"Huh!" MacRae grunted.

It set him thinking. He had a sketchy knowledge of the salmon packer's monopoly of cannery sites and pursing licenses and waters. He had heard more or less talk among fishermen of agreements in restraint of compet.i.tion among the canneries. But he had never supposed it to be quite so effective as Manuel Ferrara believed.

Even if it were, a gentleman's agreement of that sort, being a matter of profit rather than principle, was apt to be broken by any member of the combination who saw a chance to get ahead of the rest.

MacRae took pa.s.sage for Vancouver the second week in January with a certain plan weaving itself to form in his mind,--a plan which promised action and money and other desirable results if he could carry it through.

CHAPTER VI

The Springboard

With a basic knowledge to start from, any reasonably clever man can digest an enormous amount of information about any given industry in a very brief time. Jack MacRae spent three weeks in Vancouver as a one-man commission, self-appointed, to inquire into the fresh-salmon trade. He talked to men who caught salmon and to men who sold them, both wholesale and retail. He apprised himself of the ins and outs of salmon canning, and of the independent fish collector who owned his own boat, financed himself, and chanced the market much as a farmer plants his seed, trusts to the weather, and makes or loses according to the yield and market,--two matters over which he can have no control.

MacRae learned before long that old Manuel Ferrara was right when he said no man could profitably buy salmon unless he had a cast-iron agreement either with a cannery or a big wholesaler. MacRae soon saw that the wholesaler stood like a wall between the fishermen and those who ate fish. They could make or break a buyer. MacRae was not long running afoul of the rumor that the wholesale fish men controlled the retail price of fresh fish by the simple method of controlling the supply, which they managed by cooperation instead of compet.i.tion among themselves. He heard this stated. And more,--that behind the big dealers stood the shadowy figure of the canning colossus. This was told him casually by fishermen. Fish buyers repeated it, sometimes with a touch of indignation. That was one of their wails,--the fish combine. It was air-tight, they said. The packers had a strangle hold on the fishing waters, and the big local fish houses had the same unrelenting grip on the market.

Therefore the ultimate consumer--whose exploitation was the prize plum of commercial success--paid thirty cents per pound for spring salmon that a fisherman chivied about in the tumbling Gulf seas fifty miles up-coast had to take fourteen cents for. As for the salmon packers, the men who pack the good red fish in small round tins which go to all the ends of the earth to feed hungry folk,--well, no one knew _their_ profits. Their pack was all exported. The back yards of Europe are strewn with empty salmon cans bearing a British Columbia label. But they made money enough to be a standing grievance to those unable to get in on this bonanza.

MacRae, however, was chiefly concerned with the local trade in fresh salmon. His plan didn't look quite so promising as when he mulled over it at Squitty Cove. He put out feelers and got no hold. A fresh-fish buyer operating without approved market connections might make about such a living as the fishermen he bought from. To Jack MacRae, eager and sanguine, making a living was an inconspicuous detail. Making a living,--that was nothing to him. A more definite spur roweled his flank.

It looked like an air-tight proposition, he admitted, at last. But, he said to himself, anything air-tight could be punctured. And undoubtedly a fine flow of currency would result from such a puncture. So he kept on looking about, asking casual questions, listening. In the language of the street he was getting wise.

Incidentally he enjoyed himself. The battle ground had been transferred to Paris. The pen, the typewriter, and the press dispatch, with immense reserves of oratory and printer's ink, had gone into action. And the soldiers were coming home,--officers of the line and airmen first, since to these leave and transportation came easily, now that the guns were silent. MacRae met fellows he knew. A good many of them were well off, had homes in Vancouver. They were mostly young and glad the big show was over. And they had the social instinct. During intervals of fighting they had rubbed elbows with French and British people of consequence.

They had a mind to enjoy themselves.

MacRae had a record in two squadrons. He needed no press-agenting when he met another R.A.F. man. So he found himself invited to homes, the inside of which he would otherwise never have seen, and to pleasant functions among people who would never have known of his existence save for the circ.u.mstance of war. Pretty, well-bred girls smiled at him, partly because airmen with notable records were still a novelty, and partly because Jack MacRae was worth a second look from any girl who was fancy-free. Matrons were kind to him because their sons said he was the right sort, and some of these same matrons mothered him because he was like boys they knew who had gone away to France and would never come back.

This was very pleasant. MacRae was normal in every respect. He liked to dance. He liked glittering lights and soft music. He liked nice people.

He liked people who were nice to him. But he seldom lost sight of his objective. These people could relax and give themselves up to enjoyment because they were "heeled"--as a boy lieutenant slangily put it--to MacRae.

"It's a great game, Jack, if you don't weaken," he said. "But a fellow can't play it through on a uniform and a war record. I'm having a top-hole time, but it'll be different when I plant myself at a desk in some broker's office at a hundred and fifty a month. It's mixed pickles, for a fact. You can't buy your way into this sort of thing. And you can't stay in it without a bank roll."

