POOR MAN'S 
 ROCK 
 
 BERTRAND W SINCLAIR 
 
OP THE 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 O Of ^ 
 
POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
BERTRAND W. SINCLAIR 
 
 North of Fifty-Three 
 Big Timber 
 Burned Bridges 
 Poor Man's Rock 
 
afraid I must apologize for my father/' she said 
 simply. — Frontispiece. Seepage 15. 
 
POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 BY 
 
 BERTRAND W. SINCLAIR 
 
 WITH FRONTISPIECE BY 
 
 FRANK TENNEY JOHNSON 
 
 BOSTON 
 
 LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 
 
 1920 
 
Copyright 1920, 
 By Little, Brown, and Company 
 
 All rights reserved 
 Published September, 1920 
 
 THE UNIVEHSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, MASS., U. S. A. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Prologue — Long, Long Ago 1 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I. The House in Cradle Bay 12 
 
 II. His Own Country 18 
 
 III. The Flutter of Sable Wings ... 27 
 
 IV. Inheritance 39 
 
 V. From the Bottom Up 52 
 
 VI. The Springboard '. . . . 60 
 
 VII. Sea Boots and Salmon 75 
 
 VIII. Vested Rights 84 
 
 IX. The Complexity of Simple Matters 92 
 
 X. Thrust and Counterthrust .... 106 
 
 XL Peril of the Sea 125 
 
 XII. Between Sun and Sun 141 
 
 XIII. An Interlude 156 
 
 XIV. The Swing of the Pendulum . . . 173 
 
 XV. Hearts are not Always Trumps . . 183 
 
 XVI. En Famille 202 
 
 XVII. Business as Usual 214 
 
 XVin. A Renewal of Hostilities 239 
 
 XIX. Top Dog 264 
 
 XX. The Dead and Dusty Past 280 
 
 XXI. As IT was in the Beginning .... 292 
 
 V 
 
 ivi599453 
 
POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 PROLOGUE 
 Long, Long Ago 
 
 The Gulf of Georgia spread away endlessly, an im- 
 mense, empty stretch of water bared to the hot eye of 
 an August sun, its broad face only saved from oily 
 smoothness by half-hearted flutterings of a westerly 
 breeze. Those faint airs blowing up along the Vancouver 
 Island shore made tentative efforts to fill and belly out 
 strongly the mainsail and jib of a small half-decked 
 sloop working out from the weather side of Sangster 
 Island and laying her snub nose straight for the mouth 
 of the Fraser River, some sixty sea-miles east by south. 
 
 In the stem sheets a young man stood, resting one 
 hand on the tiller, his navigating a sinecure, for the 
 wind was barely enough to give him steerageway. He 
 was, one would say, about twenty-five or six, fairly tali, 
 healthily tanned, with clear blue eyes having a touch of 
 steely gray in their blue depths, and he was unmistak- 
 ably of that fair type which runs to sandy hair and 
 freckles. He was dressed in a light-colored shirt, blue 
 serge trousers, canvas shoes ; his shirt sleeves, rolled to 
 the elbows, bared flat, sinewy forearms. 
 
 He turned his head to look back to where in the dis- 
 tance a white speck showed far astern, and his eyes 
 narrowed and clouded. But there was no cloud in them 
 
2 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 when he turned again to his companion, a girl sitting 
 on a box just outside the radius of the tiller. She was 
 an odd-looking figure to be sitting in the cockpit of a 
 fishing boat, amid recent traces of business with salmon, 
 codfish, and the like. The heat was putting a point on 
 the smell of defunct fish. The dried scales of them still 
 clung to the small vessel's timbers. In keeping, the 
 girl should have been buxom, red-handed, coarsely 
 healthy. And she was anything but that. No frail, 
 delicate creature, mind you, — but she did not belong 
 in a fishing boat. She looked the lady, carried herself 
 like one, — patrician from the top of her russet- 
 crowned head to the tips of her white kid slippers. Yet 
 her eyes, when she lifted them to the man at the tiller, 
 glowed with something warm. She stood up and slipped 
 a silk-draped' arm through his. He smiled down at her, 
 a tender smile tempered with uneasiness, and then bent 
 his head and kissed her. 
 
 "Doi you think they will overtake us, Donald?" she 
 asked at length. 
 
 '' That depends on the wind," he answered. " If these 
 light airs hold they may overhaul us, because they can 
 spread so much more cloth. But if the westerly fresh- 
 ens — and it nearly always does in the afternoon — 
 I can outsail the Gvll. I can drive this old tub full 
 sail in a blow that will make the Gull tie in her last 
 reef." 
 
 " I don't like it when it 's rough," the girl said wist- 
 fully. " But I '11 pray for a blow this afternoon." 
 
 If indeed she prayed — and her attitude was scarcely 
 prayerful, for it consisted of sitting with one hand 
 clasped tight in her lover's — her prayer fell dully on 
 the ears of the wind god. The light airs fluttered 
 gently off the bluish haze of Vancouver Island, wavered 
 
LONG, LONG AGO 3 
 
 across the Gulf, kept the sloop moving, but no more. 
 Sixty miles away the mouth of the Fraser opened to 
 them what security they desired. But behind them 
 power and authority crept up apace. In two hours 
 they could distinguish clearly the rig of the pursuing 
 yacht. In another hour she was less than a mile astern, 
 creeping inexorably nearer. 
 
 The man in the sloop could only stand on, hoping for 
 the usual afternoon westerly to show its teeth. 
 
 In the end, when the afternoon was waxing late, the 
 stemward vessel stood up so that every detail of her 
 loomed plain. She was full cutter-rigged, spreading 
 hundreds of feet of canvas. Every working sail was 
 set, and every hght air cloth that could catch a puff of 
 air. The slanting sun rays glittered on her white paint 
 and glossy varnish, struck flashing on bits of polished 
 brass. She looked her name, the Gull, a thing of ex- 
 ceeding grace and beauty, gliding soundlessly across 
 a sun-shimmering sea. But she represented only a 
 menace to the man and woman in the fish-soiled sloop. 
 
 The man's face darkened as he watched the distance 
 lessen between the two craft. He reached under a locker 
 and drew out a rifle. The girl's high pinkish color fled. 
 She caught him by the arm. 
 
 " Donald, Donald," she said breathlessly, " there 's 
 not to be any fighting." 
 
 "Am I to let them lay alongside, hand you aboard, 
 and then sail back to Maple Point, laughing at us 
 for soft and simple fools ? " he said quietly. " They 
 can't take you from me so easily as that. There are 
 only three of them aboard. I won't hurt them unless 
 they force me to it, but I 'm not so chicken-hearted as 
 to let them have things all their own way. Sometimes a 
 man must fight, Bessie." 
 
4 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 "You don't know my father," the girl whimpered. 
 " Nor grandpa. He 's there. I can see his white beard. 
 They'll kill you, Donald, if you oppose them. You 
 mustn't do that. It is better that I should go back 
 quietly than that there should be blood spHled over 
 me." 
 
 "But I 'm not intending to slaughter them," the man 
 said soberly. "If I warn them off and they board me 
 like a bunch of pirates, then — then it will be their look- 
 out. Do you want to go back, Bessie .^ Are you doubt- 
 ful about your bargain already?" 
 
 The tears started in her eyes. 
 
 "For shame to say that," she whispered. "Lord 
 knows I don't want to turn back from anything that 
 includes you, Don. But my father and grandpa will 
 be furious. They won't hesitate to vent their temper 
 on you if you oppose them. They are accustomed to 
 respect. To have their authority flouted rouses them 
 to fury. And they 're three to one. Put away your 
 gun, Donald. If we can't outsail the Gull I shall have 
 to go back without a struggle. There will be another 
 time. They can't change my heart." 
 
 " They can break your spirit though — -and they will, 
 for this," he muttered. 
 
 But he laid the rifle down on the locker. The girl 
 snuggled her hand into his. 
 
 "You will not quarrel with them, Donald — -please, 
 no matter what they say? Promise me that," she 
 pleaded. " If we can't outrun them, if they come along- 
 side, you will not fight? I shall go back obediently. 
 You can send word to me by Andrew Murdock. Next 
 time we shall not fail." 
 
 " There will be noi next time, Bessie," he said slowly. 
 **You will never get another chance. I know the 
 
LONG, LONG AGO 5 
 
 Gowers and Mortons better than you do, for all you 're 
 one of them. They '11 make you wish you had never 
 been bom, that you 'd never seen me. I 'd rather fight 
 it out now. Is n't our own happiness worth a blow or 
 two?" 
 
 *^I can't bear to think what might happen if you 
 defied them out here on this lonely sea," she shuddered. 
 " You must promise me, Donald." 
 
 "I promise, then," he said with a sigh. "Only I 
 know it 's the end of our dream, my dear. And I 'm 
 disappointed, too. I thought you had a stouter heart, 
 that wouldn't quail before two angry old men — and 
 a jealous young one. You can see, I suppose, that 
 Horace is there, too. 
 
 "Damn them!" he broke out passionately after a 
 minute's silence. "It's a free country, and you and 
 I are not children. They chase us as if we were pirates. 
 For two pins I 'd give them a pirate's welcome. I tell 
 you, Bessie, my promise to be meek and mild is not 
 worth much if they take a high hand with me. I can 
 take their measure, all three of them." 
 
 "But you must not,'* the girl insisted. "You've 
 promised. We can't help ourselves by violence. It 
 would break my heart." 
 
 '^'They'll do that fast enough, once they get you 
 home," he answered gloomily. 
 
 The girl's lips quivered. She sat looking back at the 
 cutter half a cable astern. The westerly had failed 
 them. The spreading canvas of the yacht was already 
 blanketing the little sloop, stealing what little wind 
 filled her sail. And as the sloop's way slackened the 
 other slid down upon her, a purl of water at her fore- 
 foot, her wide mainsail bellying out in a snowy curve. 
 
 There were three men in her. The helmsman was a 
 
6 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 patriarcK, his head showing white, a full white bearcl 
 descending from his chin, a fierce-visaged, vigorous old 
 man. Near him stood a man of middle age, a ruddj- 
 faced man in whose dark blue eyes a flame burned as he 
 eyed the two in the sloop. The third was younger still, 
 — a short, sturdy fellow in flannels, tending the main- 
 sheet with a frowning glance. 
 
 The man in the sloop held his course. 
 
 " Damn you, MacRae ; lay to, or I '11 run you down," 
 the patriarch at the cutter's wheel shouted, when a 
 boat's length separated the two craft. 
 
 MacRae's lips moved slightly, but no sound issued 
 therefrom. Leaning on the tiller, he let the sloop run. 
 So for a minute the boats sailed, the white yacht edging 
 up on the sloop until it seemed as if her broaded-off boom 
 would rake and foul the other. But when at last she 
 drew fully abreast the two men sheeted mainsail and jib 
 flat while the white-headed helmsman threw her over 
 so that the yacht drove in on the sloop and the two 
 younger men grappled MacRae's coaming with boat 
 hooks, and side by side they came slowly up into the 
 wind. 
 
 MacRae made no move, said nothing, only regarded 
 the three with sober intensity. They, for their part, 
 wasted no breath on him. 
 
 " Elizabeth, get in here," the girl's father commanded. 
 
 It was only a matter of stepping over the rubbing 
 gunwales. The girl rose. She cast an appealing glance 
 at MacRae. His face did not alter. She stepped up 
 on the guard, disdaining the hand young Gower ex- 
 tended to help her, and sprang lightly into the cockpit 
 of the Gull. 
 
 "As for you, you calculating blackguard," her 
 father addressed MacRae, "if you ever set foot on 
 
LONG, LONG AGO 7 
 
 Maple Point again, I '11 have you horsewhipped first 
 and jailed for trespass after." 
 
 For a second MacRae made no answer. His nos- 
 trils dilated; his blue-gray eyes darkened till they 
 seemed black. Then he said with a curious hoarseness, 
 and in a voice pitched so low it was scarcely audible: 
 
 "Take your boat hooks out of me and be on your 
 way." 
 
 The older man withdrew his hook. Young Gower 
 held on a second longer, matching the undisguised 
 hatred in Donald MacRae's eyes with a fury in his 
 own. His round, boyish face purpled. And when he 
 withdrew the boat hook he swung the inch-thick iron- 
 shod pole with a swift twist of his body and struck 
 MacRae fairly across the face. 
 
 MacRae went down in a heap as the Gull swung 
 away. The faint breeze out of the west filled the cut- 
 ter's sails. She stood away on a long tack south by 
 west, with a frightened girl cowering down in her cabin, 
 sobbing in grief and fear, and three men in the GvlVs 
 cockpit casting dubious glances at one another and 
 back to the fishing sloop sailing with no hand on her 
 tiller. 
 
 In an hour the Gull was four miles to windward of 
 the sloop. The breeze had taken a sudden shift full 
 half the compass. A southeast wind came backing up 
 against the westerly. There was in its breath a hint 
 of something stronger. 
 
 Masterless, the sloop sailed, laid to, started off again 
 erratically, and after many shifts ran off before this 
 stiffer wind. Unhelmed, she laid her blunt bows straight 
 for the opening between Sangster and Squitty islands. 
 On the cockpit floor Donald MacRae sprawled unheed- 
 ing. Blood from his broken face oozed over the boards. 
 
8 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 Above him the boom swung creaking and he did not 
 hear. Out of the southeast a bank of cloud crept up to 
 obscure the sun. Far southward the Gulf was dark- 
 ened, and across that darkened area specks and splashes 
 of white began to show and disappear. The hot air 
 grew strangely cool. The swell that runs far before a 
 Gulf southeaster began to roll the sloop, abandoned to 
 all the aimless movements of a vessel uncontrolled. She 
 came up into the wind and went off before it again, 
 her sails bellying strongly, racing as if to outrun the 
 swells which now here and there lifted and broke. She 
 dropped into a hollow, a following sea slewed her stern 
 sharply, and she jibed, — that is, the wind caught the 
 mainsail and flung it violently from port to starboard. 
 The boom swept an arc of a hundred degrees and put 
 her rail under when it brought up with a jerk on the 
 sheet. 
 
 Ten minutes later she jibed again. This time the 
 mainsheet parted. Only stout, heavily ironed backstays 
 kept mainsail and boom from being blown straight 
 ahead. The boom end swung outboard till it dragged 
 in the seas as she rolled. Only by a miracle and the 
 stoutest of standing gear had she escaped dismasting. 
 Now, with the mainsail broadedoff to starboard, and the 
 jib by some freak of wind and sea winged out to port, 
 the sloop drove straight before the wind, holding as 
 true a course as if the limp body on the cockpit floor 
 laid an invisible, controlling hand on sheet and tiller. 
 
 And he, while that fair wind grew to a yachtsman's 
 gale and lashed the Gulf of Georgia into petty convul- 
 sions, lay where he had fallen, his head rolling as his 
 vessel rolled, heedless when she rose and raced on a 
 wave-crest or fell laboring in the trough when a wave 
 slid out from under her. 
 
LONG, LONG AGO 9 
 
 The sloop had all but doubled on her course, — 
 nearly but not quite, — and the few points north of west 
 that she shifted bore her straight to destruction. 
 
 MacRae opened his eyes at last. He was bewildered 
 and sick. His head swam. There was a series of stab- 
 bing pains in his lacerated face. But he was of the 
 sea, of that breed which survives by dint of fortitude, 
 endurance, stoutness of arm and quickness of wit. He 
 clawed to his feet. Almost before him lifted the bleak 
 southern face of Squitty Island. Point Old jutted 
 out like a barrier. MacRae swung on the tiller. But 
 the wind had the mainsail in its teeth. Without control 
 of that boom his rudder could not serve him. 
 
 And as he crawled forward to try to lower sail, or 
 get a rope's end on the boom, whichever would do, the 
 sloop struck on a rock that stands awash at half-tide, 
 a brown hummock of granite lifting out of the sea two 
 hundred feet off the tip of Point Old. 
 
 She struck with a shock that sent MacRae sprawl- 
 ing, arrested full in an eight-knot stride. As she hung 
 shuddering on the rock, impaled by a jagged tooth, a 
 sea lifted over her stem and swept her like a watery 
 broom that washed MacRae off the cabin top, off the 
 rock itself into deep water beyond. 
 
 He came up gasping. The cool immersion had as- 
 tonishingly revived him. He felt a renewal of his 
 strength, and he had been cast by luck into a place 
 from which it took no more than the moderate effort 
 of an able swimmer to reach shore. Point Old stood 
 at an angle to the smashing seas, making a sheltered 
 bight behind it, and into this bight the flooding tide set 
 in a slow eddy. MacRae had only to keep himself 
 afloat. 
 
 In five minutes his feet touched on a gravel beach. 
 
10 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 He walked dripping out of the languid swell that ran 
 from the turbulence outside and turned to look back. 
 The sloop had lodged on the rock, bilged by the ragged 
 granite. The mast was down, mast and sodden sails 
 swinging at the end of a stay as each sea swept over 
 the rock with a hissing roar. 
 
 MacRae climbed to higher ground. He sat down 
 beside a stunted, leaning fir and watched his boat go. 
 It was soon done. A bigger sea than most tore the 
 battered hull loose, lifted it high, let it drop. The 
 crack of breaking timbers cut through the boom of 
 the surf. The next sea swept the rock clear, and the 
 broken, twisted hull floated awash. Caught in the tidal 
 eddy it began its slow j oumey to j oin the vast accumu- 
 lation of driftwood on the beach. 
 
 MacRae glanced along the island shore. He knew 
 that shore slightly, — a bald, cliify stretch notched with 
 rocky pockets in which the surf beat itself into dirty 
 foam. If he had grounded anywhere in that mile of 
 headland north of Point Old, his bones would have been 
 ibroken like the timbers of his sloop. 
 
 But his eyes did not linger there nor his thoughts 
 upon shipwreck and sudden death. His gaze turned 
 across the Gulf to a tongue of land outthrusting from 
 the long purple reach of Vancouver Island. Behind 
 that point lay the Morton estate, and beside the Mor- 
 ton boundaries, matching them mile for mile in wealth 
 of virgin timber and fertile meadow, spread the Gower 
 lands. 
 
 His face, streaked and blotched with drying blood- 
 stains, scarred with a red gash that split his cheek from 
 the hair above one ear to a comer of his mouth, hard- 
 ened into ugly lines. His eyes burned again. 
 
 This happened many years ago, long before a har- 
 
LONG, LONG AGO ii 
 
 assed world had to reckon with bourgeois and Bolshevik, 
 when profiteer and pacifist had not yet become words 
 to fill the mouths of men, and not even the politicians 
 had thought of saving the world for democracy. Yet 
 men and women were strangely as they are now. A 
 generation may change its manners, its outward seem- 
 ing; it does not change in its loving and hating, in its 
 fundamental passions, its inherent reactions. 
 
 MacRae's face worked. His lips quivered as he 
 stared across the troubled sea. He lifted his hands in a 
 swift gesture of appeal. 
 
 ** God," he cried, " curse and blast them in all 
 their ways and enterprises if they deal with her as they 
 have dealt with me." 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 The House in Cradi^e Bay 
 
 On an afternoon in the first week of November, 1918, 
 under a sky bank full of murky cloud and an air 
 freighted with a chill which threatened untimely snow, 
 a man came rowing up along the western side of Squitty 
 Island and turned into Cradle Bay, which lies under the 
 lee of Point Old. He was a young man, almost boyish- 
 looking. He had on a pair of fine tan shoes, brown 
 overalls, a new gray mackinaw coat buttoned to his chin. 
 He was bareheaded. Also he wore a patch of pink cel- 
 luloid over his right eye. 
 
 When he turned into the small half-moon bight, he 
 let up on his oars and drifted, staring with a touch of 
 surprise at a white cottage-roofed house with wide 
 porches sitting amid an acre square of bright green 
 lawn on a gentle slope that ran up from a narrow 
 beach backed by a low sea-wall of stone where the 
 gravel ended and the earth began. 
 
 " Hm-m-m," he muttered. " It was n't built yester- 
 day, either. Funny he never mentioned that.^^ 
 
 He pushed on the oars and the boat slid nearer shore, 
 the man's eyes still steadfast on the house. It stood 
 out bold against the grass and the deeper green of the 
 forest behind. Back of it opened a hillside brown with 
 dead ferns, dotted with great solitary firs and gnarly 
 branched arbutus. 
 
 No life appeared there. The chimneys were dead. 
 
THE HOUSE IN CRADLE BAY 13 
 
 Two moorings bobbed in the bay, but there was no 
 craft save a white rowboat hauled high above tidewater 
 and canted on its side. 
 
 " I wonder, now." He spoke again. 
 
 While he wondered and pushed his boat slowly in on 
 the gravel, a low pr—r-r and a sibilant ripple of water 
 caused him to look behind. A high-bowed, shining ma- 
 hogany cruiser, seventy feet or more over all, rounded 
 the point and headed into the bay. The smooth sea 
 parted with a whistling sound where her brass-shod 
 stem split it like a knife. She slowed down from this 
 trainlike speed, stopped, picked up a mooring, made 
 fast. The swell from her rolled in, swashing heavily on 
 the beach. 
 
 The man in the rowboat turned his attention to the 
 cruiser. There were people aboard to the number of a 
 dozen, men and women, clustered on her flush after- 
 deck. He could hear the clatter of their tongues, low 
 ripples of laughter, through all of which ran the im- 
 patient note of a male voice issuing peremptory orders. 
 
 The cruiser blew her whistle repeatedly, — shrill, im- 
 perative blasts. The man in the rowboat smiled. The 
 air was very still. Sounds carry over quiet water as if 
 telephoned. He could not help hearing what was said. 
 
 "Wise management," he observed ironically, under 
 his breath. 
 
 The power yacht, it seemed, had not so much as a 
 dinghy aboard. 
 
 A figure on the deck detached itself from the group 
 and waved a beckoning hand to the rowboat. 
 
 The rower hesitated, frowning. Then he shrugged 
 his shoulders and pulled out and alongside. The deck 
 crew lowered a set of steps. 
 
 " Take a couple of us ashore, will you ? " He was ad- 
 
14 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 dressed by a short, stout man. He was very round and 
 pink of face, very well dressed, and by the manner in 
 which he spoke to the others, and the glances he cast 
 ashore, a person of some consequence in great im- 
 patience. 
 
 The young man laid his rowboat against the steps. 
 
 " Climb in," he said briefly. 
 
 "You, Smith, come along," the round-faced one ad- 
 dressed a youth in tight blue jersey and peaked cap. 
 
 The deck boy climbed obediently down. A girl in 
 white duck and heavy blue sweater put her foot on the 
 steps. 
 
 " I think I shall go too, papa," she said. 
 
 Her father nodded and followed her. 
 
 The rowboat nosed in beside the end of a narrow float 
 that ran from the sea wall. The boy in the jersey 
 sprang out, reached a steadying hand to his employer. 
 The girl stepped lightly to the planked logs. 
 
 " Give the boy a lift on that boat to the chuck, will 
 you? " the stout person made further request, indicat- , 
 ing the white boat bottom up on shore. 
 
 A queer expression gleamed momentarily in the eyes 
 of the boatman. But it passed. He did not speak, but 
 made for the dinghy, followed by the hand from the 
 yacht. They turned the boat over, slid it down and 
 afloat. The sailor got in and began to ship his oars. 
 
 The man and the girl stood by till this was done. 
 Then the girl turned away. The man extended his 
 hand. 
 
 "Thanks," he said curtly. 
 
 The other's hand had involuntarily moved. The 
 short, stout man dropped a silver dollar in it, swung on 
 his heel and followed his daughter, — passed her, in fact, 
 for she had only taken a step or two and halted. 
 
THE HOUSE IN CRADLE BAY 15 
 
 The young fellow eyed the silver coin in his hand 
 with an expression that passed from astonishment to 
 anger and broke at last into a smile of sheer amuse- 
 ment. He jiggled the coin, staring at it thoughtfully. 
 Then he faced about on the jerseyed youth about to 
 dip his blades. 
 
 " Smith," he said, " I suppose if I heaved this silver 
 dollar out into the chuck you 'd think I was crazy." 
 
 The youth only stared at him. 
 
 " You don't object to tips, do you. Smith? " the man 
 in the mackinaw inquired. 
 
 " Gee, no," the boy observed. " Ain't you got no use 
 for money ? " 
 
 " Not this kind. You take it and buy smokes." 
 
 He flipped the dollar into the dinghy. It fell clinking 
 on the slatted floor and the youth salvaged it, looked 
 it over, put it in his pocket. 
 
 " Gee," he said. " Any time a guy hands me money 
 I keep it, believe me." 
 
 His gaze rested curiously on the man with the patch 
 over his eye. His familiar grin faded. He touched his 
 cap. 
 
 "Thank y', sir." 
 
 He heaved on his oars. The boat slid out. The man 
 stood watching, hands deep in his pockets. A dis- 
 pleased look replaced the amused smile as his glance 
 rested a second on the rich man's toy of polished ma- 
 hogany and shining brass. Then he turned to look 
 again at the house up the slope and found the girl at 
 his elbow. 
 
 He did not know if she had overheard him, and he did 
 not at the moment care. He met her glance with one 
 as impersonal as her own. 
 
 "I'm afraid I must apologize for my father," she 
 
i6 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 said simply. "I hope you aren't offended. It was 
 awfully good of you to bring us ashore." 
 
 "That's quite all right," he answered casually. 
 "Why should I be offended? When a roughneck does 
 something for you, it's proper to hand him some of 
 your loose change. Perfectly natural." 
 
 "But you aren't anything of the sort," she said 
 frankly. " I feel sure you resent being tipped for an 
 act of courtesy. It was very thoughtless of papa." 
 
 " Some people are so used to greasing their way with 
 money that they '11 hand St. Peter a ten-dollar bill when 
 they pass the heavenly gates," he observed. "But it 
 really does n't matter. Tell me something. Whose 
 house is that, and how long has it been there? " 
 
 " Ours," she answered. " Two years. We stay here 
 a good deal in the summer." 
 
 "Ours, I daresay, means Horace A. Gower," he re- 
 marked. " Pardon my curiosity, but you see I used to 
 know this place rather well. I 've been away for some 
 time. Things seem to have changed a bit." 
 
 "You're just back from overseas?" she asked 
 quickly. 
 
 He nodded. She looked at him with livelier interest. 
 
 " I 'm no wounded hero," he forestalled the inevitable 
 question. " I merely happened to get a splinter of wood 
 in one eye, so I have leave until it gets well." 
 
 " If you are merely on leave, why are you not in uni- 
 form? " she asked quickly, in a puzzled tone. 
 
 " I am," he replied shortly. " Only it is covered 
 up with overalls and mackinaw. Well, I must be off. 
 Good-by, Miss Gower." 
 
 He pushed his boat off the beach, rowed to the oppo- 
 site side of the bay, and hauled the small craft up over 
 a log. Then he took his bag in hand and climbed the 
 
THE HOUSE IN CRADLE BAY 17 
 
 rise that lifted to the backbone of Point Old. Halfway 
 up he turned to look briefly backward over beach and 
 yacht and house, up the veranda steps of which the 
 girl in the blue sweater was now climbing. 
 
 " It 's queer," he muttered. 
 
 He went on. In another minute he was on the ridge. 
 The Gulf opened out, a dead dull gray. The skies were 
 hidden behind drab clouds. The air was clammy, cold, 
 hushed, as if the god of storms were gathering his 
 breath for a great effort. 
 
 And Jack MacRae himself, when he topped the height 
 which gave clear vision for many miles of shore and sea, 
 drew a deep breath and halted for a long look at many 
 familiar things. 
 
 He had been gone nearly four years. It seemed to 
 him but yesterday that he left. The picture was un- 
 changed, — save for that white cottage in its square of 
 green. He stared at that with a doubtful expression, 
 then his uncovered eye came back to the long sweep of 
 the Gulf, to the brown cliffs spreading away in a ragged 
 line along a kelp-strewn shore. He put down the bag 
 and seated himself on a mossy rock close by a stunted, 
 leaning fir and stared about him like a man who has 
 come a great way to see something and means to look 
 his fiU. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 His Own Country 
 
 Squitty Island lies in the Gulf of Georgia midway 
 between a mainland made of mountains like the Alps, 
 the Andes, and the Himalayas all jumbled together 
 and all rising sheer from the sea, and the low delta-like 
 shore of Vancouver Island. Southward from Squitty 
 the Gulf runs in a thirty-mile width for nearly a hun- 
 dred miles to the San Juan islands in American waters, 
 beyond which opens the sheltered beauty of Puget 
 Sound. Squitty is six miles wide and ten miles long, 
 a blob of granite covered with fir and cedar forest, with 
 certain parklike patches of open grassland on the 
 southern end, and a hump of a mountain lifting two 
 thousand feet in its middle. 
 
 The southeastern end of Squitty — barring the tide 
 rips off Cape Mudge — is the dirtiest place in the Gulf 
 for small craft in blowy weather. The surges that 
 heave up off a hundred miles of sea tortured by a 
 southeast gale break thunderously against Squitty's 
 low cliffs. These walls face the marching breakers 
 with a grim, unchanging front. There is nothing hos- 
 pitable in this aspect of Squitty. It is an ugly shore 
 to have on the lee in a blow. 
 
 Yet it is not so forbidding as it seems. The prevail- 
 ing summer winds on the Gulf are westerly. Gales of 
 uncommon fierceness roar out of the northwest in fall and 
 early winter. At such times the storms split on Squitty 
 
HIS OWN COUNTRY 19 
 
 Island, leaving a restful calm under those brown, kelp- 
 fringed cliffs. Many a small coaster has crept thank- 
 fully into that lee out of the wliitecapped turmoil on 
 either side, to lie there through a night that was wild 
 outside, watching the Ballenas light twenty miles away 
 on a pile of bare rocks winking and blinking its warning 
 to less fortunate craft. Tugs, fishing boats, salmon 
 troUers, beach-combing launches, all that mosquito fleet 
 which gets its bread upon the waters and learns bar, 
 shoal, reef, and anchorage thoroughly in the getting, 
 — these knew that besides the half-moon bight called 
 Cradle Bay, upon which fronted Horace Gower's sum- 
 mer home, there opened also a secure, bottle-necked 
 cove less than a mile northward from Point Old. 
 
 By day a stranger could only mark the entrance by 
 eagle watch from a course close inshore. By night 
 even those who knew the place as they knew the 
 palm of their hand had to feel their way in. But 
 once inside, a man could lie down in his bunk and 
 sleep soundly, though a southeaster whistled and 
 moaned, and the seas roared smoking inlo the narrow 
 mouth. No ripple of that troubled the inside of Squitty 
 Cove. It was a finger of the sea thrust straight into 
 the land, a finger three hundred yards long, forty 
 yards wide, with an entrance so narrow that a man 
 could heave a sounding lead across it, and that entrance 
 so masked by a rock about the bigness of a six-room 
 house that one holding the channel could touch the 
 rock with a pike pole as he passed in. There was a 
 mud bottom, twenty-foot depth at low tide, and a little 
 stream of cold fresh water brawling in at the head. A 
 cliff walled it on the south. A low, grassy hill dotted 
 with solitary firs, red-barked arbutus, and clumps of 
 wild cherry formed its northern boundary. And all 
 
20 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 around the mouth, in every nook and crevice, driftwood 
 of every size and shape lay in great heaps, cast high 
 above tidewater by the big storms. 
 
 So Squitty had the three prime requisites for a har- 
 bor, — secure anchorage, fresh water, and firewood. 
 There was good fertile land, too, behind the Cove, — 
 low valleys that ran the length of the island. There 
 were settlers here and there, but these settlers were not 
 the folk who intermittently frequented Squitty Cove. 
 The settlers stayed on their land, battling with stumps, 
 clearing away the ancient forest, tilling the soil. Those 
 to whom Squitty Cove gave soundest sleep and keenest 
 joy were tillers of the sea. Off Point Old a rock brown 
 with seaweed, ringed with a bed of kelp, lifted its ugly 
 head now to the one good, blue-gray eye of Jack 
 MacRae, the same rock upon which Donald MacRae's 
 sloop broke her back before Jack MacRae was bom. 
 It was a sunken menace at any stage of water, heartily 
 cursed by the fishermen. In the years between, the rock 
 had acquired a name not written on the Admiralty 
 charts. The hydrographers would look puzzled and 
 shake their heads if one asked where in the. Gulf waters 
 lay Poor Man's Rock. 
 
 But Poor Man's Rock it is. Greek and Japanese, 
 Spaniard and Italian, American and Canadian — and 
 there are many of each — who follow the silver-sided 
 salmon when they run in the Gulf of Georgia, these 
 know that Poor Man's Rock lies half a cable south 
 southwest of Point Old on Squitty Island. Most of 
 them know, too, why it is called Poor Man's Rock. 
 
 Under certain conditions of sea and sky the Rock is 
 as lonely and forbidding a spot as ever a ship's timbers 
 were broken upon. Point Old thrusts out like the 
 stubby thumb on a clenched first. The Rock and the 
 
HIS OWN COUNTRY 21 
 
 outer nib of the Point are haunted by quarreling 
 flocks of gulls and coots and the black Siwash duck with 
 his stumpy wings and brilliant yellow bill. The south- 
 easter sends endless battalions of waves rolling up there 
 when it blows. These rear white heads over the Rock 
 and burst on the Point with shuddering impact and 
 showers of spray. When the sky is dull and gray, and 
 the wind whips the stunted trees on the Point — trees 
 that lean inland with branches all twisted to the land- 
 ward side from pressure of many gales in their growing 
 years — and the surf is booming out its basso har- 
 monies, the Rock is no place for a fisherman. Even the 
 gulls desert it then. 
 
 But in good weather, in the season, the blueback 
 and spring salmon swim in vast schools across the end 
 of Squitty. They feed upon small fish, baby herring, 
 tiny darting atoms of finny life that swarm in countless 
 numbers. What these inch-long fishes feed upon no 
 man knows, but they begin to show in the Gulf early in 
 spring. The water is alive with them, — minute, dart- 
 ing streaks of silver. The salmon follow these schools, 
 pursuing, swallowing, eating to live. Seal and dogfish 
 follow the salmon. Shark and the giant blackfish follow 
 dogfish and seal. And man follows them all, pursuing 
 and killing that he himself may live. 
 
 Around Poor Man's Rock the tide sets strongly at 
 certain stages of ebb and flood. The cliffs north of 
 Point Old and the area immediately surrounding the 
 Rock are thick strewn with kelp. In these brown patches 
 of seaweed the tiny fish, the schools of baby herring, 
 take refuge from their restless enemy, the swift and 
 voracious salmon. 
 
 For years Pacific Coast salmon have been taken by 
 net and trap, to the profit of the salmon packers and 
 
22 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 the satisfaction of those who cannot get fish save out 
 of tin cans. The salmon swarmed in millions on their 
 way to spawn in fresh-water streams. They were plenti- 
 ful and cheap. But even before the war came to send 
 the price of linen-mesh net beyond most fishermen's 
 pocketbooks, men had discovered that salmon could be 
 taken commercially by trolling lines. The lordly spring, 
 which attains to seventy pounds, the small, swift blue- 
 back, and the fighting coho could all be lured to a hook 
 on a wobbling bit of silver or brass at the end of a long 
 line weighted with lead to keep it at a certain depth 
 behind a moving boat. From a single line over the 
 stern it was but a logical step to two, four, even six 
 lines spaced on slender poles boomed out on each side 
 of a power launch, — once the fisherman learned that 
 with this gear he could take salmon in open water. So 
 trolling was launched. Odd troUers grew to trolling 
 fleets. A new method became estabhshed in the salmon 
 industry. 
 
 But there are places where the salmon run and a 
 gasboat trolling her battery of lines cannot go without 
 loss of gear. The power boats cannot troll in shallows. 
 iThey cannot operate in kelp without fouling. So they 
 hold to deep open water and leave the kelp and shoals 
 to the rowboats. 
 
 And that is how Poor Man's Rock got its name. In 
 the kelp that surrounded it and the greater beds that 
 fringed Point Old, the small feed sought refuge from the 
 salmon and the salmon pursued them there among the 
 weedy granite and the boulders, even into shallows 
 where their back fins cleft the surface as they dashed 
 after the little herring. The foul ground and the tidal 
 currents that swept by the Rock held no danger to the 
 gear of a rowboat troller. He fished a single short line 
 
HIS OWN COUNTRY 23 
 
 with a pound or so of lead. He could stop dead in a 
 boat length if his line fouled. So he pursued the salmon 
 as the salmon pursued the little fish among the kelp 
 and boulders. 
 
 Only a poor man trolled in a rowboat, tugging at 
 the oars hour after hour without cabin shelter from 
 wind and sun and rain, unable to face even such weather 
 as a tliirty by eight-foot gasboat could easily fish in, 
 unable to follow the salmon run when it shifted from 
 one point to another on the Gulf. The rowboat trollers 
 must pick a camp ashore by a likely ground and stay 
 there. If the salmon left they could only wait till 
 another run began. Whereas the power boat could 
 hear of schooling salmon forty miles away and be on 
 the spot in seven hours' steaming. 
 
 Poor Man's Rock had given many a man his chance. 
 Nearly always salmon could be taken there by a row- 
 boat. And because for many years old men, men with - 
 lean purses, men with a rowboat, a few dollars, and a 
 hunger for independence, had camped in Squitty Cove 
 and fished the Squitty headlands and seldom failed to 
 take salmon around the Rock, the name had clung to 
 that brown hummock of granite lifting out of the sea 
 at half tide. From April to November, any day a 
 rowboat could live outside the Cove, there would be half 
 a dozen, eight, ten, more or less, of these solitary rowers 
 bending to their oars, circling the Rock. 
 
 Now and again one of these would hastily drop his 
 oars, stand up, and haul in his line hand over hand. 
 There would be a splashing and splattering on the sur- 
 face, a bright silver fish leaping and threshing the water, 
 to land at last with a plop ! in the boat. Whereupon the 
 fisherman would hurriedly strike this dynamic, glisten- 
 ing fish over the head with a short, thick club, lest his 
 
24 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 struggles snarl the line, after which he would put out 
 his spoon and bend to the oars again. It was a day- 
 light and dusk job, a matter of infinite patience and 
 hard work, cold and wet at times, and in midsummer 
 the blaze of a scorching sun and the eye-dazzling glitter 
 of reflected light. 
 
 But a man must live. Some who came to the Cove 
 trolled long and skillfully, and were lucky enough to 
 gain a power troUer in the end, to live on beans and 
 fish, and keep a strangle hold on every dollar that came 
 in until with a cabin boat powered with gas- they j oined 
 the trolling fleet and became nomads. They fared well 
 enough then. Their taking at once grew beyond a row- 
 boat's scope. They could see new country, hearken to 
 the lure of distant fishing grounds. There was the 
 sport of gambling on wind and weather, on the price of 
 fish or the number of the catch. If one locality dis- 
 pleased them they could shift to another, while the row- 
 boat men were chained perforce to the monotony of the 
 same camp, the same cliffs, the same old weary round. 
 
 Sometimes Squitty Cove harbored thirty or forty of 
 these power t rollers. They would make their night 
 anchorage there while the trolling held good, filling the 
 Cove with talk and laughter and a fine sprinkle of lights 
 when dark closed in. With failing catches, or the first 
 breath of a southeaster that would lock them in the 
 Cove while it blew, they would be up and away, — to 
 the top end of Squitty, to Yellow Rock, to Cape Lazo, 
 anywhere that salmon might be found. 
 
 And the rowboat men would lie in their tents and 
 split-cedar lean-tos, cursing the weather, the salmon 
 that would not bite, grumbling at their lot. 
 
 There were two or three rowboat men who had fished 
 the Cove almost since Jack MacRae could remember, — 
 
HIS OWN COUNTRY 35 
 
 old men, fishermen who had shot their bolt, who dwelt 
 in small cabins by the Cove, living somehow from salmon 
 run to salmon run, content if the season's catch netted 
 three hundred dollars. All they could hope for was a 
 living. They had become fixtures there. 
 
 Jack MacRae looked down from the bald tip of Point 
 Old with an eager gleam in his uncovered eye. There 
 was the Rock with a slow swell lapping over it. There 
 was an old withered Portuguese he knew in a green dug- 
 out. Long Tom Spence rowing behind the Portuguese, 
 and they carrying on a shouted conversation. He 
 picked out Doug Sproul among three others he did not 
 know, — and there was not a man under fifty among 
 them. 
 
 Three hundred yards offshore half a dozen power 
 troUers wheeled and counterwheeled, working an eddy. 
 He could see them haul the lines hand over hand, casting 
 the hooked fish up into the hold with an easy swing. 
 The salmon were biting. 
 
