MacRae finished checking the salmon the fisherman heaved up on the deck. He made out two slips and handed the man his money.
"I'm paying you for the lost fish," he said. "I told you to hold them for me. I want you to hold them. If I can't get here on time, it's my loss, not yours."
The fisherman looked at the money in his hand and up at MacRae.
"Well," he said, "you're the first buyer I ever seen do that. You're all right, all right."
There were variations of this. Some of the trollers, weatherwise old sea-dogs, had foreseen that the Blackbird could not face that blow, and they had sold their fish. Others had held on. These, who were all men MacRae knew, he paid according to their own estimate of loss. He did not argue. He accepted their word. It was an astonishing experience for the trolling fleet. They had never found a buyer willing to make good a loss of that kind.
But there were other folk afloat besides simple, honest fishermen who would not lie for the price of one salmon or forty. When the Arrow drew abreast and stopped, a boat had pushed in beside the Blackbird. The fisherman in it put half a dozen bluebacks on the deck and clambered up himself.
"You owe me for thirty besides them," he announced.
"How's that?" MacRae asked coolly.
But he was not cool inside. He knew the man, a preemptor of Folly Bay, a truckler to the cannery because he was always in debt to the cannery,—and a quarrelsome individual besides, who took advantage of his size and strength to browbeat less able men.