Poor Man's Rock

by Bertrand W. Sinclair

To the trailers' surprise they found themselves dealing with a new type of independent buyer,—a man who could and did make his market trips with clocklike precision. If MacRae left Squitty with a load on Monday, saying that he would be at Squitty Cove or Jenkins Island or Scottish Bay by Tuesday evening, he was there.

He managed it by grace of an able sea boat, engined to drive through sea and wind, and by the nerve and endurance to drive her in any weather. There were times when the Gulf spread placid as a mill pond. There were trips when he drove through with three thousand salmon under battened hatches, his decks awash from boarding seas, ten and twelve and fourteen hours of rough-and-tumble work that brought him into the Narrows and the docks inside with smarting eyes and tired muscles, his head splitting from the pound and clank of the engine and the fumes of gas and burned oil.

It was work, strain of mind and body, long hours filled with discomfort. But MacRae had never shrunk from things like that. He was aware that few things worth while come easy. The world, so far as he knew, seldom handed a man a fortune done up in tissue paper merely because he happened to crave its possession. He was young and eager to do. There was a reasonable satisfaction in the doing, even of the disagreeable, dirty tasks necessary, in beating the risks he sometimes had to run. There was a secret triumph in overcoming difficulties as they arose. And he had an object, which, if it did not always lie in the foreground of his mind, he was nevertheless keen on attaining.

The risks and work and strain, perhaps because he put so much of himself into the thing, paid from the beginning more than he had dared hope. He made a hundred dollars his first trip, paid the trollers five cents a fish more on the second trip and cleared a hundred and fifty. In the second week of his venture he struck a market almost bare of fresh salmon with thirty-seven hundred shining bluebacks in his hold. He made seven hundred dollars on that single cargo.

A Greek buyer followed the Blackbird out through the Narrows that trip. MacRae beat him two hours to the trolling fleet at Squitty, a fleet that was growing in numbers.

"Bluebacks are thirty-five cents," he said to the first man who ranged alongside to deliver. "And I want to tell you something that you can talk over with the rest of the crowd. I have a market for every fish this bunch can catch. If I can't handle them with the Blackbird, I'll put on another boat. I'm not here to buy fish just till the Folly Bay cannery opens. I'll be making regular trips to the end of the salmon season. My price will be as good as anybody's, better than some. If Gower gets your bluebacks this season for twenty-five cents, it will be because you want to make him a present. Meantime, there's another buyer an hour behind me. I don't know what he'll pay. But whatever he pays there aren't enough salmon being caught here yet to keep two carriers running. You can figure it out for yourself."

MacRae thought he knew his men. Nor was his judgment in error. The Greek hung around. In twenty-four hours he got three hundred salmon. MacRae loaded nearly three thousand.

Once or twice after that he had competitive buyers in Squitty Cove and the various rendezvous of the trolling fleet. But the fishermen had a loyalty born of shrewd reckoning. They knew from experience the way of the itinerant buyer. They knew MacRae. Many of them had known his father. If Jack MacRae had a market for all the salmon he could buy on the Gower grounds all season, they saw where Folly Bay would buy no fish in the old take-it-or-leave it fashion. They were keenly alive to the fact that they were getting mid-July prices in June, that Jack MacRae was the first buyer who had not tried to hold down prices by pulling a poor mouth and telling fairy tales of poor markets in town. He had jumped prices before there was any competitive spur. They admired young MacRae. He had nerve; he kept his word.

Wherefore it did not take them long to decide that he was a good man to keep going. As a result of this decision other casual buyers got few fish even when they met MacRae's price.

When he had run a little over a month MacRae took stock. He paid the Crow Harbor Canning Company, which was Stubby Abbott's trading name, two hundred and fifty a month for charter of the Blackbird. He had operating outlay for gas, oil, crushed ice, and wages for Vincent Ferrara, whom he took on when he reached the limit of single-handed endurance. Over and above these expenses he had cleared twenty-six hundred dollars.