 It was all familiar to Jack MacRae. He knew 
 every nook and cranny on Squitty Island, every phase 
 and mood and color of the sea. It is a grim birthplace 
 that leaves a man without some sentiment for the place 
 where he was bom. Point Old, Squitty Cove, Poor 
 Man's Rock had been the boundaries of his world for a 
 long time. In so far as he had ever played, he had 
 played there. 
 
 He looked for another familiar figure or two, without 
 noting them. 
 
 "The fish are biting fast for this time of year," he 
 reflected. " It 's a wonder dad and Peter Ferrara are n't 
 out. And I never knew Bill Muriro to miss anything 
 like this.'' 
 
 He looked a little longer, over across the tip of Sang- 
 
26 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 ster Island two miles westward, with its Elephant's 
 Head, — the extended trunk of which was a treacherous 
 reef bared only at low tide. He looked at the Ele- 
 phant's unwinking eye, which was a twenty-foot hole 
 through a hump of sandstone, and smiled. He had 
 fished for salmon along the kelp beds there and dug 
 clams under the eye of the Elephant long, long ago. It 
 did seem a long time ago that he had been a youngster 
 in overalls, adventuring alone in a dugout about these 
 bold headlands. 
 
 He rose at last. The November wind chilled him 
 through the heavy mackinaw. He looked back at the 
 Gower cottage, like a snowflake in a setting of emerald ; 
 he looked at the Gower yacht; and the puzzled frown 
 returned to his face. 
 
 Then he picked up his bag and walked rapidly along 
 the brow of the cliffs toward Squitty Cove. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 The Flutter of Sable Wings 
 
 A PATH took form on the mossy rock as Jack MacRae 
 strode on. He followed this over patches of grass, by 
 lone firs and small thickets, until it brought him out on 
 the rim of the Cove. He stood a second on the cliffy 
 north wall to look down on the quiet harbor. It was 
 bare of craft, save that upon the beach two or three 
 rowboats lay hauled out. On the farther side a low, 
 rambling house of logs showed behind a clump of firs. 
 Smoke lifted from its stone chimney. 
 
 MacRae smiled reminiscently at this and moved on. 
 Hisi objective lay at the Cove's head, on the little creek 
 which came whispering down from the high land behind. 
 He gained this in another two hundred yards, coming 
 to a square house built, like its neighbor, of stout logs 
 with a high-pitched roof, a patch of ragged grass in 
 front, and a picket-fenced area at the back in which 
 stood apple trees and cherry and plum, gaunt-limbed 
 trees all bare of leaf and fruit. Ivy wound up the 
 comers of the house. Sturdy rosebushes stood before it, 
 and the dead vines of sweet peas bleached on their 
 trellises. 
 
 It had the look of an old place — as age is reckoned 
 in so new a country — old and bearing the marks of 
 many years' labor bestowed to make it what it was. 
 Even from a distance it bore a homelike air. MacRae's 
 
28 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 face lightened at the sight. His step quickened. He 
 had come a long way to get home. 
 
 Across the front of the house extended a wide porch 
 which gave a look at the Cove through a thin screen of 
 maple and alder. From the grass-bordered walk of 
 beach gravel half a dozen steps lifted to the floor level. 
 As MacRae set foot on the lower step a girl came out 
 on the porch. 
 
 MacRae stopped. The girl did not see him. Her 
 eyes were fixed questioningly on the sea that stretched 
 away beyond the narrow mouth of the Cove. As she 
 looked she drew one hand wearily across her forehead, 
 tucking back a vagrant strand of dusky hair. MacRae 
 watched her a moment. The quick, pleased smile that 
 leaped to his face faded to soberness. 
 
 " HeUo, DoUy," he said softly. 
 
 She started. Her dark eyes turned to him, and an in- 
 expressible relief glowed in them. She held up one hand 
 in a gesture that warned silence, — and by that time 
 MacRae had come up the steps to her side and seized 
 both her hands in his. She looked at him speechlessly, 
 a curious passivity in her attitude. He saw that her 
 eyes were wet. 
 
 "What's wrong, Dolly?" he asked. "Aren't you 
 glad to see Johnny come marching home? Where's 
 dad? " 
 
 "Glad?" she echoed. "I never was so glad to see 
 any one in my life. Oh, Johnny MacRae, I wish you 'd 
 come sooner. Your father 's a sick man. We 've done 
 our best, but I 'm afraid it 's not good enough." 
 
 "He's in bed, I suppose," said MacRae. "Well, 
 I '11 go in and see him. Maybe it '11 cheer the old boy 
 up to see me back." 
 
 "He won't know you," the girl murmured. "You 
 
THE FLUTTER OF SABLE WINGS 29 
 
 mustn't disturb him just now, anyway. He has fallen 
 into a doze. When he comes out of that he '11 likely be 
 delirious." 
 
 " Good Lord," MacRae whispered, " as bad as that ! 
 What is it?" 
 
 "The flu," Dolly said quietly. "Everybody has 
 been having it. Old Bill Munro died in his shack a 
 week ago." 
 
 "Has dad had a doctor.?" 
 
 The girl nodded. 
 
 " Harper from Nanaimo came day before yesterday. 
 He left medicine and directions; he can't come again. 
 He has more cases than he can handle over there." 
 
 They went through the front door into a big, rudely 
 furnished room with a very old and worn rug on the 
 floor, a few pieces of heavy furniture, and bare, uncur- 
 tained windows. A heap of wood blazed in an open 
 cobblestone fireplace. 
 
 MacRae stopped short just within the threshold. 
 Through a door slightly ajar came the sound of stertor- 
 ous breathing, intermittent in its volume, now barely 
 audible, again rising to a labored harshness. He lis- 
 tened, a look of dismayed concern gathering on his 
 face. He had heard men in the last stages of exhaus- 
 tion from wounds and disease breathe in that horribly 
 distressed fashion. 
 
 He stood a while uncertainly. Then he laid off his 
 mackinaw, walked softly to the bedroom door, looked 
 in. After a minute of silent watching he drew back. 
 The girl had seated herself in a chair. MacRae sat 
 down facing her. 
 
 *'I never saw dad so thin and old-looking," he mut- 
 tered. " Why, his hair is nearly white. He *s a wreck. 
 How long has he been sick? " 
 
30 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 "Pour days," Dolly answered. "But he hasn't 
 grown old and thin in four days, Jack. He's been 
 going downhill for months. Too much work. Too 
 much worry also, I think — out there around the Rock 
 every morning at daylight, every evening till dark. It 
 has n't been a good season for the rowboats." 
 
 MacRae stirred uneasily in his chair. He did n't un- 
 derstand why his father should have to drudge in a 
 trolling boat. They had always fished salmon, so far 
 back as he could recall, but never of stark necessity. 
 He nursed his chin in his hand and thought. Mostly 
 he thought with a constricted feeling in his throat of 
 how frail and old his father had grown, the slow-smiling^ 
 slow-speaking man who had been father and mother 
 and chum to him since he was an urchin in knee 
 breeches. He recalled him at their parting on a Van- 
 couver railway platform, — tall and rugged, a lean, 
 muscular, middle-aged man, bidding his son a restrained 
 farewell with a longing look in his eyes. Now he was 
 a wasted shadow. Jack MacRae shivered. He seemed 
 to hear the sable angel's wing-beats over the house. 
 
 He looked up at the girl at last. 
 
 "You're worn out, aren't you, Dolly.?" he said. 
 " Have you been caring for him alone ? " 
 
 "Uncle Peter helped," she answered. "But I've 
 stayed up and worried, and I am tired, of course. It 
 isn't a very cheerful home-coming, is it, Jack? And he 
 was so pleased when he got your cable from London. 
 Poor old man ! " 
 
 MacRae got up suddenly. But the clatter of his 
 shoes on the floor recalled him to himself. He sat down 
 again. 
 
 "I've got to do something," he asserted. 
 
 " There 's nothing you can do," Dolly Ferrara said 
 
THE FLUTTER OF SABLE WINGS 31 
 
 wistfully. " He can't be moved. You can't get a doctor 
 or a nurse. The country 's full of people down with the 
 flu. There 's only one chance and I 've taken that. I 
 wrote a message to Doctor Laidlaw — you remember he 
 used to come here every summer to fish — and Uncle 
 Peter went across to Sechelt to wire it. I think he'll 
 come if he can, or send some one, don't you? They 
 were such good friends." 
 
 "That was a good idea," MacRae nodded. "Laid- 
 law will certainly come if it's possible." 
 
 " And I can keep cool cloths on his head and feed him 
 broth and give him the stuff Doctor Harper left. He 
 said it depended mostly on his own resisting power. If 
 he could throw it oiF he would. If not — " 
 
 She turned her palms out expressively. 
 
 "How did you come?" she asked presently. 
 
 *' Across from Qualicum in a fish carrier to Folly 
 Bay. I borrowed a boat at the Bay and rowed up." 
 
 " You must be hungry,'* she said. " I '11 get you 
 something to eat." 
 
 " I don't feel much like eating," — MacRae followed 
 her into the kitchen — " but I can drink a cup of tea." 
 
 He sat on a comer of the kitchen table while she busied 
 herself with the kettle and teapot, marveling that in 
 four years everything should apparently remain the 
 same and still suffer such grievous change. There was 
 an air of forlomness about the house which hurt him. 
 The place had run down, as the sands of his father's 
 life were running down. Of the things unchanged the 
 girl he watched was one. Yet as he looked with keener 
 appraisal, he saw that Dolly Ferrara too had changed. 
 
 Her dusky cloud of hair was as of old ; her wide, dark 
 eyes still mirrored faithfully every shift of feeling, and 
 her incomparable creamy skin was more beautiful than 
 
32 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 ever. Moving, she had lost none of her lithe grace. And 
 though she had met him as if it had been only yesterday 
 they parted, still there was a difference which somehow 
 eluded him. He could feel it, but it was not to be de- 
 fined. It struck him for the first time that many who 
 had never seen a battlefield, never heard a screaming 
 shell, nor shuddered at the agony of a dressing station, 
 might still have suffered by and of and through the 
 reactions of war. 
 
 They drank their tea and ate a slice of toast in 
 silence. MacRae's comrades in France had called him 
 " Silent " John, because of his lapses into concentrated 
 thought, his habit of a close mouth when he was hurt 
 or troubled or uncertain. One of the things for which 
 he had liked Dolly Ferrara had been her possession of 
 the same trait, uncommon in a girl. She could sit on 
 the cliffs or lie with him in a rowboat lifting and falling 
 in the Gulf swell, staring at the sea and the sky and the 
 wheeling gulls, dreaming and keeping her dreams shyly 
 to herself, — as he did. They did not always need 
 words for understanding. And so they did not talk 
 now for the sake of talking, pour out words lest 
 silence bring embarrassment. Dolly sat resting her 
 chin in one hand, looking at him impersonally, yet criti- 
 cally, he felt. He smoked a cigarette and held his peace 
 until the labored breathing of the sick man changed to 
 disjointed, muttering, incoherent fragments of speech. 
 
 Dolly went to him at once. MacRae lingered to 
 divest himself of the brown overalls so that he stood 
 forth in his uniform, the R. A. F. uniform with the two 
 black wings joined to a circle on his left breast and 
 below that the multicolored ribbon of a decoration. 
 Then he went in to his father. 
 
 Donald MacRae was far gone. His son needed no 
 
THE FLUTTER OF SABLE WINGS 33 
 
 M.D. to tell him that. He burned with a high fever 
 which had consumed his flesh and strength in its furnace. 
 His eyes gleamed unnaturally, with no light of recog- 
 nition for either his son or Dolly Ferrara. And there 
 was a peculiar tinge to the old man's lips that chilled 
 young MacRae, the mark of the Spanish flu in its dead- 
 liest manifestation. It made him ache to see that gray 
 head shift from side to side, to listen to the incoherent 
 babble, to mark the feeble shiftings of the nervous 
 hands. 
 
 For a terrible half hour he endured the sight of his 
 father struggling for breath, being racked by spasms of 
 coughing. Then the reaction came and the sick man 
 slept, — not a healthy, restful sleep; it was more like 
 the dying stupor of exhaustion. Young MacRae knew 
 that. 
 
 He knew with disturbing certainty that without 
 skilled treatment — perhaps even in spite of that — his 
 father's life was a matter of hours. Again he and Dolly 
 Ferrara tiptoed out to the room where the fire glowed 
 on the hearth. MacRae sat thinking. Dusk was com- 
 ing on, the long twilight shortened by the overcast sky. 
 MacRae glowered at the fire. The girl watched him 
 expectantly. 
 
 " I have an idea," he said at last. " It 's worth try- 
 ing." 
 
 He oj>ened his bag and, taking out the wedge-shaped 
 cap of the birdmen, set it on his head and went out. 
 He took the same path he had followed home. On top 
 of the cliff he stopped to look down on Squitty Cove. 
 In a camp or two ashore the supper fires of the row- 
 boat trollers were burning. Through the narrow en- 
 trance the gasboats were chugging in to anchorage, one 
 close upon the heels of another. 
 
34 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 MacRae considered the power trollers. He shook his 
 head. 
 
 "Too slow," he muttered. "Too small. No place 
 to lay him only a doghouse cabin and a fish hold." 
 
 He strode away along the cliifs. ' It was dark now. 
 But he had ranged all that end of Squitty in daylight 
 and dark, in sun and storm, for years, and the old in- 
 stinctive sense of direction, of location, had not deserted 
 him. In a little while he came out abreast of Cradle 
 Bay. The Gower house, aU brightly gleaming windows, 
 loomed near. He struck down through the dead fern, 
 over the unfenced lawn. 
 
 Halfway across that he stopped. A piano broke out 
 loudly. Figures flittered by the windows, gliding, turn- 
 ing. MacRae hesitated. He had come reluctantly, 
 driven by his father's great need, uneasily conscious 
 that Donald MacRae, had he been cognizant, would 
 have forbidden harshly the request his son had come to 
 make. Jack MacRae had the feeling that his father 
 would rather die than have him ask anything of Horace 
 Gower. 
 
 He did not know why. He had never been told why. 
 All he knew was that his father would have nothing to 
 do with Gower, never mentioned the name voluntarily, 
 let his catch of salmon rot on the beach before he would 
 sell to a Gower cannery boat, — and had enj oined upon 
 his son the same aloofness from all things Gower. Once, 
 in answer to young Jack's curious question, his natural 
 " why," Donald MacRae had said : 
 
 " I knew the man long before you were bom, Johnny. 
 I don't like him. I despise him. Neither I nor any of 
 mine shall ever truck and traffic with him and his. 
 When you are a man and can understand, I shall tell 
 you more of this." 
 
THE FLUTTER OF SABLE WINGS 35 
 
 But he had never told. It had never been a mooted 
 point. Jack MacRae knew Horace Gower only as a 
 short, stout, elderly man of wealth and consequence, a 
 power in the salmon trade. He knew a little more of 
 the Gower clan now than he did before the war. MacRae 
 had gone overseas with the Seventh Battalion. His 
 company commander had been Horace Gower's son. 
 Certain aspects of that young man had not heightened 
 MacRae's esteem for the Gower family. Moreover, he 
 resented this elaborate summer home of Gower's stand- 
 ing on land he had always known to be theirs, the 
 MacRaes'. That puzzled him, as well as affronted his 
 sense of ownership. 
 
 But these things, he told himself, were for the moment 
 beside the point. He felt his father's life trembling in 
 the balance. He wanted to see affectionate, prideful 
 recognition light up those gray-blue eyes again, even if 
 briefly. He had come six thousand miles to cheer the 
 old man with a sight of his son, a son who had been a 
 credit to him. And he was willing to pocket pride, to 
 call for help from the last source he would have chosen, 
 if that would avail. 
 
 He crossed the lawn, waited a few seconds till the 
 piano ceased its syncopated frenzy and the dancers 
 stopped. 
 
 Betty Gower herself opened at his knock. 
 
 " Is Mr. Gower here ? " he asked. 
 
 "Yes. Won't you come in .? " she asked courteously. 
 
 The door opened direct into a great living room, 
 from the oak floor of which the rugs had been rolled 
 aside for dancing. As MacRae came in out of the murk 
 along the cliffs, his one good eye was dazzled at first. 
 Presently he made out a dozen or more persons in the 
 room, — young people nearly all. They were standing 
 
36 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 and sitting about. One or two were in khaki — officers. 
 There seemed to be an abrupt cessation of chatter and 
 laughing at his entrance. It did not occur to him at 
 once that these people might be avidly curious about a 
 strange young man in the uniform of the Flying Corps. 
 He apprehended that curiosity, though, poHtely veiled 
 as it was. In the same glance he became aware of a 
 middle-aged woman sitting on a couch by the fire. Her 
 hair was pure white, elaborately arranged, her eyes 
 were a pale blue, her skin very delicate and clear. Her 
 face somehow reminded Jack MacRae of a faded rose 
 leaf. 
 
 In a deep armchair near her sat Horace Gower. A 
 young man, a very young man, in evening clothes, hold- 
 ing a long cigarette daintily in his fingers, stood by 
 Gower. 
 
 MacRae followed Betty Gower across the room to 
 her father. She turned. Her quick eyes had picked out 
 the insignia of rank on MacRae's uniform. 
 
 " Papa," she said. " Captain " she hesitated, 
 
 " MacRae," he supplied. 
 
 *' Captain MacRae wishes to see you." 
 
 MacRae wished no conventionalities. He did not want 
 to be introduced, to be shaken by the hand, to have 
 Gower play host. He forestalled all this, if indeed it 
 threatened. 
 
 " I have just arrived home on leave," he said briefly. 
 "I find my father desperately ill in our house at the 
 Cove. You have a very fast and able cruiser. Would 
 you care to put her at my disposal so that I may take 
 my father to Vancouver? I think that is his only 
 chance." 
 
 Gower had risen. He was not an imposing man. At 
 his first glimpse of MacRae's face, the pink-patched eye. 
 
THE FLUTTER OF SABLE WINGS 37 
 
 the uniform, he flushed slightly, — recalling that after- 
 noon. 
 
 " I 'm sorry," he said. " You 'd be welcome to the 
 Arrow if she were here. But I sent her to Nanaimo an 
 hour after she landed us. Are you Donald MacRae's 
 boy.?" 
 
 " Yes," MacRae said. " Thank you. That 's all." 
 
 He had said his say and got his answer. He turned 
 to go. Betty Gower put a detaining hand on his arm. 
 
 "Listen," she put in eagerly. "Is there anything 
 any of us could do to help.'' Nursing or — or any- 
 thing? " 
 
 MacRae shook his head. 
 
 " There is a girl with him," he answered. " Nothing 
 but skilled medical aid would help him at this stage. He 
 has the flu, and the fever is burning his life out." 
 
 " The flu, did you say.? " The young man with the 
 long cigarette lost his bored air. "Hang it, it isn't 
 very sporting, is it, to expose us — these ladies — to 
 the infection.? I'll say it isn't." 
 
 Jack MacRae fixed the young man — and he was not, 
 after all, much younger than MacRae — with a steady 
 stare in which a smoldering fire glowed. He bestowed 
 a scrutiny while one might count five, under which the 
 other's gaze began to shift uneasily. A constrained 
 silence fell in the room. 
 
 "I would suggest that you learn how to put on a 
 gas mask," MacRae said coldly, at last. 
 
 Then he walked out. Betty Gower followed him to the 
 door, but he had asked his question and there was noth- 
 ing to wait for. He did not even look back until he 
 reached the cliff. He did not care if they thought him 
 rude, ill-bred. Then, as he reached the cliff, the joyous 
 jazz broke out again and shadows of dancing couples 
 
38 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 flitted by the windows. MacRae looked once and went 
 on, moody because chance had decreed that he should 
 
 fan. 
 
 When a ruddy dawn broke through the gray cloud 
 battahons Jack MacRae sat on a chair before the fire- 
 place in the front room, his elbows on his knees, his 
 chin in his cupped palms. He had been sitting like that 
 for two hours. The fir logs had wasted away to a pile 
 of white ash spotted with dying coals. MacRae sat 
 heedless that the room was growing cold. 
 
 He did not even lift his head at the sound of heavy 
 footsteps on the porch. He did not move until a voice 
 at the door spoke his name in accents of surprise. 
 
 " Is that you, yourself, Johnny MacRae ? " 
 
 The voice was deep and husky and kind, and it was 
 not native to Squitty Cove. MacRae lifted his head to 
 see his father's friend and his own. Doctor Laidlaw, 
 physician and fisherman, bulking large. And beyond 
 the doctor he saw a big white launch at anchor inside 
 the Cove. 
 
 "Yes," MacRae said. 
 
 " How 's your father? '* Laidlaw asked. " That wire 
 worried me. I made the best time I could." 
 
 "He's dead," MacRae answered evenly. "He died 
 at midnight." 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 Inheeitance 
 
 On a morning four days later Jack MacRae sat staring 
 into the coals on the hearth. It was all over and done 
 with, the house empty and still, Dolly Ferrara gone 
 back to her uncle's home. Even the Cove was bare of 
 fishing craft. He was alone under his own rooftree, 
 alone with an oppressive silence and his own thoughts. 
 
 These were not particularly pleasant thoughts. There 
 was nothing mawkish about Jack MacRae. He had never 
 been taught to shrink from the inescapable facts of ex- 
 istence. Even if he had, the war would have cured him 
 of that weakness. As it was, twelve months in the 
 infantry, nearly three years in the air, had taught him 
 that death is a commonplace after a man sees about 
 so much of it, that it is many times a welcome relief 
 from suffering either of the body or the spirit. He 
 chose to believe that it had proved so to his father. 
 So his feelings were not that strange mixture of grief 
 and protest which seizes upon those to whom death is the 
 ultimate tragedy, the irrevocable disaster, when it falls 
 upon some one near and dear. 
 
 No, Jack MacRae, brooding by his fire, was lonely 
 and saddened and heavy-hearted. But beneath these 
 neutral phases there was slowly gathering a flood of 
 feeling unrelated to his father's death, more directly 
 based indeed upon Donald MacRae's life, upon matters 
 but now revealed to him, which had their root in thai 
 
40 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 misty period when his father was a young man like 
 himself. 
 
 On the table beside him lay an inch-thick pile of note 
 paper all closely written upon in the clear, small pen- 
 script of his father. 
 
 My son: [MacRae had written] I have a feeling 
 lately that I may never see you again. Not that I fear 
 you will be killed. I no longer have that fear. I seem 
 to have an unaccountable assurance that having come 
 through so much you will go on safely to the end. But 
 I'm not so sure about myself. I'm aging too fast. 
 I 've been told my heart is bad. And I 've lost heart 
 lately. Things have gone against me. There is noth- 
 ing new in that. For thirty years I've been losing out 
 to a greater or less extent in most of the things I under- 
 took — that is, the important things. 
 
 Perhaps I did n't bring the energy and feverish am- 
 bition I might have to my undertakings. Until you 
 began to grow up I accepted things more or less pas- 
 sively as I found them. 
 
 Until you have a son of your own, until you observe 
 closely other men and their sons, my boy, you will 
 scarcely realize how close we two have been to each 
 other. We've been what they call good chums. I've 
 taken a secret pride in seeing you grow and develop 
 into a man. And while I tried to give you an educa- 
 tion — broken into, alas, by this unending war — such 
 as would enable you to hold your own in a world which 
 deals harshly with the ignorant, the incompetent, the 
 untrained, it was also my hope to pass on to you some- 
 thing of material value. 
 
 This land which runs across Squitty Island from the 
 Cove to Cradle Bay and extending a mile back — in all 
 a trifle over six hundred acres — was to be your inher- 
 itance. You were bom here. I know that no other 
 place means quite so much to you as this old log house 
 
INHERITANCE 41 
 
 with the meadow behind it, and the woods, and the sea 
 grumbling always at our doorstep. Long ago this place 
 came into my hands at little more cost than the taking. 
 It has proved a refuge to me, a stronghold against all 
 comers, against all misfortune. I have spent much labor 
 on it, and most of it has been a labor of love. It has 
 begun to grow valuable. In years to come it will be of 
 far greater value. I had hoped to pass it on to you in- 
 tact, unencumbered, an inheritance of some worth. 
 Land, you will eventually discover, Johnny, is the basis 
 of everything. A man may make a fortune in industry, 
 in the market. He turns to land for permanence, sta- 
 bility. All that is sterling in our civilization has its 
 foundation in the soil. 
 
 Out of this land of ours, which I have partially and 
 half-heartedly reclaimed from the wUdemess, you should 
 derive a comfortable livelihood, and your children after 
 you. 
 
 But I am afraid I must forego that dream and you, 
 my son, your inheritance. It has slipped away from 
 me. How this has come about I wish to make clear to 
 you, so that you will not feel unkindly toward me that 
 you must face the world with no resources beyond your 
 own brain and a sound young body. If it happens that 
 the war ends soon and you come home while I am still 
 aUve to welcome you, we can talk this over man to 
 man. But, as I said, my heart is bad. I may not be 
 here. So I am writing all this for you to read. There 
 are many things which you should know — or at least 
 which I should like you to know. 
 
 Thirty years ago — 
 
 Donald MacRae's real communication to his son began 
 at that point in the long ago when the Gtdl outsailed 
 his sloop and young Horace Gower, smarting with jeal- 
 ousy, struck that savage blow with a pike pole at a man 
 whose fighting hands were tied by a promise. Bit by 
 
42 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 bit, incident by incident, old Donald traced out of a full 
 heart and bitter memories all the passing years for his 
 son to see and understand. He made Elizabeth Morton, 
 the Morton family, Horace Gower and the Gower kin 
 stand out in bold relief. He told how he, Donald 
 MacRae, a nobody from nowhere, for all they knew, ad- 
 venturing upon the Pacific Coast, questing carelessly 
 after fortune, had fallen in love with this girl whose 
 family, with less consideration for her feelings and de^ 
 sires than for mutual advantages of land and money 
 and power, favored young Gower and saw nothing but 
 impudent presumption in MacRae. 
 
 Young Jack sat staring into the coals, seeing much, 
 understanding more. It was aU there in those written 
 pages, a powerful spur to a vivid imagination. 
 
 No MacRae had ever lain down unwhipped. Nor had 
 Donald MacRae, his father. Before his bruised face 
 had healed — and young Jack remembered well the thin 
 white scar that crossed his father's cheek bone — 
 Donald MacRae was again pursuing his heart's desire. 
 But he was forestalled there. He had truly said to 
 Elizabeth Morton that she would never have another 
 chance. By force or persuasion or whatsoever means 
 were necessary they had married her out of hand to 
 Horace Gower. 
 
 "That must have been she sitting on the couch," 
 Jack MacRae whispered to himself, " that middle-aged 
 woman with the faded rose-leaf face. Lord, Lord, how 
 things get twisted!" 
 
 Though they so closed the avenue to a mesalliance, 
 still their pride must have smarted because of that 
 clandestine affection, that boldly attempted elopement. 
 Most of all, young Gower must have hated MacRae — 
 with almost the same jealous intensity that Donald 
 
INHERITANCE 43 
 
 MacRae must for a time have hated him — because 
 Gower apparently never forgot and never forgave. 
 Long after Donald MacRae outgrew that passion 
 Gower had continued secretly to harass him. Certain 
 things could not be otherwise accounted for, Donald 
 MacRae wrote to his son. Gower functioned in the 
 salmon trade, in timber, in politics. In whatever 
 MacRae set on foot, he ultimately discerned the hand 
 of Gower, implacable, hidden, striking at him from 
 under cover. 
 
 And so in a land and during a period when men 
 created fortunes easily out of nothing, or walked care- 
 lessly over golden opportunities, Donald MacRae got 
 him no great store of worldly goods, whereas Horace 
 Gower, after one venture in which he speedily dissipated 
 an inherited fortune, drove straight to successful out- 
 come in everything he touched. By the time young 
 Jack MacRae outgrew the Island teachers and must go 
 to Vancouver for high school and then to the University, 
 of British Columbia, old Donald had been compelled to 
 borrow money on his land to meet these expenses. 
 
 Young Jack, sitting by the fire, *winced when he 
 thought of that. He had taken things for granted. 
 The war had come in his second year at the univer- 
 sity, — and he had gone to the front as a matter of 
 course. 
 
 Failing fish prices, poor seasons, other minor dis- 
 asters had followed, — and always in the background, 
 as old Donald saw it, the Gower influence, malign, vin- 
 dictive, harboring that ancient grudge. 
 
 Whereas in the beginning IMacRae had confidently 
 expected by one resource and another to meet easily 
 the obligation he had incurred, the end of it was the loss, 
 during the second year of the war, of all the MacRae 
 
44 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 lands on Squitty, — all but a rocky comer of a few 
 acres which included the house and garden. Old Donald 
 had segregated that from his holdings when he pledged 
 the land, as a matter of sentiment, not of value. All 
 the rest — acres of pasture, cleared and grassed, 
 stretches of fertile ground, blocks of noble timber still 
 uncut — had passed through the hands of mortgage 
 holders, through bank transfers, by devious and tortu- 
 ous ways, until the title rested in Horace Gower, — who 
 had promptly built the showy summer house on Cradle 
 Bay to flaunt in his face, so old Donald believed and 
 told his son. 
 
 It was a curious document, and it made a profound 
 impression on Jack MacRae. He passed over the under- 
 lying motive, a man justifying himself to his son for a 
 failure which needed no justifying. He saw now why 
 his father tabooed all things Gower, why indeed he must 
 have hated Gower as a man who does things in the open 
 hates an enemy who strikes only from cover. 
 
 Strangely enough. Jack managed to grasp the full 
 measure of what his father's love for Elizabeth Morton 
 must have been without resenting the secondary part 
 his mother must have played. For old Donald was 
 frank in his story. He made it clear that he had loved 
 Bessie Morton with an all-consuming passion, and that 
 when this burned itself out he had never experienced so 
 headlong an affection again. He spoke with kindly re- 
 gard for his' wife, but she played little or no part in his 
 account. And Jack had only a faint memory of his 
 mother, for she had died when he was seven. His father 
 filled his eyes. His father's enemies were his. Family 
 ties^ superimposed on clan clannishness, which is the 
 blood heritage of the Highland Scotch, made it impossi- 
 ble for him to feel otherwise. That blow with a pike 
 
INHERITANCE 45 
 
 pole was a blow directed at his own face. He took up his 
 father's feud instinctively, not even stopping to consider 
 whether that was his father's wish or intent. 
 
 He got up out of his chair at last and went outside, 
 down to where the Cove waters, on a rising tide, lapped 
 at the front of a rude shed. Under this shed, secure 
 on a row of keel-blocks, rested a small knockabout- 
 rigged boat, stowed away from wind and weather, her 
 single mast, boom, and gaff unshipped and slung to 
 rafters, her sail and running gear folded and coiled and 
 hung beyond the wood-rats' teeth. Beside this sailing 
 craft lay a long blue dugout, also on blocks, half filled 
 with water to keep it from checking. 
 
 These things belonged to him. He had left them 
 lying about when he went away to France. And old 
 Donald had put them here safely against his return. 
 Jack stared at them, blinking. He was full of a dumb 
 protest. It didn't seem right. Nothing seemed right. 
 In young MacRae's mind there was nothing terrible 
 about death. He had become used to that. But he had 
 imagination. He could see his father going on day after 
 day, month after month, year after year, enduring, 
 uncomplaining. Gauged by what his father had written, 
 by what Dolly Ferrara had supplied when he questioned 
 her, these last months must have been gray indeed. 
 And he had died without hope or comfort or a sight 
 of his son. 
 
 That was what made young MacRae blink and strug- 
 gle with a lump in his throat. It hurt. 
 
 He walked away around the end of the Cove without 
 definite objective. He was suddenly restless, seeking 
 relief in movement. Sitting still and thinking had be- 
 come unbearable. He found himself on the path that 
 ran along the cliffs and followed that, coming out at 
 
46 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 last on the neck of Point Old where he could look down 
 on the broken water that marked Poor Man's Rock. 
 
 The lowering cloud bank of his home-coming day had 
 broken in heavy rain. That had poured itself out and 
 given place to a southeaster. The wind was gone now, 
 the clouds breaking up into white drifting patches with 
 bits of blue showing between, and the sun striking 
 through in yellow shafts which lay glittering areas here 
 and there on the Gulf. The swell that runs after a blow 
 still thundered all along the southeast face of Squitty, 
 bursting hoom — boom — boom against the cliffs, shoot- 
 ing spray in white cascades. Over the Rock the sea 
 boiled. 
 
 There were two rowboats trolling outside the heavy 
 backwash from the cliffs. MacRae knew them both. 
 Peter Ferrara was in one, Long Tom Spence in the other. 
 They did not ride those gray-green ridges for pleasure, 
 nor drop sidling into those deep watery hollows for joy 
 of motion. They were out for fish, which meant to them 
 food and clothing. That was their work. 
 
 They were the only fisher folk abroad that morning. 
 The gasboat men had flitted to more sheltered grounds. 
 MacRae watched these two lift and fall in the marching 
 swells. It was cold. Winter sharpened his teeth 
 already. The rowers bent to their oars, tossing and 
 lurching. MacRae reflected upon their industry. In 
 France he had eaten canned salmon bearing the Folly 
 Bay label, salmon that might have been taken here by 
 the Rock, perhaps by the hands of these very men, by 
 his own father. Still, that was unlikely. Donald 
 MacRae had never sold a fish to a Gower collector. 
 Nor would he himself, young MacRae swore under his 
 breath, looking sullenly down upon the Rock. 
 
 Day after day, month after month, his father had 
 
INHERITANCE 47 
 
 tugged at the oars, hauled on the line, rowing around 
 and around Poor Man's Rock, skirting the kelp at the 
 cliff's foot, keeping body and soul together with un- 
 remitting labor in sun and wind and rain, trying to live 
 and save that little heritage of land for his son. 
 
 Jack MacRae sat down on a rock beside a bush and 
 thought about this sadly. He could have saved his father 
 much if he had known. He could have assigned his pay. 
 There was a government allowance. He could have in- 
 voked the War Relief Act against foreclosure. Between 
 them they could have managed. But he understood 
 quite clearly why his father made no mention of his 
 difficulties. He would have done the same under the 
 same circumstances himself, played the game to its 
 bitter end without a cry. 
 
 But Donald MacRae had made a long, hard fight 
 only to lose in the end, and his son, with full knowledge 
 of the loneliness and discouragement and final hopeless- 
 ness that had been his father's lot, w£ls passing slowly 
 from sadness to a cumulative anger. That cottage amid 
 its green grounds bright in a patch of sunshine did not 
 help to soften him. It stood on land reclaimed from 
 the forest by his father's labor. It should have be- 
 longed to him, and it had passed into hands that already 
 grasped too much. For thirty years Gower had made 
 silent war on Donald MacRae because of a woman. It 
 seemed incredible that a grudge bom of jealousy 
 should run so deep, endure so long. But there were 
 the facts. Jack MacRae accepted them; he could not 
 do otherwise. He came of a breed which has handed 
 its feuds from generation to generation, interpreting 
 literally the code of an eye for an eye. 
 
 So that as he sat there brooding, it was perhaps a 
 little unfortunate that the daughter of a man whom 
 
48 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 he was beginning to regard as a forthright enemy 
 should have chosen to come to him, tripping sound- 
 lessly over the moss. 
 
 He did not hear Betty Gower until she was beside 
 him. Her foot clicked on a stone and he looked up. 
 Betty was all in white, a glow in her cheeks and in her 
 eyes, bareheaded, her reddish-brown hair shining in a 
 smooth roll above her ears. 
 
 " I hear you have lost your father," she said simply. 
 "I'm awfully sorry." 
 
 Some peculiar quality of sympathy in her tone 
 touched MacRae deeply. His eyes shifted for a 
 moment to the uneasy sea. The lump in his throat 
 troubled him again. Then he faced her again. 
 
 "Thanks," he said slowly. "I dare say you mean 
 it, although I don't know why you should. But I 'd 
 rather not talk about that. It 's done." 
 
 "I suppose that^s the best way," she agreed, al- 
 though she gave him a doubtful sort of glance, as if she 
 scarcely knew how to take part of what he said. " Is n't 
 it lovely after the storm? Pretty much all the civilized 
 world must feel a sort of brightness and sunshine to-day, 
 I imagine." 
 
 "Why.'^" he asked. It seemed to him a most un- 
 called-for optimism. 
 
 "Why, haven't you heard that the war is over.'*" 
 she smiled. " Surely some one has told you.'' " 
 
 He shook his head. 
 
 "It is a fact," she declared. "The armistice was 
 signed yesterday at eleven. Aren't you glad?" 
 
 MacRae reflected a second. A week earlier he would 
 have thrown up his cap and whooped. Now the tre- 
 mendously important happening left him unmoved, 
 unbelievably indifferent. He was not stirred at all by 
 
INHERITANCE 49 
 
 the fact of acknowledged victory, of cessation from 
 killing. 
 
 "I should be, I suppose," he muttered. "I know 
 a lot of fellows will be — and their people. So far as 
 I 'm concerned — right now — " 
 
 He made a quick gesture with his hands. He could n't 
 explain how he felt — that the war had suddenly and 
 imperiously been relegated to the background for him. 
 Temporarily or otherwise, as a spur to his emotions, 
 the war had ceased to function. He didn't want to 
 talk. He wanted to be let alone, to think. 
 
 Yet he was conscious of a wish not to offend, to be 
 courteous to this clear-eyed young woman who looked 
 at him with frank interest. He wondered why he should 
 be of any interest to her. MacRae had never been shy. 
 Shyness is nearly always bom of acute self-conscious- 
 ness. Being free from that awkward intuming of the 
 mind Jack MacRae was not thoroughly aware of him- 
 self as a likable figure in any girl's sight. Four years 
 overseas had set a mark on many such as himself. A 
 man cannot live through manifold chances of death, 
 face great perils, do his work under desperate risks 
 and survive, without some trace of his deeds being 
 manifest in his bearing. Those tried by fire are sure of 
 themselves, and it shows in their eyes. Besides, Jack 
 MacRae was twenty-four, clear-skinned, vigorous, 
 straight as a young fir tree, a handsome boy in uni- 
 form. But he was not quick to apprehend that these 
 things stirred a girl's fancy, nor did he know that the 
 gloomy something which clouded his eyes made Betty 
 Gower want to comfort him. 
 
 "I think I understand," she said evenly, — when in 
 truth she did not understand at all. " But after a while 
 you'll be glad. I know I should be if I were in the 
 
50 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 army, although of course no matter how horrible it all 
 was it had to be done. For a long time I wanted to 
 go to France myself, to do something. I was simply 
 wild to go. But they wouldn't let me." 
 
 "And I," MacRae said slowly, "didn't want to go 
 at all — and I had to go." 
 
 " Oh," she remarked with a peculiar interrogative 
 inflection. Her eyebrows lifted. "Why did you have 
 to.f^ You went over long before the draft was thought 
 of." 
 
 " Because I 'd been taught that my flag and country 
 really meant something," he said. " That was all ; and 
 it was quite enough in the way of compulsion for a good 
 many like myself who didn't hanker to stick bayonets 
 through men we 'd never seen, nor shoot them, nor blow 
 them up with hand grenades, nor kill them ten thou- 
 sand feet in the air and watch them fall, turning over 
 and over like a winged duck. But these things seemed 
 necessary. They said a country worth living in was 
 worth fighting for." 
 
 " And is n't it? " Betty Gower challenged promptly. 
 
 MacRae looked at her and at the white cottage, at 
 the great Gulf seas smashing on the rocks below, at 
 the far vista of sea and sky and the shore line faintly 
 purple in the distance. His gaze turned briefly to the 
 leafless tops of maple and alder rising out of the hollow 
 in which his father's body lay — in a comer of the little 
 plot that was left of all their broad acres — and came 
 back at last to this fair daughter of his father's enemy. 
 
 "The country is, yes," he said. "Anything that's 
 worth having is worth fighting for. But that is n't 
 what they meant, and that is n't the way it has worked 
 out." 
 
 He was not conscious of the feeling in his voice. 
 
INHERITANCE 51 
 
 He was thinking with exaggerated bitterness that the 
 Germans in Belgium had dealt less hardly with a con- 
 quered people than this girl's father had dealt with 
 his. 
 
 " I 'm afraid I don't quite understand what you 
 mean by that," she remarked. Her tone was puzzled. 
 She looked at him, frankly curious. 
 
 But he could not tell her what he meant. He had a 
 feeling that she was in no way responsible. He had an 
 instinctive aversion to rudeness. And while he was 
 absolving himself of any intention to make war on 
 her he was wondering if her mother, long ago, had been 
 anything like Miss Betty Gower. It seemed odd to 
 think that this level-eyed girl's mother might have 
 been his mother, — if she had been made of stiifer 
 metal, or if the west wind had blown that afternoon. 
 
