There were nine male Ferraras when Jack MacRae went to France.  Dolores’ father was dead.  Uncle Peter was a bachelor.  He had two brothers, and each brother had bred three sons.  Four of these sons had left their boats and gear to go overseas.  Two of them would never come back.  The other two were home,—­one after a whiff of gas at Ypres, the other with a leg shorter by two inches than when he went away.  These two made nothing of their disabilities, however; they were home and they were nearly as good as ever.  That was enough for them.  And with the younger boys and their fathers they came to old Peter’s house for a week at Christmas, after an annual custom.  These gatherings in the old days had always embraced Donald MacRae and his son.  And his son was glad that it included him now.  He felt a little less alone.

They were of the sea, these Ferraras, Castilian Spanish, tempered and diluted by three generations in North America.  Their forebears might have sailed in caravels.  They knew the fishing grounds of the British Columbia coast as a schoolboy knows his a, b, c’s.  They would never get rich, but they were independent fishermen, making a good living.  And they were as clannish as the Scotch.  All of them had chipped in to send Dolly to school in Vancouver.  Old Peter could never have done that, MacRae knew, on what he could make trolling around Poor Man’s Rock.  Peter had been active with gill net and seine when Jack MacRae was too young to take thought of the commercial end of salmon fishing.  He was about sixty-five now, a lean, hardy old fellow, but he seldom went far from Squitty Cove.  There was Steve and Frank and Vincent and Manuel of the younger generation, and Manuel and Peter and Joaquin of the elder.  Those three had been contemporary with Donald MacRae.  They esteemed old Donald.  Jack heard many things about his father’s early days on the Gulf that were new to him, that made his blood tingle and made him wish he had lived then too.  Thirty years back the Gulf of Georgia was no place for any but two-handed men.

He heard also, in that week of casual talk among the Ferraras, certain things said, statements made that suggested a possibility which never seemed to have occurred to the Ferraras themselves.

“The Folly Bay pack of blueback was a whopper last summer,” Vincent Ferrara said once.  “They must have cleaned up a barrel of money.”

Folly Bay was Gower’s cannery.

“Well, he didn’t make much of it out of us,” old Manuel grunted.  “We should worry.”

“Just the same, he ought to be made to pay more for his fish.  He ought to pay what they’re worth, for a change,” Vincent drawled.  “He makes about a hundred trollers eat out of his hand the first six weeks of the season.  If somebody would put on a couple of good, fast carriers, and start buying fish as soon as he opens his cannery, I’ll bet he’d pay more than twenty-five cents for a five-pound salmon.”