"What sort of men do they hire?"

"Chinese, Japs, and Italians, mainly. It's like a foreign country here,
only there are no women. The bunk-rooms are filled with opium fumes and
noisy with clacking tongues. On one side of the village streets the
Orientals burn incense to their Joss, across the way the Latins worship
the Virgin. They work side by side all day until they are ready to drop,
then mass in the street and knife each other over their rival gods."

"How long does it all last?"

"Only about six weeks; then the furnace fires die out, the ships are
loaded, the men go to sleep, and the breezes waft them out into the August
haze, after which Kalvik sags back into its ten months' coma, becoming, as
you see it now, a dead, deserted village, shunned by man."

"Jove! you have a graphic tongue," said Boyd, appreciatively. "But I don't
see how those huge plants can pay for their upkeep with such a short run."

"Well, they do; and, what's more, they pay tremendously; sometimes a
hundred per cent. a year or more."

"Impossible!" Emerson was now thoroughly aroused, and Cherry continued:

"Two years ago a ship sailed into port in early May loaded with an army of
men, with machinery, lumber, coal, and so forth. They landed, built the
plant, and had it ready to operate by the time the run started. They made
their catch, and sailed away again in August with enough salmon in the
hold to pay twice over for the whole thing. Willis Marsh did even better
than that the year before, but of course the price of fish was high then.