 He wondered if she knew. Not likely, he decided. 
 It wasn't a story either Horace Gower or his wife 
 would care to tell their children. 
 
 So he did not try to tell her what he meant. He 
 withdrew into his shell. And when Betty Gower seated 
 herself on a rock and evinced an inclination to quiz 
 him about things he did not care to be quizzed about, 
 he lifted his cap, bade her a courteous good-by, and 
 walked back toward the Cove. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 From the Bottom Up 
 
 MacRae did nothing but mark time until he found 
 himself a plain citizen once more. He could have re- 
 mained in the service for months without risk and with 
 much profit to himself. But the fighting was over. 
 The Germans were whipped. That had been the goal. 
 Having reached it, MacRae, like thousands of other 
 young men, had no desire to loaf in a uniform subject 
 to military orders while the politicians wrangled. 
 
 But even when he found himself a civilian again, 
 master of his individual fortunes, he was still a trifle 
 at a loss. He had no definite plan. He was rather at 
 sea, because all the things he had planned on doing 
 when he came home had gone by the board. So many 
 things which had seemed good and desirable had been 
 contingent upon his father. Every plan he had ever 
 made for the future had included old Donald MacRae 
 and those wide acres across the end of Squitty. He 
 had been deprived of both, left without a ready mark 
 to shoot at. The flood of war had carried him far. 
 The ebb of it had set him back on his native shores, — 
 stranded him there, so to speak, to pick up the broken 
 threads of his old life as best he could. 
 
 He had no quarrel with that. But he did have a 
 feud with circumstance, a profound resentment with 
 the past for its hard dealing with his father, for the 
 
FROM THE BOTTOM UP 53 
 
 blankness of old Donald's last year or two on earth* 
 And a good deal of this focused on Horace Gower and 
 his wprks. 
 
 "He might have let up on the old man," Jack 
 MacRae would say to himself resentfully. He would 
 lie awake in the dark thinking about this. "We were 
 doing our bit. He might have stopped putting spokes 
 in our wheel while the war was on." 
 
 The fact of the matter is that young MacRae was 
 deeply touched in his family pride as well as his per- 
 sonal sense of injustice. Gower had deeply injured 
 his father, therefore it was any MacRae's concern. 
 It made no difference that the first blow in this quarrel 
 had been struck before he was born. He smarted 
 under it and all that followed. His only difficulty was 
 to discern a method of repaying in kind, which he was 
 thoroughly determined to do. 
 
 He saw no way, if the truth be told. He did not 
 even contemplate inflicting physical injury on Horace 
 Gower. That would have been absurd. But he wanted 
 to hurt him, to make him squirm, to heap trouble on the 
 man and watch him break down under the load. And 
 he did not see how he possibly could. Gower was too 
 well fortified. Four years of war experience, which 
 likewise embraced a considerable social experience, had 
 amply shown Jack MacRae the subtle power of money, 
 of political influence, of family connections, of commer- 
 cial prestige. 
 
 All these things were on Gower's side. He was im- 
 pregnable. MacRae was not a fool. Neither was he 
 inclined to pessimism. Yet so far as he could see, the 
 croakers were not lying when they said that here at 
 home the war had made the rich richer and the poor 
 poorer. It was painfully true in his own case. He 
 
54 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 had given four years of himself to his country, gained 
 an honorable record, and lost everything else that was 
 worth having. 
 
 What he had lost in a material way he meant to get 
 back. How, he had not yet determined. His brain 
 was busy with that problem. And the dying down of 
 his first keen resentment and grief over the death of 
 his father, and that dead father's message to him, 
 merely hardened into a cold resolve to pay off his 
 father's debt to the Gowers and Mortons. MacRae ran 
 true to the traditions of his Highland blood when he 
 lumped them all together. 
 
 In this he was directed altogether by the promptings 
 of emotion, and he never questioned the justice of his 
 attitude. But in the practical adjustment of his life 
 to conditions as he found them he adopted a purely 
 rational method. 
 
 He took stock of his resources. They were limited 
 enough. A few hundred dollars in back pay and de- 
 mobilization gratuities; a sound body, now that his 
 injured eye was all but healed; an abounding con- 
 fidence in himself, — which he had earned the right to 
 feel. That was all. Ambition for place, power, wealth, 
 he did not feel as an imperative urge. He perceived 
 the value and desirability of these things. Only he 
 saw no short straight road to any one of them. 
 
 For four years he had been fed, clothed, directed, 
 master of his own acts only in supreme moments. 
 There was an unconscious reaction from that high 
 pitch. Being his own man again and a trifle uncertain 
 what to do, he did nothing at all for a time. He made 
 one trip to Vancouver, to learn by just what legal 
 processes the MacRae lands had passed into the Gower 
 possession. He found out what he wanted to know 
 
FROM THE BOTTOM UP 55 
 
 easily enough. Gower had got his birthright for a song. 
 Donald MacRae had borrowed six thousand dollars 
 through a broker. The land was easily worth double, 
 even at wild-land valuation. But old Donald's luck 
 had run true to form. He had not been able to renew 
 the loan. The broker had discounted the mortgage in 
 a pinch. A financial house had foreclosed and sold 
 the place to Gower, — who had been trying to buy it 
 for years, through different agencies. His father's 
 papers told young MacRae plainly enough through 
 what channels the money had gone. Chance had func- 
 tioned on the wrong side for his father. 
 
 So Jack went back to Squitty and stayed in the old 
 house, talked with the fishermen, spent a lot of his time 
 with old Peter Ferrara and Dolly. Always he was 
 casting about for a course of action which would give 
 him scope for two things upon which his mind was set : 
 to get the title to that six hundred acres revested in 
 the MacRae name, and, in Jack's own words to Dolores 
 Ferrara, to take a fall out of Horace Gower that would 
 jar the bones of his ancestors. 
 
 With Christmas the Ferrara clan gathered at the 
 Cove, all the stout and able company of Dolly 
 Ferrara's menfolk. It had seemed to MacRae a curi- 
 ous thing that Dolly was the only woman of all the 
 Ferraras. There had been mothers in the Ferrara 
 family, or there could not have been so many capable 
 uncles and cousins. But in MacRae's memory there 
 had never been any mothers or sisters or daughters 
 save Dolly. 
 
 There were nine male Ferraras when Jack MacRae 
 went to France. Dolores' father was dead. Uncle Peter 
 was a bachelor. He had two brothers, and each brother 
 had bred three sons. Four of these sons had left their 
 
56 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 boats and gear to go overseas. TVo of them would 
 never come back. The other two were home, — one after 
 a whiif of gas at Ypres, the other with a leg shorter by 
 two inches than when he went away. These two made 
 nothing of their disabilities, however; they were home 
 and they were nearly as good as ever. That was 
 enough for them. And with the younger boys and their 
 fathers they came to old Peter's house for a week at 
 Christmas, after an annual custom. These gatherings 
 in the old days had always embraced Donald MacRae 
 and his son. And his son was glad that it included 
 him now. He felt a little less alone. 
 
 They were of the sea, these Ferraras, Castilian Span- 
 ish, tempered and diluted by three generations in North 
 America. Their forebears might have sailed in cara- 
 vels. They knew the fishing grounds of the British 
 Columbia coast as a schoolboy knows his a, b, c's. 
 They would never get rich, but they were independent 
 fishermen, making a good living. And they were as 
 clannish as the Scotch. All of them had chipped in to 
 send Dolly to school in Vancouver. Old Peter could 
 never have done that, MacRae knew, on what he could 
 make trolling around Poor Man's Rock. Peter had 
 been active with gill net and seine when Jack MacRae 
 was too young to take thought of the commercial end of 
 salmon fishing. He was about sixty-five now, a lean, 
 hardy old fellow, but he seldom went far from Squitty 
 Cove. There was Steve and Frank and Vincent and 
 Manuel of the younger generation, and Manuel and 
 Peter and Joaquin of the elder. Those three had been 
 contemporary with Donald MacRae. They esteemed 
 old Donald. Jack heard many things about his father's 
 early days on the Gulf that were new to him, that made 
 his blood tingle and made him wish he had lived then 
 
FROM THE BOTTOM UP 57 
 
 too. Thirty years back the Gulf of Georgia was no 
 place for any but two-handed men. 
 
 He heard also, in that week of casual talk among the 
 Ferraras, certain things said, statements made that 
 suggested a possibility which never seemed to have 
 occurred to the Ferraras themselves. 
 
 "The FoUy Bay pack of blueback was a whopper 
 last summer," Vincent Ferrara said once. *'They 
 must have cleaned up a barrel of money." 
 
 Folly Bay was Gower's cannery. 
 
 "Well, he didn't make much of it out of us," old 
 Manuel grunted. " We should worry." 
 
 ** Just the same, he ought to be made to pay more 
 for his fish. He ought to pay what they're worth, 
 for a change," Vincent drawled. "He makes about a 
 hundred trollers eat out of his hand the first six weeks 
 of the season. If somebody would put on a couple of 
 good, fast carriers, and start buying fish as soon as he 
 opens his cannery, I '11 bet he 'd pay more than twenty- 
 five cents for a five-pound salmon." 
 
 "Maybe. But that's been tried and didn't work. 
 Every buyer that ever cut in on Gower soon found him- 
 self up against the Packers' Association when he went 
 into the open market with his fish. And a wise man,'^ 
 old Manuel grinned, *' don't even figure on monkeying 
 with a buzz saw, sonny." 
 
 Not long afterward Jack MacRae got old Manuel in 
 a comer and asked him what he meant. 
 
 "Well," he said, "it's like this. When the blue- 
 backs first run here in the spring, they 're pretty small, 
 too small for canning. But the fresh fish markets in 
 town take 'em and palm 'em off on the public for sal- 
 mon trout. So there's an odd fresh-fish buyer cruises 
 around here and picks up a few loads of salmon between 
 
58 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 tly end of April and the middle of June. The Folly 
 Bay cannery opens about then, and the buyers quit. 
 "Hiey go farther up the coast. Partly because there 's 
 more fish, mostly because nobody has ever made any 
 money bucking Gower for salmon on his own grounds." 
 
 " Why? " MacRae asked bluntly. 
 
 " Nobody knows exactly why," Manuel replied. " A 
 feller can guess, though. You know the fisheries de- 
 partment has the British Columbia coast cut up iuto 
 areas, and each area is controlled by some packer as 
 a concession. Well, Gower has the Folly Bay license, 
 and a couple of purse-seine licenses, and that just 
 about gives him the say-so on all the waters around 
 Squitty, besides a couple of good bays on the Van- 
 couver Island side and the same on the mainland. He 
 belongs to the Packers' Association. They ain't sup- 
 posed to control the local market. But the way it 
 works out they really do. At least, when an independ- 
 ent fish buyer gets to cuttin' in strong on a packer's 
 territory, he generally finds himself in trouble to sell 
 in Vancouver unless he's got a cast-iron contract. 
 That is, he can't sell enough to make any money. Any 
 damn fool can make a living. 
 
 " At the top of the island here there *s a bunch that 
 has homesteads. They troll in the summer. They 
 deal at the Folly Bay cannery store. Generally they're 
 in the hole by spring. Even if they ain't they have to 
 depend on Folly Bay to market their catch. .The can- 
 nery 's a steady buyer, once it opens. JThey can't al- 
 ways depend on the freshrfish buyer, even if he pays a 
 few cents more. So once the cannery opens, Gower has 
 a bunch of trollers ready to deliver salmon at most any 
 price he cares to name. And he generally names the 
 lowest price on the coast. He don't have no competi- 
 
FROM THE BOTTOM UP 59 
 
 tion for a month or so. If there is a little there 's ways 
 of killin' it. So he sets his own price. The trollers can 
 take it or leave it." 
 
 Old Manuel stopped to light his pipe. 
 
 "For three seasons," said he, "Gower has bought 
 blueback salmon the first month of the season for 
 twenty-five cents or less — fish that run three to four 
 pounds. And there hasn't been a time when salmon 
 could be bought in a Vancouver fresh-fish market for 
 less than twenty-five cents a pound." 
 
 *' Huh ! " MacRae grunted. 
 
 It set him thinking. He had a sketchy knowledge of 
 the salmon packer's monopoly of cannery sites and 
 pursing licenses and waters. He had heard more or 
 less talk among fishermen of agreements in restraint of 
 competition among the canneries. But he had never 
 supposed it to be quite so effective as Manuel Ferrara 
 beHeved. 
 
 Even if it were, a gentleman's agreement of that sort, 
 being a matter of profit rather than principle, was apt 
 to be broken by any member of the combination who 
 saw a chance to get ahead of the rest. 
 
 MacRae took passage for Vancouver the second week 
 in January with a certain plan weaving itself to form 
 in his mind, — a plan which promised action and money 
 and other desirable results if he could carry it through. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 The Springboard 
 
 With a basic knowledge to start from, any reasonably 
 clever man can digest an enormous amount of infor- 
 mation about any given industry in a very brief time. 
 Jack MacRae spent three weeks in Vancouver as a 
 one-man commission, self-appointed, to inquire into the 
 fresh-salmon trade. He talked to men who caught sal- 
 mon and to men who sold them, both wholesale and 
 retail. He apprised himself of the ins and outs of sal- 
 mon canning, and of the independent fish collector who 
 owned his own boat, financed himself, and chanced the 
 market much as a farmer plants his seed, trusts to the 
 weather, and makes or loses according to the yield and 
 market, — two matters over which he can have no 
 control. 
 
 MacRae learned before long that old Manuel Ferrara 
 was right when he said no man could profitably buy 
 salmon unless he had a cast-iron agreement either with 
 a cannery or a big wholesaler. MacRae soon saw that 
 the wholesaler stood like a wall between the fishermen 
 and those who ate fish. They could make or break a 
 buyer. MacRae was not long running afoul of the 
 rumor that the wholesale fish men controlled the retail 
 price of fresh fish by the simple method of controlling 
 the supply, which they managed by cooperation instead 
 of competition among themselves. He heard this stated. 
 And more, — that behind the big dealers stood the 
 
THE SPRINGBOARD 6i 
 
 shadowy figure of the canning colossus. This was told 
 him casually by fishermen. Fish buyers repeated it, 
 sometimes with a touch of indignation. That was one 
 of their wails, — the fish combine. It was air-tight, 
 they said. The packers had a strangle hold on the 
 fishing waters, and the big local fish houses had the 
 same unrelenting grip on the market. 
 
 Therefore the ultimate consumer — whose exploita- 
 tion was the prize plum of commercial success — paid 
 thirty cents per pound for spring salmon that a fisher- 
 man chivied about in the tumbling Gulf seas fifty miles 
 up-coast had to take fourteen cents for. As for the sal- 
 mon packers, the men who pack the good red fish in 
 small round tins which go to all the ends of the earth 
 to feed hungry folk, — well, no one knew their profits. 
 Their pack was all exported. The back yards of Europe 
 are strewn with empty salmon cans bearing a British 
 Columbia label. But they made money enough to be 
 a standing grievance to those unable to get in on this 
 bonanza. 
 
 MacRae, however, was chiefly concerned with the 
 local trade in fresh salmon. His plan did n't look quite 
 so promising as when he mulled over it at Squitty Cove. 
 He put out feelers and got no hold. A fresh-fish buyer 
 operating without approved market connections might 
 make about such a living as the fishermen he bought 
 from. To Jack MacRae, eager and sanguine, making a 
 living was an inconspicuous detail. Making a living, — 
 that was nothing to him. A more definite spur row- 
 eled his flank. 
 
 It looked like an air-tight proposition, he admitted, 
 at last. But, he said to himself, anything air-tight 
 could be punctured. And undoubtedly a fine flow of 
 currency would result from such a puncture. So he 
 
62 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 kept on looking about, asking casual questions, listen- 
 ing. In the language of the street he was getting wise. 
 
 Incidentally he enjoyed himself. The battle ground 
 had been transferred to Paris. The pen, the t3rpe- 
 writer, and the press dispatch, with immense reserves 
 of oratory and printer's ink, had gone into action. 
 And the soldiers were coming home, — officers of the 
 line and airmen first, since to these leave and transpor- 
 tation came easily, now that the guns were silent. 
 MacRae met fellows he knew. A good many of them 
 were well off, had homes in Vancouver. They were 
 mostly young and glad the big show was over. And 
 they had the social instinct. During intervals of fight- 
 ing they had rubbed elbows with French and British 
 people of consequence. They had a mind to enjoy 
 themselves. 
 
 MacRae had a record in two squadrons. He needed 
 no press-agenting when he met another R. A. F. man. 
 So he found himself invited to homes, the inside of which 
 he would otherwise never have seen, and to pleasant 
 functions among people who would never have known of 
 his existence save for the circumstance of war. Pretty, 
 well-bred girls smiled at him, partly because airmen 
 with notable records were still a novelty, and partly 
 because Jack MacRae was worth a second look from 
 any girl who was fancy-free. Matrons were kind to 
 him because their sons said he was the right sort, and 
 some of these same matrons mothered him because he 
 was like boys they knew who had gone away to France 
 and would never come back. 
 
 This was very pleasant. MacRae was normal in 
 every respect. He liked to dance. He liked glittering 
 lights and soft music. He liked nice people. He liked 
 people who were nice to him. But he seldom lost sight 
 
THE SPRINGBOARD 63 
 
 of his objective. These people could relax and give 
 themselves up to enjoyment because they were 
 "heeled" — as a boy lieutenant slangily put it — to 
 MacRae. 
 
 " It 's a great game, Jack, if you don't weaken," he 
 said. "But a fellow can't play it through on a uni- 
 form and a war record. I 'm having a top-hole time, 
 but it'll be different when I plant myself at a desk in 
 some broker's office at a hundred and fifty a month. 
 It 's mixed pickles, for a fact. You can't buy your way 
 into this sort of thing. And you can't stay in it with- 
 out a bank roll." 
 
 Which was true enough. Only the desire to " see it 
 through" socially was not driving Jack MacRae. He 
 had a different target, and his eye did not wander far 
 from the mark. And perhaps because of this, chance 
 and his social gadding about gave him the opening he 
 sought when he least expected to find one. 
 
 To be explicit, he happened to be one of an after- 
 theater party at an informal supper dance in the 
 Granada, which is to Vancouver what the Biltmore is to 
 New York or the Fairmont to San Francisco, — a place 
 where one can see everybody that is anybody if one lin- 
 gers long enough. And almost the first man he met was 
 a stout, ruddy-faced youngster about his own age. 
 They had flown in the same squadron until " Stubby " 
 Abbott came a cropper and was invalided home. 
 
 Stubby fell upon Jack MacRae, pounded him earn- 
 estly on the back, and haled him straight to a table 
 where two women were sitting. 
 
 " Mother," he said to a plump, middle-aged woman, 
 "here's Silent John MacRae." 
 
 Her eyes lit up pleasantly. 
 
 " I 've heard of you,'* she said, and her extended 
 
64 POOR MAN^S ROCK 
 
 hand put the pressure of the seal of sincerity on her 
 words. " I 've wanted to thank you. You can scarcely 
 know what you did for us. Stubby 's the only man in 
 the family, you know.*' 
 
 MacRae smiled. 
 
 " Why," he said easily, " little things like that were 
 part of the game. Stubb used to pull off stuff like that 
 himself now and then." 
 
 " Anyway, we can thank God it 's over," Mrs. Abbott 
 said fervently. "Pardon me, — my daughter, Mr. 
 MacRae." 
 
 Nelly Abbott was small, tending to plumpness like 
 h^r mother. She was very fair with eyes of true violet, 
 a baby-doll sort of young woman, and she took pos- 
 session of Jack MacRae as easily and naturally as if 
 she had known him for years. They drifted away in 
 a dance, sat the next one out together with Stubby and 
 a slim young thing in orange satin whose talk ran un- 
 deviatingly upon dances and sports and motor trips, 
 past and anticipated. Listening to her, Jack MacRae 
 fell dumb. Her father was worth half a million. Jack 
 wondered how much of it he would give to endow his 
 daughter with a capacity for thought. A label on 
 her program materialized to claim her presently. 
 Stubby looked after her and grinned. MacRae looked 
 thoughtful. The girl was pretty, almost beautiful. 
 She looked like Dolores Ferrara, dark, creamy-skinned, 
 seductive. And MacRae was comparing the two to 
 Dolores' advantage. 
 
 Nelly Abbott was eying MacRae. 
 
 '*Tessie bores you, eh?" she said bluntly. 
 
 MacRae smiled. "Her flow of profound utterance 
 carries me out of my depth, I 'm afraid," said he. " I 
 can't follow her." 
 
THE SPRINGBOARD 65 
 
 ** She'd lead you a chase if you tried," Stubby 
 grinned and sauntered away to smoke. 
 
 "Is that sarcasm?" Nelly drawled. "I wonder if 
 you are called Silent John because you stop talking 
 now and then to think? Most of us don't, you know. 
 Tell me," she changed the subject abruptly, "did you 
 know Norman Gower overseas ? " 
 
 " He was an officer in the battalion I went over with," 
 MacRae replied. "I went over in the ranks, you see. 
 So I couldn't very well know him. And I never met 
 him after I transferred to the air service." 
 
 "I just wondered," Nelly went on. **I know Nor- 
 man rather well. It has been whispered about that he 
 pulled every string to keep away from the front, — that 
 all he has done over there is to hold down cushy j obs in 
 England. Did you ever hear any such talk?" 
 
 "We were too busy to gossip about the boys at 
 home, except to envy them.'* MacRae evaded direct 
 reply, and Nelly did not follow it up. 
 
 "I see his sister over there. Betty is a dear girl. 
 That's she talking to Stubby. Come over and meet 
 her. They 've been up on their island for a long time, 
 wlule the flu raged." 
 
 MacRae couldn't very well avoid it without seeming 
 rude or making an explanation which he did not intend 
 to make to any one. His grudge against the Gower 
 clan was focused on Horace Gower. His feeling had 
 not abated a jot. But it was a personal matter, some- 
 thing to remain locked in his own breast. So he per- 
 force went with Nelly Abbott and was duly presented 
 to Miss Elizabeth Gower. And he had the next dance 
 with her, also for convention's sake." 
 
 While they stood chatting a moment, the four of 
 them. Stubby said to MacRae: 
 
66 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 " Who are you with, Jack? " 
 
 "The Robbin-Steeles." 
 
 " If I don't get a chance to talk to you again, come 
 out to the house to-morrow," Stubby said. "The 
 mater said so, and I want to talk to you about some- 
 thing." 
 
 The music began and MacRae and Betty Gower slid 
 away in the one-step, that most conversational of 
 dances. But Jack couldn't find himself chatty with 
 Betty Gower. She was graceful and clear-eyed, a vigor- 
 ously healthy girl with a touch of color in her cheeks 
 that came out of Nature's rouge pot. But MacRae 
 was subtly conscious of a stiffness between them. 
 
 "After all,'^ Betty said abruptly, when they had 
 circled half the room, " it was worth fighting for, don't 
 you really think.'*" 
 
 For a second MacRae looked down at her, puzzled. 
 Then he remembered. 
 
 " Good Heavens ! " he said, " is that still bothering 
 you? Do you take everything a fellow says so seri- 
 ously as that?" 
 
 " No. It was n't so much what you said as the way 
 you said it," she replied. "You were uncompromis- 
 ingly hostile that day, for some reason. Have you 
 acquired a more equable outlook since?" 
 
 " I 'm trying," he answered. 
 
 **You need coaching in the art of looking on the 
 bright side of things," she smiled. 
 
 " Such as clusters of frosted lights, cut glass, dia- 
 monds, silk dresses and ropes of pearls," he drawled. 
 "Would you care to take on the coaching job. Miss 
 Gower? " 
 
 " I might be persuaded." She looked him frankly in 
 the eyes. 
 
 N 
 
THE SPRINGBOARD 67 
 
 But MacRae would not follow that lead, whatever it 
 might mean. Betty Gower was nice, — he had to admit 
 it. To glide around on a polished floor with his arm 
 around her waist, her soft hand clasped in his, and her 
 face close to his own, her grayish-blue eyes, which 
 were so very like his own, now smiling and now soberly 
 reflective, was not the way to carry on an inherited 
 feud. He couldn't subject himself to that peculiarly 
 feminine attraction which Betty Gower bore like an 
 aura and nurse a grudge. In fact, he had no grudge 
 against Betty Gower except that she was the daughter 
 of her father. And he could n't explain to her that he 
 hated her father because of injustice and injury done 
 before either of them was born. In the genial atmos- 
 phere of the Granada that sort of thing did not seem 
 nearly so real, so vivid, as when he stood on the cliffs 
 of Squitty listening to the pound of the surf. Then it 
 welled up in him like a flood, — the resentment for all 
 that Gower had made his father suffer, for those thirty 
 years of reprisal which had culminated in reducing 
 his patrimony to an old log house and a garden patch 
 out of all that wide sweep of land along the southern 
 face of Squitty. He looked at Betty and wished silently 
 that she were, — well. Stubby Abbott's sister. He could 
 be as nice as he wanted to then. Whereupon, instinc- 
 tively feeling himself upon dangerous ground, he di- 
 verged from the personal, talked without saying much 
 until the music stopped and they found seats. And 
 when another partner claimed Betty, Jack as a matter 
 of courtesy had to rejoin his own party. 
 
 The affair broke up at length. MacRae slept late 
 the next morning. By the time he had dressed and 
 breakfasted and taken a flying trip to Coal Harbor to 
 look over a fort3'-five-foot fish carrier which was adver- 
 
68 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 tised for sale, he bethought himself of Stubby Abbott's 
 request and, getting on a car, rode out to the Abbott 
 home. This was a roomy stone house occupying a 
 sightly corner in the West End, — that sharply defined 
 residential area of Vancouver which real estate agents 
 unctuously speak of as "select." There was half a 
 block of ground in green lawn bordered with rose- 
 bushes. The house itself was solid, homely, built for 
 use, and built to endure, all stone and heavy beams, 
 wide windows and deep porches, and a red tile roof 
 lifting above the gray stone walls. 
 
 Stubby permitted MacRae a few minutes' exchange 
 of pleasantries with his mother and sister. 
 
 " I want to extract some useful information from this 
 man," Stubby said at length. "You can have at him 
 later, Nell. He'll stay to dinner." 
 
 "How do you know he will.?" NeUy demanded. 
 "He hasn't said so, yet." 
 
 "Between you and me, he can't escape," Stubby 
 said cheerfully and led Jack away upstairs into a small 
 cheerful room liued with bookshelves, warmed by glow- 
 ing coals in a grate, and with windows that gave a 
 look down on a sandy beach facing the Gulf. 
 
 Stubby pushed two chairs up to the fire, waved Jack 
 to one, and extended his own feet to the blaze. 
 
 " I 've seen the inside of a good many homes in town 
 lately," MacRae observed. "This is the homiest one 
 
 yet." 
 
 " I '11 say it is," Stubby agreed. " A place that has 
 been lived in and cared for a long time gets that way, 
 though. Remember some of those old, old places in 
 England and France? This is new compared to that 
 country. Still, my father built this house when the 
 West End was covered with virgin timber." 
 
THE SPRINGBOARD 69 
 
 ** How 'd you like to be bom and grow up in a house 
 that your father built with a vision of future genera- 
 tions of his blood growing up in," Stubby murmured, 
 ** and come home crippled after three years in the red 
 mill and find you stood a fat chance of losing it? " 
 
 "I wouldn't like it much,'* MacRae agreed. 
 
 But he did not say that he had already undergone 
 the distasteful experience Stubby mentioned as a possi- 
 bility. He waited for Stubby to go on. 
 
 "Well, it's a possibility," Stubby continued, quite 
 cheerfully, however. " I don't propose to allow it to 
 happen. Hang it, I would n't blat this to any one but 
 you, Jack. The mater has only a hazy idea of how 
 things stand, and she 's an incurable optimist anyway. 
 Nelly and the Infant — you have n't met the Infant yet 
 — don't know anything about it. I tell you it put the 
 breeze up when I got able to go into our affairs and 
 learned how things stood. I thought I'd get mended 
 and then be a giddy idler for a year or so. But it 's 
 up to me. I have to get into the collar. Otherwise I 
 should have stayed south all winter. You know we 've 
 just got home. I had to loaf in the sun for practically 
 a year. Now I have to get busy. I don't mean to say 
 that the poorhouse stares us in the face, you know, 
 but unless a certain amount of revenue is forthcoming, 
 we simply can't afford to keep up this place. 
 
 " And I 'd damn well like to keep it going." Stubby 
 paused to light a cigarette. " I like it. It 's our home. 
 We 'd be deucedly sore at seeing anybody else hang up 
 his hat and call it home. So behold in me an active 
 cannery operator when the season opens, a conscience- 
 less profiteer for sentiment's sake. You live up where 
 the blueback salmon run, don't you, Jack.''" 
 
 MacRae nodded. 
 
70 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 " How many trollers fish those waters ? " 
 
 "Anywhere from forty to a hundred, from ten to 
 thirty rowboats.'^ 
 
 "The Folly Bay cannery gets practically all that 
 catch?" 
 
 MacRae nodded again. 
 
 " I 'm trying to figure a way of getting some of those 
 blueback salmon," Abbott said crisply. "How can it 
 best be done ? " 
 
 MacRae thought a minute. A whole array of possi- 
 bilities popped into his mind. He knew that the Abbotts 
 owned the Crow Harbor cannery, in the mouth of Howe 
 Sound just outside Vancouver Harbor. When he spoke 
 he asked a question instead of giving an answer. 
 
 "Are you going to buck the Packers' Association?" 
 
 "Yes and no," Stubby chuckled. "You do know 
 something about the cannery business, don't you?" 
 
 "One or two things," MacRae admitted. "I grew 
 up in the Gulf, remember, among salmon fishermen." 
 
 " Well, I '11 be a little more explicit," Stubby volun- 
 teered. "Briefly, my father, as you know, died while 
 I was overseas. We own the Crow Harbor cannery. I 
 will say that while I was still going to school he started 
 in teaching me the business, and he taught me the way 
 he learned it himself — in the cannery and among fish- 
 ermen. If I do say it, I know the salmon business from 
 gill net and purse seine to the Iron Chink and bank ad- 
 vances on the season's pack. But Abbott, senior, it 
 seems, was n't a profiteer. He took the war to heart. 
 His patriotism didn't consist of buying war bonds in 
 fifty-thousand dollar lots and calling it square. He got 
 in wrong by trying to keep the price of fresh fish down 
 locally, and the last year he lived the Crow Harbor 
 cannery only made a normal profit. Last season the 
 
THE SPRINGBOARD ^x 
 
 plant operated at a loss in the hands of hired men. 
 They simply did n't get the fish. The Fraser River run 
 of sockeye has been going downhill. The river canner- 
 ies get the fish that do run. Crow Harbor, with a man- 
 ager who was n't up on his toes, got very few. I don*t 
 believe we will ever see another big sockeye run in the 
 Fraser anyway. So we shall have to go up-coast to 
 supplement the Howe Sound catch and the few sockeyes 
 we can get from gill-netters. 
 
 "The Packers' Association can't hurt me — much. 
 For one thing, I 'm a member. For another, I can still 
 swing enough capital so they would hesitate about 
 using pressure. You understand. I've got to make 
 that Crow Harbor plant pay. I must have salmon to 
 do so. I have to go outside my immediate territory to 
 get them. If I could get enough blueback to keep full 
 steam from the opening of the sockeye season until the 
 coho run comes — there's nothing to it. I've been 
 having this matter looked into pretty thoroughly. I 
 can pay twenty per cent, over anything Gower has ever 
 paid for blueback and coin money. The question is, 
 how can I get them positively and in quantity.'"' 
 
 " Buy them," MacRae put in softly. 
 
 " Of course," Stubby agreed. " But buying direct 
 means collecting. I have the carriers, true. But where 
 am I going to find men to whom I can turn over a six- 
 thousand-dollar boat and a couple of thousand dollars 
 in cash and say to him, * Go buy me salmon '? His only 
 interest in the matter is his wage." 
 
 " Bonus the crew. Pay 'em percentage on what sal- 
 mon they bring in." 
 
 " I 've thought of that," Stubby said between puffs. 
 "But—" 
 
 " Or," MacRae made the plunge he had been coming 
 
72 ' POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 to while Stubby talked, " I '11 get them for you. I was 
 going to buy bluebacks around Squitty anyi^ay for 
 the fresh-fish market in town if I can make a sure- 
 delivery connection. I know those grounds. I know a 
 lot of fishermen. If you'll give me twenty per cent, 
 over Gower prices for bluebacks delivered at Crow 
 Harbor I '11 get them." 
 
 "This grows interesting." Stubby straightened in 
 his chair. "I thought you were going to ranch it! 
 Lord, I remember the night we sat watching for the 
 bombers to come back from a raid and you first told 
 me about that place of yours on Squitty Island. Seems 
 ages ago — yet it is n't long. As I remember, you were 
 planning aU sorts of things you and your father would 
 do." 
 
 "I can't," MacRae said grimly. "You've been in 
 California for months. You wouldn't hear any men- 
 tion of my affairs, anyway, if you 'd been home. I got 
 back three days before the armistice. My father died 
 of the flu the night I got home. The ranch, or aU of 
 it but the old log house I was bom in and a patch of 
 ground the size of a town lot, has gone the way you 
 mentioned your home might go if you don't buck up 
 the business. Things did n't go well with us lately. I 
 have no land to turn to. So I 'm for the salmon busi- 
 ness as a means to get on my feet." 
 
 " Gower got your place? " Abbott hazarded. 
 
 " Yes. How did you know?" 
 
 " Made a guess. I heard he had built a summer home 
 on the southeast end of Squitty. In fact Nelly was up 
 there last summer for a week or so. Hurts, eh. Jack? 
 That little trip to France cost us both something." 
 
 MacRae sprang up and walked over to a window. 
 He stood for half a minute staring out to sea, looking 
 
THE SPRINGBOARD 73 
 
 in that direction by chance, because the window hap- 
 pened to face that way, to where the Gulf haze lifted 
 above a faint purple patch that was Squitty Island, 
 very far on the horizon. 
 
 " I 'm not kicking," he said at last. " Not out loud, 
 anyway.^* 
 
 " No," Stubby said affectionately, " I know you 're 
 not, old man. Nor am I. But I'm going to get ac- 
 tion, and I have a hunch you will too. Now about this 
 fish business. If you think you can get them, I '11 cer- 
 tainly go you on that twenty per cent, proposition^ — up 
 to the point where Gower boosts me out of the game, 
 if that is possible. We shall have to readjust our 
 arrangement then." 
 
 " Will you give me a contract to that effect ? " Mac- 
 Rae asked, 
 
 "Absolutely. We'll get together at the office to- 
 morrow and draft an agreement." 
 
 They shook hands to bind the bargain, grinning at 
 each other a trifle self-consciously. 
 
 " Have you a suitable boat.'' " Stubby asked after a 
 little. 
 
 " No," MacRae admitted. " But I have been looking 
 around. I find that I can charter one cheaper than I 
 can build — until such time as I make enough to build 
 a fast, able carrier." 
 
 "I'll charter you one," Stubby offered. "That's 
 where part of our money is uselessly tied up, in ex- 
 pensive boats that never carried their weight in salmon. 
 I 'm going to sell two fifty-footers and a seine boat. 
 There's one called the Blackbird, fast, seaworthy rig, 
 you can have at a nominal rate." 
 
 "All right," MacRae nodded. "By chartering I 
 have enough cash in hand to finance the buying. I 'm 
 
74 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 going to start as soon as the bluebacks come and run 
 fresh fish, if I can make suitable connections." 
 
 Stubby grinned. 
 
 "I can fix that too," he said. "I happen to own 
 some shares in the Terminal Fish Company. The 
 pater organized it to give Vancouver people cheap fish, 
 but somehow it didn't work as he intended. It's a 
 fairly strong concern. I'll introduce you. They'll 
 buy your salmon, and they'll treat you right." 
 
 " And now," Stubby rose and stretched his one good 
 arm and the other that was visibly twisted and scarred 
 between wrist and elbow, above his head, "let's go 
 downstairs and prattle. I see a car in front, and I hear 
 twittering voices." 
 
 Halfway down the stairs Stubby halted and laid a 
 hand on MacRae's arm. 
 
 *' Old Horace is a two-fisted old buccaneer," he said. 
 *' And I don't go much on Norman. But I '11 say 
 Betty Gower is some girl. What do you think. Silent 
 John?" 
 
 And Jack MacRae had to admit that Betty was. 
 Oddly enough. Stubby Abbott had merely put into 
 words an impression to which MacRae himself was 
 slowly and reluctantly subscribing. 
 
CHAPTER Vn 
 
 Sea Boots and Salmon 
 
 Feom November to April the British Columbian coast 
 is a region of weeping skies, of intermittent frosts and 
 fog, and bursts of sleety snow. The frosts, fogs, and 
 snow squalls are the punctuation points, so to speak, 
 of the eternal rain. Murky vapors eddy and swirl along 
 the coast. The sun hides behind gray banks of cloud, 
 the shining face of him a rare miracle bestowed upon 
 the sight of men as a promise that bright days and 
 blossoming flowers will come again. When they do 
 come the coast is a pleasant country. The mountains 
 reveal themselves, duskily green upon the lower slopes, 
 their sky-piercing summits crowned with snow caps 
 which endure until the sun comes to his full strength in 
 July. The Gulf is a vista of purple-distant shore and 
 island, of shimmering sea. And the fishermen come out 
 of winter quarters to overhaul boats and gear against 
 the first salmon run. 
 
 The blueback, a lively and toothsome fish, about 
 which rages an ichthyological argument as to whether 
 he is a distant species of the salmon tribe or merely a 
 half-grown coho, is the first to show in great schools. 
 The spring salmon is always in the Gulf, but the spring 
 is a finny mystery with no known rule for his comings 
 and goings, nor his numbers. All the others, the blue- 
 back, the sockeye, the hump, the coho, and the dog sal- 
 mon, run in the order named. They can be reckoned on 
 
76 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 as a man reckons on changes of the moon. These are the 
 mainstay of the salmon canners. Upon their taking for- 
 tunes have been built ^ — and squandered — men have 
 lived and died, loved and hated, gone hungry and dressed 
 their women in silks and furs. The can of pink meat 
 some inland chef dresses meticulously with parsley and 
 sauces may have cost some fisherman his life; a multi- 
 plicity qf cases of salmon may have produced a divorce 
 in the packer's household. We eat this fine red fish and 
 heave its container into the garbage tin, with no care 
 for the tragedy or humors that have attended its getting 
 for us. 
 
 In the spring, when life takes on a new prompting, 
 the blueback salmon shows first in the Gulf. He cannot 
 be taken by net or bait, — unless the bait be a small live 
 herring. He may only be taken in commercial quan- 
 tities by a spinner or a wobbling spoon hook of silver 
 or brass or copper drawn through the water at slow 
 speed. The dainty gear of the trout spinner gave birth 
 to the trolling fleets of the Pacific Coast. 
 
 At first the schools pass into the Straits of San Juan. 
 Here the joint fleets of British Columbia and of Puget 
 Sound begin to harry them. A week or ten days later 
 the vanguard will be off Nanaimo. And in another 
 week they will be breaking water like trout in a still 
 pool around the rocky base of the Ballenas Light and 
 the kelp beds and reefs of Squitty Island. 
 
 By the time they were there, in late April, there were 
 twenty local power boats to begin taking them, for Jack 
 MacRae made the rounds of Squitty to tell the fisher- 
 men that he was putting on a carrier to take the first 
 run of blueback to Vancouver markets. 
 
 They were a trifle pessimistic. Other buyers had 
 tried it, men gambling on a shoestring for a stake in the 
 
SEA BOOTS AND SALMON • 77 
 
 fish trade, buyers unable to make regular trips, whereby 
 there was a tale of many salmon rotted in waiting fish 
 holds, through depending on a carrier that did not 
 come. What was the use of burning fuel, of tearing 
 their fingers with the gear, of catching fish to rot? 
 Better to let them swim. 
 
 But since the Folly Bay cannery never opened until 
 the fish ran to greater size and number, the fishermen, 
 chafing against inaction after an idle winter, took a 
 chance and trolled for Jack MacRae. 
 
 To the troUers' surprise they found themselves deal- 
 ing with a new type of independent buyer, — a man who 
 could and did make his market trips with clocklike 
 precision. If MacRae left Squitty with a load on 
 Monday, saying that he would be at Squitty Cove or 
 Jenkins Island or Scottish Bay by Tuesday evening, 
 he was there. 
 
