“I’ve seen the inside of a good many homes in town lately,” MacRae observed.  “This is the homiest one yet.”

“I’ll say it is,” Stubby agreed.  “A place that has been lived in and cared for a long time gets that way, though.  Remember some of those old, old places in England and France?  This is new compared to that country.  Still, my father built this house when the West End was covered with virgin timber.”

“How’d you like to be born and grow up in a house that your father built with a vision of future generations of his blood growing up in,” Stubby murmured, “and come home crippled after three years in the red mill and find you stood a fat chance of losing it?”

“I wouldn’t like it much,” MacRae agreed.

But he did not say that he had already undergone the distasteful experience Stubby mentioned as a possibility.  He waited for Stubby to go on.

“Well, it’s a possibility,” Stubby continued, quite cheerfully, however.  “I don’t propose to allow it to happen.  Hang it, I wouldn’t blat this to any one but you, Jack.  The mater has only a hazy idea of how things stand, and she’s an incurable optimist anyway.  Nelly and the Infant—­you haven’t met the Infant yet—­don’t know anything about it.  I tell you it put the breeze up when I got able to go into our affairs and learned how things stood.  I thought I’d get mended and then be a giddy idler for a year or so.  But it’s up to me.  I have to get into the collar.  Otherwise I should have stayed south all winter.  You know we’ve just got home.  I had to loaf in the sun for practically a year.  Now I have to get busy.  I don’t mean to say that the poorhouse stares us in the face, you know, but unless a certain amount of revenue is forthcoming, we simply can’t afford to keep up this place.

“And I’d damn well like to keep it going.”  Stubby paused to light a cigarette.  “I like it.  It’s our home.  We’d be deucedly sore at seeing anybody else hang up his hat and call it home.  So behold in me an active cannery operator when the season opens, a conscienceless profiteer for sentiment’s sake.  You live up where the blueback salmon run, don’t you, Jack?”

MacRae nodded.

“How many trollers fish those waters?”

“Anywhere from forty to a hundred, from ten to thirty rowboats.”

“The Folly Bay cannery gets practically all that catch?”

MacRae nodded again.

“I’m trying to figure a way of getting some of those blueback salmon,” Abbott said crisply.  “How can it best be done?”

MacRae thought a minute.  A whole array of possibilities popped into his mind.  He knew that the Abbotts owned the Crow Harbor cannery, in the mouth of Howe Sound just outside Vancouver Harbor.  When he spoke he asked a question instead of giving an answer.

“Are you going to buck the Packers’ Association?”

“Yes and no,” Stubby chuckled.  “You do know something about the cannery business, don’t you?”