Chapter XII: A Ptarmigan Feast

As Red McGee opened his eyes he found the foreman, Dan Weston and his daughter, Rusty, bending over him.

“Wh-what!” he exclaimed, struggling to a sitting position, “what in the name of—”

“You fell into a fast one, Red.” The foreman laughed. The crowd joined in this laugh but not the girl. Sober of face, she stood looking down at her father.

“Daddy,” she began, “are you—”

“Do you mean to say that kid from the _Stormy Petrel_ put me out?” Red McGee interrupted.

“Well, you went out,” the foreman drawled. “The boy was the only one near you so I reckon—”

He was not allowed to finish for at that Red McGee let out a tremendous roar of laughter.

“Ho! Ho! Ha-ha-ha!” he roared. “That’s one on Red McGee.

“But, boys!” he struggled to his feet. “I want to admit right here. There might be something to that _Stormy Petrel_ crew after all. Give ’em a chance, I say.”

“Sure! Sure!” the crowd boomed. “Give ’em a chance.”

“Where’s that young roughneck?” Red demanded, staring about him. “I want to shake his hand.”

“Here—here he is!” Blackie pushed Johnny forward.

“I—I’m sorry—” Johnny began.

“Young man,” Red McGee broke in, “never apologize. Your enemies don’t deserve it, and your friends don’t demand it. From now on we’re pals. Shake on it.” Their hands met in the clasp of a grizzly and a bear cub.

“What’s more,” Red went on, “the treat’s on me. You’re coming up to dinner with me, all four of you fellows from the _Stormy Petrel_. Ever eat ptarmigan pot pie?”

“Never have,” said Johnny.

“Well, you’re going to before this day is ...”

* * * * * * * *

... look into her eyes, he found himself seeing cold, blue-gray circles expressing as near as he could tell, undying hate.

“Of course,” he said to Blackie, “you can’t expect a girl to understand about boxing, with all of its ups and downs. But it does seem she might give a fellow the benefit of the doubt.”

“She will, son. She will,” Blackie reassured him. “Perhaps sooner than you think.” Was this prophesy or a guess? Time would tell.

Rusty McGee was the type of girl any real boy might be proud to call a pal. With an easy smile, a freckled face and a mass of wavy, rust-colored hair, she caught your interest at a glance. The strong, elastic, healthy spring of her whole self kept you looking.

More than once during his visit to the McGee summer home, a stout log cabin nestling among the barren Alaskan hills, Johnny found his eyes following her movements as she glided from room to room.

“Boy, she can cook!” Blackie exclaimed as he set his teeth into the juicy breast of “mountain quail,” as ptarmigan are often called. And Johnny did not disagree.

Since the crew of the _Stormy Petrel_ were her father’s friends, it was evident that Rusty meant to do her best as a hostess. But to Johnny she gave never a smile.

“How she must love that old dad of hers!” Blackie whispered once. Johnny’s only answer was a scowl.

Yes, Johnny was shunned and slighted by this youthful “queen of the canneries,” as she had once been called, but the _Stormy Petrel’s_ engineer, old Hugh MacGregor, came in for more than his full share of interest.

Hugh MacGregor was truly old. His thatch of gray told that. With grandchildren of his own he was just a big-hearted old man. Rusty was not long in sensing that.

When the dinner, a truly grand feast, was over, the others, Blackie, Red McGee, Lawrence and Johnny retired to the glassed-in porch where they might have a look at the barren hills of Alaska and the wide, foam-flecked sweep of Bristol Bay, and, at the same time, talk of fish, Oriental raiders and the sea.

MacGregor remained behind to “help with the dishes.”

“Do you like Alaska?” Rusty asked him.

“Oh, sure I do!” was the old man’s quick response. “I spent a winter much further north than this many years ago. I was quite young then. It was thrilling, truly it was. Cape Prince of Wales on Bering Straits—” his voice trailed off dreamily.

“Way up there?” the girl exclaimed. “What were you doing?”