 He managed it by grace of an able sea boat, engined 
 to drive through sea and wind, and by the nerve and 
 endurance to drive her in any weather. There were 
 times when the Gulf spread placid as a mill pond. 
 There were trips when he drove through with three 
 thousand salmon under battened hatches, his decks 
 awash from boarding seas, ten and twelve and fourteen 
 hours of rough-and-tumble work that brought him into 
 the Narrows and the docks inside with smarting eyes 
 and tired muscles, his head splitting from the pound 
 and clank of the engine and the fumes of gas and 
 burned oil. 
 
 It was work, strain of mind and body, long hours 
 filled with discomfort. But MacRae had never shrunk 
 from things like that. He was aware that few things 
 worth while come easy. The world, so far as he knew, 
 seldom handed a man a fortune done up in tissue paper 
 
78 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 merely because he happened to crave its possession. He 
 was young and eager to do. There was a reasonable 
 satisfaction in the doing, even of the disagreeable, dirty 
 tasks necessary, in beating tlie risks he sometimes had 
 to run. There was a secret triumph in overcoming diffi- 
 culties as they arose. And he had an object, which, if 
 it did not always lie in the foreground of his mind, he 
 was nevertheless keen on attaining. 
 
 The risks and work and strain, perhaps because he 
 put so much of himself into the thing, paid from the 
 beginning more than he had dared hope. He made a 
 hundred dollars his first trip, paid the troUers five cents 
 a fish more on the second trip and cleared a hundred 
 and fifty. In the second week of his venture he struck 
 a market almost bare of fresh salmon with thirty-seven 
 hundred shining bluebacks in his hold. He made seven 
 hundred dollars on that single cargo. 
 
 A Greek buyer followed the Blackbird out through 
 the Narrows that trip. MacRae beat him two hours to 
 the trolling fleet at Squitty, a fleet that was growing 
 in numbers. 
 
 " Bluebacks are thirty-five cents," he said to the first 
 man who ranged alongside to deliver. " And I want to 
 tell you something that you can talk over with the rest 
 of the crowd. I have a market for every fish this bunch 
 can catch. If I can't handle them with the Blachhirdy 
 I '11 put on another boat. I 'm not here to buy fish just 
 till the Folly Bay cannery opens. I '11 be making regu- 
 lar trips to the end of the salmon season. My price will 
 be as good as anybody's, better than some. If Gower 
 gets your bluebacks this season for twenty-five cents, 
 it will be because you want to make him a present. 
 Meantime, there 's another buyer an hour behind me. 
 I don't know what he '11 pay. But whatever he pays 
 
SEA BOOTS AND SALMON 79 
 
 there aren't enough salmon being caught here yet to 
 keep two carriers running. You can figure it out for 
 yourself.'' 
 
 MacRae thought he knew his men. Nor was his 
 judgment in error. The Greek hung around. In 
 twenty-four hours he got three hundred salmon. Mac- 
 Rae loaded nearly three thousand. 
 
 Once or twice after that he had competitive buyers in 
 Squitty Cove and the various rendezvous of the trolling 
 fleet. But the fishermen had a loyalty born of shrewd 
 reckoning. They knew from experience the way of 
 the itinerant buyer. They knew MacRae. Many of 
 them had known his father. If Jack MacRae had a 
 market for all the salmon he could buy on the Gower 
 grounds all season, they saw where Folly Bay would 
 buy no fish in the old take-it-or-leave it fashion. They 
 were keenly alive to the fact that they were getting 
 mid- July prices in June, that Jack MacRae was the 
 first buyer who had not tried to hold down prices by 
 pulling a poor mouth and telling fairy tales of poor 
 markets in town. He had jumped prices before there 
 was any competitive spur. They admired young Mac- 
 Rae. He had nerve ; he kept his word. 
 
 Wherefore it did not take them long to decide that 
 he was a good man to keep going. As a result of this 
 decision other casual buyers got few fish even when they 
 met MacRae's price. 
 
 When he had run a little over a month MacRae took 
 stock. He paid the Crow Harbor Canning Company, 
 which was Stubby Abbott's trading name, two hundred 
 and fifty a month for charter of the Blackbird. He had 
 operating outlay for gas, oil, crushed ice, and wages 
 for Vincent Ferrara, whom he took on when he reached 
 the limit of single-handed endurance. Over and above 
 
8o POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 these expenses he hp,d cleared twenty-six hundred dollars. 
 
 That was only a beginning he knew, — only a begin- 
 ning of profits and of work. He purposely thrust the 
 taking of salmon on young Ferrara, let him handle the 
 cash, tally in the fish, watched Vincent nonchalantly 
 chuck out overripe salmon that careless trollers would 
 as nonchalantly heave in for fresh ones if they could get 
 away with it. For Jack MacRae had it in his mind to 
 go as far and as fast as he could while the going was 
 good. That meant a second carrier on the run as soon 
 as the Folly Bay cannery opened, and it meant that he 
 must have in charge of the second boat an able man 
 whom he could trust. There was no question about 
 trusting Vincent Ferrara. It was only a matter of 
 his ability to handle the j ob, and that he demonstrated 
 to MacRae's complete satisfaction. 
 
 Early in June MacRae went to Stubby Abbott. 
 
 "Have you sold the Bluebird yet?" he asked. 
 
 ** I want to let three of those Bird boats go," Stubby 
 told him. " I don't need 'em. They 're dead capital. 
 But I haven't made a sale yet." 
 
 " Charter me the Bluebird on the same terms," Jack 
 proposed. 
 
 "You're on. Things must be going good." 
 
 " Not too bad," MacRae admitted. 
 
 "Folly Bay opens the twentieth. We open July 
 first," Stubby said abruptly. "How many bluebacks 
 are you going to get for us ? " 
 
 " Just about all that are caught around Squitty 
 Island," MacRae said quietly. "That's why I want 
 another carrier." 
 
 " Huh ! " Stubby grunted. His tone was slightly 
 incredulous. " You '11 have to go some. Wish you luck 
 though. More you get the better for me." 
 
SEA BOOTS AND SALMON 8i 
 
 " I expect to deliver sixty thousand bluebacks to Crow 
 Harbor in July," MacRae said. 
 
 Stubby stared at him. His eyes twinkled. 
 
 "If you can do that in July, and in August too," 
 he said, " I '11 give you the Bluebird.''^ 
 
 '' No," MacRae smiled. " I '11 buy her." 
 
 " Where will Folly Bay get off if you take that many 
 fish away.?" Stubby reflected. 
 
 "Don't know. And I don't care a hoot." MacRae 
 shrugged his shoulders. " I 'm fairly sure I can do it. 
 You don't care? " 
 
 "Do I? I'U shout to the world I don't," Stubby 
 replied. " It 's self-preservation with me. Let old 
 Horace look out for himself. He had his fingers in the 
 pie while we were in France. I don't have to have four 
 hundred per cent, profit to do business. Get the fish if 
 you can. Jack, old boy, even if it busts old Horace. 
 Which it won't — and, as I told you, lack of them may 
 bust me." 
 
 "By the way," Stubby said as MacRae rose to go, 
 "don't you ever have an hour to spare in town? You 
 have n't been out at the house for six weeks." 
 
 MacRae held out his hands. They were red and cut 
 and scarred, roughened, and sore from salt water and 
 ice-handling and fish slime. 
 
 "Wouldn't they look well clasping a wafer and a 
 teacup," he laughed. "I'm working. Stub. When I 
 have an hour to spare I lie down and sleep. If I 
 stopped to play every time I came to town — do you 
 think you'd get your sixty thousand bluebacks in 
 July?" 
 
 Stubby looked at MacRae a second, at his work-torn 
 hands and weary eyes. 
 
 " I guess you 're right," he said slowly. " But the 
 
82 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 old stone house will still be up on the comer when the 
 salmon run is over. Don't forget that." 
 
 MacRae went off to Coal Harbor to take over the 
 second carrier. And he wondered as he went if it would 
 all be such clear sailing, if it were possible that at the 
 first thrust he had found an open crack in Gower's 
 armor through which he could prick the man and make 
 him squirm. 
 
 He looked at his hands. When they fingered death 
 as a daily task they had been soft, white, delicate, — 
 dainty instruments equally fit for the manipulation of 
 aerial controls, machine guns or teacups. Why should 
 honest work prevent a man from meeting pleasant peo- 
 ple amid pleasant surroundings? Well, it was not the 
 work itself, it was simply the effects of that gross 
 labor. On the American continent, at least, a man did 
 not lose caste by following any honest occupation, — 
 only he could not work with the workers and flutter 
 with the butterflies. MacRae, walking down the street, 
 communing with himself, knew that he must pay a pen- 
 alty for working with his hands. If he were a drone in 
 uniform — necessarily a drone since the end of war — 
 he could dance and play, flirt with pretty girls, be a 
 welcome guest in great houses, make the heroic past pay 
 social dividends. 
 
 It took nearly as much courage and endurance to 
 work as it had taken to fight ; indeed it took rather more, 
 at times, to keep on working. Theoretically he should 
 not lose caste. Yet MacRae knew he would, — unless he 
 made a barrel of money. There had been stray straws 
 in the past month. There were, it seemed, very nice 
 people who could not quite understand why an officer 
 and a gentleman should do work that was n't, — well, not 
 even clean. Not clean in the purely objective, physi- 
 
SEA BOOTS AND SALMON 83 
 
 cal sense, like banking or brokerage, or teaching, or 
 any of those semi-genteel occupations which permit 
 people to make a living without straining their backs 
 or soiling their hands. He wasn't even sure that 
 Stubby Abbott — MacRae was ashamed of his cynicism 
 when he got that far. Stubby was a real man. Even if 
 he needed a man or a man's activities in his business 
 Stubby would n't cultivate that man socially merely be- 
 cause he needed his producing capacity. 
 
 The solace for long hours and aching flesh and sleep- 
 wear^ eyes was a glimpse of concrete reward, — money 
 which meant power, power to repay a debt, opportunity 
 to repay an ancient score. It seemed to Jack MacRae 
 that his personal honor was involved in getting back all 
 that broad sweep of land which his father had claimed 
 from the wilderness, that he must exact an eye for an 
 eye and a tooth for a tooth. That was the why of his 
 unceasing energy, his uncomplaining endurance of long 
 hours in sea boots, the impatient facing of storms that 
 threatened to delay. Man strives under the spur of a 
 vision, a deep longing, an imperative squaring of needs 
 with desires. MacRae moved under the whip of all 
 three. 
 
 He was quite sanguine that he would succeed in this 
 undertaking. But he had not looked much beyt)nd the 
 first line of trenches which he planned to storm. They 
 did not seem to him particularly formidable. The 
 Scotch had been credited with uncanny knowledge of the 
 future. Jack MacRae, however, though his Highland 
 blood ran undiluted, had no such gift of prescience. He 
 did not know that the highway of modem industry is 
 strewn with the casualties of commercial warfare. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 Vested Rights 
 
 A SMALL balcony over the porch of Gower's summer cot- 
 tage commanded a wide sweep of the Gulf south and 
 east. That was one reason he had built there. He 
 liked to overlook the sea, the waters out of which he had 
 taken a fortune, the highway of his collecting boats. 
 He had to keep in touch with the Folly Bay cannery 
 while the rush of the pack was on. But he was getting 
 more fastidious as he grew older, and he no longer 
 relished the odors of the cannery. There were other 
 places nearer the cannery than Cradle Bay, if none 
 more sightly, where he could have built a summer house. 
 People wondered why he chose the point that frowned 
 over Poor Man's Rock. Even his own family had ques- 
 tioned his judgment. Particularly his wife. She com- 
 plained of the isolation. She insisted on a houseful of 
 people when she was there, and as Vancouver was full of 
 eligible week-enders of both sexes her wish was always 
 gratified. And no one except Betty Gower ever knew 
 that merely to sit looking out on the Gulf from that 
 vantage point afforded her father some inscrutable 
 satisfaction. 
 
 On a day in mid-July Horace Gower stepped out on 
 this balcony. He carried in his hand a pair of prism 
 binoculars. He took a casual look around. Then he 
 put the glasses to his eyes and scanned the Gulf with a 
 slow, searching sweep. At first sight it seemed empty. 
 
VESTED RIGHTS 85 
 
 Then far eastward toward Vancouver his glass picked 
 up two formless dots which alternately showed and 
 disappeared. 
 
 Gower put down the glasses, seated himself in a grass 
 chair, lighted a cigar and leaned back, looking imper- 
 sonally down on Point Old and the Rock. A big, slow 
 swell rolled up oif the Gulf, breaking with a precisely 
 spaced boom along the cliffs. For forty-eight hours 
 a southeaster had swept the sea, that rare phenomenon 
 of a summer gale which did not blow itself out between 
 suns. This had been a wild tantrum, driving every- 
 thing of small tonnage to the nearest shelter, even de- 
 laying the big coasters. 
 
 One of these, trailing black smoke from two funnels, 
 lifting white superstructure of cabins high above her 
 main deck, standing bold and clear in the mellow sun- 
 shine, steamed out of the fairway between Squitty and 
 Vancouver Island. But she gained scant heed from 
 Gower. His eyes kept turning to where those distant 
 specks showed briefly between periods in the hollows of 
 the sea. They drew nearer. Gower finished his cigar 
 in leisurely fashion. He focused the glass again. He 
 grunted something unintelligible. They were what he 
 fully expected to behold as soon as the southeaster 
 ceased to whip the Gulf, — the Bluebird and the Black- 
 bird, Jack MacRae's two salmon carriers. They were 
 walking up to Squitty in eight-knot boots. Through 
 his glass Gower watched them lift and fall, lurch and 
 yaw, running with short bursts of speed on the crest of 
 a wave, laboring heavily in the trough, plowing steadily 
 up through uneasy waters to take the salmon that 
 should go to feed the hungry machines at Folly Bay. 
 
 Gower laid aside the glasses. He smoked a second 
 cigar down to a stub, resting his plump hands on his 
 
86 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 plump stomach. He resembled a thoughtful Billiken 
 in white flannels, a round-faced, florid, middle-aged 
 Billiken. By that time the two Bird boats had come 
 up and parted on the head of Squitty. The Bluebird, 
 captained by Vin Ferrara, headed into the Cove. The 
 Blackbird, slashing along with a bone in her teeth, 
 rounded Poor Man's Rock, cut across the mouth of 
 Cradle Bay, and stood on up the western shore. 
 
 "He knows every pot-hole where a troller can lie. 
 He 's not afraid of wind or sea or work. No wonder he 
 gets the fish. Those damned — " 
 
 Gower cut his soliloquy off in the middle to watch the 
 Blackbird slide out of sight behind a point. He knew 
 all about Jack MacRae's operations, the wide swath 
 he was cutting in the matter of blueback salmon. The 
 Folly Bay showing to date was a pointed reminder. 
 Gower's cannery foreman and fish collectors gave him 
 profane accounts of MacRae's indefatigable raiding, 
 — as it suited them to regard his operations. What 
 Gower did not know he made it his business to find out. 
 He sat now in his grass chair, a short, compact body of 
 a man, with a heavy-jawed, powerful face frowning in 
 abstraction. Gower looked younger than his fifty-six 
 years. There was little gray in his light-brown hair. 
 His blue eyes were clear and piercing. The thick 
 roundness of his body was not altogether composed of 
 useless tissue. Even considered superficially he looked 
 what he really was, what he had been for many years, — 
 a man accustomed to getting things done according to 
 his desire. He did not look like a man who would fight 
 with crude weapons — such as a pike pole — but never- 
 theless there was the undeniable impression of latent 
 force, of aggressive possibilities, of the will and the 
 ability to rudely dispose of things which might become 
 
VESTED RIGHTS 87 
 
 obstacles in his way. And the current history of him in 
 the Gulf of Georgia did not belie such an impression. 
 
 He left the balcony at last. He appeared next mov- 
 ing, with the stumpy, ungraceful stride peculiar to the 
 short and thick-bodied, down the walk to a float. From 
 this he hailed the Arrow, and a boy came in, rowing a 
 dinghy. 
 
 When Gower reached the cruiser's deck he cocked 
 his ear at voices in the after cabin. He put his head 
 through the companion hatch. Betty Gower and Nelly 
 Abbott were curled up on a berth, chuckling to each 
 other over some exchange of confidences. 
 
 "Thought you were ashore," Gower grunted. 
 
 " Oh, the rest of the crowd went off on a hike into the 
 woods, so we came out here to look around. Nelly 
 hasn't seen the Arrow inside since it was done over," 
 Betty replied. 
 
 " I 'm going to Folly Bay," Gower said. " Will you 
 go ashore.'' " 
 
 " Far from such," Betty returned. " I 'd as soon go 
 to the cannery as anywhere. Can't we, daddy.'' " 
 
 " Oh, yes. Bit of a swell though. You may be sick." 
 
 Betty laughed. That was a standing joke between 
 them. She had never been seasick. Nelly Abbott de- 
 clared that if there was anything she loved it was to 
 ride the dead swell that ran after a storm. They came 
 up out of the cabin to watch the mooring line cast off, 
 and to wave handkerchiefs at the empty cottage porches 
 as the Arrow backed and straightened and swept out 
 of the bay. 
 
 The Arrow was engined to justify her name. But 
 the swell was heavier than it looked from shore. No 
 craft, even a sixty-footer built for speed, finds her 
 Tspeed lines a thing of comfort in heavy going. Until 
 
88 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 the Arrow passed into the lee of an island group half- 
 way along Squitty she made less time than a fishing 
 boat, and she rolled and twisted uncomfortably. If 
 Horace Gower had a mind to reach Folly Bay before 
 the Blackbird he could not have done so. However, he 
 gave no hint of such intention. He kept to the deck. 
 The girls stayed below until the big cruiser struck 
 easier going and a faster gait. Then they joined Gower. 
 
 The three of them stood by the rail just abaft the 
 pilot house when the Arrow turned into the half-mile 
 breadth of Folly Bay. The cannery loomed white on 
 shore, with a couple of purse seiners and a tender or 
 two tied at the slips. And four hundred yards off 
 the cannery wharf the Blackbird had dropped anchor 
 and lay now, a dozen trolling boats clustered about her 
 to deliver fish. 
 
 " Slow up and stop abreast of that buyer," Gower 
 ordered. 
 
 The Arrow^s skipper brought his vessel to a stand- 
 still within a boat-length of the Blackbird. 
 
 "Why, that's Jack MacRae," Nelly Abbott ex- 
 claimed. " Hoo-hoo, Johnny ! " 
 
 She waved both hands for good measure. MacRae, 
 bareheaded, sleeves rolled above his elbows, standing in 
 hip boots of rubber on a deck wet and slippery with 
 water and fish slime, amid piles of gleaming salmon, 
 recognized her easily enough. He waved greeting, but 
 his gaze only for that one recognizing instant left the 
 salmon that were landing flop, flop on the Blackbird's 
 deck out of a troller's fish well. He made out a slip, 
 handed the troUer some currency. There was a brief 
 exchange of words between them. The man nodded, 
 pushed off his boat. Instantly another edged into the 
 vacant place, Salmon began to fall on the deck, 
 
VESTED RIGHTS 89 
 
 heaved up on a picaroon. At the other end of the fish 
 hold another of the Ferrara boys was tallying in fish. 
 
 " Old crab," Nelly Abbott murmured. " He does n't 
 even look at us." 
 
 "He's counting salmon, silly," Betty explained- 
 "How can he.?" 
 
 There was no particular inflection in her voice. 
 Nevertheless Horace Gower shot a sidelong glance at 
 his daughter. She also waved a hand pleasantly to 
 Jack MacRae, who had faced about now. 
 
 " Why don't you say you 're glad to see us, old 
 dear?" Nelly Abbott suggested bluntly, and smiling 
 so that all her white teeth gleamed and her eyes twinkled 
 mischievously. 
 
 " Tickled to death," MacRae called back. He went 
 through the pantomime of shaking hands with himself. 
 His lips parted in a smile. " But I 'm the busiest thing 
 afloat right now. See you later." 
 
 " Nerve," Horace Gower muttered under his breath. 
 
 " Not if we see you first," Nelly Abbott retorted. 
 
 " It 's not likely you will," MacRae laughed. 
 
 He turned back to his work. The fisherman along^ 
 side was tall and surly looking, a leathery-faced indi- 
 vidual with a marked scowl. He heaved half a dozen 
 salmon up on the Blackbird. Then he climbed up him- 
 self. He towered over Jack MacRae, and MacRae was 
 not exactly a small man. He said something, his hands 
 on his hips. MacRae looked at him. He seemed to be 
 making some reply. And he stepped back from the man. 
 Every other fisherman turned his face toward the Black- 
 bird*s deck. Their clattering talk stopped short. 
 
 The man leaned forward. His hands left his hips, 
 drew into doubled fists, extended threateningly. He 
 took a step toward MacRae. 
 
90 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 And MacRae suddenly lunged forward, as if pro- 
 pelled by some invisible spring of tremendous force. 
 With incredible swiftness his left hand and then his 
 right shot at the man's face. The two blows sounded 
 like two open-handed smacks. But the fisherman 
 sagged, went lurching backward. His heels caught on 
 the Blackbird's^ bulwark and he pitched backward head- 
 first into the hold of his own boat. 
 
 MacRae picked up the salmon and flung them one 
 by one after the man, with no great haste, but with little 
 care where they fell, for one or two spattered against 
 the fellow's face as he clawed up out of his own hold. 
 There was a smear of red on his lips. 
 
 "Oh! My goodness gracious, sakes alive!" 
 
 Nelly Abbott grasped Betty by the arm and mur- 
 mured these expletives as much in a spirit of deviltry as 
 of shock. Her eyes danced. 
 
 " Did you see that? " she whispered. " I never 
 saw two men fight before. I 'd hate to have Jack Mac- 
 Rae hit m^." 
 
 But Betty was holding her breath, for MacRae had 
 picked up a twelve-foot pike pole, a thing with an ugly 
 point and a hook of iron on its tip. He only used it, 
 however, to shove away the boat containing the man he 
 had so savagely smashed. And while he did that Gower 
 curtly issued an order, and the Arrow slid on to the 
 cannery wharf. 
 
 Nelly went below for something. Betty stood by the 
 rail, staring back thoughtfully, unaware that her father 
 was keenly watching the look on her face, with an odd 
 expression in his own eyes. 
 
 " You saw quite a lot of young MacRae last spring, 
 did n't you ? " he asked abruptly. " Do you like him ? " 
 
 A faint touch of color leaped into her cheeks. She 
 
VESTED RIGHTS 91 
 
 met her father's glance with an inquiring one of her 
 own, 
 
 "Well — yes. Rather," she said at last. "He's a 
 nice boy." 
 
 "Better not," Gower rumbled. His frown grew 
 deeper. His teeth clamped a cigar in one corner of his 
 mouth at an aggressive angle. "Granted that he is 
 what you call a nice boy. I '11 admit he 's good-looking 
 and that he dances well. And he seems to pack a punch 
 up his sleeve. I 'd suggest that you don't cultivate any 
 romantic fancy for him. Because he 's making himself 
 a nuisance in my business — and I'm going to smash 
 him." 
 
 Gower turned away. If he had lingered he might 
 have observed unmistakable signs of temper. Betty 
 flew storm signals from cheek and eye. She looked after 
 her father with something akin to defiance, likewise with 
 an air of astonishment. 
 
 "As if I — " she left the whispered sentence un- 
 finished. 
 
 She perched herself on the mahogany-capped rail, 
 and while she waited for Nelly Abbott she gave her- 
 self up to thinking of herself and her father and her 
 father's amazing warning which carried a veiled 
 threat, — an open threat so far as Jack MacRae was 
 concerned. Why should he cut loose like that on her? 
 
 She stared thoughtfully at the Blackbird, marked 
 the trollers slipping in from the grounds and clustering 
 around the chunky carrier. 
 
 It might have interested Mr. Horace Gower could he 
 have received a verbatim report of his daughter's re- 
 flections for the next five minutes. But whether it 
 would have pleased him it is hard to say. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 The Complexity of Simple Matters 
 
 The army, for a period extending over many months, 
 had imposed a rigid discipline on Jack MacRae. The 
 Air Service had bestowed upon him a less rigorous dis- 
 cipline, but a far more exacting self-control. He was 
 not precisely aware of it, but those four years had saved 
 him from being a firebrand of sorts in his present sit- 
 uation, because there resided in him a fiery temper and 
 a capacity for passionate extremes, and those years in 
 the King's uniform, whatever else they may have done 
 for him, had placed upon his headlong impulses mani- 
 fold checks, taught him the vital necessity of restraint, 
 the value of restraint. 
 
 If the war had made human life seem a cheap and 
 perishable commodity, it had also worked to give men 
 like MacRae a high sense of honor, to accentuate a 
 natural distaste for lying and cheating, for anything 
 that was mean, petty, ignoble. Perhaps the Air Service 
 was unique in that it was at once the most dangerous 
 and the most democratic and the most individual of all 
 the organizations that fought the Germans. It had 
 high standards. The airmen were all young, the pick 
 of the nations, clean, eager, vigorous boys whose ideals 
 were still undimmed. They lived and — as it hap- 
 pened — died in big moments. They trained with the 
 gods in airy spaces and became men, those who survived. 
 
 And the gods may launch destroying thunderbolts, — 
 
COMPLEXITY OF SIMPLE MATTERS 93 
 
 but they do not lie or cheat or steal. An honest man 
 may respect an honest enemy, and be roused to mur- 
 derous fury by a common rascal's trickery. 
 
 When MacRae dropped his hook in Folly Bay he was 
 two days overdue, for the first time in his fish-running 
 venture. The trollers had promised to hold their fish. 
 The first man alongside to deliver reminded him of 
 this. 
 
 "Southeaster held you up, eh.?" said he. "We 
 fished in the lee off the top end. But we might as well 
 have laid in. Held 'em too long for you." 
 
 "They spoiled before you could slough them on the 
 cannery, eh ? " MacRae observed. 
 
 " Most of mine did. They took some." 
 
 " How many of your fish went bad.'' " Jack asked. 
 
 " About twenty-five, I guess." 
 
 MacRae finished checking the salmon the fisherman 
 heaved up on the deck. He made out two slips and 
 handed the man his money. 
 
 " I 'm paying you for the lost fish," he said. " I 
 told you to hold them for me. I want you to hold 
 them. If I can't get here on time, it's my loss, not 
 yours." 
 
 The fisherman looked at the money in his hand and 
 up at MacRae. 
 
 " Well," he said, " you 're the first buyer I ever seen 
 do that. You 're all right, all right." 
 
 There were variations of this. Some of the trollers, 
 weatherwise old sea-dogs, had foreseen that the Black- 
 bird could not face that blow, and they had sold their 
 fish. Others had held on. These, who were all men 
 MacRae knew, he paid according to their own estimate 
 of loss. He did not argue. He accepted their word. 
 It was an astonishing experience for the trolling fleet. 
 
94 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 They had never found a buyer wiHing to make good a 
 loss of that kind. 
 
 But there were other folk afloat besides simple, hon- 
 est fishermen who would not lie for the price of one 
 salmon or forty. When the Arrow drew abreast and 
 stopped, a boat had pushed in beside the Blackbird. 
 The fisherman in it put half a dozen bluebacks on the 
 deck and clambered up himself. 
 
 " You owe me for thirty besides them," he announced. 
 
 "How's that?" MacRae asked coolly. 
 
 But he was not cool inside. He knew the man, a pre- 
 emptor of Folly Bay, a truckler to the cannery because 
 he was always in debt to the cannery, — and a quarrel- 
 some individual besides, who took advantage of his size 
 and strength to browbeat less able men. 
 
 MacRae had got few salmon off Sam Kaye since the 
 cannery opened. He had never asked Kaye to hold fish 
 for him. He knew instantly what was in Kaye's mind; 
 it had flitted from one boat to another that MacRae 
 was making good the loss of salmon held for him, and 
 Kaye was going to get in on this easy money if he 
 could bluff it through. 
 
 He stood on the Blackbird's deck, snarlingly de- 
 manding payment for thirty fish. MacRae looked at 
 him silently. He hated brawling, acrimonious dispute. 
 He was loth to a common row at that moment, because 
 he was acutely conscious of the two girls watching. 
 But he was even more conscious of Gower's stare and 
 the curious expectancy of the fishermen clustered about 
 his stern. 
 
 Kaye was simply trying to do him out of fifteen 
 dollars. MacRae knew it. He knew that the fishermen 
 knew it, — and he had a suspicion that Folly Bay 
 might not be unaware, or averse, to Sam Kaye taking 
 
COMPLEXITY OF SIMPLE MATTERS 95 
 
 a fall out of him. Folly Bay had tried other unpleasant 
 tricks. 
 
 "That doesn't go for you, Kaye," he said quietly. 
 "I know your game. Get off my boat and take your 
 fish with you." 
 
 Sam Kaye glowered threateningly. He had cowed 
 men before with the fierceness of his look. He was long- 
 armed and raw-boned, and he rather fancied himself 
 in a rough and tumble. He was quite blissfully ignorant 
 that Jack MacRae was stewing under his outward 
 calmness. Kaye took a step forward, with an intimi- 
 dating thrust of his jaw. 
 
 MacRae smashed him squarely in the mouth with a 
 straight left, and hooked him somewhere on the chin 
 with a wicked right cross. Either blow was sufficient 
 to knock any ordinary man down. There was a decep- 
 tive power in MacRae's slendemess, which was not so 
 much slendemess as perfect bodily symmetry. He 
 weighed within ten pounds as much as Sam Kaye, al- 
 though he did not look it, and he was as quick as a play- 
 ful kitten. Kaye went down, as told before. He lifted a 
 dazed countenance above the cockpit as MacRae shoved 
 his craft clear. 
 
 The fishermen broke the silence with ribald laughter. 
 They knew Kaye's game too. 
 
 MacRae left Folly Bay later in the afternoon, poorer 
 by many dollars paid for rotten salmon. He wasn't 
 in a particularly genial mood. The Sam Kaye affair 
 had come at an inopportune moment. He did n't care to 
 stand out as a bruiser. Still, he asked himself irritably, 
 why should he care because Nelly Abbott and Betty 
 Gower had seen him using his fists? He was perfectly 
 justified. Indeed, he knew very well he could have done 
 nothing else. The trollers had chortled over the out- 
 
96 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 come. These were matters they could understand and 
 appreciate. Even Steve Ferrara looked at him en- 
 viously. 
 
 " It makes me wish I 'd dodged the gas," Steve said 
 wistfully. " It 's hell to wheeze your breath in and out. 
 By jiminy, you 're wicked with your hands, Jack. Did 
 you box much in France.?" 
 
 " Quite a lot," MacRae replied. " Some of the fel- 
 lows in our squadron were pretty clever. We used the 
 gloves quite a bit." 
 
 "And you're naturally quick," Steve drawled. 
 " Now, me, the gas has cooked my goose. I 'd have to 
 bat Kaye over the head with an oar. Gee, he sure got 
 a surprise." 
 
 They both laughed. Even upon his bloody face — 
 as he rose out of his own fish hold — bewildered aston- 
 ishment had been Sam Kaye's chief expression. 
 
 The Blackbird went her rounds. At noon the next 
 day she met Vincent Ferrara with her sister ship, and 
 the two boats made one load for the Blackbird, She 
 headed south. With high noon, too, came the summer 
 westerly, screeching and whistling and lashing the Gulf 
 to a brief fury. 
 
 It was the regular summer wind, a yachtsman's gale. 
 Four days out of six its cycle ran the same, a breeze 
 rising at ten o'clock, stiffening to a healthy blow, a 
 mere sigh at sundown. Midnight would find the sea 
 smooth as a mirror, the heaving swell killed by chang- 
 ing tides. 
 
 So the Blackbird ran down Squitty, rolling and yaw- 
 ing through a following sea, and turned into Squitty 
 Cove to rest till night and calm settled on the Gulf. 
 
 When her mudhook was down in that peaceful nook, 
 Steve Ferrara turned into his bunk to get a few hours' 
 
COMPLEXITY OF SIMPLE MATTERS 97 
 
 sleep against the long night watch. MacRae stirred 
 wakeful on the sun-hot deck, slushing it down with 
 buckets of sea water to save his ice and fish. He coiled 
 ropes, made his vessel neat, and sat him down to think. 
 Squitty Cove always stirred him to introspection. His 
 mind leaped always to the manifold suggestions of any 
 well-remembered place. He could shut his eyes and see 
 the old log house behind its leafy screen of alder and 
 maple at the Cove's head. The rosebushes before it 
 were laden with bloom now. At his hand were the gray 
 cliffs backed by grassy patches, running away inland 
 to virgin forest. He felt dispossessed of those noble 
 acres. He was always seeing them through his father's 
 eyes, feeling as Donald MacRae must have felt in those 
 last, lonely years of which he had written in simple 
 language that had wrung his son's heart. 
 
 But it never occurred to Jack MacRae that his 
 father, pouring out the tale of those troubled years, 
 had bestowed upon him an equivocal heritage. 
 
 He slid overboard the small skiff the Blackbird car- 
 ried and rowed ashore. There were rowboat troUers 
 on the beach asleep in their tents and rude lean-tos. 
 He walked over the low ridge behind which stood Peter 
 Ferrara's house. It was hot, the wooded heights of 
 the island shutting off the cool westerly. On such a 
 day Peter Ferrara should be dozing on his porch and 
 Dolly perhaps mending stockings or sewing in a rocker 
 beside him. 
 
 But the porch was bare. As MacRae drew near the 
 house a man came out the door and down the three low 
 steps. He was short and thick-set, young, quite fair, 
 inclined already to floridness of skin. MacRae knew 
 him at once for Norman Gower. He was a typical 
 Gower, — a second edition of his father, save that his 
 
98 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 face was less suggestive of power, less heavily marked 
 with sullenness. 
 
 He glanced with blank indifference at Jack MacRae, 
 passed within six feet and walked along the path which 
 ran around the head of the Cove. MacRae watched him. 
 He would cross between the boathouse and the roses in 
 MacRae's doorjard. MacRae had an impulse to stride 
 after him, to forbid harshly any such trespass on 
 MacRae ground. But he smiled at that childishness. 
 It was childish, MacRae knew. But he felt that way 
 about it, just as he often felt that he himself had a per- 
 fect right to range the whole end of Squitty, to tramp 
 across greensward and through forest depths, despite 
 Horace Gower's legal title to the land. MacRae was 
 aware of this anomaly in his attitude, without troubling 
 to analyze it. 
 
 He walked into old Peter's house without announce- 
 ment beyond his footsteps on the floor, as he had been 
 accustomed to do as far back as he could remember. 
 Dolly was sitting beside a little table, her chin in her 
 palms. There was a droop to her body that disturbed 
 MacRae. She had sat for hours like that the night his 
 father died. And there was now on her face something 
 of the same look of sad resignation and pity. Her big, 
 dark eyes were misty, troubled, when she lifted them to 
 MacRae. 
 
 "Hello, Jack," she said. 
 
 He came up to her, put his hands on her shoulders. 
 
 "What is it now?" he demanded. "I saw Norman 
 Gower leaving as I came up. And here you 're looking — 
 what's wrong? " 
 
 His tone was imperative. 
 
 " Notliing, Johnny." 
 
 " You don't cry for nothing. You 're not that kind," 
 
COMPLEXITY OF SIMPLE MATTERS 99 
 
 MacRae replied. "That chunky lobster hasn't given 
 you the glooms, surely?" 
 
 Dolly's eyes flashed. 
 
 " It is n't like you to call names," she declared. *' It 
 isn't nice. And — and what business of yours is it 
 whether I laugh or cry ? " 
 
 MacRae smiled. Dolly in a temper was not wholly 
 strange to him. He was struck with her remarkable 
 beauty every time he saw her. She was altogether too 
 beautiful a flower to be blushing unseen on an island in 
 the Gulf. He shook her gently. 
 
 " Because I 'm big brother. Because you and I were 
 kids together for years before we ever knew there could 
 be serpents in Eden. Because anything that hurts you 
 hurts me. I don't like anything to make you cry, mia 
 Dolores. I 'd wring Norman Gower's chubby neck with 
 great pleasure if I thought he could do that. I didn't 
 even know you knew him." 
 
 Dolly dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. 
 
 "There are lots of things you don't know, Jack 
 MacRae," she murmured. "Besides, why shouldn't I 
 know Norman ? " 
 
 MacRae threw out his hands helplessly. 
 
 "No law against it, of course," he admitted. 
 "Only — well— " 
 
 He was conscious of floundering, with her grave, 
 dark eyes searching his face. There was no reason 
 save his own hostility to anything Gower, — and Dolly 
 knew no basis for that save the fact that Horace Gower 
 had acquired his father's ranch. That could not pos- 
 sibly be a ground for Dolores Ferrara to frown on any 
 Gower, male or female, who happened to come her way. 
 
 "Why, I suppose it really is none of my business," 
 he said slowly. " Except that I can't help being con- 
 
100 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 cerned in anything that makes you unhappy. That 's 
 all.'^ 
 
 He sat down on the arm of her chair and patted 
 her cheek. To his utter amazement Dolly broke into a 
 storm of tears. Long ago he had seen Dolly cry when 
 she had hurt herself, because he had teased her, because 
 she was angry or disappointed. He had never seen any 
 woman cry as she did now. It was not just simple 
 grieved weeping. It was a tempest that shook her. 
 Her body quivered, her breath came in gasping bursts 
 between racking sobs. 
 
 MacRae gathered her into his arms, trying to dam 
 that wild flood. She put her face against him and clung 
 there, trembling like some hunted thing seeking refuge, 
 mysteriously stirring MacRae with the passionate aban- 
 don of her teajrs, filling him with vague apprehensions, 
 with a strange excitement. 
 
 Like the tornado, swift in its striking and passing, so 
 this storm passed. Dolly's, sobbing ceased. She rested 
 passively in his arms for a minute. Then she sighed, 
 brushed the cloudy hair out of her eyes, and looked up 
 at him. 
 
 " I wonder why I should go all to pieces like that so 
 suddenly.?" she muttered. "And why I should some- 
 how feel better for it ? " 
 
 " I don't know," MacRae said. " Maybe I could tell 
 you if I knew wlvif you went off like that. You poor 
 little devil. Something has stung you deep, I know." 
 
 "Yes," she admitted. "I hope nothing like it ever 
 comes to you, Jack. I'm bleeding internally. Oh, it 
 hurts, it hurts ! " 
 
 She laid her head against him and cried again 
 softly. 
 
 " Tell me," he whispered. 
 
COMPLEXITY OF SIMPLE MATTERS loi 
 
 "Why not?" She lifted her head after a little. 
 '* You could always keep things to yourself. It was n't 
 much wonder they called you Silent John. Do you know 
 I never really grasped The Ancient Mariner until now.? 
 People must tell their troubles to some one — or they'd 
 corrode inside." 
 
 "Go ahead," MacRae encouraged. 
 
 "When Norman Gower went overseas we were en- 
 gaged," she said bluntly, and stopped. She was not 
 looking at MacRae now. She stared at the opposite 
 wall, her fingers locked together in her lap. 
 
 " For four years," she went on, " I 've been hoping, 
 dreaming, waiting, loving. To-day he came home to tell 
 me that he married in England two years ago. Married 
 in the madness of a drunken hour — that is how he puts 
 it — a girl who didn't care for anything but the good 
 time his rank and pay could give her." 
 
 " I think you 're in luck," MacRae said soberly. 
 
 "What queer creatures men are!" She seemed not 
 to have heard him — to be thinking her own thoughts 
 out loud. " He says he loves me, that he has loved me 
 all the time, that he feels as if he had been walking in 
 his sleep and fallen into some muddy hole. And I be- 
 lieve him. It 's terrible, Johnny." 
 
 " It 's impossible," MacRae declared savagely. " If 
 he's got in that kind of a hole, let him stay there. 
 You 're well out of it. You ought to be glad." 
 
 " But I 'm not," she said sadly. " I 'm not made that 
 way. I can't let a thing become a vital part of my life 
 and give it up without a pang." 
 
 "I don't see what else you can do," MacRae ob- 
 served. " Only brace up and forget it." 
 
 " It is n't quite so simple as that," she sighed. " Nor- 
 man's w — this woman presently got tired of him. 
 
102 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 Evidently she had no scruples about getting what she 
 wanted, nor how. She went away with another man. 
 Norman is getting a divorce — the decree absolute will 
 be granted in March next. He wants me to marry him." 
 
 "Will you?" 
 
 Dolly looked up to meet MacRae's wondering stare. 
 She nodded. 
 
 " You 're a triple-plated fool," he said roughly. 
 
 *' I don't know," she repHed thoughtfully. " Norman 
 certainly has been. Perhaps I am too. We should get 
 on — a pair of fools together." 
 
 The bitterness in her voice stung MacRae. 
 
