“To buy as cheaply as you can and sell for as much as you can,” Stubby reminded him, “is a fundamental of business.  You can’t get away from it.  My father abandoned that maxim the last two years of his life, and it nearly broke us.  He was a public-spirited man.  He took war and war-time conditions to heart.  In a period of jumping food costs he tried to give people cheaper food.  As I said, he nearly went broke trying to do a public service, because no one else in the same business departed from the business rule of making all they could.  In fact, men in the same business, I have since learned, were the first to sharpen their knives for him.  He was establishing a bad precedent.  I don’t know but their attitude is sound, after all.  In sheer self-defense a man must make all he can when he has a chance.  You cannot indulge in philanthropy in a business undertaking these days, Silent John.”

“Granted,” MacRae made answer.  “I don’t propose to be a philanthropist myself.  But you will get farther with a salmon fisherman, or any other man whose labor you must depend on, if you accept the principle that he is entitled to make a dollar as well as yourself, if you don’t stretch every point to take advantage of his necessity.  These fellows who fish around Squitty have been gouged and cheated a lot.  They aren’t fools.  They know pretty well who makes the long profit, who pile up moderate fortunes while they get only a living, and not a particularly good living at that.”

“Are you turning Bolshevik?” Stubby inquired with mock solicitude.

MacRae smiled.

“Hardly.  Nor are the fishermen.  They know I’m making money.  But they know also that they are getting more out of it than they ever got before, and that if I were not on the job they would get a lot less.”

“They certainly would,” Abbott drawled.  “You have been, and are now, paying more for blueback salmon than any buyer on the Gulf.”

“Well, it has paid me.  And it has been highly profitable to you, hasn’t it?” MacRae said.  “You’ve had a hundred thousand salmon to pack which you would not otherwise have had.”

“Certainly,” Stubby agreed.  “I’m not questioning your logic.  In this case it has paid us both, and the fisherman as well.  But suppose everybody did it?”

“If you can pay sixty cents a fish, and fifteen per cent, on top of that and pack profitably, why can’t other canneries?  Why can’t Folly Bay meet that competition?  Rather, why won’t they?”

“Matter of policy, maybe,” Stubby hazarded.  “Matter of keeping costs down.  Apart from a few little fresh-fish buyers, you are the only operator on the Gulf who is cutting any particular ice.  Gower may figure that he will eventually get these fish at his own price.  If I were eliminated, he would.”

“I’d still be on the job,” MacRae ventured.

“Would you, though?” Stubby asked doubtfully.

“Yes.”  MacRae made his reply positive in tone.  “You could buy all right.  That Squitty Island bunch of trollers seem convinced you are the whole noise in the salmon line.  But without Crow Harbor where could you unload such quantities of fish?”