Which was true enough. Only the desire to "see it through" socially was not driving Jack MacRae. He had a different target, and his eye did not wander far from the mark. And perhaps because of this, chance and his social gadding about gave him the opening he sought when he least expected to find one.

To be explicit, he happened to be one of an after-theater party at an informal supper dance in the Granada, which is to Vancouver what the Biltmore is to New York or the Fairmont to San Francisco,--a place where one can see everybody that is anybody if one lingers long enough. And almost the first man he met was a stout, ruddy-faced youngster about his own age. They had flown in the same squadron until "Stubby" Abbott came a cropper and was invalided home.

Stubby fell upon Jack MacRae, pounded him earnestly on the back, and haled him straight to a table where two women were sitting.

"Mother," he said to a plump, middle-aged woman, "here's Silent John MacRae."

Her eyes lit up pleasantly.

"I've heard of you," she said, and her extended hand put the pressure of the seal of sincerity on her words. "I've wanted to thank you. You can scarcely know what you did for us. Stubby's the only man in the family, you know."

MacRae smiled.

"Why," he said easily, "little things like that were part of the game.

Stubb used to pull off stuff like that himself now and then."

"Anyway, we can thank G.o.d it's over," Mrs. Abbott said fervently.

"Pardon me,--my daughter, Mr. MacRae."

Nelly Abbott was small, tending to plumpness like her mother. She was very fair with eyes of true violet, a baby-doll sort of young woman, and she took possession of Jack MacRae as easily and naturally as if she had known him for years. They drifted away in a dance, sat the next one out together with Stubby and a slim young thing in orange satin whose talk ran undeviatingly upon dances and sports and motor trips, past and antic.i.p.ated. Listening to her, Jack MacRae fell dumb. Her father was worth half a million. Jack wondered how much of it he would give to endow his daughter with a capacity for thought. A label on her program materialized to claim her presently. Stubby looked after her and grinned. MacRae looked thoughtful. The girl was pretty, almost beautiful. She looked like Dolores Ferrara, dark, creamy-skinned, seductive. And MacRae was comparing the two to Dolores' advantage.

Nelly Abbott was eying MacRae.

"Tessie bores you, eh?" she said bluntly.

MacRae smiled. "Her flow of profound utterance carries me out of my depth, I'm afraid," said he. "I can't follow her."

"She'd lead you a chase if you tried," Stubby grinned and sauntered away to smoke.

"Is that sarcasm?" Nelly drawled. "I wonder if you are called Silent John because you stop talking now and then to think? Most of us don't, you know. Tell me," she changed the subject abruptly, "did you know Norman Gower overseas?"

"He was an officer in the battalion I went over with," MacRae replied.

"I went over in the ranks, you see. So I couldn't very well know him.

And I never met him after I transferred to the air service."

"I just wondered," Nelly went on. "I know Norman rather well. It has been whispered about that he pulled every string to keep away from the front,--that all he has done over there is to hold down cushy jobs in England. Did you ever hear any such talk?"

"We were too busy to gossip about the boys at home, except to envy them." MacRae evaded direct reply, and Nelly did not follow it up.

"I see his sister over there. Betty is a dear girl. That's she talking to Stubby. Come over and meet her. They've been up on their island for a long time, while the flu raged."

MacRae couldn't very well avoid it without seeming rude or making an explanation which he did not intend to make to any one. His grudge against the Gower clan was focused on Horace Gower. His feeling had not abated a jot. But it was a personal matter, something to remain locked in his own breast. So he perforce went with Nelly Abbott and was duly presented to Miss Elizabeth Gower. And he had the next dance with her, also for convention's sake.

While they stood chatting a moment, the four of them, Stubby said to MacRae:

"Who are you with, Jack?"

"The Robbin-Steeles."

"If I don't get a chance to talk to you again, come out to the house to-morrow," Stubby said. "The mater said so, and I want to talk to you about something."

The music began and MacRae and Betty Gower slid away in the one-step, that most conversational of dances. But Jack couldn't find himself chatty with Betty Gower. She was graceful and clear-eyed, a vigorously healthy girl with a touch of color in her cheeks that came out of Nature's rouge pot. But MacRae was subtly conscious of a stiffness between them.

"After all," Betty said abruptly, when they had circled half the room, "it was worth fighting for, don't you really think?"

For a second MacRae looked down at her, puzzled. Then he remembered.

"Good Heavens!" he said, "is that still bothering you? Do you take everything a fellow says so seriously as that?"

"No. It wasn't so much what you said as the way you said it," she replied. "You were uncompromisingly hostile that day, for some reason.

Have you acquired a more equable outlook since?"