 " You really should have loved me," he said, " and I 
 you." 
 
 "But you don't, Jack. You have never thought of 
 that before." 
 
 " I could, quite easily." 
 
 Dolly considered this a moment. 
 
 "No," she said. "You like me. I know that,. 
 Johnny. I like you, too. You are a man, and I 'm a 
 woman. But if you weren't bursting with sympathy 
 you wouldn't have thought of that. If Norman had 
 some of your backbone — but it wouldn't make any 
 difference. If you know what it is' that draws a certain 
 man and woman together in spite of themselves, in spite 
 of things they can see in each other that they don't 
 quite like, I dare say you 'd understand. I don't think I 
 do. Norman Gower has made me dreadfully unhappy. 
 But I loved him before he went away, and I love him 
 yet. I want him just the same. And he says — he 
 says — that he never stopped caring for me — that it 
 was like a bad dream. I believe him. I'm sure of it. 
 He didn't lie to me. And I can't hate him. I can't 
 punish him without punishing myself. I don't want to 
 
COMPLEXITY OF SIMPLE MATTERS 103 
 
 punish him, any more than I would want to punish a 
 baby, if I had one, for a naughtiness it could n't help." 
 
 " So you '11 marry him eventually ? " MacRae asked. 
 
 Dolly nodded. 
 
 "If he doesn't change his mind," she murmured. 
 " Oh, I should n't say ugly things like that. It sounds 
 cheap and mean." 
 
 "But it hurts, it hurts me so to think of it," she 
 broke out passionately. " I can forgive him, because I 
 can see how it happened. Still it hurts. I feel 
 cheated — cheated ! " 
 
 She lay back in her chair, fingers locked together, 
 red lips parted over white teeth that were clenched 
 together. Her eyes glowed somberly, looking away 
 through distant spaces. 
 
 And MacRae, conscious that she had said her say, 
 feeling that she wanted to be alone, as he himself always 
 wanted to fight a grief or a hurt alone and in silence, 
 walked out into the sunshine, where the westerly droned 
 high above in the swaying fir tops. 
 
 He went up the path around the Cove's head to the 
 porch of his own house, sat down on the top step, 
 and cursed the Gowers, root and branch. He hated 
 them, everything of the name and blood, at that mo- 
 ment, with a profound and active hatred. 
 
 They were like a blight, as their lives touched the 
 lives of other people. They sat in the seats of the 
 might}'^, and for their pleasure or their whims others 
 must sweat and suffer. So it seemed to Jack MacRae. 
 
 Home, these crowded, hurrying days, was aboard 
 the Blackbird. It was pleasant now to sit on his own 
 doorstep and smell the delicate perfume of the roses 
 and the balsamy odors from the woods behind. But the 
 rooms depressed him when he went in. They were dusty 
 
104 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 and silent, abandoned to that forsaken air which rests 
 upon uninhabited dwellings. MacRae went out again, 
 to stride aimlessly along the cliffs past the mouth of 
 the Cove. 
 
 Beyond the lee of the island the westerly still lashed 
 the Gulf. The white horses galloped on a gray-green 
 field. MacRae found a grassy place in the shade of an 
 arbutus, and lay down to rest and watch. Sunset would 
 bring calm, a dying wind, new colors to sea and sky 
 and mountains. It would send him away on the long 
 run to Crow Harbor, driving through the night under 
 the cool stars. 
 
 No matter what happened people must be fed. Food 
 was vital. Men lost their lives at the fishing, but it went 
 on. Hearts might be torn, but hands still plied the 
 gear. Life had a bad taste in Jack MacRae's mouth 
 as he lay there under the red-barked tree. He was 
 moody. It seemed a struggle without mercy or justice, 
 almost without reason, a blind obedience to the will-to- 
 live. A tooth-and-toenail contest. He surveyed his 
 own part in it with cynical detachment. So long as 
 salmon ran in the sea they would be taken for profit 
 in the markets and the feeding of the hungry. And the 
 salmon would run and men would pursue them, and the 
 game would be played without slackening for such 
 things as broken faith or aching hearts or a woman's 
 tears. 
 
 MacRae grew drowsy puzzling over things like that. 
 Life was a jumble beyond his understanding, he con- 
 cluded at last. Men strove to a godlike mastery of 
 circumstances, — and achieved three meals a day and 
 a squalid place to sleep. Sometimes, when they were 
 pluming themselves on having beaten the game. Destiny 
 was laughing in her sleeve and spreading a snare for 
 
COMPLEXITY OF SIMPLE MATTERS 105 
 
 their feet. A man never knew what was coming next. 
 It was just a damned scramble! A disorderly scramble 
 in which a man could be sure of getting hurt. 
 He wondered if that were really true. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 Thrust and Counterthrust 
 
 By the time Jack MacRae was writing August on his 
 sales slips he was conscious of an important fact; 
 namely, that nearly a hundred gas-boat fishermen, troll- 
 ing Squitty Island, the Ballenas, Gray Rock, even 
 farther afield to Yellow Rock Light and Lambert Chan- 
 nel, were compactly behind him. They were still close 
 to a period when they had been remorselessly exploited. 
 They were all for MacRae. Prices being equal, they 
 preferred that he should have their fish. It was still 
 vivid in their astonished minds that he had shared 
 profits with them without compulsion, that he had 
 boosted prices without competition, had put a great 
 many dollars in their pockets. Only those who earn a 
 living as precariously, as riskily and with as much 
 patient labor as a salmon fisherman, can so well value 
 a dollar. They had an abiding confidence, by this time, 
 in Jack MacRae. They knew he was square, and they 
 said so. In the territory his two carriers covered, 
 MacRae was becoming the uncrowned salmon king. 
 Other buyers cut in from time to time. They did not 
 fare well. The troUers would hold their salmon, even 
 when some sporting independent offered to shade the 
 current price. They would shake their heads if they 
 knew either of the Bird boats would be there to take 
 the fish. For when MacRae said he would be there, he 
 was always there. In the old days they had been com- 
 
THRUST AND COUNTERTHRUST 107 
 
 pelled to play one buyer against another. They did 
 not have to do that with MacRae. 
 
 The Folly Ba}^ collectors fared little better than 
 outside buyers. In July Gower met MacRae's price by 
 two successive raises. He stopped at that. MacRae 
 did not. Each succeeding run of salmon averaged 
 greater poundage. They were worth more. MacRae 
 paid fifty, fifty-five cents. When Gower stood pat at 
 fifty-five, MacRae gave up a fourth of his' contract per- 
 centage and paid sixty. It was like draw poker with 
 the advantage of the last raise on his side. 
 
 The salmon were worth the price. They were worth 
 double to a cannery that lay mostly idle for lack of 
 fish. The salmon, now, were running close to six pounds 
 each. The finished product was eighteen dollars a 
 case in the market. There are forty-eight one-pound 
 cans in a case. To a man familiar with packing costs 
 it is a simple sum. MacRae often wondered why Gower 
 stubbornly refused to pay more, when his collecting 
 boats came back to the cannery so often with a few 
 scattered salmon in their holds. They were primitive 
 folk, these salmon trollers. They jeered the unlucky 
 collectors. Gower was losing his fisheirmen as well as 
 his fish. For the time, at least, the back of his long- 
 held monopoly was broken. 
 
 MacRae got a little further light on this attitude 
 from Stubby Abbott. 
 
 "He's figuring on making out a season's pack with 
 cohoes, humps, and dog salmon," Stubby told MacRae 
 at the Crow Harbor cannery. "He expects to work 
 his purse seiners overtime, and to hell with the indi- 
 vidual fisherman. Norman was telling me. Old Horace 
 has put Norman in charge at Folly Bay, you know." 
 
 MacRae nodded. He knew about that. 
 
io8 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 "The old boy is sore as a boil at you 
 Stubby chuckled. "I don't blame him much. He has 
 had a cinch there so long he thinks it's his private 
 pond. You 've certainly put a crimp in the Folly Bay 
 blueback pack — to my great benefit. I don't suppose 
 any one but you could have done it either.'* 
 
 " Any one could," MacRae declared, " if he knew the 
 waters, the men, and was wise enough to play the game 
 square. The trouble has been that each buyer wanted 
 to make a clean-up on each trip. He wanted easy 
 money. The salmon fisherman away up the coast 
 practically has to take what is offered him day by day, 
 or throw his fish overboard. Canneries and buyers 
 alike have systematically given him the worst of the 
 deal. You don't cut your cannery hands' pay because 
 on certain days your pack falls off." 
 
 « Hardly." 
 
 " But canneries and collectors and every independent 
 buyer have always used any old pretext to cut the price 
 to the fisherman out on the grounds. And while a fish- 
 erman has to take what he is offered he does n't have to 
 keep on taking it. He can quit, and try something else. 
 Lots of them have done that. That 's why there are 
 three Japanese to every white salmon fisherman on the 
 British Columbia coast. That is why we have an 
 Oriental problem. The Japs are making the canneries 
 squeal, are n't they ? " 
 
 "Rather." Stubby smiled. "They are getting to 
 be a bit of a problem." 
 
 "The packers got them in here as cheap labor in 
 the salmon fishing," MacRae went on. "The white 
 fisherman was too independent. He wanted all he could 
 get out of his work. He was a kicker, as well as a good 
 fisherman. The packers thought they could keep wages 
 
THRUST AND COUNTERTHRUST 109 
 
 down and profits up by importing the Jap — cheap 
 labor with a low standard of living. And the Jap has 
 turned the tables on the big fellows. They hang to- 
 gether, as aliens always do in a strange country, and 
 the war has helped them freeze the white fisherman out 
 on one hand and exact more and more from the canner- 
 ies on the other. And that would never have happened 
 if this had been kept a white man's country, and the 
 white fisherman had got a square deal." 
 
 '* To buy as cheaply as you can and sell for as much 
 as you can," Stubby reminded him, " is a fundamental 
 of business. You can't get away from it. My father 
 abandoned that maxim the last two years of his life, and 
 it nearly broke us. He was a public-spirited man. 
 He took war and war-time conditions to heart. In a 
 period of jumping food costs he tried to give people 
 cheaper food. As I said, he nearly went broke trying 
 to do a public service, because no one else in the same 
 business departed from the business rule of making 
 all they could. In fact, men in the same business, 
 I have since learned, were the first to sharpen their 
 knives for him. He was establishing a bad precedent. 
 I don't know but their attitude is sound, after all. In 
 sheer self-defense a man must make all he can when he 
 has a chance. You cannot indulge in philanthropy in 
 a business undertaking these days. Silent John." 
 
 "Granted," MacRae made answer. "I don't pro- 
 pose to be a philanthropist myself. But you will get 
 farther with a salmon fisherman, or any other man 
 whose labor you must depend on, if you accept the 
 principle that he is entitled to make a dollar as well as 
 yourself, if you don't stretch every point to take ad- 
 vantage of his necessity. These fellows who fish around 
 Squitty have been gouged and cheated a lot. They 
 
no POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 aren't fools. They know pretty well who makes the 
 long profit, who pile up moderate fortunes while they 
 get only a living, and not a particularly good living at 
 that." 
 
 " Are you turning Bolshevik? " Stubby inquired with 
 mock solicitude. 
 
 MacRae smiled. 
 
 "Hardly. Nor are the fishermen. They know I'm 
 making money. But they know also that they are get- 
 ting more out of it than they ever got before, and that 
 if I were not on the job they would get a lot less." 
 
 "They certainly would," Abbott drawled. "You 
 have been, and are now, paying more for blueback sal- 
 mon than any buyer on the Gulf." 
 
 "Well, it has paid me. And it has been highly 
 profitable to you, has n't it? " MacRae said. " You've 
 had a hundred thousand salmon to pack which you 
 would not otherwise have had." 
 
 " Certainly," Stubby agreed. " I 'm not questioning 
 your logic. In this case it has paid us both, and the 
 fisherman as well. But suppose everybody did it?" 
 
 "If you can pay sixty cents a fish, and fifteen per 
 cent, on top of that and pack profitably, why can't 
 other canneries ? Why can't Folly Bay meet that com- 
 petition? Rather, why won't they?" 
 
 "Matter of policy, maybe," Stubby hazarded. 
 "Matter of keeping costs down. Apart from a few little 
 fresh-fish buyers, you are the only operator on the 
 Gulf who is cutting any particular ice. Gower may 
 figure that he will eventually get these fish at his own 
 price. If I were eliminated, he would." 
 
 "I'd still be on the job," MacRae ventured. 
 
 "Would you, though? " Stubby asked doubtfully. 
 
 " Yes." MacRae made his reply positive in tone. 
 
THRUST AND COUNTERTHRUST in 
 
 "You could buy all right. That Squitty Island 
 bunch of trollers seem convinced you are the whole 
 noise in the salmon line. But without Crow Harbor 
 where could you unload such quantities of fish.? " 
 
 It struck MacRae that there was something more 
 than mere casual speculation in Stubby's words. But 
 he did not attempt to delve into motives. 
 
 " A good general," he said with a dry smile, "does n't 
 advertise his plan of campaign in advance. Without 
 Crow Harbor as a market I could not have done what 
 I have done this season. But Crow Harbor could shut 
 down to-morrow — and I'd go on just the same." 
 
 Stubby poked thoughtfully with a pencil at the blot- 
 ter on his desk. 
 
 " Well, Jack, I may as well be quite frank with you," 
 he said at last. " I have had hints that may mean some- 
 thing. The big run will be over at Squitty in another 
 month. I don't believe I can be dictated to on short 
 notice. But I cannot positively say. If you can see 
 your way to carry on, it will be quite a relief to me. 
 Another season it may be different." 
 
 "I think I can." 
 
 But though MacRae said this confidently, he was 
 privately not so sure. From the very beginning he 
 had expected pressure to come on Stubby, as the active 
 head of Crow Harbor. It was as Stubby said. Unless 
 he — MacRae — had a market for his fish, he could not 
 buy. And within the limits of British Columbia the 
 salmon market was subject to control; by just what 
 means MacRae had got inklings here and there. He 
 had not been deceived by the smoothness of his opera- 
 tions so far. Below the clear horizon there was a storm 
 gathering. A man like Gower did not lie down and 
 submit passively to being beaten at his own game. 
 
112 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 But MacRae believed he had gone too far to be 
 stopped now, even if his tactics did not please the can- 
 nery interests. They could have squelched him easily 
 enough in the beginning, when he had no funds to speak 
 of, when his capital was mostly a capacity for hard, 
 dirty work and a willingness to take chances. Already 
 he had run his original shoestring to fifteen thousand 
 dollars cash in hand. It scarcely seemed possible. It 
 gave him a startling vision of the profits in the salmon 
 industry, and it was not a tenable theory that men who 
 had controlled such a source of profits would sit idle 
 while he undermined their monopoly. Nevertheless he 
 had made that much money in four months. He had at 
 his back a hundred fishermen who knew him, liked him, 
 trusted him, who were anxious that he should prosper, 
 because they felt that they were sharing in that pros- 
 perity. Ninety per cent, of these men had a grievance 
 against the canneries. And he had the good will of 
 these men with sun-browned faces and hook-scarred 
 hands. The human equation in industrial processes is 
 a highly important one, as older, wiser men than Jack 
 MacRae had been a longer time discovering. 
 
 He did not try to pin Stubby to a more definite state- 
 ment. A hint was enough for MacRae. Stubby Abbott 
 could also be depended upon to see things beyond the 
 horizon. If a storm broke Stubby was the most vul- 
 nerable, because in a sense he was involved with the 
 cannery interests in general, and they would consider 
 him an apostate and knife him without mercy, — if 
 they could. If the Abbott estate had debts, obliga- 
 tions which could be manipulated, if through the finan- 
 cial convolutions of marketing the Crow Harbor pack 
 Stubby could be reached, the Abbott family had prop- 
 erty, a standard of living that stood for comfort, ap- 
 
THRUST AND COUNTERTHRUST 113 
 
 pearance, luxury almost. There are always plenty of 
 roads open to a flank attack on people like that; many 
 levers, financial and otherwise, can be pulled for or 
 against them. 
 
 So MacRae, knowing that Stubby must protect him- 
 self in a showdown, set about fortifying his own ap- 
 proaches. 
 
 For a first move he hired an engineer, put Steve 
 Ferrara in charge of the Blackbird, and started him 
 back to Squitty. Then MacRae took the next train to 
 Bellingham, a cannery town which looks out on the 
 southern end of the Gulf of Georgia from the American 
 side of the boundary. He extended his journey to 
 Seattle. Altogether, he was gone three days. 
 
 When he came back he made a series of calls, — at 
 the Vancouver offices of three different canneries and 
 one of the biggest cold-storage concerns on the Pacific 
 Coast. He got a courteous but unsatisfactory recep- 
 tion from the cannery men. He fared a little better 
 with the manager of the cold-storage plant. This gen- 
 tleman was tentatively agreeable in the matter of pur- 
 chasing salmon, but rather vague in the way of terms. 
 
 "Beginning with May next I can deliver any quan- 
 tity up to two thousand a day, perhaps more, for a 
 period of about four months," MacRae stated. " What 
 I should like to know is the percentage over the up-coast 
 price you would pay." 
 
 But he could not pin the man down to anything 
 definite. He would only speak pleasantly of the market 
 and possible arrangements, utter vague commonplaces 
 in business terminology. MacRae rose. 
 
 "I'm wasting your time and my own," he said. 
 " You don't want my fish. Why not say so? " 
 
 "We always want fish," the man declared, bending 
 
114 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 a shrewdly appraising eye on MacRae. " Bring in the 
 salmon and we will do business." 
 
 "On your own terms when my carriers are tied to 
 your dock with a capacity load which I must sell or 
 throw overboard within forty-eight hours," MacRae 
 smiled. " No, I don't intend to go up against any take- 
 it-or-leave proposition like that. I don't have to." 
 
 "Well, we might allow you five per cent. That's 
 about the usual thing on salmon. And we would rather 
 have salmon now than a promise of them next season." 
 
 " Oh, rats ! " MacRae snorted. " I 'm in the business 
 to make money — not simply to create dividends for 
 your Eastern stockholders while I eke out a living and 
 take all the risks. Come again." 
 
 The cold storage man smiled. 
 
 " Come and see me in the spring. Meantime, when 
 you have a cargo of salmon, you might run them in to 
 us. We '11 pay market prices. It 's up to you to pro- 
 tect yourself in the buying." 
 
 MacRae went on about his business. He had not ex- 
 pected much encouragement locally, so he did not suffer 
 disappointment. He knew quite well "what he could 
 expect in Vancouver if Crow Harbor canceled his con- 
 tract. He would bring in boatloads of salmon, and the 
 dealers would squeeze him, all but the Terminal Fish 
 Company. And if the market could be controlled, if 
 the men behind could dictate the Crow Harbor policy, 
 they might also bring the Terminal into line. Even 
 if they did not the Terminal could only handle a minor 
 portion of the salmon he could get while the big run 
 swirled around Squitty Island. 
 
 But MacRae was not downcast. He was only sober 
 and thoughtful, which had become characteristic of him 
 in the last four months. He was forgetting how to 
 
THRUST AND COUNTERTHRUST 115 
 
 laugh, to be buoyant, to see the world through the rose- 
 colored glasses of sanguine youth. He was becoming a 
 living exampler of his nickname. Even Stubby Abbott 
 marked this when Jack came back from Bellingham. 
 
 " Come on out to the house," Stubby urged. " Your 
 men can handle the job a day or two longer. Forget 
 the grind for once. It 's getting you." 
 
 " No, I don't think it is," MacRae denied. " But a 
 man can't play and produce at the same time. I have 
 to keep going." 
 
 He did go out to Abbott's one evening, however, 
 and suffered a good deal of teasing from Nelly over his 
 manhandling of Sam Kaye. A lot of other young people 
 happened to foregather there. They sang and flirted 
 and presently moved the rugs off the living-room floor 
 and danced to a phonograph. MacRae found himself 
 a little out of it, by inclination. He was tired, without 
 knowing quite what was the matter with him. A man, 
 even a young and sturdy man, cannot work like a horse 
 for months on end, eating his meals anyhow and sleep- 
 ing when he can, without losing temporarily the zest for 
 careless fun. For another thing, he found himself 
 looking at these immaculate young people as any hard- 
 driven worker must perforce look upon drones. 
 
 They were sons and daughters of the well-to-do, 
 divorced from all uncouthness, with pretty manners and 
 good clothes. They seemed serene in the assurance — 
 MacRae got this impression for the first time in his 
 social contact with them — that wearing good clothes, 
 behaving well, giving themselves whole-heartedly to 
 having a good time, was the most important and sat- 
 isfying thing in the world. They moved in an atmos- 
 phere of considering these things their due, a birthright, 
 their natural and proper condition of well-being. 
 
ii6 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 And MacRae found himself wondering what they 
 gave or ever expected to give in return for this pleasant 
 security of mind and body. Some one had to pay for it, 
 the silks and georgettes and white flannels, furs and 
 strings of pearls and gold trinkets, the good food, the 
 motor cars, and the fun. 
 
 He knew a little about every one he met that evening, 
 for in Vancouver as in any other community which has 
 developed a social life beyond the purely primitive 
 stages of association, people gravitate into sets and 
 cliques. They lived in good homes, they had servants, 
 they week-ended here and there. Of the dozen or more 
 young men and women present, only himself and Stubby 
 Abbott made any pretense at work. 
 
 Yet somebody paid for all they had and did. Men 
 in offices, in shops, in fishing boats and mines and log- 
 ging camps worked and sweated to pay for all this well- 
 being in which they could have no part. MacRae even 
 suspected that a great many men had died across the 
 sea that this sort of thing should remain the inviolate 
 privilege of just such people as these. It was not an 
 inspiring conclusion. 
 
 He smiled to himself. How they would stare if he 
 should voice these stray thoughts in plain English. 
 They would cry out that he was a Bolshevik. Abso- 
 lutely ! He wondered why he should think such things. 
 He wasn't disgruntled. He wanted a great many 
 things which these young people of his own age had got- 
 ten from fairy godmothers, — in the shape of pioneer 
 parents who had skimmed the cream off the resources 
 of a developing frontier and handed it on to their chil- 
 dren, and who themselves so frequently kept in the 
 background, a little in awe of their gilded offspring. 
 MacRae meant to beat the game as it was being played. 
 
THRUST AND COUNTERTHRUST 117 
 
 He felt that he was beating it. But nothing would be 
 handed him on a silver salver. Fortune would not be 
 bestowed upon him in any easy, soft-handed fashion. 
 He would have to render an equivalent for what he got. 
 He wondered if the security of success so gained would 
 have any greater value for him than it would have for 
 those who took their blessings so lightly. 
 
 This kink of analytical reasoning was new to Mac- 
 Rae, and it kept him from entering whole-heartedly 
 into the joyous frivolity which functioned in the Abbott 
 home that evening. He had never found himself in that 
 critical mood before. He did not want to prattle non- 
 sense. He did not want to think, and he could not help 
 thinking. He had a curious sense of detachment from 
 what was going on, even while he was a part of it. So 
 he did not linger late. 
 
 The Blackbird had discharged at Crow Harbor late 
 in the afternoon. She lay now at a Vancouver slip. By 
 eleven o'clock he was aboard in his bunk, still thinking 
 when he should have been asleep, staring wide-eyed at 
 dim deck beams, his mind flitting restlessly from one 
 thing to another. Steve Ferrara lay in the opposite 
 bunk, wheezing his breath in and out of lungs seared by 
 poison gas in Flanders. Smells of seaweed and tide- 
 flat wafted in through open hatch and portholes. A full 
 moon thrust silver fingers through deck openings. 
 Gradually the softened medley of harbor noises lulled 
 MacRae into a dreamless sleep. He only wakened at 
 the clank of the engine and the shudder of the Black- 
 bird's timbers as Steve backed her out of her berth in 
 the first faint gleam of dawn. 
 
 The Blackbird made her trip and a second and a 
 third, which brought the date late in August. On his 
 delivery, when the salmon in her hold had been pica- 
 
ii8 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 rooned to the cannery floor, MacRae went up to the 
 office. Stubby had sent for him. He looked uncom- 
 fortable when Jack came in. 
 
 "What's on your mind now?" MacRae asked 
 genially. 
 
 " Something damned unpleasant," Stubby growled. 
 
 " Shoot," MacRae said. He sat down and lit a 
 cigarette. 
 
 " I did n't think they could do it," Abbott said slowly. 
 " But it seems they can. I guess you '11 have to lay off 
 the Gower territory after all. Jack." 
 
 " You mean you will," MacRae replied. " I 've been 
 rather expecting that. Can Gower hurt you.'"' 
 
 " Not personally. But the banks — export control — 
 there are so many angles to the cannery situation. 
 There 's nothing openly threatened. But it has been 
 made perfectly clear to me that I '11 be hampered and 
 harassed till I won't know whether I'm afoot or on 
 horseback, if I go on paying a few cents more for sal- 
 mon in order to keep my plant working efficiently. 
 Damn it, I hate it. But I 'm in no position to clash with 
 the rest of the cannery crowd and the banks too. I hate 
 to let you down. You 've pulled me out of a hole. I 
 don't know a man who would have worked at your pitch 
 and carried things off the way you have. If I had this 
 pack marketed, I could snap my fingers at them. But I 
 haven't. There's the rub. I hate to ditch you in 
 order to insure myself — get in line at somebody else's 
 dictation." 
 
 " Don't worry about me," MacRae said gently. " I 
 have no cannery and no pack to market through the 
 regular channels. Nor has the bank advanced me any 
 funds. You are not responsible for what I do. And 
 neither Gower nor the Packers' Association nor the 
 
THRUST AND COUNTERTHRUST 119 
 
 banks can stop me from buying salmon so long as I 
 have the money to pay the fishermen and carriers to 
 haul them, can they?'' 
 
 " No, but the devil of it is they can stop you selling, ^^ 
 Stubby lamented bitterly. " I tell you there is n't a 
 cannery on the Gulf will pay you a cent more than 
 they pay the fishermen. What's the use of buying if 
 you can't sell? " 
 
 MacRae did not attempt to answer that. 
 
 "Let's sum it up," he said. "You can't take any 
 more bluebacks from Gower's territory. That, I gather, 
 is the chief object. I suppose they know as much about 
 your business as you know yourself. Am I to be de- 
 prived of the two boat charters into the bargain? " 
 
 "No, by the Lord," Stubby swore. "Not if you 
 want them. My general policy may be subject to dic- 
 tation, but not the petty details of my business. There 's 
 a limit. I won't stand for that." 
 
 "Put a fair price on the Birds, and I'll buy 'em 
 both," MacRae suggested. "You had them up for 
 sale, anyway. That will let you out, so far as my 
 equipment is concerned." 
 
 "Five thousand each," Stubby said promptly. 
 " They 're good value at that. And I can use ten thou- 
 sand dollars to advantage, right now." 
 
 " I '11 give you a check. I want the registry trans- 
 ferred to me at once," MacRae continued. "That 
 done, you can cease worrying over me. Stub. You 've 
 been square, and I 've made money on the deal. You 
 would be foolish to fight unless you have a fighting 
 chance. Oh, another thing. Will the Terminal shut off 
 on me, too?" 
 
 " No," Stubby declared. " The Terminal is one of the 
 weapons I intend ultimately to use as a club on the heads 
 
120 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 of this group of gentlemen who want to make a close cor- 
 poration of the salmon industry on the British Columbia 
 coast. If I get by this season, I shall be in shape to 
 show them something. They will not bother about the 
 Terminal, because the Terminal is small. All the sal- 
 mon they could take from you wouldn't hurt Gower. 
 What they want is to enable Gower to get up his usual 
 fall pack. It has taken him this long to get things 
 shaped so he could call me off. He can't reach a local 
 concern like the Terminal. No, the Terminal will con- 
 tinue to buy salmon from you. Jack. But you know 
 they haven't the facilities to handle a fourth of the 
 salmon you have been running lately." 
 
 " I '11 see they get whatever they can use," MacRae 
 declared. " And if it is any satisfaction to you person- 
 ally. Stub, I can assure you that I shall continue to do 
 business as usual." 
 
 Stubby looked curious. 
 
 ''You've got something up your sleeve?" 
 
 " Yes," MacRae admitted. " No stuffed club, either. 
 It 's loaded. You wait and keep your ears open." 
 
 MacRae's face twisted into a mirthless smile. His 
 eyes glowed with the fire that always blazed up in them 
 when he thought too intensely of Horace Gower and 
 the past, or of Gower's various shifts to defeat him in 
 what he undertook. He had anticipated this move. He 
 was angrily determined that Gower should not get one 
 more salmon, or buy what he got a cent cheaper, by 
 this latest strategy. 
 
 "You appear to like old Horace," Stubby said 
 thoughtfully, "about as much as our fellows used to 
 like Fritz when he dropped high explosives on suppos- 
 edly bomb-proof shelters." 
 
 " Just about as much," MacRae said shortly. " Well, 
 
THRUST AND COUNTERTHRUST 121 
 
 you'll transfer that registry — when? I want to get 
 back to Squitty as soon as possible." 
 
 " I '11 go to town with you now, if you like," Stubby 
 offered. 
 
 They acted on that. Within two hours MacRae was 
 the owner of two motor launches under British registry. 
 Payment in full left him roughly with five thousand 
 doUars working capital, enough by only a narrow mar- 
 gin. At sunset Vancouver was a smoky smudge on a far 
 horizon. At dusk he passed in the narrow mouth of 
 Squitty Cove. The Bluebird was swinging about to go 
 when her sister ship ranged alongside. Vincent Ferrara 
 dropped his hook again. There were forty trollers in 
 the Cove. MacRae called to them. They came in skiffs 
 and dinghy s, and when they were all about his stern 
 and some perched in sea boots along the Blackbird's low 
 bulwarks, MacRae said what he had to say. 
 
 "Gower has come alive. My market for fish bought 
 in Gower's territory is closed, so far as Crow Harbor 
 is concerned. If I can't sell salmon I can't buy them 
 from you. How much do you think Folly Bay will pay 
 for your fish ? " 
 
 He waited a minute. The fishermen looked at him in 
 the yellow lantern light, at each other. They shifted 
 uneasily. No one answered his question. 
 
 MacRae went on. 
 
 "You can guess what will happen. You will be 
 losers. So will I. I don't like the idea of being frozen 
 out of the salmon-buying business, now that I have got 
 my hand in. I don't intend to be. As long as I can 
 handle a load of salmon I '11 make the run. But I 've 
 got to run them farther, and you fellows will have to 
 wait a bit for me now and then, perhaps. The cannery 
 men hang together. They are making it bad for me 
 
122 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 because I 'm paying a few cents more for salmon. They 
 have choked off Crow Harbor. Gower is hungry for 
 cheap salmon, ^e '11 get them, too, if you let him head 
 off outside buyers. Since I 'm the only buyer covering 
 these grounds, it's up to you, more than ever, to see 
 that I keep coming. That's all. Tell the rest of the 
 fishermen what I say whenever you happen to run 
 across them." 
 
 They became articulate. They plied MacRae with 
 questions. He answered tersely, as truthfully as he 
 could. They cursed Folly Bay and the canneries in 
 general. But they were not downcast. They did not 
 seem apprehensive that Folly Bay would get salmon for 
 forty cents. MacRae had said he would still buy. For 
 them that settled it. They would not have to sell their 
 catch to Folly Bay for whatever price Gower cared to 
 set. Presently they began to drift away to their boats, 
 to bed, for their work began in that gray hour between 
 dawn and sunrise when the schooling salmon best strike 
 the trolling spoon. 
 
 One lingered, a returned soldier named Mullen, who 
 had got his discharge in May and gone fishing. Mullen 
 had seen two years in the trenches. He sat in his skiff, 
 scowling up at MacRae, talking about the salmon 
 packers, about fishing. 
 
 "Aw, it's the same everywhere," he said cynically. 
 " They all want a cinch, easy money, big money. Looks 
 like the more you have, the more you can grab. Folly 
 Bay made barrels of coin while the war was on. Why 
 can't they give us fellers a show to make a little now.? 
 But they don't give a damn, so long as they get theirs. 
 And then they wonder why some of us guys that went 
 to France holler about the way we find things when we 
 come home." 
 
THRUST AND COUNTERTHRUST 123 
 
 He pushed his skiff away into the gloom that rested 
 upon the Cove. 
 
 The Bluebird was packed with salmon to her hatch 
 covers. There had been a fresh run. The trollers were 
 averaging fifty fish to a man daily. MacRae put Vin- 
 cent Ferrara aboard the Blackbird, himself took over 
 the loaded vessel, and within the hour was clear of 
 Squitty's dusky headlands, pointing a course straight 
 down the middle of the Gulf. His man turned in to 
 sleep. MacRae stood watch alone, listening to the 
 ksi-chooff lia-choof of the exhaust, the murmuring swash 
 of calm water cleft by the Bluebird's stem. Away to 
 starboard the Ballenas light winked and blinked its 
 flaming eye to seafaring men as it had done in his 
 father's time. Miles to port the Sand Heads lightship 
 swung to its great hawsers off the Fraser River shoals. 
 
 MacRae smiled contentedly. There was a long run 
 ahead. But he felt that he had beaten Gower in this 
 first definite brush. Moving in devious channels to a 
 given end Gower had closed the natural markets to 
 MacRae. 
 
 But there was no law against the export of raw sal- 
 mon to a foreign country. MacRae could afford to 
 smile. Over in Bellingham there were salmon packers 
 who, like Folly Bay, were hungry for fish to feed their 
 great machines. But — unlike Folly Bay — they were 
 willing to pay the price, any price in reason, for a sup- 
 ply of salmon. Their own carriers later in the season 
 would invade Canadian waters, so many thorns in the 
 ample sides of the British Columbia packers. "The 
 damned Americans ! " they sometimes growled, and 
 talked about legislation to keep American fish buyers 
 out. Because the American buyer and canner alike 
 would spend a dollar to make a dollar. And the British 
 
124 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 Columbia packers wanted a cinch, a monopoly, which 
 in a measure they had. They were an anachronism, 
 MacRae felt. They regarded the salmon and the sal- 
 mon waters of the British Columbia coast as the feudal 
 barons of old jealously regarded their special preroga- 
 tives. MacRae could see them growling and grumb- 
 ling, he could see most clearly the scowl that would 
 spread over the face of Mr. Horace A» Gower, when 
 he learned that ten to twenty thousand Squitty Island 
 salmon were passing down the Gulf each week to an 
 American cannery ; that a smooth-faced boy out of the 
 Air Service was putting a crimp in the ancient order 
 of things so far as one particular cannery was con- 
 cerned. 
 
 This notion amused MacRae, served to while away 
 the hours of monotonous plowing over an unruffled sea, 
 until he drove down abreast the Fraser River's mouth 
 and passed in among the nets and lights of the sockeye 
 iQeet drifting, a thousand strong, on the broad bosom 
 of the Gulf. Then he had to stand up to his steering 
 wheel and keep a sharp lookout, lest he foul his pro- 
 pellor in a net or cut down some careless fisherman who 
 did not show a riding light. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 PE111I4 OF THE Sea 
 
 The last of August set the Red Flower of the Jungle 
 books blooming along the British Columbia coast. The 
 seeds of it were scattered on hot, dry, still days by pipe 
 and cigarette, by sparks from donkey engines, by un- 
 tended camp fires, wherever the careless white man went 
 in the great coastwise forests. The woods were like a 
 tinder box. One unguarded moment, and the ancient 
 firs were wrapped in sheets of flame. Smoke lay on the 
 Gulf like a pall of pungent fog, through which vessels 
 ran by chart and compass, blind between ports, at im- 
 minent risk of collision. 
 
 Through this, well on into September, MacRae and 
 Vincent Ferrara gathered cargoes of salmon and ran 
 them down the Gulf to Bellingham, making their trips 
 with the regularity of the tides, despite the murk that 
 hid landmarks by day and obscured the guiding light- 
 house flashes when dark closed in. They took their 
 chances in the path of coastwise traffic, straining 
 their eyes for vessels to leap suddenly out of the thick- 
 ness that shut them in, their ears for fog signals that 
 blared warning. There were close shaves, but they 
 escaped disaster. They got the salmon and they de- 
 livered them, and Folly Bay still ran a bad second 
 wherever the Bird boats served the trolling fleet. Even 
 when Gower at last met MacRae's price, his collectors 
 got few fish. The fishermen took no chances. They 
 
126 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 were convinced that if MacRae abandoned buying for 
 lack of salmon Folly Bay would cut the price in two. 
 It had been done before. So they held their fish for the 
 Bird boats. MacRae got them all. Even when Ameri- 
 can buyers trailed MacRae to the source of his supply 
 their competition hurt Gower instead of MacRae. 
 The tr oilers supplied MacRae with all the salmon he 
 could carry. It was still fresh in their minds that he 
 had come into the field that season as their special 
 Providence. 
 
 But the blueback run tapered off at Squitty. Sep- 
 tember ushered in the annual coho run on its way to 
 the spawning grounds. And the coho did not school 
 along island shores, feeding upon tiny herring. Stray 
 squadrons of coho might pass Squitty, but they did 
 not linger in thousands as the blueback did. The coho 
 swept into the Gulf from mysterious haunts in blue 
 water far offshore, myriads of silver fish seeking the 
 streams where they were spawned, and to which as 
 mature fish they now returned to reproduce themselves. 
 They came in great schools. They would loaf awhile 
 in some bay at a stream mouth, until some irresistible 
 urge drove them into fresh water, up rivers and creeks, 
 over shoal and rapid, through pool and canyon, until 
 the stream ran out to a whimpering trickle and the 
 backs of the salmon stuck out of the water. Up there, 
 in the shadow of great mountains, in the hidden 
 places of the Coast range, those that escaped their 
 natural enemies would spawn and die. 
 
 While the coho and the humpback, which came about 
 the same time, and the dog salmon, which comes last of 
 all — but each to function in the same manner and 
 sequence — laid in the salt-water bays, resting, it 
 would seem, before the last and most terrible struggle 
 
PERIL OF THE SEA 127 
 
 of their brief existence, the gill-net fishermen and the 
 cannery purse-seine boats took toll of them. The troll- 
 ers harried them from the moment they showed in the 
 Gulf, because the coho will strike at a glittering spoon 
 anywhere in salt water. But the net boats take them in 
 hundreds at one drift, and the purse seiners gather 
 thousands at a time in a single sweep of the great bag- 
 like seine. 
 
 When September days brought the cohoes in full force 
 along with cooler nights and a great burst of rain 
 that drowned the forest fires and cleared away the en- 
 shrouding smoke, leaving only the pleasant haze of 
 autumn, the Folly Bay purse-seine boats went out to 
 work. The trolling fleet scattered from Squitty Island. 
 Some steamed north to the troubled waters of Salmon 
 River and Blackfish Sound, some to the Redondas where 
 spring salmon could be taken. Many put by their 
 trolling gear and hung their gill nets. A few gas boats 
 and a few rowboat men held to the Island, depending 
 upon stray schools and the spring salmon that haunted 
 certain reefs and points and beds of kelp. But the main 
 fleet scattered over two hundred miles of sea. 
 
 MacRae could have called it a season and quit with 
 honor and much profit. Or he might have gone north 
 and bought salmon here and there, free-lancing. He 
 did neither. There were enough gill-netters operating 
 on Gower's territory to give him fair cargoes. Every 
 salmon he could divert from the cans at Folly Bay 
 meant, — well, he did not often stop to ask precisely 
 what that did mean to him. But he never passed Poor 
 Man's Rock, bleak and brown at low tide, or with seas 
 hissing over it when the tide was at flood, without 
 thinking of his father, of the days and months and years 
 old Donald MacRae had lived and worked in sight of 
 
128 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 the Rock, — a life at the last lonely and cheerless and 
 embittered by the sight of his ancient enemy preening 
 his feathers in Cradle Bay. Old Donald had lived for 
 thirty years unable to return a blow which had scarred 
 his face and his heart in the same instant. But his son 
 felt that he was making better headway. It is unlikely 
 that Donald MacRae ever looked at Gower's cottage 
 nestling like a snowflake in the green lee of Point Old, 
 or cast his eyes over that lost estate of his, with more 
 unchristian feelings than did his son. In Jack Mac- 
 Rae's mind the Golden Rule did not apply to Horace 
 Gower, nor to aught in which Gower was concerned. 
 
 So he stayed on Folly Bay territory with a dual pur- 
 pose : to make money for himself, and to deprive Gower 
 of profit where he could. He was wise enough to know 
 that was the only way he could hurt a man like 
 Gower. And he wanted to hurt Gower. The intensity 
 of that desire grew. It was a point of honor, the old 
 inborn clan pride that never compromised an injury or 
 an insult or an injustice, which neither forgave nor 
 forgot. 
 
