“If somebody else offered sixty cents you’d sell to him, wouldn’t you?” MacRae asked a dozen of them sitting on the Blanco’s deck one afternoon.  They had been talking about canneries and competition.

“Not if he was boosting the price up just to make you quit, and then cut it in two when he had everything to himself,” one man said.  “That’s been done too often.”

“Remember that when the canneries open, then,” MacRae said dryly.  “There is not going to be much, of a price for humps and dog salmon this fall.  But there is going to be a scramble for the good canning fish.  I can pay as much as salmon are worth, but I can’t go any further.  If I should have to pull my boats off in mid-season you can guess what they’ll pay around Squitty.”

MacRae was not crying “wolf.”  There were signs and tokens of uneasiness and irritation among those who still believed it was their right and privilege to hold the salmon industry in the hollows of their grasping hands.  Stubby Abbott was a packer.  He had the ears of the other packers.  They were already complaining to Stubby, grouching about MacRae, unable to understand that Stubby listened to them with his tongue in his cheek, that one of their own class should have a new vision of industrial processes, a vision that was not like their own.

“They’re cultivating quite a grievance about the price you’re paying,” Stubby told Jack in confidence.  “They say you are a damned fool.  You could get those fish for thirty cents and you are paying forty.  The fishermen will want the earth when the canneries open.  They hint around that something will drop with a loud bang one of these days.  I think it’s just hot air.  They can’t hurt either of us.  I’ll get a fair pack at Crow Harbor, and I’ll have this plant loaded.  I’ve got enough money to carry on.  It makes me snicker to myself to imagine how they’ll squirm and squeal next winter when I put frozen salmon on the market ten cents a pound below what they figure on getting.  Oh, yes, our friends in the fish business are going to have a lot of grievances.  But just now they are chiefly grouching at you.”

MacRae seldom set foot ashore those crowded days.  But he passed within sight of Squitty Cove and Poor Man’s Rock once at least in each forty-eight hours.  For weeks he had seen smoke drifting blue from the cottage chimney in Cradle Bay.  He saw now and then the flutter of something white or blue on the lawn that he knew must be Betty.  Part of the time a small power boat swung to the mooring in the bay where the shining Arrow nosed to wind and tide in other days.  He heard current talk among the fishermen concerning the Gowers.  Gower himself was spending his time between the cottage and Folly Bay.

The cannery opened five days in advance of the sockeye season on the Fraser.  When the Gower collecting boats made their first round MacRae knew that he had a fight on his hands.  Gower, it seemed to him, had bared his teeth at last.