isfaction in the doing, even of the disagreeable,
dirty tasks necessary, in beating the risks he sometimes had to run.
There was a secret triumph in overcoming difficulties as they arose. And
he had an object, which, if it did not always lie in the foreground of
his mind, he was nevertheless keen on attaining.

The risks and work and strain, perhaps because he put so much of himself
into the thing, paid from the beginning more than he had dared hope. He
made a hundred dollars his first trip, paid the trollers five cents a
fish more on the second trip and cleared a hundred and fifty. In the
second week of his venture he struck a market almost bare of fresh
salmon with thirty-seven hundred shining bluebacks in his hold. He made
seven hundred dollars on that single cargo.

A Greek buyer followed the _Blackbird_ out through the Narrows that
trip. MacRae beat him two hours to the trolling fleet at Squitty, a
fleet that was growing in numbers.

"Bluebacks are thirty-five cents," he said to the first man who ranged
alongside to deliver. "And I want to tell you something that you can
talk over with the rest of the crowd. I have a market for every fish
this bunch can catch. If I can't handle them with the _Blackbird_, I'll
put on another boat. I'm not here to buy fish just till the Folly Bay
cannery opens. I'll be making regular trips to the end of the salmon
season. My price will be as good as anybody's, better than some. If
Gower gets your bluebacks this season for twenty-five cents, it will be
because you want to make him a present. Meantime, there's another buyer
an hour behind me. I don't know what he'll pay. But whatever he pays
there aren't enough salmon being caught here yet to keep two carriers
running. You can figure it out for yourself."

MacRae thought he knew his men. Nor was his judgment in error. The Greek
hung around. In twenty-four hours he got three hundred salmon. MacRae
loaded nearly three thousand.

Once or twice after that he had competitive buyers in Squitty Cove and
the various rendezvous of the trolling fleet. But the fishermen had a
loyalty born of shrewd reckoning. They knew from experience the way of
the itinerant buyer. They knew MacRae. Many of them had known his
father. If Jack MacRae had a market for all the salmon he could buy on
the Gower grounds all season, they saw where Folly Bay would buy no fish
in the old take-it-or-leave it fashion. They were keenly alive to the
fact that they were g