 For weeks MacRae in the Blackbird and Vin Ferrara 
 in her sister ship flitted here and there. The purse 
 seiners hunted the schooling salmon, the cohoes and 
 humps. The gill-netters hung on the seiner's heels, be- 
 cause where the purse seine could get a haul so could 
 they. And the carriers and buyers sought the fisher- 
 men wherever they went, to buy and carry away their 
 catch. 
 
 Folly Bay suffered bad luck from the beginning. 
 Gower had four purse-seine boats in commission. Within 
 a week one broke a crankshaft in half a gale off Sangster 
 Island. The wind put her ashore under the nose of 
 the sandstone Elephant and the seas destroyed her. 
 
PERIL OF THE SEA 129 
 
 Fire gutted a second not long after, so that for weeks 
 she was laid up for repairs. That left him but two 
 efficient craft. One operated on his concessions along 
 the mainland shore. The other worked three stream 
 mouths on Vancouver Island, straight across from Folly 
 Bay. 
 
 Still, Gower's cannery was getting salmon. In those 
 three bays no other purse seiner could shoot his gear. 
 Folly Bay held them under exclusive license. Gill nets 
 could be drifted there, but the purse seiner was king. 
 
 A gill net goes out over a boat's stern. When it is 
 strung it stands in the sea like a tennis net across a 
 court, a web nine hundred feet long, twenty feet deep, 
 its upper edge held afloat by corks, its lower sunk by 
 lead weights spaced close together. The outer end is 
 buoyed to a float which carries a flag and a lantern ; the 
 inner is fast to the bitts of the launch. Thus set, and 
 set in the evening, since salmon can only be taken by the 
 gills in the dark, fisherman, launch, and net drift with 
 the changing tides till dawn. Then he hauls. He may 
 have ten salmon, or a hundred, or treble that. He may 
 have none, and the web be torn by sharks and fouled 
 heavy with worthless dogfish. 
 
 The purse seiner works in daylight, off a powerfully 
 engined sixty-foot, thirty-ton craft. He pays the seine 
 out over a roller on a revolving platform aft. His ves- 
 sel moves slowly in a sweeping circle as the net goes 
 out, — a circle perhaps a thousand feet in diameter. 
 When the circle is complete the two ends of the net 
 meet at the seiner's stern. A power winch hauls on 
 ropes and the net closes. Nothing escapes. It draws 
 together until it is a bag, a " purse " drawn up under 
 the vessel's counter, full of glistening fish. 
 
 The salmon is a surface fish, his average depth seldom 
 
130 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 below four fathoms. He breaks water when he feeds, 
 when he plays, when he runs in schools. The purse 
 seiner watches the signs. When the salmon rise in 
 numbers he makes a set. To shoot the gear and purse 
 the seine is a matter of minutes. A thousand salmon 
 at a haul is nothing. Three thousand is common. Five 
 thousand is far below the record. Purse seines have 
 been burst by the dead weight of fish against the pull 
 of the winch. 
 
 The purse seine is a deadly trap for schooling sal- 
 mon. And because the salmon schools in mass for- 
 mation, crowding nose to tail and side to side, in the 
 entrance to a fresh-water stream, the Fisheries Depart- 
 ment having granted a monopoly of seining rights to 
 a packer has also benevolently decreed that no purse 
 seine or other net shall operate within a given distance 
 of a stream mouth, — that the salmon, having won to 
 fresh water, shall go free and his kind be saved from 
 utter extinction. 
 
 These regulations are liot drawn for sentimental 
 reasons, only to preserve the salmon industry. The 
 farmer saves wheat for his next year's seeding, instead 
 of selling the last bushel to the millers. No man will- 
 fully kills the goose that lays him golden eggs. But 
 the salmon hunter, eagerly pursuing the nimble dollar, 
 sometimes grows rapacious in the chase and breaks laws 
 of his own devising, — if a big haul promises and no 
 Fisheries Inspector is by to restrain him. The cannery 
 purse seiners are the most frequent offenders. They can 
 make their haul quickly in forbidden waters and get 
 away. Folly Bay, shrewdly paying its seine crews a 
 bonus per fish on top of wages, had always been notori- 
 ous for crowding the law. 
 
 Solomon River takes its rise in the mountainous back- 
 
PERIL OF THE SEA 131 
 
 bone of Vancouver Island. It is a wide, placid stream 
 on its lower reaches, flowing through low, timbered re- 
 gions, emptying into the Gulf in a half-moon bay called 
 the Jew's Mouth, which is a perfect shelter from the 
 Gulf storms and the only such shelter in thirty miles of 
 bouldery shore line. The beach runs northwest and 
 southeast, bleak and open, undented. In all that 
 stretch there is no point from behind which a Fisheries 
 Patrol launch could steal unexpectedly into the Jew's 
 Mouth. 
 
 Upon a certain afternoon the Blackbird lay therein. 
 At her stem, fast by light lines to her after bitts, 
 clung half a dozen fish boats, blue wisps of smoke 
 drifting from the galley stovepipes, the fishermen vari- 
 ously occupied. The Blackbird's hold was empty ex- 
 cept for ice. She was waiting for fish, and the Bluebird 
 was due on the same errand the following day. 
 
 Nearer shore another cluster of gill-netters was an- 
 chored, a Jap or two, and a Siwash Indian with his hull 
 painted a gaudy blue. And in the middle of the Jew's 
 Mouth, which was a scant six hundred yards across at 
 its widest, the Folly Bay No. 5 swung on her anchor 
 chain. A tubby cannery tender lay alongside. The 
 crews were busy with picaroons forking salmon out of 
 the seiner into the tender's hold. The flip-flop of the 
 fish sounded distinctly in that quiet place. Their silver 
 bodies flashed in the sun as they were thrown across the 
 decks. 
 
 When the tender drew clear and passed out of the 
 bay she rode deep with the weight of salmon aboard. 
 Without the Jew's Mouth, around the Blackbird and 
 the fish boats and the No. 5 the salmon were thresh- 
 ing water. Klop. A flash of silver. Bubbles. A series 
 of concentric rings that ran away in ripples, till they 
 
132 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 merged into other widening rings. They were every- 
 where. The river was full of them. The bay was alive 
 with them. 
 
 A boat put off from the seiner. The man rowed out 
 of the Jew's Mouth and stopped, resting on his oars. 
 He remained there, in approximately the same position. 
 A sentry. 
 
 The No, 5 heaved anchor, the chain clanMng and 
 chattering in a hawsepipe. Her exhaust spat smoky, 
 gaseous fumes. A bell clanged. She moved slowly 
 ahead, toward the river's mouth, a hundred yards to 
 one side of it. Then the brown web of the seine began 
 to spin out over the stem. She crossed the mouth of 
 the Solomon, holding as close in as her draft permitted, 
 and kept on straight till her seine was paid out to the 
 end. Then she stopped, lying still in dead water with 
 her engine idling. 
 
 The tide was on the flood. Salmon run streams on 
 a rising tide. And the seine stood like a wall across the 
 river's mouth. 
 
 Every man watching knew what the seiner was about, 
 in defiance of the law. The salmon, nosing into the 
 stream, driven by that imperative urge which is the 
 law of their being, struck the net, turned aside, swam 
 in a slow circle and tried again and again, seeking free 
 passage, until thousands of them were massed behind 
 the barrier of the net. Then the No. 5 would close the 
 net, tauten the ropes which made it a purse, and haul 
 out into deep water. 
 
 It was the equivalent of piracy on the high seas. To 
 be taken in the act meant fines, imprisonment, confisca- 
 tion of boat and gear. But the No. 5 would not be 
 caught. She had a guard posted. Cannery seiners 
 were never caught. When they were they got off with 
 
PERIL OF THE SEA 133 
 
 a warning and a reprimand. Only gill-netters, the small 
 fry of the salmon industry, ever paid the utmost penalty 
 for raids like that. So the fishermen said, with a cynical 
 twist of their lips. 
 
 "Look at 'em," one said to MacRae. "They make 
 laws and break 'em themselves. They been doin' that 
 every day for a week. If one of us set a piece of net in 
 the river and took three hundred salmon the canners 
 would holler their heads off. There 'd be a patrol boat 
 on our heels all the time if they thought we'd take a 
 chance." 
 
 " Well, I 'm about ready to take a chance," another 
 man growled. " They clear the bay in daylight and all 
 we get is their leavings at night." 
 
 The No. 5 pursed her seine and hauled out until she 
 was abreast of the Blackbird, She drew close up to 
 her massive hull a great heap of salmon, struggling, 
 twisting, squirming within the net. The loading began. 
 Her men laughed and shouted as they worked. The gill- 
 net fishermen watched silently, scowling. It was like 
 taking bread out of their mouths. It was like an honest 
 man restrained by a policeman's club from taking 
 food when he is hungry, and seeing a thief fill his 
 pockets and walk off unmolested. 
 
 "Four thousand salmon that shot," Dave Mullen 
 said, the same Mullen who had talked to MacRae in 
 Squitty one night. " Say, why should we stand for 
 that? We can get salmon that way too." 
 
 He spoke directly to MacRae. 
 
 " What 's sauce for the goose ought to be sauce for 
 the gander," MacRae replied. " I '11 take the fish if 
 you get them." 
 
 "You aren't afraid of getting in wrong yourself.?" 
 the man asked him. 
 
134 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 MacRae shook his head. He did not lean to lawless- 
 ness. But the cannery men had framed this law. They 
 cried loudly and continually for its strict enforcement. 
 And they violated it flagrantly themselves, or winked 
 at its violation when that meant an added number of 
 cases to their pack. Not alone in the Jew's Mouth; 
 all along the British Columbia coast the purse seiners 
 forgot the law when the salmon swarmed in a stream 
 mouth and they could make a killing. Only canneries 
 could hold a purse-seine license. If the big men would 
 not honor their own law, why should the lesser.? So 
 MacRae felt and said. 
 
 The men in the half-dozen boats about his stern had 
 dealt all the season with MacRae. They trusted him. 
 They neither liked nor trusted Folly Bay. Folly Bay 
 was not only breaking the law in the Jew's Mouth, but 
 in breaking thie law they were making it hard for these 
 men to earn a dollar legitimately. Superior equipment, 
 special privilege, cold-blooded violation of law because 
 it was safe and profitable, gave the purse seiner an un- 
 fair advantage. The men gathered in a little knot on 
 the deck of one boat. They put their heads together 
 and lowered their voices. MacRae knew they were 
 angry, that they had reached the point of fighting fire 
 with fire. And he smiled to himself. He did not know 
 what they were planning, but he could guess. It would 
 not be the first time the individual fishermen had kicked 
 over the traces and beaten the purse seiners at their 
 own game. They did not include him in their council. 
 He was a buyer. It was not his function to inquire 
 how they took their fish. If they could take salmon 
 which otherwise the No. 5 would take, so much the 
 worse for Folly Bay, — and so much the better for the 
 fishermen, who earned their living precariously at best. 
 
PERIL OF THE SEA 135 
 
 It was dusk when the purse seiner finished loading 
 her catch and stowed the great net in a dripping heap 
 on the turntable aft. At daylight or before, a cannery 
 tender would empty her, and she would sweep the Jew's 
 Mouth bare of salmon again. 
 
 With dusk also the fishermen were busy over their 
 nets, still riding to the Blackbird^s stem. Then they 
 moved oif in the dark. MacRae could hear nets paying 
 out. He saw lanterns set to mark the outer end of each 
 net. Silence fell on the bay. A single riding light 
 glowed at the No, 5's masthead. Her cabin lights 
 blinked out. Her crew sprawled in their bunks, sound 
 asleep. 
 
 Under cover of the night the fishermen took pattern 
 from the seiner's example. A gill net is nine hundred 
 feet long, approximately twenty feet deep. They 
 stripped the cork floats oif one and hung it to the lead- 
 line of another. Thus with a web forty feet deep they 
 went stealthily up to the mouth of the Solomon. With 
 a four-oared skiff manning each end of the nine hun- 
 dred-foot length they swept their net around the Jew's 
 Mouth, closed it like a purse seine, and hauled it out 
 into the shallows of a small beach. They stood in the 
 shallow water with sea boots on and forked the salmon 
 into their rowboats and laid the rowboats alongside the 
 Blackbird to deliver, — all in the dark without a lantern 
 flicker, with mufiled oarlocks and hushed voices. Three 
 times they swept the bay. 
 
 At five in the morning, before it was lightening in 
 the east, the Blackbird rode four inches below her load 
 water line with a mixed cargo of coho and dog salmon, 
 the heaviest cargo ever stowed under her hatches, — 
 and eight fishermen divided two thousand dollars share 
 and share alike for their night's work. 
 
136 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 MacRae battened his hatch covers, started his engine, 
 heaved up the hook, and hauled out of the bay. 
 
 In the Gulf the obscuring clouds parted to lay a shaft 
 of silver on smooth, windless sea. The Blackbird wal- 
 lowed down the moon-trail. MacRae stood at the steer- 
 ing wheel. Beside him Steve Ferrara leaned on the low 
 cabin. 
 
 " She ^s getting day," Steve said, after a long silence. 
 He chuckled. " Some raid. If they can keep that lick 
 up those boys will all have new boats for next season. 
 You'll break old Gower if you keep on. Jack." 
 
 The thought warmed MacRae. To break Gower, to 
 pull him down to where he must struggle for a living 
 like other common men, to deprive him of the power he 
 had abused, to make him suffer as such a man would 
 suffer under that turn of fortune, — that would help 
 to square accounts. It would be only a measure of jus- 
 tice. To be dealt with as he had dealt with others, — 
 MacRae asked no more than that for himself. 
 
 But it was not likely, he reflected. One bad season 
 would not seriously involve a wary old bird like Horace 
 Gower. He was too secure behind manifold bulwarks. 
 Still in the end, — more spectacular things had come 
 to pass in the affairs of men on this kaleidoscopic 
 coast. MacRae's face was hard in the moonlight. His 
 eyes were somber. It was an ugly feeling to nurse. For 
 thirty years that sort of impotent bitterness must have 
 rankled in his father's breast — with just cause, Mac- 
 Rae told himself moodily. No wonder old Donald had 
 been a grave and silent man; a just, kindly, generous 
 man, too. Other men had liked him, respected him. 
 Gower alone had been implacable. 
 
 Well into the red and yellow dawn MacRae stood at 
 the wheel, thinking of this, an absent look in eyes which 
 
PERIL OF THE SEA 137 
 
 still kept keen watch ahead. He was glad when it came 
 time for Steve's watch on deck, and he could lie down 
 and let sleep drive it out of his mind. He did not live 
 solely to revenge himself upon Horace Gower. He had 
 his own way to make and his own plans — even if they 
 were still a bit nebulous — to fulfill. It was only now 
 and then that the past saddened him and made him 
 bitter. 
 
 The week following brought great runs of salmon to 
 the Jew's Mouth. Of these the Folly Bay No. 5 some- 
 how failed to get the lion's share. The gill-net men 
 laughed in their soiled sleeves and furtively swept the 
 bay clear each night and all night, and the daytime haul 
 of the seine fell far below the average. The Blackbird 
 and the Bluebird waddled down a placid Gulf with all 
 they could carry. 
 
 And although there was big money-making in this 
 short stretch, and the secret satisfaction of helping put 
 another spoke in Gower's wheel, MacRae did not 
 neglect the rest of his territory nor the few troUers that 
 still worked Squitty Island. He ran long hours to get 
 their few fish. It was their living, and MacRae would 
 not pass them up because their catch meant no profit 
 compared to the time he spent and the fuel he burned 
 making this round. He would drive straight up the 
 Gulf from Bellingham to Squitty, circle the Island and 
 then across to the mouth of the Solomon. The weather 
 was growing cool now. Salmon would keep unspoiled 
 a long time in a troller's hold. It did not matter to 
 him whether it was day or night around Squitty. He 
 drove his carrier into any nook or hole where a troller 
 might lie waiting with a few salmon. 
 
 The Blackbird came pitching and diving into a 
 heavy southeast swell up along the western side of 
 
138 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 Squitty at ten o'clock in the black of an early October 
 night. There was a storm brewing, a wicked one, reck- 
 oned by the headlong drop of the aneroid. MacRae 
 had a hundred or so salmon aboard for all his Squitty 
 round, and he had yet to pick up those on the boats in 
 the Cove. He cocked his eye at a cloud-wrack streaking 
 above, driving before a wind which had not yet dropped 
 to the level of the Gulf, and he said to himself that 
 it would be wise to stay in the Cove that night. A 
 southeast gale, a beam sea, and the tiny opening of the 
 Jew's Mouth was a bad combination to face in a black 
 night. As he stood up along Squitty he could hear the 
 swells break along the shore. Now and then a cold puiF 
 of air, the forerunner of the big wind, struck him. Driv- 
 ing full speed the Blackbird dipped her bow deep in 
 each sea and rose dripping to the next. He passed 
 Cradle Bay at last, almost under the steep cliffs, hold- 
 ing in to round Poor Man's Rock and lay a compass 
 course to the mouth of Squitty Cove. 
 
 And as he put his wheel over and swept around the 
 Rock and came clear of Point Old a shadowy thing 
 topped by three lights in a red and green and white 
 triangle seemed to leap at him out of the darkness. The 
 lights showed, and under the lights white water hissing. 
 MacRae threw his weight on the wheel. He shouted to 
 Steve Ferrara, lying on his bunk in the little cabin aft. 
 
 He knew the boat instantly, — the Arrow shooting 
 through the night at twenty miles an hour, scurrying 
 to shelter under the full thrust of her tremendous 
 power. For an appreciable instant her high bow loomed 
 over him, while his hands twisted the wheel. But the 
 Blackbird was heavy, sluggish on her helm. She swung 
 a little, from square across the rushing Arrow, to a 
 sli^t angle. Two seconds would have cleared him. By 
 
PERIL OF THE SEA 139 
 
 the rules of the road at sea the Blackbird had the right 
 of way. If MacRae had held by the book this speeding 
 mass of mahogany and brass and steel would have cut 
 him in two amidships. As it was, her high bow, the 
 stem shod with a cast bronze cutwater edged like a 
 knife, struck him on the port quarter, sheared through 
 guard, planking, cabin. 
 
 There was a crash of riven timbers, the crunching 
 ring of metal, quick oaths, a cry. The Arrow scarcely 
 hesitated. She had cut away nearly the entire stem 
 works of the Blackbird. But such was her momen- 
 tum that the shock barely slowed her up. Her hull 
 bumped the Blackbird aside. She passed on. She did 
 not even stand by to see what she had done. There was 
 a sound of shouting on her decks, but she kept on. 
 
 MacRae could have stepped aboard her as she 
 brushed by. Her rail was within reach of his hand. 
 But that did not occur to him. Steve Ferrara wa» 
 asleep in the cabin, in the path of that destroying 
 stem. For a stunned moment MacRae stood as the 
 Arrow drew clear. The Blackbird began to settle 
 under his feet. 
 
 MacRae dived down the after companion. He went 
 into water to his waist. His hands, groping blindly, 
 laid hold of clothing, a limp body. He struggled back, 
 up, gained the deck, dragging Steve after him. The 
 Blackbird was deep by the holed stem now, awash to 
 her after fish hatch. She rose slowly, like a log, on 
 each swell. Only the buoyancy of her tanks and tim- 
 bers kept her from the last plunge. There was a light 
 skiff bottom up across her hatches by the steering 
 wheel. MacRae moved warily toward that, holding to 
 the bulwark with one hand, dragging Steve with the 
 other lest a sea sweep them both away. 
 
140 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 He noticed, with his brain functioning unruffled, that 
 the Arrow drove headlong into Cradle Bay. He could 
 hear her exhaust roaring. He could still hear shout- 
 ing. And he could see also that the wind and the tide 
 and the roll of the swells carried the water-logged hulk 
 of the Blackbird in the opposite direction. She was 
 past the Rock, but she was edging shoreward, in under 
 the granite walls that ran between Point Old and the 
 Cove. He steadied himself, keeping his hold on Steve, 
 and reached for the skiiF. As his fingers touched it a 
 comber flung itself up out of the black and shot two 
 feet of foam and green water across the swamped hull. 
 It picked up the light cedar skiff like a chip and cast 
 it beyond his reach and beyond his sight. And as he 
 clung to the cabin pipe-rail, drenched with the cold 
 sea, he heard that big roller burst against the shore very 
 near at hand. He saw the white spray lift ghostly 
 in the black. 
 
 MacRae held his hand over Steve's heart, over his 
 mouth to feel if he breathed. Then he got Steve's body 
 between his legs to hold him from slipping away, and 
 bracing himself against the sodden lurch of the wreck, 
 began to take off his clothes. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 Between Sun and Sun 
 
 Walking when he could, crawling on hands and knees 
 when his legs buckled under him, MacRae left a blood- 
 sprinkled trail over grass and moss and fallen leaves. 
 He lived over and over that few minutes which had 
 seemed so long, in which he had been battered against 
 broken rocks, in which he had clawed over weedy ledges 
 armored with barnacles that cut like knives, hauling 
 Steve Ferrara's body with him so that it should not 
 become the plaything of the tides. MacRae was no 
 stranger to death. He had seen it in many terrible 
 forms. He had heard the whistle of the invisible scythe 
 that cuts men down. He knew that Steve was dead 
 when he dragged him at last out of the surf, up where 
 nothing but high-flung drops of spray could reach him. 
 He left him there on a mossy ledge, knowing that he 
 could do nothing more for Steve Ferrara and that he 
 must do something for himself. So he came at last to 
 the end of that path which led to his own house and 
 crept and stumbled up the steps into the deeper dark- 
 ness of those hushed, lonely rooms. 
 
 MacRae knew he had suffered no vital hurt, no 
 broken bones. But he had been fearfuljy buffeted 
 among those sea-drenched rocks, bruised from head to 
 foot, shocked by successive blows. He had spent his 
 strength to keep the sea from claiming Steve. He had 
 
142 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 been unmercifully slashed by the barnacles. He was 
 weak from loss of blood, and he was bleeding yet, in 
 oozy streams, — face, hands, shoulders, knees, wherever 
 those lance-edged shells had raked his flesh. 
 
 He was sick and dizzy. But he could still think and 
 act. He felt his way to matches on a kitchen shelf, 
 staggered into his bedroom, lit a lamp. Out of a dresser 
 drawer he took clean white cloth, out of another car- 
 bolic acid. He got himself a basin of water. 
 
 He sat down on the edge of his bed. As he tore the 
 first strip of linen things began to swim before his 
 eyes. He sagged back on a pillow. The room and the 
 lamp and all that was near him blended in a misty swirl. 
 He had the extraordinary sensation of floating lightly 
 in space that was quiet and profoundly dark — and 
 still he was cloudily aware of footsteps ringing hollow 
 on the bare floor of the other room. 
 
 He became aware — ^as if no interval had elapsed — 
 of being moved, of hands touching him, of a stinging 
 sensation of pain which he understood to be the smart- 
 ing of the cuts in his flesh. But time must have gone 
 winging by, he knew, as his senses grew clearer. He 
 was stripped of his sodden, bloody undershirt and 
 overalls, partly covered by his blanket. He could feel 
 bandages on his legs, on one badly slashed arm. He 
 made out Betty Gower^s face with its unruly mass of 
 reddish-brown hair and two rose spots of color glow- 
 ing on her smooth cheeks. There was also a tall young 
 man, coatless, showing a white expanse of flannel sliirt 
 with the sleeves rolled above his elbows. MacRae could 
 only see this out of one comer of his eye, for he was 
 being turned gently over on his face. Weak and pas- 
 sive as he was, the firm pressure of Betty's soft hands 
 on his skin gave him a curiously pleasant sensation. 
 
BETWEEN SUN AND SUN 143 
 
 He heard her draw her breath sharply and make 
 some exclamation as his bare back turned to the light. 
 
 "This chap has been to the wars, eh, Miss Gower? " 
 he heard the man say. " Those are machine-gun marks, 
 I should say — close range, too. I saw plenty of that 
 after the Argonne." 
 
 " Such scars. How could a man live with holes like 
 that through his body.'*" Betty said. "He was in the 
 air force." 
 
 " Some Hun got in a burst of fire on him, sometime, 
 then," the man commented. " Did n't get him, either, 
 or he would n't be here. Why, two or three bullet holes 
 like that would only put a fellow out for a few weeks. 
 Look at him," he tapped MacRae's back with a fore- 
 finger. " Shoulders and chest and arms like a champion 
 middle weight ready to go twenty rounds. And you can 
 bet all your pin money. Miss Gower, that this man's 
 heart and lungs and nerves are away above par or he 
 would never have got his wings. Takes a lot to down 
 those fellows. Looks in bad shape now, doesn't he? 
 All cut and bruised and exhausted. But he '11 be walk- 
 ing about day after to-morrow. A little stiff and sore, 
 but otherwise well enough." 
 
 " I wish he 'd open his eyes and speak," Betty said. 
 "How can you tell? He may be injured internally." 
 
 The man chuckled. He did not cease work as he 
 talked. He was using a damp cloth, with a pungent 
 medicated smell. Dual odors familiar to every man who 
 has ever been in hospital assailed MacRae's nostrils. 
 Wherever that damp cloth touched a cut it burned. 
 MacRae listened drowsily. He had not the strength or 
 the wish to do anything else. 
 
 " Heart action 's normal. Respiration and tempera- 
 ture, ditto," he heard above him. " Unconsciousne§s is 
 
144 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 merely natural reaction from shock, nerve strain, loss 
 of blood. You can guess what sort of fight he must 
 have made in those breakers. If you were a sawbones. 
 Miss Gower, you wouldn't be uneasy. I'll stake my 
 professional reputation on his injuries being superficial. 
 Quite enough to knock a man out, I grant. But a 
 physique of this sort can stand a tremendous amount 
 of strain without serious effect. Hand me that adhesive, 
 will you, please ? " 
 
 There was an air of unreality about the whole pro- 
 ceeding in MacRae's mind. He wondered if he would 
 presently wake up in his bunk opposite Steve and find 
 that he had been dreaming. Yet those voices, and the 
 hands that shifted him tenderly, and the pyjama coat 
 that was slipped on him at last, were not the stuff of 
 dreams. No, the lights of the Arrow, the smash of the 
 collision, the tumbling seas which had flung him against 
 the rocks, the dead weight of Steve's body in his bleed- 
 ing arms, were not illusions. 
 
 He opened his eyes when they turned him on his back. 
 
 "Well, old man, how do you feel.'^" Betty's com- 
 panion asked genially. 
 
 "All right," MacRae said briefly. He found that 
 speech required effort. His mind worked clearly enough, 
 but his tongue was uncertain, his voice low-pitched, 
 husky. He turned his eyes on Betty. She tried to 
 smile. But her lips quivered in the attempt. MacRae 
 looked at her curiously. But he did not say anything. 
 In the face of accomplished facts, words were rather 
 futHe. 
 
 He closed his eyes again, only to get a mental picture 
 of the Arrow leaping at him out of the gloom, the 
 thunder of the swells bursting against the foot of the 
 cliffs, of Steve lying on that ledge alone. But nothing 
 
BETWEEN SUN AND SUN 145 
 
 could harm Steve. Storm and cold and pain and loneli- 
 ness were nothing to him, now. 
 
 He heard Betty speak. 
 
 " Can we do anything more? " 
 
 "Um — no," the man answered. "Not for some 
 time, anyway." 
 
 "Then I wish you would go back to the house and 
 tell them," Betty said. "They'll be worrying. I'll 
 stay here." 
 
 " I suppose it would be as well," he agreed. " I '11 
 come back." 
 
 " There 's no need for either of you to stay here," 
 MacRae said wearily. "You've stopped the bleeding, 
 and you can't do any more. Go home and go to bed. 
 I'm as well alone." 
 
 There was a brief interval of silence. MacRae heard 
 footsteps crossing the floor, receding, going down the 
 steps. He opened his eyes. Betty Gower sat on a low 
 box by his bed, her hands in her lap, looking at him 
 wistfully. She leaned a little toward him. 
 
 " I 'm awfully sorry," she whispered. 
 
 " So was the little boy who cut off his sister's thumb 
 with the hatchet," MacRae muttered. "But that did n't 
 help sister's thumb. If you'll run down to old Peter 
 Ferrara's house and tell him what has happened, and 
 then go home yourself, we '11 call it square." 
 
 " I have already done that," Betty said. " Dolly is 
 away. The fishermen are bringing Steve Ferrara's 
 body to his uncle's house. They are going to try to 
 save what is left of your boat." 
 
 " It is kind of you, I 'm sure, to pick up the pieces," 
 MacRae gibed. 
 
 " I am sorry," the girl breathed. 
 
 " After the fact. Belting around a point in the dark 
 
146 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 at train speed, regardless of the rules of the road. 
 Destroying a valuable boat, killing a man. Property 
 is supposed to be sacred — if life has no market value. 
 Were you late for dinner? " 
 
 In his anger he made a quick movement with his arms, 
 flinging the blanket off, sending intolerable pangs 
 through his bruised and torn body. 
 
 Betty rose and bent over him, put the blanket back 
 silently, tucked him in like a mother settling the cover 
 about a restless child. She did not say anything for 
 a minute. She stood over him, nervously plucking bits 
 of lint off the blanket. Her eyes grew wet. 
 
 " I don't blame you for feeling that way," she said 
 at last. " It was a terrible thing. You had the right 
 of way. I don't know why or how Robertson let it 
 happen. He has always been a careful navigator. The 
 nearness when he saw you under his bows must have 
 paralyzed him, and with our speed — oh, it isn't any 
 use, I know, to tell you how sorry I am. That won't 
 bring that poor boy back to life again. It won't — " 
 
 "You killed him — your kind of people — twice," 
 MacRae said thickly. *^Once in France, where he 
 risked his life — all he had to risk — so that you and 
 your kind should continue to have ease and security. 
 He came home wheezing and strangling, suifering all 
 the pains of death without death's relief. And when 
 he was beginning to think he had another chance you 
 finish him off. But that's nothing. A mere incident. 
 Why should you care? The country is full of Ferraras. 
 What do they matter? Men of no social or financial 
 standing, men who work with their hands and smell of 
 fish. If it's a shock to you to see one man dead and 
 another cut and bloody, think of the numbers that suffer 
 as great pains and hardships that you know nothing 
 
BETWEEN SUN AND SUN 147 
 
 about — and wouldn't care if you did. You couldn't 
 be what you are and have what you have if they did n't. 
 Sorry ! Sympathy is the cheapest thing in the market, 
 cheaper than salmon. You can't help Steve Ferrara 
 with that — not now. Don't waste any on me. I don't 
 need it. I resent it. You may need it all for your own 
 before I get through. I — I am — " 
 
 MacRae's voice trailed off into an incoherent murmur. 
 He seemed to be floating off into those dark shadowy 
 spaces again., In reality he was exhausted. A man with 
 his veins half emptied of blood cannot get in a passion 
 without a speedy reaction. MacRae went off into an 
 unconscious state which gradually became transformed 
 into natural, healthy sleep, the deep slumber of utter 
 exhaustion. 
 
 At intervals thereafter he was hazily aware of some 
 one beside him, of soft hands that touched him. Once 
 he wakened to find the room empty, the lamp turned 
 low. In the dim light and the hush the place seemed 
 imutterably desolate and forsaken, as if he were buried 
 in a crypt. When he listened he could hear the melan- 
 choly drone of the southeaster and the rumble of the 
 surf, two sounds that fitted well his mood. He felt a 
 strange relief when Betty came tiptoeing in from the 
 kitchen. She bent over him. MacRae closed his eyes 
 and slept again. 
 
 He awakened at last, alert, refreshed, free of that de- 
 pression which had rested so heavily on him. And he 
 found that weariness had caught Betty Gower in its 
 overpowering grip. She had drawn her box seat up 
 close beside him. Her body had drooped until her arms 
 rested on the side of the bed, and her head rested on her 
 arms. MacRae found one of his hands caught tight in 
 both hers. She was asleep, breathing lightly, regularly. 
 
148 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 He twisted his stiffened neck to get a better look at her. 
 He could only see one side of her face, and that he 
 studied a long time. Pretty and piquant, still it was no 
 doll's face. There was character in that firm mouth 
 and round chin. Betty had a beautiful skin. That had* 
 been MacRae's first impression of her, the first time he 
 saw her. And she had a heavy mass of reddish-brown 
 hair that shone in the sunlight with a decided wave in 
 it which always made it seem unruly, about to escape 
 from its conventional arrangement. 
 
 MacRae made no attempt to free his hand. He was 
 quite satisfied to let it be. The touch of her warm flesh 
 against his stirred him a little, sent his mind straying 
 off into strange channels. Queer that the first woman 
 to care for him when he crept wounded and shaken to 
 the shelter of his own roof should be the daughter of 
 his enemy. For MacRae could not otherwise regard 
 Horace Gower. Anything short of that seemed treason 
 to the gray old man who had died in the next room, 
 babbling of his son and the west wind and some one he 
 called Bessie. 
 
 MacRae's eyes blurred unexpectedly. What a 
 damned shame things had to be the way they were. 
 Behind this girl, who was in herself lovely and desirable 
 as a woman should be, loomed the pudgy figure of her 
 father, ruthless, vindictively unjust. Gower hadn't 
 struck at him openly; but that, MacRae believed, was 
 merely for lack of suitable opening. 
 
 But that did not keep Jack MacRae from thinking — 
 what every normal man begins to think, or rather to 
 feel, soon or late — that he is incomplete, insufficient, 
 without some particular woman to love him, upon whom 
 to bestow love. It was like a revelation. He caught 
 himself wishing that Betty would wake up and smile 
 
BETWEEN SUN AND SUN 149 
 
 at him, bend over him with a kiss. He stared up at the 
 shadowy roof beams, feeling the hot blood leap to his 
 face at the thought. There was an uncanny magic in 
 the nearness of her, a lure in the droop of her tired 
 body. And MacRae struggled against that seduction. 
 Yet he could not deny that Betty Gower, innocently 
 sleeping with his hand fast in hers, filled him with visions 
 and desires which had never before focused with such 
 intensity on any woman who had come his way. Mys- 
 teriously she seemed absolved of all blame for being a 
 Gower, for any of the things the Gower clan had done 
 to him and his, even to the misfortune of that night 
 which had cost a man his life. 
 
 " It is n't her fault," MacRae said to himself. " But, 
 Lord, I wish she 'd kept away from here, if this sort of 
 thing is going to get me." 
 
 What this was he did not attempt to define. He did 
 not admit that he was hovering on the brink of loving 
 Betty Gower — it seemed an incredible thing for him to 
 do — but was vividly aware that she had kindled an in- 
 comprehensible fire in him, and he suspected, indeed 
 he feared with a fear that bordered on spiritual shrink- 
 ing, that it would go on glowing after she was gone. 
 And she would go presently. This spontaneous rushing 
 to his aid was merely what a girl like that, with generous 
 impulses and quick sympathy, would do for any one in 
 dire need. She would leave behind her an inescapable 
 longing, an emptiness, a memory of sweetly disturbing 
 visions. MacRae seemed to see with remarkable clarity 
 and sureness that he would be penalized for yielding 
 to that bewitching fancy. By what magic had she so 
 suddenly made herself a shining figure in a golden 
 dream? Some necromancy of the spirit, invisible but 
 wonderfully potent.? Or was it purely physical, — the 
 
150 POOR MAN^S ROCK 
 
 soft reddish-brown of her hair; her frank gray eyes, 
 very like his own; the marvelous, smooth clearness 
 and coloring of her skin; her voice, that was given to 
 soft cadences? He did not know. No man ever quite 
 knows what positive qualities in a woman can make his 
 heart leap. MacRae was no wiser than most. But he 
 was not prone to cherish illusions, to deceive himself. 
 He had imagination. That gave him a key to many 
 things which escape a sluggish mind. 
 
 "Well," he said to himself at last, with a fatalistic 
 humor, " if it comes that way, it comes. If I am to be 
 the goat, I shall be, and that 's all there is to it." 
 
 Under his breath he cursed Horace Gower deeply and 
 fervently, and he was not conscious of anything in- 
 congruous in that. And then he lay very thoughtful 
 and a little sad, his eyes on the smooth curve of Betty's 
 cheek swept by long brown lashes, the comer of a red 
 mouth made for kissing. His fingers were warm in hers. 
 He smiled sardonically at a vagrant wish that they 
 might remain there always. 
 
 Whom the gods would destroy they first make 
 mad. MacRae wondered if the gods thus planned his 
 destruction ? 
 
 A tremulous sigh warned him. He shut his eyes, 
 feigned sleep. He felt rather than saw Betty sit up 
 with a start, release his hand. Then very gently she 
 moved that arm back under the blanket, reached across 
 him and patted the covers close about his body, stood 
 looking down at him. 
 
 And MacRae stirred, opened his eyes. 
 
 "What time is it?" he asked. 
 
 She looked at a wrist watch. " Four o'clock." She 
 shivered. 
 
 "You've been here all this time without a fire. 
 
BETWEEN SUN AND SUN 151 
 
 You're chilled through. Why didn't you go home? 
 You should go now." 
 
 "I have been sitting here dozing," she said. "I 
 was n't aware of the cold until now. But there is wood 
 and kindling in the kitchen, and I am going to make a 
 fire. Aren't you hungry.?" 
 
 *' Starving," he said. " But there is nothing to eat 
 in the house. It has been empty for months." 
 
 "There is tea," she said. "I saw some on a shelf. 
 I'll make a cup of that. It will be something warm, 
 refreshing." 
 
 MacRae listened to her at the kitchen stove. There 
 was the clink of iron lids, the smell of wood smoke, the 
 pleasant crackle of the fire. Presently she came in with 
 two steaming cups. 
 
 " I have a faint recollection of talking wild and large 
 a while ago," MacRae remarked. Indeed, it seemed 
 hazy to him now. " Did I say anytliing nasty ? " 
 
 " Yes," she replied frankly ; " perhaps the sting of 
 what you said lay in its being partly true. A half 
 truth is sometimes a deadly weapon. I wonder if you 
 do really hate us as much as your manner implied — 
 and why ? " 
 
 " Us. Who ? " MacRae asked. 
 
 " My father and me," she put it bluntly. 
 
 "What makes you think I do ? " MacRae asked. " Be- 
 cause I have set up a fierce competition in a business 
 where your father has had a monopoly so long that he 
 thinks this part of the Gulf belongs to him? Because 
 I resent your running down one of my boats? Because 
 I go about my affairs in my own way, regardless of 
 Gower interests ? " 
 
 " What do these things amount to ? " Betty answered 
 impatiently. "It's in your manner, your attitude. 
 
152 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 Sometimes it even shows in your eyes. It was there 
 the morning I came across you sitting on Point Old, 
 the day after the armistice was signed. I 've danced 
 with you and seen you look at me as if — as if," she 
 laughed self-consciously, " you would like to wring my 
 neck. I have never done anything to create a dislike 
 of that sort. I have never be6n with you without being 
 conscious that you were repressing something, out of 
 — well, courtesy, I suppose. There is a peculiar tension 
 about you whenever my father is mentioned. I'm not 
 a fool," she finished, "even if I happen to be one of 
 what you might call the idle rich. What is the cause 
 of this bad blood?" 
 
 "What does it matter.?" MacRae parried. 
 
 "There is something, then.? " she persisted. 
 
 MacRae turned his head away. He could n't teU her. 
 It was not wholly his story to tell. How could he ex- 
 pect her to see it, to react to it as he did? A matter 
 involving her father and mother, and his father. It 
 was not a pretty tale. He might be influenced power- 
 fully in a certain direction by the account of it passed 
 on by old Donald MacRae; he might be stirred by the 
 backwash of those old passions, but he could not lay 
 bare all that to any one — least of all to Betty Gower. 
 And still MacRae, for the moment, was torn between 
 two desires. He retained the same implacable resent- 
 ment toward Gower, and he found himself wishing to 
 set Gower^s daughter apart and outside the conse- 
 quences of that ancient feud. And that, he knew, was 
 trying to reconcile the irreconcilable. It couldn't be 
 done. 
 
 "Was the 'Arrow holed in the crash? " 
 
 Betty stood staring at him. She blinked. Her fingers 
 began again that nervous plucking at the blanket. But 
 
BETWEEN SUN AND SUN 153 
 
 her face settled presently into its normal composure 
 and she answered evenly. 
 
 "Rather badly up forward. She was settling fast 
 when they beached her in the Bay." 
 
 "And then," she continued after a pause, "Doctor 
 Wallis and I got ashore as quickly as we could. We 
 got a lantern and came along the cliffs. And two of 
 the men took our big lifeboat and rowed along near the 
 shore. They found the Blackbird pounding on the 
 rocks, and we found Steve Ferrara where you left him. 
 And we followed you here by the blood you spattered 
 along the way." 
 