“Herdin’ reindeer and Eskimo,” he laughed. “I crossed the straits in a skin boat with the Eskimo and lived a while in Russia without a passport. You do things like that when you are young.

“Ah yes,” he sighed, “youth is impulsive, and often wrong.” He was thinking of Johnny. He knew how Johnny felt about things. He had become very fond of the boy.

Did Rusty understand? Who could tell? Burying her hands in foamy suds, she washed dishes furiously. Nor did she speak again for some time.

Meanwhile, over their pipes, Red McGee and Blackie were discussing the task that lay before them.

“I suppose you know all about this Oriental fishing business,” Red suggested.

“I’m not sure that I do know all about it,” was Blackie’s modest reply. “Suppose you tell me.”

“It’s like this,” Red cleared his throat. “There was a time when we thought the salmon supply off these shores was inexhaustible. We caught them in nets and traps just as we pleased.

“Then,” he blew out a cloud of smoke, “there came a time when we woke up to the fact that the whole run of salmon might vanish. You know what that would mean?”

“Yes, I know,” Blackie agreed. “The little man in Hoboken, Omaha and Detroit who hasn’t much pay and has a big family could no longer feed the children on a fifteen-cent can of salmon.”

“Right,” McGee agreed. “More than that, thousands of fine fellows, just such men as you saw tonight, fair-minded, honest men that would,” he paused to chuckle, “that would see one of their best friends knocked cold by a stranger in a fair sparring match and not want to kill him, men like that would be out of a job. Their families would go hungry. You know, about all they understand is salmon catching.”

“And so?” Blackie prompted after a moment’s silence.

“So the government and the canners got together on a conservation program; so many fish to be caught each year, the same number allowed to go up stream and spawn.

“The plan was well worked out. We’ve put the salmon industry on a sound foundation. It will continue so for years unless—”

“These Orientals are allowed to come over here and set three-mile-long nets across the bay,” suggested Blackie.

“That’s just it!” McGee struck the table a resounding blow. “They’re taking advantage of a technicality of international law. And unless we drive them out—”

“Not too loud,” Blackie cautioned. “There goes one of them now.”

“What?” McGee sprang to his feet. A slender, dark-haired person was passing down the path before the cabin.

“No,” he settled back in his place. “He’s not one of ’em. He’s one of our Eskimos. We have three of them down here. It’s a little off their regular beat. But they are keen at locating the runs of salmon. Inherited it from their fathers, I—

“But say!” his voice rose. “He does look like one of those Orientals.”

“Sure he does,” Blackie agreed.

“We might use him for a sort of spy,” McGee’s voice dropped to a whisper. “His name’s Kopkina. Used to work in a restaurant. He picked up the Oriental lingo, at least enough to pass for one of ’em. If some of them come around here, we’ll have Kopkina mix in with them. He might find things out, important facts.”

“It’s a good idea,” Blackie agreed.

“Yes,” MacGregor was saying to Rusty, as he told more of his adventures in the very far north, “it was a bit peculiar goin’ up there like that, livin’ with the Eskimos. And me still a young fellow like Johnny Thompson now.” He shot her a look. She smiled at him in a peculiar way, but said never a word.

“It was the food that was strange,” he went on after a chuckle. “Of course, you can chew polar bear steak if you’ve got uncommon good teeth. Seal steak’s not half-bad and reindeer makes a grand Mulligan stew.”

“Yes, I know,” the girl agreed. “We have some reindeer meat sent down every season. Stay with us and you’ll have a taste of it.”

“We’ll stay, all right,” MacGregor declared. “That’s what we’re here for to stay, hunting Orientals and shadows—shadows.” He repeated the word slowly. “Blackie believes in moving shadows in the fog on the sea.”

“Shadows?” the girl stared at him.

“Sure! He says they glide along across the sea with never a sound. Like some phantom schooner it was,” he said.

