But though MacRae said this confidently, he was privately not so sure. From the very beginning he had expected pressure to come on Stubby, as the active head of Crow Harbor. It was as Stubby said. Unless he—MacRae—had a market for his fish, he could not buy. And within the limits of British Columbia the salmon market was subject to control; by just what means MacRae had got inklings here and there. He had not been deceived by the smoothness of his operations so far. Below the clear horizon there was a storm gathering. A man like Gower did not lie down and submit passively to being beaten at his own game.
But MacRae believed he had gone too far to be stopped now, even if his tactics did not please the cannery interests. They could have squelched him easily enough in the beginning, when he had no funds to speak of, when his capital was mostly a capacity for hard, dirty work and a willingness to take chances. Already he had run his original shoestring to fifteen thousand dollars cash in hand. It scarcely seemed possible. It gave him a startling vision of the profits in the salmon industry, and it was not a tenable theory that men who had controlled such a source of profits would sit idle while he undermined their monopoly. Nevertheless he had made that much money in four months. He had at his back a hundred fishermen who knew him, liked him, trusted him, who were anxious that he should prosper, because they felt that they were sharing in that prosperity. Ninety per cent. of these men had a grievance against the canneries. And he had the good will of these men with sun-browned faces and hook-scarred hands. The human equation in industrial processes is a highly important one, as older, wiser men than Jack MacRae had been a longer time discovering.
He did not try to pin Stubby to a more definite statement. A hint was enough for MacRae. Stubby Abbott could also be depended upon to see things beyond the horizon. If a storm broke Stubby was the most vulnerable, because in a sense he was involved with the cannery interests in general, and they would consider him an apostate and knife him without mercy,—if they could. If the Abbott estate had debts, obligations which could be manipulated, if through the financial convolutions of marketing the Crow Harbor pack Stubby could be reached, the Abbott family had property, a standard of living that stood for comfort, appearance, luxury almost. There are always plenty of roads open to a flank attack on people like that; many levers, financial and otherwise, can be pulled for or against them.
So MacRae, knowing that Stubby must protect himself in a showdown, set about fortifying his own approaches.
For a first move he hired an engineer, put Steve Ferrara in charge of the Blackbird, and started him back to Squitty. Then MacRae took the next train to Bellingham, a cannery town which looks out on the southern end of the Gulf of Georgia from the American side of the boundary. He extended his journey to Seattle. Altogether, he was gone three days.
When he came back he made a series of calls,—at the Vancouver offices of three different canneries and one of the biggest cold-storage concerns on the Pacific Coast. He got a courteous but unsatisfactory reception from the cannery men. He fared a little better with the manager of the cold-storage plant. This gentleman was tentatively agreeable in the matter of purchasing salmon, but rather vague in the way of terms.
"Beginning with May next I can deliver any quantity up to two thousand a day, perhaps more, for a period of about four months," MacRae stated. "What I should like to know is the percentage over the up-coast price you would pay."
But he could not pin the man down to anything definite. He would only speak pleasantly of the market and possible arrangements, utter vague commonplaces in business terminology. MacRae rose.
"I'm wasting your time and my own," he said. "You don't want my fish. Why not say so?"
"We always want fish," the man declared, bending a shrewdly appraising eye on MacRae. "Bring in the salmon and we will do business."