r;
also I have a twenty-five-year lease on the water frontage there. I have
the capital to go ahead and build a cold-storage plant. The wholesale
crowd can't possibly bother me. And the canneries are going to have
their hands full this season without mixing into a scrap over local
prices of fresh fish. You've heard about the new regulations?"

MacRae nodded assent.

"There's going to be a free-for-all," Stubby chuckled. "There'll be a
lot of independent purse seiners. If the canneries don't pay good prices
these independent fishermen, with their fast, powerful rigs, will seine
the salmon under the packers' noses and run their catch down to the
Puget Sound plants. This is no time for the British Columbia packers to
get uppish. Good-by, four hundred per cent."

"They'll wiggle through legislation to prevent export of raw salmon,"
MacRae suggested; "same as they have on the sockeye."

"No chance. They've tried, and it can't be done," Stubby grinned. "There
aren't going to be any special privileges for British Columbia salmon
packers any more. I know, because I'm on the inside. The fishermen have
made a noise that disturbs the politicians, I guess. Another thing,
there's a slack in the demand for all but the best grades of salmon. But
the number one grades, sockeye and blueback and coho, are short. So that
a cannery man with an efficient plant can pay big for those fish. If
you can hold that Squitty fleet of trollers like you did last year,
you'll make some money."

"Do you want those salmon?" MacRae asked.

"Sure I want them. I want them as soon as they begin to run big enough
to be legally taken for sale," Stubby declared. "I'm going to rush that
cold-storage construction. By the time you begin collecting bluebacks
I'll have a place for them, all you can buy. I'll have storage for three
hundred thousand fish. I'm going to buy everything and start half a
dozen retail stores at the same time. Just imagine the situation in this
burg of a hundred and fifty thousand people with waters that swarm with
fish right at our doors--salmon selling for thirty cents a pound, hardly
ever below twenty, other fish in about the same proportion. It's a
damned scandal, and I don't much blame a man who works for four dollars
a day thinking he might as well turn Bolshevik. I know that I can pay
twelve cents for salmon and make a good profit selling for sixteen. Can
you make money supplying me with bluebacks at twelve cents a pound?"

"Y