“That’s strange.” The girl’s eyes shone. “There was a gill-net fisherman last season told something just like that. He was an Italian, sort of a dreamer. We didn’t believe him. But now—what do you think?”

“I don’t know what to think,” MacGregor scratched his gray thatch.

“But, Mr. MacGregor,” the girl said after a moment, “didn’t you have a thing to eat except Eskimo food?”

“What? Oh, yes, up there, up there when I was a kid same as Johnny,” MacGregor laughed. “Sure—sure we did. It came on a sailin’ schooner all in cans.

“We had evaporated potatoes and eggs in cans, butter pickled in cans, hot dogs in cans, everything. And the Eskimos,” he threw back his head and laughed. “They’d stand around watchin’ to see what we’d take out of a can next.

“And then we got a phonograph,” he laughed again.

“A phonograph?” Rusty said.

“Sure. First one those little brown boys ever seen. Had a long tin horn to it, that phonograph did. The Eskimos looked at it and tapped the tin horn. They said, ‘_Suna una?_’ (What is it?) We didn’t tell ’em, so they tapped it some more and said, ‘All same tin can-_emuck_.’

“Bye and bye we cranked it up and started it going. The record was a white man singin’ ‘Meet me in Saint Louis, Louie. Meet me at the Fair.’

“Well, that was funny!” he chuckled. “The Eskimos just looked and listened for a long time. Then one of them looked at the others and said, ‘Can you beat that! A white man in that tin can!’”

The merry laugh that rang out from the kitchen was heard by those on the porch. Johnny heard it with the others and was glad—glad that that fine girl could laugh even if it wasn’t his joke.

“See that cannery out there?” Red McGee was saying. “Cost a cool million dollars. Paying interest on the investment, too. Also it’s giving two thousand people a living. But these Orientals with their floating canneries—”

“Floating canneries?” Lawrence broke in.

“Sure! That’s what they’ve got. They pick up some big hulk of a ship cheap, install some canning equipment, load on a drove of cheap coolies and steam away. Pretty soon they’re over Bristol Bay, just off the shores of Alaska, but beyond the three-mile limit. Three miles! Bah!” he exploded.

“I’m in favor of calling every square mile of Bristol Bay American waters,” Blackie replied.

Red McGee stared at him with sudden approval. “Say!” he roared, “we must be brothers.”

“We ought to run those Orientals off,” Blackie grinned. “We’re here to start just that. That boat of ours may not seem so hot, but she’s got speed and power, three airplane motors in her. Good ones, too. Once we sight an Oriental fishing boat setting nets too close behind the fog they’re coming ashore.”

“To do a lot of explaining.”

“Yes, and for quite a long visit.”

“That’s the talk,” Red McGee stood up. “Here’s hoping the wind drops so you can get there. The fishing hasn’t really started. No foreign boats have been seen. But they’re there. They made a haul last year. We’re sure of that. So why shouldn’t they come back?”

“Why not?” Blackie agreed.

In all of this time neither Johnny nor Lawrence said a word. For all that, they were thinking hard and their young hearts were on fire with a desire to do their bit for the good old U. S. A. and Alaska, their present home.

“Nice place you’ve got here,” said MacGregor, as he joined the party on the porch.

“It will pass,” was Red McGee’s modest reply. “I built it for my wife. She loved these rugged hills and the smell of the sea. She—” his voice faltered. He looked away. “She left us a year and a half ago. But Rusty and I, we—we sort of carry on.

“But if those Orientals—” his voice rose, “Oh! Well, enough of that for today. It’s good of you fellows to join us in a feast!”

“It’s been swell!” said Blackie.

“Swell! Grand! Mighty keen!” were the impulsive comments of the boys.

“We know each other better,” said Blackie.

“A whole lot better,” Red McGee agreed.

“Goodbye, Rusty,” MacGregor called back through the house.

“Goodbye! Goodbye! Come again soon,” came back in a girlish voice.

“I wonder,” Johnny thought as he took the winding path leading down to the wharf. “Wonder if we’ll ever get to come back here?”