 A line from the Rhyme of the Three Sealers came 
 into MacRae's mind as befitting. But he was thinking 
 of his father and not so much of himself as he quoted; 
 
 " * Sorrow is me, in a lonely sea, 
 And a sinful fight I fall.'" 
 
 "I'm afraid I don't quite grasp that," Betty said. 
 "Although I know Kipling too, and could supply the 
 rest of those verses. I 'm afraid, I don't understand." 
 
 " It is n't likely that you ever will," MacRae an- 
 swered slowly. " It is not necessary that you should." 
 
 Their voices ceased. In the stillness the w^histle of 
 the wind and the deep drone of the seas shattering 
 themselves on the granite lifted a dreary monotone. 
 And presently a quick step sounded on the porch. 
 Doctor Wallis came hurriedly in. 
 
 "Upon my soul," he said apologetically. "I ought 
 to be shot. Miss Gower. I got everybody calmed down 
 over at the cottage and chased them all to bed. Then 
 I sat down in a soft chair before that cheerful fire in 
 your living room. And I didn't wake up for hours. 
 You must be worn out." 
 
154 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 " That 's quite all right," Betty assured him. "Don't 
 be conscience-stricken. Did mamma have hysterics ? " 
 
 Wallis grinned cheerfully. 
 
 " Well, not quite," he drawled. " At any rate, all 's 
 quiet along the Potomac now. How 's the patient get- 
 ting on ? " 
 
 " I 'm O. K.," MacRae spoke for himself, " and much 
 obliged to you both for tinkering me up. Miss Gower 
 ought to go home." 
 
 "I think so myself," WaUis said. "I'U take her 
 across the point. Then I '11 KJome back and have an- 
 other look over you." 
 
 "It isn't necessary," MacRae declared. "Barring 
 a certain amount of soreness I feel fit enough. I sup- 
 pose I could get up and walk now if I had to. Go 
 home and go to bjed, both of you." 
 
 "Good night, or perhaps it would be better to say 
 good morning." Betty gave him her hand. " Pleasant 
 dreams." 
 
 It seemed to MacRae that there was a touch of 
 reproach, a hint of the sardonic in her tone and 
 words. 
 
 Then he was alone in the quiet house, with his 
 thoughts for company, and the distant noises of the 
 storm muttering in the outer darkness. 
 
 They were not particularly pleasant processes of 
 thought. The sins of the fathers shall be visited even 
 unto the third and fourth generation. Why, in the 
 name of God, should they be, he asked himself? 
 
 Betty Gower liked him. She had been trying to tell 
 him so. MacRae felt that. He did not question too 
 <rlosely the quality of the feeling for her which had 
 leaped up so unexpectedly. He was afraid to dig too 
 deep. He had got a glimpse of depths and eddies that 
 night which if they did not wholly frighten him, at 
 
BETWEEN SUN AND SUN 155 
 
 least served to confuse him. They were like flint and 
 steel, himself and Betty Gower. They could not come 
 together without striking sparks. And a man may long 
 to warm himself by fire, MacRae reflected gloomily, but 
 he shrinks from being burned. 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 An Interlude 
 
 At daybreak Peter Ferrara came to the house. 
 
 " How are you ? " he asked. 
 
 " Sore. Wobbly." MacRae had tried his legs and 
 found them wanting. 
 
 "It was a bad night all round, eh, lad?" Peter 
 rumbled in his rough old voice. " Some of the boys 
 got a line on the Blackbird and hauled what was left 
 of her around into the Cove. But she 's a ruin. The 
 engine went to pieces while she was poundin' on the 
 rocks. Steve lays in the house. He looks peaceful — as 
 if he was glad to be through." 
 
 " I could n't save him. It was done like that." Mac- 
 Rae snapped his fingers. 
 
 "I know," Old Peter said. "You're not to blame. 
 Perhaps nobody is. Them things happen. Manuel '11 
 feel it. He's lost both sons now. But Steve's better 
 off. He'd 'a' died of consumption or something, slow 
 an' painful. His lungs was gone. I seen him set for 
 weeks on the porch wheezin' after he come home. He 
 didn't get no pleasure livin'. He said once a bullet 
 would 'a' been mercy. No, don't worry about Steve. 
 We all come to it soon or late, John. It 's never a pity 
 for the old or the crippled to die." 
 
 "You old Spartan," MacRae muttered. 
 
 " What 's that? " Peter asked. But MacRae did not 
 explain. He asked about Dolly iustead. 
 
AN INTERLUDE 157 
 
 " She was up to Potter's Landing. I sent for her 
 and she 's back," Peter told him. " She '11 be up to see 
 you presently. There 's no grub in the house, is there? 
 Can you eat? Well, take it easy, lad." 
 
 An hour or so later Dolly Ferrara brought him a 
 steaming breakfast on a tray. She sat talking to him 
 while he ate. 
 
 "Gower will have to pay for the Blackbird, won't 
 he?" she asked. "The fishermen say so." 
 
 " If he does n't in one way he will another," MacRae 
 answered indifferently. " But that does n't help Steve. 
 The boat does n't matter. One can build boats. You 
 can't bring a man back to life when he 's dead." 
 
 " If Steve could talk he 'd say he didn't care," Dolly 
 declared sadly. "You know he wasn't getting much 
 out of living. Jack. There was nothing for him to look 
 forward to but a few years of discomfort and uncer- 
 tainty. A man who has been strong and active rebels 
 against dying by inches. Steve told me — not so very 
 long ago — that if sometliing would finish him off 
 quickly he would be glad." 
 
 If that had been, Stevens wish, MacRae thought, then 
 fate had hearkened to him. He knew it was true. He 
 had lived at elbows with Steve all summer. Steve never 
 complained. He was made of different stuff. It was 
 only a gloomy consolation, after all, to think of Steve 
 as being better off. MacRae knew how men cling to life, 
 even when it has lost all its savor. There is that im- 
 perative will-to-live which refuses to be denied. 
 
 Dollj went away. After a time Wallis came over 
 from the cottage at Cradle Bay. He was a young and 
 genial medico from Seattle, who had just returned from 
 service with the American forces overseas, and was 
 holidaying briefly before he took up private practice 
 
158 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 again. He had very little more than a casual interest 
 in MacRae, however, and he did not stay long once he 
 had satisfied himself that his patient had little further 
 need of professional services. And MacRae, who was 
 weaker than he expected to find himself, rested in his 
 bed until late afternoon brought bars of sunlight stream- 
 ing through openings in the cloud bank which still ran 
 swift before the wind. 
 
 Then he rose, dressed, made his way laboriously and 
 painfully down to the Cove's edge and took a brief look 
 at the hull of the Blackbird sunk to her deck line, her 
 rail and cabins broken and twisted. After that he 
 hailed a fisherman, engaged him to go across to Solomon 
 River and apprise the Bluebird. That accomplished 
 he went back to the house. Thereafter he spent days 
 lying on his bed, resting in a big chair before the fire- 
 place while his wounds healed and his strength came 
 back to him, thinking, planning, chafing at inaction. 
 
 There was a perfunctory inquest, after which Steve's 
 body went away to Hidalgo Island to rest beside the 
 bodies of other Ferraras in a plot of ground their 
 grandfather had taken for his own when British Co- 
 lumbia was a Crown colony. 
 
 MacRae carried insurance on both his carriers. There 
 was no need for him to move against Gower in the mat- 
 ter. The insurance people would attend efficiently to 
 that. The adjusters came, took over the wreck, made 
 inquiries. MacRae made his formal claim, and it was 
 duly paid. 
 
 But long before the payment was made he was at 
 work, he and Vin Ferrara together, on the Bluebird, 
 plowing the Gulf in stormy autumn weather. The 
 season was far gone, the salmon run slackening to its 
 close. It was too late to equip another carrier. The 
 
AN INTERLUDE 159 
 
 echoes were gone. The dog salmon, great-toothed, 
 slimy fish which are canned for European export — for 
 cheap trade, wliich nevertheless returned much profit to 
 the canneries — were still running. 
 
 MacRae had taken ninety per cent, of the Folly Bay 
 bluebacks. He had made tremendous inroads on Folly 
 Bay's take of coho and humpback. He did not care 
 greatly if Gower filled his cans with " dogs." But the 
 Bellingham packers cried for salmon of whatsoever 
 quality, and so MacRae drove the Bluebird hard in a 
 trade which gave liim no great profit, chiefly to preserve 
 his connection with the American canners, to harass 
 Folly Bay, and to let the fishermen know that he was 
 still a factor and could serve them well. 
 
 He was sick of the smell of salmon, weary of the 
 eternal heaving of the sea under his feet, of long cold 
 tricks at the wheel, of days in somber, driving rain and 
 nights without sleep. But he kept on until the salmon 
 ceased to run, until the purse seiners tied up for the 
 season, and the fishermen put by their gear. 
 
 MacRae had done well, — far better than he expected. 
 His knife had cut both ways. He had eighteen thou- 
 sand dollars in cash and the Bluebird. The Folly Bay 
 pack was twelve thousand cases short. How much that 
 shortage meant in lost profit MacRae could only guess, 
 but it was a pretty sum. Another season like that, — 
 he smiled grimly. The next season would be better, — 
 for him. The trollers were all for him. They went 
 out of their way to tell him that. He had organized 
 good will behind him. The inen who followed the 
 salmon schools believed he did not want the earth, only 
 a decent share. He did not sit behind a mahogany desk 
 in town and set the price of fish. These men had 
 labored a long time under the weighty heel of a con- 
 
i6o POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 trolled industry, and they were thankful for a new dis- 
 pensation. It gave MacRae a pleasant feeling to know 
 this. It gave him also something of a contempt for 
 Gower, who had sat tight with a virtual monopoly for 
 ten years and along with his profits had earned the 
 distrust and dislike of a body of men who might as 
 easily have been loyal laborers in his watery vineyards, 
 — if he had not used his power to hold them to the 
 most meager return they could wring from the sea. 
 
 He came home to the house at Squitty Cove with some 
 odds and ends from town shops to make it more com- 
 fortable, flooring to replace the old, worn boards, a rug 
 or two, pictures that caught his fancy, new cushions 
 for the big chairs old Donald MacRae had fashioned 
 by hand years before, a banjo to pick at, and a great 
 box of books which he had promised to read some day 
 when he had time. And he knew he would have time 
 through long winter evenings when the land was 
 drenched with rain, when the storm winds howled in 
 the swaying firs and the sea beat clamorously along the 
 cliffs. He would sit with his feet to a glowing fire and 
 read books. 
 
 He did, for a time. When late November laid down 
 a constant barrage of rain and the cloud battalions 
 marched and countermarched along the coast, MacRae 
 had settled down. He had no present care upon his 
 shoulders. Although he presumed himself to be resting, 
 he was far from idle. He found many ways of occupy- 
 ing himself about the old place. It was his pleasure 
 that the old log house should be neat within and with- 
 out, the yard clean, the garden restored to order. It 
 had suffered a season's neglect. He remedied that with 
 a little labor and a little money, wishing, as the place 
 took on a sprightlier air, that old Donald could be 
 
AN INTERLUDE i6i 
 
 there to see. MacRae was frank in liis affection for 
 the spot. No other place that he had ever seen meant 
 quite the same to him. He was always glad to come 
 back to it; it seemed imperative that he should always 
 come back there. It was home, his refuge, his castle. 
 Indeed he had seen castles across the sea from whose 
 towers less goodly sights spread than he could command 
 from his own front door, now that winter had stripped 
 the maple and alder of their leafy screen. There was 
 the sheltered Cove at his feet, the far sweep of the Gulf 
 — colored according to its mood and the weather — 
 great mountain ranges lifting sheer from blue water, 
 their lower slopes green with forest and their crests 
 white with snow. Immensities of land and trees. All 
 his environment pitched upon a colossal scale. It was 
 good to look at, to live among, and MacRae knew that 
 it was good. 
 
 He sat on a log at the brink of the Cove one morn- 
 ing, in a burst of sunshine as grateful as it was rare. 
 He looked out at the mainland shore, shading away 
 from deep olive to a faint and misty blue. He cast his 
 gaze along Vancouver Island, a three-hundred-mile bar- 
 rier against the long roll of the Pacific. He thought 
 of England, with its scant area and its forty million 
 souls. He smiled. An empire opened within range of 
 his vision. He had had to go to Europe to appreciate 
 his own country. Old, old peoples over there. Out- 
 worn, bewildered aristocracies and vast populations 
 troubled with the specter of want, swarming like rab- 
 bits, pressing always close upon the means of subsist- 
 ence. No room; no chance. Bom in social stratas 
 solidified by centuries. No wonder Europe was full of 
 race and class hatred, of war and pestilence. Snap 
 judgment,' — but Jack MacRae had seen the peasants 
 
i62 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 of France and Belgium, the driven workmen of indus- 
 trial France and England. He had seen also something 
 of the forces which controlled them, caught glimpses 
 of the iron hand in the velvet glove, a hand that was 
 not so sure and steady as in days gone by. 
 
 Here a man still had a chance. He could not pick 
 golden apples off the fir trees. He must use his brains 
 as well as his hands. A reasonable measure of security 
 was within a man's grasp if he tried for it. To pile up 
 a fortune might be a heavy task. But getting a living 
 was no insoluble problem. A man could accomplish 
 either without selling his soul or cutting throats or 
 making serfs of his fellow men. There was room to 
 move and breathe, — and some to spare. 
 
 Perhaps Jack MacRae, in view of his feelings, his 
 cherished projects, was a trifle inconsistent in the judg- 
 ments he passed, sitting there on his log in the winter 
 sunshine. But the wholly consistent must die young. 
 Their works do not appear in this day and hour. The 
 normal man adjusts himself to, and his actions are 
 guided by, moods and circumstances which are seldom 
 orderly and logical in their sequence. 
 
 MacRae cherished as profound an animosity toward 
 Horace Gower as any Russian ever felt for bureaucratic 
 tyranny. He could smart under injustice and plan 
 reprisal. He could appreciate his environment, his 
 opportunities, be glad that his lines were cast amid 
 rugged beauty. But he did not on that account feel 
 tolerant toward those whom he conceived to be his 
 enemies. He was not, however, thinking concretely of 
 his personal affairs or tendencies that bright morning. 
 He was merely sitting more or less quiescent on his log, 
 nursing vagrant impressions, letting the sun bathe him. 
 
 He was not even conscious of trespassing on Horace 
 
AN INTERLUDE 163 
 
 Gower's land. When he thought of it, of course he 
 realized that this was legally so. But the legal fact 
 had no reality for MacRae. Between the Cove and 
 Point Old, for a mile back into the dusky woods, he 
 felt free to come and go as he chose. He had always 
 believed and understood and felt that area to be his, 
 and he still held to that old impression. There was not 
 a foot of that six hundred acres that he had not ex- 
 plored alone, with his father, with Dolly Ferrara, season 
 after season. He had gone barefoot over the rocks, 
 dug clams on the beaches, fished trout in the little 
 streams, hunted deer and grouse in the thickets, as far 
 back as he could remember. He had loved the cliffs and 
 the sea, the woods around the Cove with an affection 
 bred in use and occupancy, confirmed by the sense of 
 inviolate possession. Old things are dear, if a man has 
 once loved them. They remain so. The aura of beloved 
 familiarity clings to them long after they have passed 
 into alien hands. When MacRae thought of this and 
 turned his eyes upon this noble sweep of land and forest 
 which his father had claimed for his own from the 
 wilderness, it was as if some one had deprived him of 
 an eye or an arm by trickery and unfair advantage. 
 
 He was not glooming over such things this rare 
 morning which had come like a benediction after ten 
 days of rain and wind. He was sitting on his log bare- 
 headed, filled with a passive content rare in his recent 
 experience. 
 
 From this perch, in the idle wandering of his gaze, 
 his eyes at length rested upon Peter Ferrara's house. 
 He saw a man and a woman come out of the front door 
 and stand for a minute or two on the steps. He could 
 not recognize the man at the distance, but he could 
 guess. The man presently walked away around the end 
 
i64 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 of the Cove, MacRae perceived that his guess was cor- 
 rect, for Norman Gower came out on the brow of the 
 cliff that bordered the south side of the Cove. He ap- 
 peared a short distance away, walking slowly, his eyes 
 on the Cove and Peter Ferrara's house. He did not 
 see MacRae till he was quite close and glanced that way. 
 
 "Hello, MacRae," he said. 
 
 " How d' do," Jack answered. There was no cordi- 
 ality in his tone. If he had any desire at that moment 
 it was not for speech with Norman Gower, but rather a 
 desire that Gower should walk on. 
 
 But the other man sat down on MacRae's log. 
 
 ** Not much like over the pond, this," he remarked. 
 
 *^Not much," MacRae agreed indifferently. 
 
 Young Gower took a cigarette case out of his pocket, 
 extended it to MacRae, who declined with a brief shake 
 of his head. Norman lighted a cigarette. He was 
 short and stoutly biiilt, a compact, muscular man some- 
 what older than MacRae. He had very fair hair and 
 blue eyes, and the rose-leaf skin of his mother had in 
 him taken on a masculine floridity. But he had the 
 Gower mouth and determined chin. So had Betty, 
 MacRae was reminded, looking at her brother. 
 
 " You sank your harpoon pretty deep into Folly 
 Bay this season," Norman said abruptly. "Did you 
 do pretty well yourself?" 
 
 "Pretty well," MacRae drawled. "Did it worry 
 you?" 
 
 "Me? Hardly," young Gower smiled. "It did not 
 cost me anything to operate Folly Bay at a loss while 
 I was in charge; I had neither money nor reputation 
 to lose. You may have worried the governor. I dare 
 say you did. He never did take kindly to anything or 
 any one that interfered with his projects. But I 
 
AN INTERLUDE 165 
 
 haven't heard him commit himself. He doesn't con- 
 fide in me, anyway, nor esteem me very highly in any 
 capacity. I wonder if your father ever felt that way 
 about you ? " 
 
 "No," MacRae said impulsively. " By God, no ! " 
 
 "Lucky. And you came home with a record behind 
 you. Nothing to handicap you. You jumped into the 
 fray to do something for yourself and made good right 
 off the bat. There is such a thing as luck," Norman 
 said soberly. "A man can do his best — and fail. I 
 have, so far. I was expected to come home a credit to 
 the family, a hero, dangling medals on my manly chest. 
 Instead, I've lost caste with my own crowd. Girls and 
 fellows I used to know sneer at me behind my back. 
 They put their tongues in their cheek and say I was a 
 crafty slacker. I suppose you've heard the talk?" 
 
 "No," MacRae answered shortly; he had forgotten 
 Nelly Abbott's questioning almost the first time he met 
 her. " I don't run much with your crowd, anyway." 
 
 "Well, they can think what they damn please," 
 young Gower grumbled. " It 's quite true that I was 
 never any closer to the front than the Dover cliffs. 
 Perhaps at home here in the beginning they handed 
 me a captain's commission on the family pull. But I 
 tried to deliver the goods. These people think I dodged 
 the trenches. They don't know my eyesight spoiled my 
 chances of going into action. I could n't get to France. 
 So I did my bit where headquarters told me I could do 
 it or go home. And all I have got out of it is the 
 veiled contempt of nearly everybody I know, my father 
 included, for not killing Germans with my own hands." 
 
 MacRae kept still. It was a curious statement. 
 Young Gower twisted and ground his boot heel into the 
 soft earth. 
 
i66 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 "Being a rich man's son has proved a considerable 
 handicap in my case," he continued at last. " I was 
 petted and coddled all my life. Then the war came 
 along. Everybody expected a lot of me. And I am as 
 good as excommunicated for not coming up to expecta- 
 tions. Beautiful irony. If my eyes had been normal, 
 I should be another of Vancouver's heroes, — alive or 
 dead. The spirit doesn't seem to count. The only 
 thing that matters, evidently, is that I stayed on the 
 safe side of the Channel. They take it for granted that 
 I did so because I valued my own skin above everything. 
 Idiots." 
 
 "You can easily explain," MacRae suggested. 
 
 " I won't. I 'd see them all in Hades first," Norman 
 growled. " I '11 admit it stings me to have people think 
 so and rub it in, in their polite way. But I 'm getting 
 more or less indifferent. There are plenty of real 
 people in England who know I did the only work I could 
 do and did it well. Do you imagine I fancied sitting 
 on the side lines when all the fellows I knew were play- 
 ing a tough game.'' But I can't go about telling that to 
 people at home. I'll be damned if I will. A man has 
 to learn to stand the gaff sometime, and the last year 
 or so seems to be my period of schooling." 
 
 " Why tell all this to me ? " MacRae asked quietly. 
 
 Norman rose from the log. He chucked the butt of 
 his cigarette away. He looked directly, rather search- 
 ingly, at MacRae. 
 
 " Really, I don't know," he said in a flat, expression- 
 less tone. Then he walked on. 
 
 MacRae watched him pass out of sight among the 
 thickets. Young Gower had succeeded in dispelling the 
 passive contentment of basking in the sun. He had 
 managed to start buzzing trains of not too agreeable 
 
AN INTERLUDE 167 
 
 reflection. MacRae got to his feet before long and 
 tramped back around the Cove's head. He had known, 
 of course, that the Gowers still made more or less use 
 of their summer cottage. But he had not come in per- 
 sonal contact with any of them since the night Betty 
 had given him that new, disturbing angle from which to 
 view her. He had avoided her purposely. Now he was 
 afflicted with a sudden restlessness, a desire for other 
 voices and faces besides his own, and so, as he was in 
 the habit of doing when such a mood seized him, he went 
 on to Peter Ferrara's house. 
 
 He walked in through a wide-open door, unannounced 
 by aught save his footsteps, as he was accustomed to do, 
 and he found Dolly Ferrara and Betty Gower laughing 
 and chatting familiarly in the kitchen over teacups and 
 little cakes. 
 
 " Oh, I beg pardon," said he. " I did n't know you 
 were entertaining." 
 
 ** I don't entertain, and you know it," Dolly laughed. 
 " Come down from that lofty altitude and I 'U give you 
 a cup of tea." 
 
 '* Mr. MacRae, being an aviator of some note," Betty 
 put in, "probably finds himself at home in the high 
 altitudes." 
 
 "Do I seem to be up in the air.?" MacRae inquired 
 dryly. " I shall try to come down behind my own lines, 
 and not in enemy territory." 
 
 " You might have to make a forced landing," Dolly, 
 remarked. 
 
 Her great dusky eyes rested upon liim with a singular 
 quality of speculation. MacRae wondered if those two 
 had been talking about him, and why. 
 
 There was, an astonishing contrast between these two 
 girls, MacRae thought, his mind and his eyes busy upon 
 
i68 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 them while his tongue uttered idle words and his hands 
 coped with a teacup and cakes. Thej were the product 
 of totally dissimilar environments. They were the 
 physical antithesis of each other, — in all but the 
 pecuhar feline grace of young females who are healthily, 
 exuberantly alive. Yet MacRae had a feeling that they 
 were sisters under their skins, wonderfully alike in their 
 primary emotions. Why, then, he wondered, should one 
 be capable of moving him to violent emotional reactions 
 (he had got that far in his self-admissions concerning 
 Betty Gower), and the other move him only to a 
 friendly concern and latterly a certain pity? 
 
 Certainly either one would quite justify a man in 
 seeking her for his mate, if he found his natural in- 
 stincts urging him along ways which MacRae was begin- 
 ning to perceive no normal man could escape traveling. 
 And if he had to tread that road, why should it not 
 have been his desire to tread it with Dolly Ferrara? 
 That would have been so much simpler. With uncon- 
 scious egotism he put aside Norman Gower as a factor. 
 If he had to develop an unaccountable craving for some 
 particular woman, why couldn't it have centered upon 
 a woman he knew as well as he knew Dolly, whose likes 
 and dislikes, little tricks of speech and manner, habits 
 of thought, all the inconsiderable traits that go to make 
 up what we call personality, were pleasantly familiar? 
 
 Strange thoughts over a teacup, MacRae decided. 
 It seemed even more strange that he should be con- 
 sidering such intimately personal things in the very act 
 of carrying on an impersonal triangular conversation; 
 as if there were two of him present, one being occupied 
 in the approved teacup manner while the other sat by 
 speculating with a touch of moroseness upon distress- 
 ingly important potentialities. This duality persisted 
 
AN INTERLUDE 169 
 
 in functioning even when Betty looked at her watch and 
 said, " I must go," 
 
 He walked with her around to the head of the Cove. 
 He had not wanted to do that, — and still he did. He 
 found himself filled with an intense and resentful curi- 
 osity about this calm, self-possessed young woman. He 
 wondered if she really had any power to hurt him, if 
 there resided in her any more potent charm than other 
 women possessed, or if it were a mere sentimental be- 
 fogging of his mind due to the physical propinquity of 
 her at a time when he was weak and bruised and helpless. 
 He could feel the soft warmth of her hands yet, and 
 without even closing his eyes he could see her reddish- 
 brown hair against the white of his bed covers and the 
 tired droop of her body as she slept that night. 
 
 Curiously enough, before they were well clear of the 
 Ferrara house they had crossed swords. Courteously, 
 to be sure. !MacRae could not afterward recall clearly 
 how it began, — something about the war and the after- 
 effect of the war. British Columbia nowise escaped the 
 muddle into which the close of the war and the wrangle 
 of the peacemakers had plunged both industry and 
 politics. There had been a recent labor disturbance in 
 Vancouver in which demobilized soldiers had played a 
 part. 
 
 " You can't blame these men much. They 're be- 
 wildered at some of the things they get up against, and 
 exasperated by others. A lot of them have found the 
 going harder at home than it was in France. A lot of 
 promises and preachments don't fit in with performance 
 since the guns have stopped talking. I suppose that 
 doesn't seem reasonable to people like you," MacRae 
 found himself saying. "You don't have to gouge and 
 claw a living out of the world. Or at least, if there is 
 
170 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 any gouging and clawing to be done, you are not per- 
 sonally involved in it. You get it done by proxy." 
 
 Betty flushed slightly. 
 
 " Do you always go about with a chip on your 
 shoulder.?^ " she asked. " I should think you did enough 
 fighting in France." 
 
 " I learned to fight there," he said. " I was a happy- 
 go-lucky kid before that. Rich and poor looked alike 
 to me. I did n't covet anything that anybody had, and 
 I didn't dream that any one could possibly wish to 
 take away from me anything that I happened to have. 
 I thought the world was a kind and pleasant place for 
 everybody. But things look a little different to me 
 now. They sent us fellows to France to fight Huns. 
 But there are a few at home, I find. Why shouldn't 
 I fight them whenever I see a chance.^ " 
 
 " But I 'm not a Hun," Betty said with a smile. 
 
 " I 'm not so sure about that." 
 
 The words leaped out before he was quite aware of 
 what they might imply. They had come to a point on 
 the path directly in front of his house. Betty stopped. 
 Her gray eyes flashed angrily. Storm signals blazed in 
 her cheeks, bright above the delicate white of her neck. 
 
 "Jack MacRae," she burst out hotly, "you are 
 a — a — a first-class idiot!" 
 
 Then she turned her back on him and went off up the 
 path with a quick, springy step that somehow suggested 
 extreme haste. 
 
 MacRae stood looking after her fully a minute. 
 Then he climbed the steps, went into the front room and 
 sat himself down in a deep, cushioned chair. He 
 glowered into the fireplace with a look as black as the 
 charred remains of his morning fire. He uttered one 
 brief word after a long period of fixed staring. 
 
AN INTERLUDE 171 
 
 " Damn ! " he said. 
 
 It seemed a very inadequate manner of expressing liis 
 feelings, but it was the best he could do at the moment. 
 
 He sat there until the chill discomfort of the room 
 stirred him out of his abstraction. Then he built a 
 fire and took up a book to read. But the book presently 
 lay unheeded on his knees. He passed the rest of the 
 short forenoon sprawled in that big chair before the 
 fireplace, struggling with chaotic mental processes. 
 
 It made him unhappy, but he could not help it. A 
 tremendous assortment of mental images presented 
 themselves for inspection, flickering up unbidden out of 
 his brain-stufl', — 'old visions and new, familiar things 
 and vague, troublesome possibilities, all strangely jum- 
 bled together. His mind hopped from Squitty Cove to 
 Salisbury Plain, to the valley of the Rhone, to Paris, 
 London, Vancouver, turned up all sorts of recollections, 
 cameralike flashes of things that had happened to him, 
 things he had seen in curious places, bits of his life in 
 that somehow distant period when he was a youngster 
 chumming about with his father. And always he came 
 back to the Gowers, — father, son and daughter, and 
 the delicate elderly woman with the faded rose-leaf face 
 whom he had seen only once. Whole passages of Donald 
 MacRae's written life story took form in living words. 
 He could not disentangle himself from these Gowers. 
 
 And he hated them ! 
 
 Dark came down at last. MacRae went out on the 
 porch. The few scattered clouds had vanished com- 
 pletely. A starry sky glittered above horizons edged 
 by mountain ranges, serrated outlines astonishingly 
 distinct. The sea spread duskily mysterious from 
 duskier shores. It was very still, to MacRae suddenly 
 very lonely, empty, depressing. 
 
172 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 The knowledge that just across a narrow neck of 
 land the Gowers, father, daughter and son, went care- 
 lessly, securely about their own affairs, made him in- 
 finitely more lonelyt, irritated him, stirred up a burning 
 resentment against the lot of them. He lumped them 
 all together, despite a curious tendency on the part of 
 Betty's image to separate itself from the others. He 
 hated them, the whole damned, profiteering, arrogant, 
 butterfly lot. He nursed an unholy satisfaction in 
 having made some inroad upon their comfortable 
 security, in having " sunk his harpoon " into their only 
 vulnerable spot. 
 
 But that satisfaction did not give him relief or con- 
 tent as he stood looking out into the clear frost-tinged 
 night. Squitty had all at once become a ghostly place, 
 haunted with sadness. Old Donald MacRae was living 
 over again in him, he had a feeling, reliving those last 
 few cheerless, hopeless years which, MacRae told him- 
 self savagely, Horace Gower had deliberately made 
 more cheerless and hopeless. 
 
 And he was in a fair way to love that man's flesh and 
 blood? MacRae sneered at himself in the dark. Never 
 to the point of staying his hand, of foregoing his pur- 
 pose, of failing to strike a blow as chance offered. Not 
 so long as he was his father's son. 
 
 " Hang it, I 'm getting morbid," MacRae muttered 
 at last. "I've been sticking around here too close. 
 I '11 pack a bag to-morrow and go to town for a while." 
 
 He closed the door on the crisp, empty night, and 
 set about getting himself something to eat. 
 
\ 
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 The Swing op the Pendulum 
 
 MacRae did himself rather well, as the English say, 
 when he reached Vancouver. This was a holiday, and 
 he was disposed to make the most of it. He put up at 
 the Granada. He made a few calls and presently found 
 himself automatically relaunched upon Vancouver's 
 social waters. There were a few maids and more than 
 one matron who recalled pleasantly this straight up- 
 standing youngster with the cool gray eyes who had 
 come briefly into their ken the winter before. There 
 were a few fellows he had kno^vn in squadron quarters 
 overseas, home for good now that demobilization was 
 fairly complete. MacRae danced well. He had the 
 faculty of making himself agreeable without effort. He 
 found it pleasant to fall into the way of these careless, 
 well-dressed folk whose greatest labor seemed to be in 
 amusing themselves, to keep life from seeming " slow." 
 Buttressed by revenues derived from substantial sources, 
 mines, timber, coastal fisheries, land, established indus- 
 tries, these sons and daughters of the pioneers, many 
 but one degree removed from pioneering uncouthness, 
 were patterning their lives upon the plan of equivalent 
 classes in older regions. If it takes six generations in 
 Europe to make a gentleman, western America quite 
 casually dispenses with five, and the resulting product 
 seldom suffers by comparison. 
 
 As the well-to-do in Europe flung themselves into 
 
174 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 revelry with the signing of the armistice, so did they 
 here. Four years of war had corked the bottle of 
 gayety. The young men were all overseas. Life was a 
 little too cloudy during that period to be gay. Shadows 
 hung over too many homes. But that was past. They 
 had pulled the cork and thrown it away, one would 
 think. Pleasure was king, to be served with light 
 abandon. 
 
 It was a fairly vigorous place, MacRae discovered. 
 He liked it, gave himself up to it gladly, — for a while. 
 It involved no mental effort. These people seldom spoke 
 of money, or of work, or politics, the high cost of living, 
 international affairs. If they did it was jocularly, 
 sketchily, as matters of no importance. Their talk ran 
 upon dances, clothes, motoring, sports indoors and 
 afield, on food, — and sometimes genially on drink, 
 since the dry wave had not yet drained their cellars. 
 
 MacRae floated with this tide. But he was not wholly 
 carried away with it. He began to view it impersonally, 
 to wonder if it were the real thing, if this was what 
 inspired men to plot and scheme and struggle labori- 
 ously for money, or if it were just the froth on the 
 surface of realities which he could not quite grasp. He 
 couldn't say. There was a dash and glitter about it 
 that charmed him. He could warm and thrill to the 
 beauty of a Granada ballroom, music that seduced a 
 man's feet, beauty of silk and satin, of face and figure, 
 of bright eyes and gleaming jewels, a blending of all 
 the primary c'blors and every shade between, flashing 
 over a polished floor under high, carved ceilings. 
 
 He had surrendered Nelly Abbott to a claimant and 
 stood watching the swirl and glide of the dancers in the 
 Granada one night. His eyes were on the brilliance a 
 little below the raised area at one end of the floor, and 
 
THE SWING OF THE PENDULUM 175 
 
 so was his mind, inquiringly, with the curious concen- 
 tration of wliich his mind was capable. Presently he 
 became aware of some one speaking to liim, tugging at 
 his elbow. 
 
 " Oh, come out of it,'* a voice said derisively. 
 
 He looked around at Stubby Abbott. 
 
 ** Regular trance. I spoke to you twice. In love ? " 
 
 "Uh-uh. Just thinking," MacRae laughed. 
 
 *'Deep thinking, I'll say. Want to go down to the 
 billiard room and smoke.? '* 
 
 They descended to a subterranean chamber where, 
 in a pit lighted by low-hung shaded globes, men in shirt 
 sleeves clicked the red and white balls on a score 
 of tables. Rows of leather-upholstered chairs gave 
 comfort to spectators. They commandeered seats and 
 lighted cigarettes. "Look," Stubby said. "There's 
 Norman Gower." 
 
 Young Gower sat across a comer from them. He 
 was in evening clothes. He slumped in his chair. His 
 hands were limp along the chair arms. He was not 
 watching the billiard players. He was staring straight 
 across the room with the sightless look of one whose 
 mind is far away. 
 
 " Another deep thinker," Stubby drawled. " Rather 
 rough going for Norman these days." 
 
 "How?" MacRae asked. 
 
 "Funked it over across," Stubby replied. "So they 
 say. Careful to stay on the right side of the Channel. 
 Paying the penalty now. Girls rather rub it in. Fel- 
 lows not too — well, cordial. Pretty rotten for Nor- 
 man." 
 
 "Think he slacked deliberately?" MacRae inquired. 
 
 "That's the story. Lord, I don't know," Stubby 
 answered. " He stuck in England four years. Every- 
 
176 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 body else that was fit went up the line. That 's* all I 
 know. By their deeds ye shall judge them — eh? " 
 
 " Perhaps. What does he say about that himself? " 
 
 " Nothing, so far as I know. Keeps strictly mum on 
 the war subject," Stubby said. 
 
 Young Gower did not alter his position during the 
 few minutes they sat there. He sat staring straight 
 ahead of him, unseeingly. MacRae suddenly felt sorry 
 for him. If he had told the truth he was suffering 
 a peculiarly distressing form of injustice, of mis- 
 conception. MacRae recalled the passionate undertone 
 in Gower's voice when he said, " I did the only thing I 
 could do in the way I was told to do it." Yes, he was 
 sorry for Norman. The poor devil was not getting a 
 square deal. 
 
 But MacRae^s pity was swiftly blotted out. He had 
 a sudden uncomfortable vision of old Donald MacRae 
 rowing around Poor Man's Rock, back and forth in sun 
 and rain, in frosty dawns and stormy twilights, coming 
 home to a lonely house, dying at last a lonely death, the 
 sordid culmination of an embittered life. 
 
 Let him sweat, — the whole Gower tribe. MacRae 
 was the ancient Roman, for the moment, wishing all his 
 enemies had but a single head that he might draw his 
 sword and strike it off. Something in him hardened 
 against that first generous impulse to repeat to Stubby 
 Abbott what Norman had told him on the cliff at 
 Squitty. Let the beggar make his own defense. Yet 
 that stubborn silence, the proud refusal to make words 
 take the place of valiant deeds expected, wrung a gleam 
 of reluctant admiration from MacRae. He would have 
 done just that himself. 
 
 " Let 's get back," Stubby suggested. " I 've got the 
 next dance with Betty Gower. I don't want to miss it." 
 
THE SWING OF THE PENDULUM 177 
 
 "Is she here to-night? I haven't noticed her." 
 
 " Eyesight affected? " Stubby bantered. " Sure she 's 
 here. Looking like a dream." 
 
 MacRae felt a pang of envy. There was nothing to 
 hold Stubby back, — no old scores, no deep, abiding 
 resentment. MacRae had the conviction that Stubby 
 would never take anything like that so seriously as he. 
 Jack MacRae, did. He was aware that Stubby had 
 the curious dual code common in the business world, — 
 one set of inhibitions and principles for business and 
 another for personal and social uses. A man might be 
 Stubby's opponent in the market and his friend when 
 they met on a common social ground. MacRae could 
 never be quite like that. Stubby could fight Horace 
 Gower, for instance, tooth and toenail, for an advantage 
 in the salmon trade, and stretch his legs under Gower's 
 dining table with no sense of incongruity, no matter 
 what shifts the competitive struggle had taken or what 
 weapons either had used. That was business; and a 
 man left his business at the office. A curious thing, 
 MacRae thought. A phenomenon in ethics which he 
 found hard to understand, harder still to endorse. 
 
 He stood watching Stubby, knowing that Stubby 
 would go straight to Betty Gower. Presently he saw 
 her, marked the cut and color of her gown, watched 
 them swing into the gyrating wave of couples that took 
 the floor when the orchestra began. Indeed, MacRae 
 stood watching them until he recalled with a start that 
 he had this dance with Etta Robbin-Steele, who would, 
 in her own much-used phrase, be " simply furious " at 
 anything that might be construed as neglect; only 
 Etta's fury would consist of showing her white, even 
 teeth in a pert smile with a challenging twinkle in her 
 very black eyes. 
 
178 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 He went to Betty as soon as he found opportunity. 
 He did not quite know why. He did not stop to ask 
 himself why. It was a purely instinctive propulsion. 
 He followed his impulse as the needle swings to the 
 pole; as an object released from the hand at a great 
 height obeys the force of gravity; as water flows 
 downhill. 
 
 He took her programme. 
 
 "I don't see any vacancies," he said. "Shall I 
 create one ? " 
 
 He drew his pencil through Stubby Abbott's name. 
 Stubby's signature was rather liberally inscribed there, 
 he thought. Betty looked at him a trifle uncertainly. 
 
 "Aren't you a trifle — sweeping?" she inquired. 
 
 " Perhaps. Stubby won't mind. Do you? " he asked. 
 
 "I seem to be defenseless." Betty shrugged her 
 shoulders. "What shall we quarrel about this time?" 
 
 " Anything you like," he made reckless answer. 
 
 " Very well, then," she said as they got up to dance. 
 " Suppose we begin by finding out what there is to 
 quarrel over. Are you aware that practically every 
 time we meet we nearly come to blows? What is there 
 about me that irritates you so easily?" 
 
 "Your inaccessibility." 
 
 MacRae spoke without weighing his words. Yet that 
 was the truth, although he knew that such a frank truth 
 was neither good form nor policy. He was sorry before 
 the words were out of his mouth. Betty could not 
 possibly understand what he meant. He was not sure 
 he wanted her to understand. MacRae felt himself 
 riding to a fall. As had happened briefly the night of 
 the Blackbird's wrecking, he experienced that feeling of 
 dumb protest against the shaping of events in which he 
 moved helpless. This bit of flesh and blood swaying in 
 
THE SWING OF THE PENDULUM 179 
 
 his arms in effortless rhythm to sensuous music was 
 something he had to reckon with powerfully, whether 
 he liked or not. MacRae was beginning dimly to see 
 that. When he was with her — 
 
 " But I 'm not inaccessible." 
 
