"I wanted to do it last year," he said, "but I couldn't. I had to play the old game—make a bunch of money and make it quick. Between you and Gower's pig-headedness, and the rest of the cannery crowd letting me go till it was too late to stop me, and a climbing market, I made more money in one season than I thought was possible. I'm going to use that money to make more money and to squash some of these damned fish pirates. I tell you it's jolly awful. We had baked cod for lunch to-day. That fish cost twenty cents a pound. Think of it! When the fisherman sells it for six cents within fifty miles of us. No wonder everybody is howling. I don't know anything about other lines of food supply, but I can sure put my finger on a bunch of fish profiteers. And I feel like putting my foot on them. Anyway, I've got the Terminal for a starter; also I have a twenty-five-year lease on the water frontage there. I have the capital to go ahead and build a cold-storage plant. The wholesale crowd can't possibly bother me. And the canneries are going to have their hands full this season without mixing into a scrap over local prices of fresh fish. You've heard about the new regulations?"
MacRae nodded assent.
"There's going to be a free-for-all," Stubby chuckled. "There'll be a lot of independent purse seiners. If the canneries don't pay good prices these independent fishermen, with their fast, powerful rigs, will seine the salmon under the packers' noses and run their catch down to the Puget Sound plants. This is no time for the British Columbia packers to get uppish. Good-by, four hundred per cent."
"They'll wiggle through legislation to prevent export of raw salmon," MacRae suggested; "same as they have on the sockeye."
"No chance. They've tried, and it can't be done," Stubby grinned. "There aren't going to be any special privileges for British Columbia salmon packers any more. I know, because I'm on the inside. The fishermen have made a noise that disturbs the politicians, I guess. Another thing, there's a slack in the demand for all but the best grades of salmon. But the number one grades, sockeye and blueback and coho, are short. So that a cannery man with an efficient plant can pay big for those fish. If you can hold that Squitty fleet of trollers like you did last year, you'll make some money."
"Do you want those salmon?" MacRae asked.
"Sure I want them. I want them as soon as they begin to run big enough to be legally taken for sale," Stubby declared. "I'm going to rush that cold-storage construction. By the time you begin collecting bluebacks I'll have a place for them, all you can buy. I'll have storage for three hundred thousand fish. I'm going to buy everything and start half a dozen retail stores at the same time. Just imagine the situation in this burg of a hundred and fifty thousand people with waters that swarm with fish right at our doors—salmon selling for thirty cents a pound, hardly ever below twenty, other fish in about the same proportion. It's a damned scandal, and I don't much blame a man who works for four dollars a day thinking he might as well turn Bolshevik. I know that I can pay twelve cents for salmon and make a good profit selling for sixteen. Can you make money supplying me with bluebacks at twelve cents a pound?"
"Yes, more money than I made last year," MacRae replied—"unless Folly Bay boosts prices to the sky in an effort to drive me out of business."
"I don't think there's much danger of that," Stubby said. "I doubt if Folly Bay opens this season. It's reported that Gower is broke."
"Eh?" MacRae looked his doubt.