“I have bought up the controlling interest in the Terminal Fish Company since I saw you last,” Stubby began abruptly.  “I’m going to put up a cold-storage plant and do what my father started to do early in the war—­give people cheaper fish for food.”

“Can you make it stick,” MacRae asked curiously, “with the other wholesalers against you?  Their system seems to be to get all the traffic will bear, to boost the price to the consumer by any means they can use.  And there is the Packers’ Association.  They are not exactly—­well, favorable to cheap retailing of fish.  Everybody seems to think the proper caper is to tack on a cent or two a pound wherever he can.”

“I know I can,” Stubby declared.  “The pater would have succeeded only he trusted too much to men who didn’t see it his way.  Look at Cunningham—­” Stubby mentioned a fish merchant who had made a resounding splash in matters piscatorial for a year or two, and then faded, along with his great cheap-fish markets, into oblivion—­“he made it go like a house afire until he saw a chance to make a quick and easy clean-up by sticking people.  It can be done, all right, if a man will be satisfied with a small profit on a big turnover.  I know it.”

MacRae made no comment on that.  Stubby was full of his plan, eager to talk about its possibilities.

“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.”