l processes is a highly important one, as older, wiser men than
Jack MacRae had been a longer time discovering.

He did not try to pin Stubby to a more definite statement. A hint was
enough for MacRae. Stubby Abbott could also be depended upon to see
things beyond the horizon. If a storm broke Stubby was the most
vulnerable, because in a sense he was involved with the cannery
interests in general, and they would consider him an apostate and knife
him without mercy,--if they could. If the Abbott estate had debts,
obligations which could be manipulated, if through the financial
convolutions of marketing the Crow Harbor pack Stubby could be reached,
the Abbott family had property, a standard of living that stood for
comfort, appearance, luxury almost. There are always plenty of roads
open to a flank attack on people like that; many levers, financial and
otherwise, can be pulled for or against them.

So MacRae, knowing that Stubby must protect himself in a showdown, set
about fortifying his own approaches.

For a first move he hired an engineer, put Steve Ferrara in charge of
the _Blackbird_, and started him back to Squitty. Then MacRae took the
next train to Bellingham, a cannery town which looks out on the southern
end of the Gulf of Georgia from the American side of the boundary. He
extended his journey to Seattle. Altogether, he was gone three days.

When he came back he made a series of calls,--at the Vancouver offices
of three different canneries and one of the biggest cold-storage
concerns on the Pacific Coast. He got a courteous but unsatisfactory
reception from the cannery men. He fared a little better with the
manager of the cold-storage plant. This gentleman was tentatively
agreeable in the matter of purchasing salmon, but rather vague in the
way of terms.

"Beginning with May next I can deliver any quantity up to two thousand a
day, perhaps more, for a period of about four months," MacRae stated.
"What I should like to know is the percentage over the up-coast price
you would pay."

But he could not pin the man down to anything definite. He would only
speak pleasantly of the market and possible arrangements, utter vague
commonplaces in business terminology. MacRae rose.

"I'm wasting your time and my own," he said. "You don't want my fish.
Why not say so?"

"We always want fish," the man declared, bending a shrewdly appraising
eye on MacRae. "Bring in the salmon and we will do business."

"On your own