Over the Straits By Ernest Haycox The stanch little cannery tender must get her load of valuable red salmon across before the fish spoiled, yet one of the worst storms that had ever swept the coast was raging up the straits. But business is business, even when lives are at stake, and that cargo of salmon represented a small fortune. A story with the tang of salt spray, and quiet, unself-conscious heroism of strong men. The _Star_ left the city float in Ketchikan at six o’clock in the evening, headed down Revillagigedo channel, bound for the Prince of Wales Island, thirty-four miles across the straits. A bad-weather flag had been run up on the post office flag pole just before the eighty-horse-power, seventy-foot purse-seine boat had cast off her lines. There was, so the weather man said, a fifty-mile blow on the outside and the boats were all hurrying for port. The city marshal, standing on the dock and watching the crew of seven discuss the matter, had given us some practical if blunt advice. It was no time for a consumptive-engined, barnacle-encrusted cannery tender, smelling to high heaven of fish odors, to be out in this kind of weather. Not even though the smell was strong enough to float a battleship. These were his words. But it was imperative that the _Star_ get across. In her hold were fifteen thousand Sockeyes, choicest of Alaskan red salmon, which had been lifted from the company traps two days ago. Those salmon had to be in the cannery in another ten hours or they would sour, and with Sockeyes at forty cents apiece, and not many to be had at any price, it was easy to see that there was a small fortune in the bottom of the boat. Nineteen hundred and twenty was a poor fish season and the _Star_ had ranged up and down the coast hundreds of miles, buying up everything offered. “What do you think, fellows?” asked Bob, our skipper. “Let’s go. Them fish has got to get out of that hold quick.” Ed Fraser emphasized his statement by taking a huge crescent-shaped segment out of a plug of Climax medium. “Rather rough,” suggested Milt, the son of an Alaskan mining magnate who was out for his fall school money. “Hell, I’d just as soon drown as be on the same boat with sour fish,” spoke up Al, the engineer. Charlie, a short and pudgy bald-headed German grinned doubtfully and squinted toward a leaden sky. Charlie scarcely ever said anything. It took too long to talk. “What do you say, Hal?” I ran my fingers through a luxurious three-month beard--fully an inch or an inch and a half long--and tried to look judicial. Most of all I wanted a good long sleep, after having been battered around the wheelhouse through a week’s steady running in rough water. Then I wanted to have a night off in Ketchikan and limber up the rusty springs of joviality; we hadn’t been near a town for a month. Added to these reasons was the gale outside. “Um,” I said, trying to convey an impartial answer.