“And when the pinch comes, they’ll remember that,” MacRae said.  “You watch, Vin.  The season is young yet.  Gower may beat me at this game, but he won’t make any money at it.”

MacRae kept abreast of Folly Bay for ten days and emerged from that period with a slight loss, because at the close he was paying more than the salmon were worth at the Terminal warehouse.  But when he ran his first load into Crow Harbor Stubby looked over the pile of salmon his men were forking across the floor and drew Jack into his office.

“I’ve made a contract for delivery of my entire sockeye and blueback pack,” he said.  “I know precisely where I stand.  I can pay up to ninety cents for all July fish.  I want all the Squitty bluebacks you can get.  Go after them, Jack.”

And MacRae went after them.  Wherever a Folly Bay collector went either the Blanco or the Bluebird was on his heels.  MacRae could cover more ground and carry more cargo, and keep it fresh, than any mustard pot.  The Bluebird covered little outlying nooks, the stragglers, the rowboat men in their beach camps.  The Blanco kept mostly in touch with the main fleet patrolling the southeastern end of Squitty like a naval flotilla, wheeling and counterwheeling over the grounds where the blueback played.  MacRae forced the issue.  He raised the price to sixty-five, to seventy, to seventy-five, to eighty, and the boats under the yellow house flag had to pay that to get a fish.  MacRae crowded them remorselessly to the limit.  So long as he got five cents a fish he could make money.  He suspected that it cost Gower a great deal more than five cents a salmon to collect what he got.  And he did not get so many now.  With the opening of the sockeye season on the Fraser and in the north the Japs abandoned trolling for the gill net.  The white trollers returned to their first love because he courted them assiduously.  There was always a MacRae carrier in the offing.  It cost MacRae his sleep and rest, but he drove himself tirelessly.  He could leave Squitty at dusk, unload his salmon at Crow Harbor, and be back at sunrise.  He did it many a time, after tallying fish all day.  Three hours’ sleep was like a gift from the gods.  But he kept it up.  He had a sense of some approaching crisis.

By the third week in July MacRae was taking three fourths of the bluebacks caught between the Ballenas and Folly Bay.  He would lie sometimes within a stone’s throw of Gower’s cannery, loading salmon.

He was swinging at anchor there one day when a rowboat from the cannery put out to the Blanco.  The man in it told MacRae that Gower would like to see him.  MacRae’s first impulse was to grin and ignore the request.  Then he changed his mind, and taking his own dinghy rowed ashore.  Some time or other he would have to meet his father’s enemy, face him, talk to him, listen to what he might say, tell him things.  Curiosity was roused in him a little now.  He desired to know what Gower had to say.  He wondered if Gower was weakening; what he could want.