas, after an annual custom. These gatherings in the old days had
always embraced Donald MacRae and his son. And his son was glad that it
included him now. He felt a little less alone.

They were of the sea, these Ferraras, Castilian Spanish, tempered and
diluted by three generations in North America. Their forebears might
have sailed in caravels. They knew the fishing grounds of the British
Columbia coast as a schoolboy knows his _a, b, c_'s. They would never
get rich, but they were independent fishermen, making a good living. And
they were as clannish as the Scotch. All of them had chipped in to send
Dolly to school in Vancouver. Old Peter could never have done that,
MacRae knew, on what he could make trolling around Poor Man's Rock.
Peter had been active with gill net and seine when Jack MacRae was too
young to take thought of the commercial end of salmon fishing. He was
about sixty-five now, a lean, hardy old fellow, but he seldom went far
from Squitty Cove. There was Steve and Frank and Vincent and Manuel of
the younger generation, and Manuel and Peter and Joaquin of the elder.
Those three had been contemporary with Donald MacRae. They esteemed old
Donald. Jack heard many things about his father's early days on the Gulf
that were new to him, that made his blood tingle and made him wish he
had lived then too. Thirty years back the Gulf of Georgia was no place
for any but two-handed men.

He heard also, in that week of casual talk among the Ferraras, certain
things said, statements made that suggested a possibility which never
seemed to have occurred to the Ferraras themselves.

"The Folly Bay pack of blueback was a whopper last summer," Vincent
Ferrara said once. "They must have cleaned up a barrel of money."

Folly Bay was Gower's cannery.

"Well, he didn't make much of it out of us," old Manuel grunted. "We
should worry."

"Just the same, he ought to be made to pay more for his fish. He ought
to pay what they're worth, for a change," Vincent drawled. "He makes
about a hundred trollers eat out of his hand the first six weeks of the
season. If somebody would put on a couple of good, fast carriers, and
start buying fish as soon as he opens his cannery, I'll bet he'd pay
more than twenty-five cents for a five-pound salmon."

"Maybe. But that's been tried and didn't work. Every buyer that ever cut
in on Gower soon found himself up against the Packers' Association when
he went into the ope