and meet his price. But MacRae in the _Blanco_ could take six, eight,
ten thousand salmon profitably on a margin which the other buyers said
was folly.

The trolling fleet swelled in numbers. The fish were there. The
old-timers had prophesied a big blueback year, and for once their
prophecy was by way of being fulfilled. The fish schooled in great
shoals off Nanaimo, around Gray Rock, the Ballenas, passed on to
Sangster and Squitty. And the fleet followed a hundred strong, each day
increasing,--Indians, Greeks, Japanese, white men, raking the salmon
grounds with glittering spoon hooks, gathering in the fish.

In early June MacRae was delivering eighteen thousand salmon a week to
the Terminal Fish Company. He was paying forty cents a fish, more than
any troller in the Gulf of Georgia had ever got for June bluebacks, more
than any buyer had ever paid before the opening of the canneries
heightened the demand. He was clearing nearly a thousand dollars a week
for himself, and he was putting unheard-of sums in the pockets of the
fishermen. MacRae believed these men understood how this was possible,
that they had a feeling of coöperating with him for their common good.
They had sold their catches on a take-it-or-leave-it basis for years. He
had put a club in their hands as well as money in their pockets. They
would stand with him against less scrupulous, more remorseless
exploiters of their labor. They would see that he got fish. They told
him that.

"If somebody else offered sixty cents you'd sell to him, wouldn't you?"
MacRae asked a dozen of them sitting on the _Blanco's_ deck one
afternoon. They had been talking about canneries and competition.