 She dropped her voice to a cooing whisper. Her eyes 
 glowed as they met his with steadfast concern. There 
 was a smile and a question in them. 
 
 *' What ever gave you that idea ? " 
 
 " It is n't an idea ; it *s a fact." 
 
 The resentment against circumstances that troubled 
 MacRae crept into his tone. 
 
 "Oh, silly!" 
 
 There was a railing note of tenderness in Betty's 
 voice. MacRae felt his moorings slip. A heady reck- 
 lessness of consequences seized him. He drew her a 
 little closer to him. Irresistible prompting from some 
 wellspring of liis being urged him on to what his reason 
 would have called sheer folly, if that reason had not 
 for the time suffered eclipse, which is a weakness of 
 rational processes when they come into conflict with a 
 genuine emotion. 
 
 " Do you like me, Betty? " 
 
 Her eyes danced. They answered as well as her lips : 
 
 "Of course I do. Haven't I been telling you so 
 plainly enough.'* I 've been ashamed of myself for being 
 so transparent — on such slight provocation." 
 
 " How much.? " he demanded. 
 
 «0h — well— " 
 
 The ballroom was suddenly shrouded in darkness, 
 saved only from a cavelike black by diffused street light 
 through the upper windows. A blown fuse. A mis- 
 pulled switch. One of those minor accidents common 
 to electric lighting systems. The orchestra hesitated. 
 
i8o POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 went on. From a momentary silence the dancers broke 
 into chuckles, amused laughter, a buzz of exclamatory 
 conversation. But no one moved, lest they collide with 
 other unseen couples. 
 
 Jack and Betty stood still. They could not see. 
 But MacRae could feel the quick beat^ of Betty's heart, 
 the rise and fall of her breast, a trembling in her 
 fingers. There was a strange madness stirring in him. 
 His arm tightened about her. He felt that she yielded 
 easily, as if gladly. Their mouths sought and clung in 
 the first real kiss Jack MacRae had ever known. And 
 then, as they relaxed that impulse-born embrace, the 
 hghts flashed on again, blazed in a thousand globes in 
 great frosted clusters high against the gold-leaf decora- 
 tions of the ceiling. The dancers caught step again. 
 MacRae and Betty circled the polished floor silently. 
 She floated in his arms like thistledown, her eyes like 
 twin stars, a deeper color in her cheeks. 
 
 Then the music ceased, and they were swept into a 
 chattering group, out of which presently materialized 
 another partner to claim Betty. So they parted with 
 a smile and a nod. 
 
 But MacRae had no mind for dancing. He went out 
 through the lobby and straight to his room. He flung 
 off his coat and sat down in a chair by the window and 
 blinked out into the night. He had looked, it seemed to 
 him, into the very gates of paradise, — and he could not 
 go in. 
 
 It wasn't possible. He sat peering out over the 
 dusky roofs of the city, damning with silent oaths the 
 coil in which he found himself inextricably involved. 
 History was repeating itself. Like father, like son. 
 
 There was a difference though. MacRae, as he grew 
 calmer, marked that. Old Donald had lost his sweet- 
 
THE SWING OF THE PENDULUM i8i 
 
 heart by force and trickery. His son must forego love 
 — if it were indeed love — ^of his own volition. He had 
 no choice. He saw no way of winning Betty Gower 
 unless he stayed his hand against her father. And he 
 would not do that. He could not. It would be like 
 going over to the enemy in the heat of battle. Gower 
 had wronged and persecuted his father. He had beaten 
 old Donald without mercy in every phase of that thirty- 
 year period. He had taken Donald MacRae's woman 
 from him in the beginning and his property in the end. 
 Jack ^lacRae had every reason to believe Gower merely 
 sat back awaiting a favorable opportunity to crush him. 
 
 So there could be no compromising there; no inter- 
 marrying and sentimental burying of the old feud. 
 Betty would tie his hands. He was afraid of her power 
 to do that. He did not want to be a Samson shorn. 
 His ego revolted against love interfering with the grim 
 business of everyday life. He bit his lip and wished he 
 could wipe out that kiss. He cursed himself for a 
 slavish weakness of the flesh. The night was old when 
 MacRae lay down on his bed. But he could find no 
 ease for the throbbing ferment within him. He suffered 
 with a pain as keen as if he had been physically wounded, 
 and the very fact that he could so suffer filled him with 
 dismay. He had faced death man}*^ times with less 
 emotion than he now was facing life. 
 
 He had no experience of love. Nothing remotely 
 connected with women had ever suggested such possi- 
 bilities of torment. He had known first-hand the pangs 
 of hunger and tliirst, of cold and weariness, of anger 
 and hate, of burning wounds in his flesh. He had al- 
 ways been able to grit his teeth and endure ; none of it 
 had been able to wring his soul. This did. He had 
 come to manhood, to a full understanding of sex, at a 
 
i82 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 time when he played the greatest game of all, when all 
 his energies were fiercely centered upon preservation for 
 himself and certain destruction for other men. Per- 
 haps because he had come back clean, having never 
 wasted himself in complaisant liaisons overseas, the in- 
 evitable focusing of passion stirred him more pro- 
 foundly. He was neither a varietist nor a male prude. 
 He was aware of sex. He knew desire. But the flame 
 Betty Gower had kindled in him made him look at 
 women out of different eyes. Desire had been revealed 
 to him not as something casual, but as an imperative. 
 As if nature had pulled the blinkers oif his eyes and 
 shown him his mate and the aim and object and law 
 and fiery urge of the mating instinct all in one blinding 
 flash. 
 
 He lay hot and fretful, cursing himself for a fool, 
 yet unable to find ease, wondering dully if Betty Gower 
 must also suffer as he should, or if it were only an 
 innocent, piquant game that Betty played. Always in 
 the background of his mind lurked a vision of her father, 
 sitting back complacently, fat, smug, plump hands on 
 a well-rounded stomach, chuckling a brutal satisfaction 
 over another MacRae beaten. 
 
 MacRae wakened from an uneasy sleep at ten o'clock. 
 He rose and dressed, got his breakfast, went out oil the 
 streets. But Vancouver had all at once grown insuffer- 
 able. The swarming streets irritated him. He smol- 
 dered inside, and he laid it to the stir and bustle and 
 noise. He conceived himself to crave hushed places 
 and solitude, where he could sit and think. 
 
 By mid-afternoon he was far out in the Gulf of 
 Georgia, aboard a coasting steamer sailing for island 
 ports. If it occurred to him that he was merely running 
 away from temptation, he did not admit the fact. 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 
 Hearts are Not Always Trumps 
 
 If MacRae reckoned on tranquillity in his island seclu- 
 sion he failed in his reckoning. A man may fly from 
 temptation, run from a threatening danger, but he 
 cannot run away from himself. He could not inhibit 
 thought, reflection, surges of emotion generated mys- 
 teriously within himself. 
 
 He did his best. He sought relief in action. There 
 were a great many things about his freehold upon which 
 he bestowed feverish labor for a time. He cleared away 
 all the underbrush to the outer limits of his shrunken 
 heritage. He built a new enclosing fence of neatly 
 split cedar, installed a pressure system of water in the 
 old house. 
 
 "You goin' to get married?" old Peter inquired 
 artlessly one day. "You got all the symptoms — 
 buzzin' around in your nest like a bumblebee." 
 
 And Dolly smiled her slow, enigmatic smile. 
 
 Whereupon MacRae abandoned his industry and 
 went off to Blackfish Sound with Vincent in the Blue- 
 bird. The salmon run was long over, but the coastal 
 waters still yielded a supply of edible fish. There were 
 always a few spring salmon to be taken here and there. 
 Ling, red and rock cod knew no seasons. Nor the 
 ground fish, plaice, sole, flounders, halibut. Already 
 the advance guard of the great run of mature herring 
 began to show. For a buyer there was no such profit 
 
i84 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 in running these fish to market as the profit of the 
 annual salmon run. Still it paid moderately. So 
 MacRae had turned the Blitebird over to Vin to operate 
 for a time on a share basis. It gave Vin, who was am- 
 bitious and apparently tireless, a chance to make a few 
 hundred dollars in an off season. 
 
 Wherefore MacRae, grown suddenly restless beyond 
 all restraining upon his island, made a trip or two 
 north with Vin — a working guest on his own vessel — 
 up where the Gulf of Georgia is choked to narrow 
 passages through which the tidal currents race like 
 mountain streams pent in a gorge, up where the sea 
 is a maze of waterways among wooded islands. They 
 anchored in strange bays. They fared once into Queen 
 Charlotte Sound and rode the great ground swell that 
 heaves up from the far coast of Japan to burst against 
 the rocky outpost of Cape Caution. They doubled on 
 their tracks and gathered their toll of the sea from fish- 
 ing boats here and there until the Blitebird rode deep with 
 cargo, fresh fish to be served on many tables far inland. 
 MacRae often wondered if the housewife who ordered 
 her weekly ration of fish and those who picked daintily 
 at the savory morsels with silver forks ever thought 
 how they came by this food. Men till the sea with 
 pain and risk and infinite labor, as they till the land; 
 only the fisherman with his nets and hooks and gear 
 does not sow, he only reaps. Nature has attended 
 diligently to the sowing, from the Cape of Good Hope 
 to Martha's Vineyard, from Bering Strait to Botany 
 Bay. 
 
 But MacRae soon had enough of that and came back 
 to Squitty, to his fireplace and his books. He had been 
 accustomed to enjoy the winters, the clear crisp morn- 
 ings that varied weeks of drenching rain which washed 
 
HEARTS ARE NOT ALWAYS TRUMPS 185 
 
 the land clean ; to prowl about in the woods with a gun 
 when he needed meat; to bask before a bed of coals in 
 the fireplace through long evenings when the wind 
 howled and the rain droned on the roof and the sea 
 snored along the rocky beaches. That had been in days 
 before he learned the weight of loneliness, when his 
 father had been there to sit quietly beside the fire 
 smoking a pipe, when Dolly Ferrara ran wild in the 
 woods with him or they rode for pure sport the tum- 
 bling seas in a dugout canoe. 
 
 Now winter was a dull inaction, a period of discon- 
 tent, in which thought gnawed at him like an ingrowing 
 toenail. Everything seemed out of joint. He found 
 himself feverishly anxious for spring, for the stress and 
 strain of another tilt with Folly Bay. Sometimes he 
 asked himself where he would come out, even if he won 
 all along the line, if he made money, gained power, 
 beat Gower ultimately to his knees, got back his land. 
 He did not try to peer too earnestly into the future. 
 It seemed a little misty. He was too much concerned 
 with the immediate present, looming big with possi- 
 bilities of good or evil for himself. Things did not 
 seem quite so simple as at first. A great many com- 
 plications, wholly unforeseen, had arisen since he came 
 back from France. But he was committed to certain 
 undertakings from which he neither wished nor intended 
 to turn aside, — not so long as he had the will to choose. 
 
 Christmas came again, and with it the gathering of 
 the Ferraras for their annual reunion, — Old Manuel 
 and Joaquin, young Manuel and Ambrose and Vincent. 
 Steve they could speak of now quite casually. He had 
 died in his sea boots like many another Ferrara. It was 
 a pity, of course, but it was the chance of his calling. 
 And the gathering was stronger in numbers, even with 
 
i86 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 Steve gone. Ambrose had taken himself a wife, a merry 
 round-cheeked girl whose people were coaxing Ambrose 
 to quit the sea for a more profitable undertaking in 
 timber. And also Norman Gower was there. 
 
 MacRae did not quite know how to take that young 
 man. He had had stray contacts with Norman during 
 the Jast few weeks. For a rich man's son he was not run- 
 ning true to form. He and Long Tom Spence had 
 struck up a partnership in a group of mineral claims 
 on the Knob, that conical mountain which lifted like 
 one of the pyramids out of the middle of Squitty Island. 
 There had been much talk of those claims. Years ago 
 Bill Munro — he who died of the flu in his cabin beside 
 the Cove — had staked those claims. Munro was a 
 young man then, a prospector. He had inveigled other 
 men to share his hopes and labors, to grubstake him 
 while he drove the tunnel that was to cut the vein. 
 MacRae's father had taken a hand in this. So had 
 Peter Ferrara. But these informal partnerships had 
 always lapsed. Old Bill Munro's prospects had never 
 got beyond the purely prospective stage. The copper 
 was there, ample traces of gold and silver. But he 
 never developed a showing big enough to lure capital. 
 When Munro died the claims had been long abandoned. 
 
 Long Tom Spence had suddenly relocated them. 
 Some working agreement had included Uncle Peter and 
 young Gower. Long Tom went about hinting mysteri- 
 ously of fortunes. Peter Ferrara even admitted that 
 there was a good showing. Norman had been there 
 for weeks, living with Spence in a shack, sweating day 
 after day in the tunnel. They were all beginning to 
 speak of it as " the mine." 
 
 Norman had rid himself of that grouchy frown. He 
 was always singing or whistling or laughing. His fair. 
 
HEARTS ARE NOT ALWAYS TRUMPS 187 
 
 rather florid face glowed with a perpetual good nature. 
 He treated MacRae to the same cheerful, careless air 
 that he had for everything and everybody. And when 
 he was about Uncle Peter's house at the Cove he monop- 
 olized Dolly, an attitude which Dolly herself as well as 
 her uncle seemed to find agreeable and proper. 
 
 MacRae finally found himself compelled to accept 
 Norman Gower as part of the group. He was a little 
 surprised to find that he harbored no decided feeling 
 about young Gower, one way or the other. If he felt 
 at all, it was a mild impatience that another man had 
 established a relation with Dolly Ferrara which put 
 aside old friendships. He found himself constrained 
 more and more to treat Dolly like any other pleasant 
 young woman of his acquaintance. He did not quite 
 like that. He and Dolly Ferrara had been such good 
 chums. Besides, he privately considered that Dolly 
 was throwing herself away on a man weak enough to 
 make the tragic blunder young Gower had made in 
 London. But that was their own affair. Altogether, 
 MacRae found it quite impossible to muster up any 
 abiding grudge against young Gower on his own account. 
 
 So he let matters stand and celebrated Christmas 
 with them. Afterward they got aboard the Bluebird 
 and went to a dance at Potter's Landing, where for all 
 that Jack MacRae was the local hero, both of the great 
 war and the salmon war of the past season, both Dolly 
 and Norman, he privately conceded, enjoyed themselves 
 a great deal more than he did. Their complete absorp- 
 tion in each other rather irritated him. 
 
 They came back to the Cove early in the morning. 
 The various Ferraras disposed themselves about Peter's 
 house to sleep, and MacRae went on to his own place. 
 About an hour after daybreak he saw Norman Gower 
 
i88 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 pass up the bush trail to the mine with a heavy pack 
 of provisions on his back. And MacRae wondered idly 
 if Norman was bucking the game in earnest, strictly 
 on his own, and why? 
 
 Late in January the flash of a white skirt and a sky- 
 blue sweater past his dooryard apprised MacRae that 
 Betty was back. And he did not want to see Betty or 
 talk with her. He hoped her stay would be brief. He 
 even asked himself testily why people like that wanted 
 to come to a summer dwelling in the middle of winter. 
 But her so j oum was not so brief as he hoped. At divers 
 times thereafter he saw her in the distance, faring to 
 and fro from Peter Ferrara's house, out on the trail that 
 ran to the Knob, several times when the sea was calm 
 paddling a canoe or rowing alongshore. Also he had 
 glimpses of the thickset figure of Horace Gower walking 
 along the cliffs. MacRae avoided both. That was easy 
 enough, since he knew every nook and bush and guUy on 
 that end of the island. But the mere sight of Gower 
 was an irritation. He resented the man's presence. It 
 affected him like a challenge. It set him always ponder- 
 ing ways and means to secure ownership of those acres 
 again and forever bar Gower from walking along those 
 cliffs with that masterful air of possession. Only a 
 profound distaste for running away from anything 
 kept him from quitting the island while they were there, 
 those two, one of whom he was growing to hate far be- 
 yond the original provocation, the other whom he 
 loved, — for MacRae admitted reluctantly, resentfully, 
 that he did love Betty, and he was afraid of where that 
 emotion might lead him. He recognized the astonish- 
 ing power of passion. It troubled him, stirred up 
 an amazing conflict at times between his reason and his 
 impulses. He fell back always upon the conclusion that 
 
HEARTS ARE NOT ALWAYS TRUMPS 189 
 
 love was an irrational thing anyway, that it should not 
 be permitted to upset a man's logical plan of existence. 
 But he was never very sure that this conclusion would 
 stand a practical test. 
 
 The southern end of Squitty was not of such vast 
 scope that two people could roam here and there without 
 sometime coming face to face, particularly when these 
 two were a man and a woman driven by a spirit of rest- 
 lessness to lonely wanderings. MacRae went into the 
 woods with his rifle one day in search of venison. He 
 wounded a buck, followed him down a long canyon, and 
 killed his game within sight of the sea. He took the 
 carcass by a leg and dragged it through the bright 
 green salal brush. As he stepped out of a screening 
 thicket on to driftwood piled by storm and tide, he saw 
 a rowboat hauled up on the shingle above reach of 
 short, steep breakers, and a second glance showed him 
 Betty sitting on a log close by, looking at him. 
 
 " Stormbound ? " he asked her. 
 
 '' Yes. I was rowing and the wind came up." 
 
 She rose and came over to look at the dead deer. 
 
 " What beautiful animals they are ! " she said. " Is n't 
 it a pity to kill them?" 
 
 " It 's a pity, too, to kill cattle and sheep and pigs, 
 to haul fish by the gills out of the sea," MacRae replied; 
 " to trap marten and mink and fox and beaver and 
 bear for their skins. But men must eat and women 
 must wear furs." 
 
 "How horribly logical you are," Betty murmured. 
 "You make a natural sympathy appear wishy-washy 
 sentimentalism." 
 
 She reseated herself on the log. MacRae sat down 
 beside her. He looked at her searchingly. He could 
 not keep his eyes away. A curious inconsistency was 
 
igo POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 revealed to him. He sat beside Betty, responding to 
 the potent stimuli of her nearness and wishing pettishly 
 that she were a thousand miles away, so that he would 
 not be troubled by the magic of her lips and eyes and 
 unruly hair, the musical cadences of her voice. There 
 was a subtle quality of expectancy about her, as if 
 she sat there waiting for him to say something, do some- 
 thing, as if her mere presence were powerful to compel 
 him to speak and act as she desired. MacRae realized 
 the fantasy of those impressions. Betty sat looking at 
 him calmly, her hands idle in her lap. If there were in 
 her soul any of the turmoil that was fast rising in his, 
 it was not outwardly manifested by any sign whatever. 
 For that matter, MacRae knew that he himself was 
 placid enough on the surface. Nor did he feel the urge 
 of inconsequential speech. There was no embarrassment 
 in that mutual silence, only the tug of a compelling de- 
 sire to take her in his arms, which he must resist. 
 
 "There are times," Betty said at last, "when you 
 live up to your nickname with a vengeance." 
 
 "There are times," MacRae replied slowly, "when 
 that is the only wise thing for a man to do." 
 
 " And you, I suppose, rather pride yourself on being 
 wise in your day and generation." 
 
 There was gentle raillery in her tone. 
 
 *' I don't like you to be sarcastic," he said. 
 
 *'I don't think you like me sarcastic or otherwise," 
 Betty observed, after a moment's silence. 
 
 "But I do," he protested. "That's the devil of it. 
 I do — and you know I do. It would be a great deal 
 better if I didn't." 
 
 Betty's fingers began to twist in her lap. The color 
 rose faintly in her smooth cheeks. Her eyes turned to 
 the sea. 
 
HEARTS ARE NOT ALWAYS TRUMPS 191 
 
 *' I don't know why," she said gently. " I 'd hate to 
 think it would." 
 
 MacRae did not find any apt reply to that. His mind 
 was in an agonized muddle, in which he could only per- 
 ceive one or two things with any degree of clearness. 
 Betty loved him. He was sure of that. He could tell 
 her that he loved her. And then.'' Therein arose the 
 conflict. Marriage was the natural sequence of love. 
 And when he contemplated marriage with Betty he 
 found himself unable to detach her from her back- 
 ground, in which lurked something which to MacRae's 
 imagination loomed sinister, hateful. To make peace 
 with Horace Gower — granting that Gower was willing 
 for such a consummation — for love of his daughter 
 struck MacRae as something very near to dishonor. 
 And if, contrariwise, he repeated to Betty the ugly 
 story which involved her father and his father, she 
 would be harassed by irreconcilable forces even if she 
 cared enough to side with him against her own people. 
 MacRae was gifted with acute perception, in some 
 things. He said to himself despairingly — nor was it 
 the first time that he had said it — that you cannot 
 mix oil and water. 
 
 He could do nothing at all. That was the sum of his 
 ultimate conclusions. His hands were tied. He could 
 not go back and he could not go on. He sat beside 
 Betty, longing to take her in his arms and still fighting 
 stoutly against that impulse. He was afraid of his 
 impulses. 
 
 A faint moisture broke out on his face with that 
 acute nervous strain. A lump rose chokingly in his 
 throat. He stared out at the white-crested seas that 
 came marching up the Gulf before a rising wind until 
 his eyes grew misty. Then he slid down off the log 
 
192 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 and laid his head on Betty's knee. A weight of dumb 
 grief oppressed him. He wanted to cry, and he was 
 ashamed of his weakness. 
 
 Betty's fingers stole caressingly over his bare head, 
 rumpled his hair, stroked his hot cheek. 
 
 "Johnny-boy," she said at last, "what is it that 
 comes like a fog between you and me ? " 
 
 MacRae did not answer. 
 
 " I make love to you quite openly," Betty went on. 
 " And I don't seem to be the least bit ashamed of doing 
 so. I 'm not a silly kid. I 'm nearlj^ as old as you are, 
 and I know quite well what I want — which happens 
 to be you. I love you. Silent John. The man is sup- 
 posed to be the pursuer. But I seem to have that in- 
 stinct myself. Besides," she laughed tremulously, 
 " this is leap year. And, remember, you kissed me. Or 
 did I kiss you? Which was it. Jack.? " 
 
 MacRae seated himself on the log beside her. He put 
 his arm around her and drew her close to him. That 
 disturbing wave of emotion which had briefly mastered 
 him was gone. He felt only a passionate tenderness for 
 Betty and a pity for them both. But he had deter- 
 mined what to do. 
 
 "I do love you, Betty," he said — ^"your hair and 
 your eyes and your lips and the sound of your voice 
 and the way you walk and everything that is you. 
 Is that quite plain enough.? It's a sort of emotional 
 madness.'* 
 
 " Well, I am afflicted with the same sort of madness," 
 she admitted. " And I like it. It is natural." 
 
 "But you wouldn't like it if you knew it meant a 
 series of mental and spiritual conflicts that would be 
 almost like physical torture," he said slowly. " You 'd 
 be afraid of it." 
 
HEARTS ARE NOT ALWAYS TRUMPS 193 
 
 " And you ? " she demanded. 
 
 "Yes," he said simply. "I am." 
 
 "Then you're a poor sort of lover," she flung at 
 him, and freed herself from his arms with a quick twist 
 of her body. Her breast heaved. She moved away from 
 him. 
 
 "I'll admit being a poor lover, perhaps," MacRae 
 said. " I did n't want to love you. I should n't love 
 you. I really ought to hate you. I don't, but if I was 
 consistent, I should. I ought to take every opportunity 
 to hurt you just because you are a Gower. I have 
 good reason to do so. I can't tell you why — or at least 
 I am not going to tell you l^hy. I don't think it would 
 mend matters if I did. I dare say I 'm a better fighter 
 than a lover. I fight in the open, on the square. And 
 because I happen to care enough to shrink from making 
 you risk things I can't dodge, I 'm a poor lover. Well, 
 perhaps I am." 
 
 " I did n't really mean that. Jack," Betty muttered. 
 
 "I know you didn't," he returned gently. "But 
 I mean what I have just said." 
 
 "You mean that for some reason which I do not 
 know and which you will not tell me, there is such bad 
 blood between you and my father that you can't — you 
 won't — won't even take a chance on me?" 
 
 " Something like that," MacRae admitted. " Only 
 you put it badly. You 'd either tie my hands, which 
 I could n't submit to, or you 'd find yourself torn be- 
 tween two factions, and life would be a pretty sad 
 affair." 
 
 "I asked you once before, and you told me it was 
 something that happened before either of us was born," 
 Betty said thoughtfully. "I am going to get at the 
 bottom of this somehow. I wonder if you do really care, 
 
194 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 or if this is all camouflage, — if you're just pla3ring 
 with me to see how big a fool I mil make of myself." 
 
 That queer mistrust of him which suddenly clouded 
 Betty's face and made her pretty mouth harden roused 
 Jack MacRae to an intolerable fury. It was like a 
 knife in a tender spot. He had been stifling the impulse 
 to forget and bury all these ancient wrongs and injus- 
 tices for which neither of them was responsible but for 
 which, so far as he could see, they must both suifer. 
 Something cracked in him at Betty's words. She 
 jumped, warned by the sudden blaze in his eyes. But 
 he caught her with a movement quicker than her own. 
 He held her by the arms with fingers that gripped like 
 iron clamps. He shook her. 
 
 " You wonder if I really care," he cried. " My God, 
 can't you see? Can't you feel? Must a man grovel 
 and weep and rave ? " 
 
 Betty whitened a little at this storm which she had 
 evoked. But she did not flinch. Her eyes looked 
 straight into his, fearlessly. 
 
 "You are raving now," she said. "And you are 
 hurting my arms terribly." 
 
 MacRae released his hold on her. His hands 
 dropped to his sides. 
 
 "I suppose I was," he said in a flat, lifeless tone. 
 "But don't say that to me again, ever. You can say 
 anything you like, Betty, except that I'm not in 
 earnest. I don't deserve that." 
 
 Betty retreated a little. MacRae was not even look- 
 ing at her now. His eyes were turned to the sea, to 
 hide the blur that crept into them in spite of his will. 
 
 "You don't deserve anything," Betty said dis- 
 tinctly. She moved warily away as she spoke. "You 
 have the physical courage to face death; but you 
 
HEARTS ARE NOT ALWAYS TRUMPS 195 
 
 haven't the moral courage to face a problem in living, 
 even though you love me. You take it for granted 
 that I'm as weak as you are. You won't even give me 
 a chance to prove whether love is strong or weak in 
 the face of trouble. And I will never give you another 
 chance — never." 
 
 She sprang from the beach to the low pile of drift- 
 wood and from that plunged into the thicket. MacRae 
 did not try to follow. He did not even move. He 
 looked after her a minute. Then he sat down on the 
 log again and stared at the steady march of the swells. 
 There was a sense of finality in this thing which made 
 him flounder desperately. Still, he assured himself, it 
 had to be. And if it had to be that way it was better 
 to have it so understood. Betty would never look at 
 him again with that disturbing message in her eyes. 
 He would not be troubled by a futile longing. But it 
 hurt. He had never imagined how so abstract a thing 
 as emotion could breed such an ache in a man's heart. 
 
 After a little he got up. There was a trail behind 
 that thicket, an old game trail widened by men's feet, 
 that ran along the seaward slope to Cradle Bay. He 
 went up now to this path. His eye, used to the practice 
 of woodcraft, easily picked up tiny heel marks, toe 
 prints, read their message mechanically. Betty had 
 been running. She had gone home. 
 
 He went back to the beach. The rowboat and the 
 rising tide caught his attention. He hauled the boat 
 up on the driftwood so that it should not float away. 
 Then he busied himself on the deer's legs with a knife 
 for a minute and shouldered the carcass. 
 
 It was a mile and a half across country to the head 
 of Squitty Cove. He had intended to hang his deer in 
 a tree by the beach and come for it later with a boat. 
 
196 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 Now he took up this hundred-pound burden for the 
 long carry over steep hills and through brushy hollows 
 in the spirit of the medieval flagellantes, mortifying 
 his flesh for the ease of his soul. 
 
 An hour or so later he came out on a knoll over- 
 looking all the southeastern face of Squitty. Below, 
 the wind-harassed Gulf spread its ruffled surface. He 
 looked down on the cliffs and the Cove and Cradle Bay. 
 He could see Gower's cottage white among the green, 
 one chimney spitting blue smoke that the wind carried 
 away in a wispy banner. He could see a green patch 
 behind his own house with the white headboard that 
 marked his father's grave. He could see Poor Man's 
 Rock bare its kelp-grown head between seas, and on 
 the point above the Rock a solitary figure, squat and 
 brown, that he knew must be Horace Gower. 
 
 MacRae laid down his pack to rest his aching shoul- 
 ders. But there was no resting the ache in his heart. 
 Nor was it restful to gaze upon any of these things 
 within the span of his eye. He was reminded of too 
 much which it was not good to remember. As he sat 
 staring down on the distant Rock and a troubled sea 
 with an intolerable heaviness in his breast, he recalled 
 that so must his father have looked down on Poor Man's 
 Rock in much the same anguished spirit long ago. 
 And Jack MacRae's mind reacted morbidly to the sug^ 
 gestion, the parallel. His eyes turned with smolder- 
 ing fire to the stumpy figure on the tip of Point Old. 
 
 "I'll pay it all back yet," he gritted. "Betty or 
 no Betty, I'll make him wish he'd kept his hands off 
 the MacRaes." 
 
 About the time Jack MacRae with his burden of ven- 
 ison drew near his own dooryard, Betty Gower came out 
 
HEARTS ARE NOT ALWAYS TRUMPS 197 
 
 upon the winter-sodden lawn before their cottage and 
 having crossed it ran lightly up the steps to the wide 
 porch. From there she saw her father standing on the 
 Point. She called to him. At her hail he came trudg- 
 ing to the house. Betty was piling wood in the living- 
 room fireplace when he came in. 
 
 ** I was beginning to worry about you," he said. 
 
 "The wind got too much for me," she answered, 
 "so I put the boat on the beach a mile or so along 
 and walked home." 
 
 Gower drew a chair up to the fire. 
 
 ** Blaze feels good," he remarked. "There's a chill 
 in this winter air." 
 
 Betty made no comment. 
 
 "Getting lonesome?" he inquired after a minute. 
 "It seems to me you've been restless the last day or 
 two. Want to go back to town, Betty.?" 
 
 " I wonder why we come here and stay and stay, out 
 of reach of everything and everybody?" she said at 
 last. 
 
 " Blest if I know," Gower answered casually. " Ex- 
 cept that we like to. It's a restful place, isn't it? 
 You work harder at having a good time in town than I 
 ever did making money. Well, we don't have to be 
 hermits unless we like. We'll go back to mother and 
 the giddy whirl to-morrow, if you like." 
 
 " We might as well, I think," she said absently. 
 
 For a minute neither spoke. The fire blazed up in a 
 roaring flame. Raindrops slashed suddenly against 
 the windows out of a storm-cloud driven up by the wind. 
 Betty turned her eyes on her father. 
 
 "Did you ever do anything to Jack MacRae that 
 would give him reason to hate you ? " she asked 
 bluntly. 
 
igS POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 Gower shook his head without troubling to look at 
 her. He kept his face steadfastly to the fire. 
 
 " No," he said. " The other way about, if any- 
 thing. He put a crimp in me last season." 
 
 " I remember you said you were going to smash him," 
 she said thoughtfully. 
 
 "Did I?" he made answer in an indifferent tone. 
 " Well, I might. And then again I might not. He may 
 do the smashing. He's a harder proposition than I 
 figured he would be, in several ways." 
 
 " That is n't it," Betty said, as if to herself. " Then 
 you must have had some trouble with his father — long 
 ago. Something that hurt him enough for him to pass 
 a grudge on to Jack. What was it, daddy? Anything 
 real?" 
 
 "Jack, eh?" Gower passed over the direct ques- 
 tion. " You must be getting on. Have you been seeing 
 much of that young man lately? " 
 
 "What does that matter?" Betty returned im- 
 patiently. " Of course I see him. Is there any reason 
 I shouldn't?" 
 
 Gower picked up a brass poker. He leaned forward, 
 digging aimlessly at the fire, stirring up tiny cascades 
 of sparks that were sucked glowing into the black 
 chimney throat. 
 
 " Perhaps no reason that would strike you as valid," 
 he said slowly. "Still — I don't know. Do you like 
 him?" 
 
 "You won't answer my questions," Betty com- 
 plained. " Why should I answer yours ? " 
 
 " There are plenty of nice young fellows in your own 
 crowd," Gower went on, still poking mechanically at 
 the fire. " Why pick on young MacRae ? " 
 
 " You 're evading, daddy," Betty murmured. " Why 
 
HEARTS ARE NOT ALWAYS TRUMPS 199 
 
 should n^t I pick on Jack MacRae if I like him — if 
 he likes me ? That 's what I 'm trying to find out.'' 
 
 "Does he?" Gower asked pointblank. 
 
 " Yes," Betty admitted in a reluctant whisper. " He 
 does — but — why don't you tell me, daddy, what I 'm 
 up against, as you would say? What did you ever do 
 to old Donald MacRae that his son should have a feel- 
 ing that is stronger than love ? " 
 
 " You think he loves you ? " 
 
 " I know it," Betty murmured. 
 
 "And you?" Gower's deep voice seemed harsh. 
 
 Betty threw out her hands in an impatient gesture. 
 
 "Must I shout it out loud?" she cried. 
 
 " You always were different from most girls, in some 
 things," Gower observed reflectively. "Iron under 
 your softness. I never knew you to stop trying to 
 get anything you really wanted, not while there was a 
 chance to get it. Still — don't you think it would be 
 as well for you to stop wanting young MacRae — 
 since he doesn't want you bad enough to try to get 
 you? Eh?" 
 
 He still kept his face studiously averted. His tone 
 was kind, full of a peculiar tenderness that he kept for 
 Betty alone. 
 
 She rose and perched herself on the arm of his chair, 
 caught and drew his head against her, forced him to 
 look up into eyes pretematurally bright. 
 
 "You don't seem to understand," she said. "It 
 is n't that Jack does n't want me badly enough. He 
 could have me, and I think he knows that too. But 
 there is something, something that drives him the 
 other way. He loves me. I know he does. And still 
 he has spells of hating all us Gowers — especially you. 
 I know he would n't do that without reason." 
 
200 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 " Does n't he tell you the reason ? " 
 
 Betty shook her head. 
 
 '' Would I be asking you, daddy ? '* 
 
 **I can't tell you, either," Gower rumbled deep in 
 his throat. 
 
 " Is it something that can't be mended? " Betty put 
 her face down against his, and he felt the tears wet on 
 her cheek. " Think, daddy. I 'm beginning to be ter- 
 ribly unhappy." 
 
 "That seems to be a family failing," Gower mut- 
 tered. "I can't mend it, Betty. I don't know what 
 young MacRae knows or what he feels, but I can guess. 
 I 'd make it worse if I meddled. Should I go to this 
 hot-headed young fool and say, * Come on, let's shake 
 hands, and you marry my daughter'? " 
 
 "Don't be absurd," Betty flashed. "I'm not ask- 
 ing you to do anything." 
 
 " I could n't do anything in this case if I wanted to," 
 Gower declared. "As a matter of fact, I think I'd 
 put young MacRae out of my head, if I were you. I 
 would n't pick him for a husband, anyway." 
 
 Betty rose to her feet. 
 
 " You brought me into the world," she said passion- 
 ately. " You have fed me and clothed me and educated 
 me and humored all my whims ever since I can remem- 
 ber. But you can't pick a husband for me. I shall do 
 that for myself. It's silly to tell me to put Jack 
 MacRae out of my head. He is n't in my head. He 's 
 in my — my — heart. And I can keep him there, if 
 I can't have him in my arms. Put him out of my 
 head! You talk as if loving and marrying were like 
 dealing in fish." 
 
 "I wish it were," Gower rumbled. "I might have 
 had some success at it myself." 
 
HEARTS ARE NOT ALWAYS TRUMPS 201 
 
 Betty did not even vouchsafe reply. Probably she 
 did not even hear what he said. She turned and went 
 to the window, stood looking out at the rising turmoil 
 of the sea, at the lowering scud of the clouds, dabbing 
 surreptitiously at her eyes with a handkerchief. After 
 a little she walked out of the room. Her feet sounded 
 lightly on the stairs. 
 
 Gower bent to the fire again. He resumed his aim- 
 less stirring of the coals. A grim, twisted smile played 
 about his lips. But his eyes were as somber as the 
 storm-blackened winter sky. 
 
CHAPTER XVI 
 En Famille 
 
 Horace Gower's town house straddled the low crest 
 of a narrow peninsula which juts westward into the Gulf 
 from the heart of the business section of Vancouver. 
 The tip of this peninsula ends in the green forest of 
 Stanley Park, which is like no other park in all North 
 America, either in its nature or its situation. It is 
 a sizable stretch of ancient forest, standing within gun- 
 shot of skyscrapers, modern hotels, great docks where 
 China freighters unload tea and silk. Hard on the 
 flank of a modem seaport this area of primitive wood- 
 land broods in the summer sun and the winter rains not 
 greatly different from what it must have been in those 
 days when only the Siwash Indians penetrated its 
 shadowy depths. 
 
 The rear of Gower's house abutted against the park, 
 neighbor to great tall firs and massive, branchy cedars 
 and a jungle of fern and thicket bisected by a few paths 
 and drives, with the sea lapping all about three sides 
 of its seven-mile boundary. From Gower's northward 
 windows the Capilano canyon opened between two 
 mountains across the Inlet. Southward other windows 
 gave on English Bay and beach sands where one could 
 count a thousand swimmers on a summer afternoon. 
 
 The place was only three blocks from Abbott's. 
 The house itself was not unlike Abbott's, built substan- 
 tially of gray stone and set in ample grounds. But it 
 
EN FAMILLE 203 
 
 was a good deal larger, and both within and without it 
 W£is much more elaborate, as befitted the dwelling of a 
 successful man whose wife was socially a leader in- 
 stead of a climber, — like so many of Vancouver's 
 newly rich. There was order and system and a smooth, 
 unobtrusive service in that home. Mrs. Horace A. 
 Gower rather prided herself on the noiseless, super- 
 efficient operation of her domestic machinery. Any 
 little affair was sure to go off without a hitch, to be 
 quite charming, you know. Mrs. Gower had a firmly 
 established prestige along certain lines. Her business 
 in life was living up to that prestige, not only that 
 it might be retained but judiciously expanded. 
 
 Upon a certain March morning, however, Mrs. 
 Gower seemed to be a trifle shaken out of her usual 
 complacency. She sat at a rather late breakfast, fac- 
 ing her husband, flanked on either hand by her son and 
 daughter. There was an injured droop to Mrs. 
 Gower's mouth, a slightly indignant air about her. The 
 conversation had reached a point where Mrs. Gower 
 felt impelled to remove her pince-nez and polish them 
 carefully with a bit of cloth. This was an infallible 
 sign of distress. 
 
 "I cannot see the least necessity for it, Norman," 
 she resumed in a slightly agitated, not to say petu- 
 lant tone. " It 's simply ridiculous for a young man 
 of your position to be working at common labor with 
 such terribly common people. It 's degrading." 
 
 Norman was employing himself upon a strip of 
 bacon. 
 
 " That 's a mere matter of opinion," he replied at 
 length. " Somebody has to work. I have to do some- 
 thing for myself sometime, and it suits me to begin 
 now, in this particular manner which annoys you so 
 
204 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 much. I don't mind work. And those copper claims 
 are a rattling good prospect. Everybody says so. 
 We'll make a barrel of money out of them yet. Why 
 shouldn't I peel off my coat and go at it?" 
 
 "By the way," Gower asked bluntly, "what occa- 
 sioned this flying trip to England?" 
 
 Norman pushed back his chair a trifle, thrust his 
 hands in his trousers pockets and looked straight at 
 his father. 
 
 " My own private business," he answered as bluntly. 
 
 "You people," he continued after a brief interval, 
 " seem to think I 'm still in knee breeches." 
 
 But this did not serve to turn his mother from her 
 theme. 
 
 " It is quite unnecessary for you to attempt making 
 money in such a primitive manner," she observed. 
 " We have plenty of money. There is plenty of oppor- 
 tunity for you in your father's business, if you must 
 be in business." 
 
 " Huh ! " Norman grunted. " I 'm no good in my 
 father's business, nor anywhere else, in his private 
 opinion. It's no good, mamma. I'm on my own for 
 keeps. I'm going through with it. I've been a jolly 
 fizzle so far. I 'm not even a blooming war hero. You 
 just stop bothering about me." 
 
 "I really can't think what's got into you," Mrs. 
 Gower complained in a tone which implied volumes of 
 reproach. " It 's bad enough for your father and 
 Betty to be running off and spending so much time 
 at that miserable cottage when so much is going on 
 here. I 'm simply exhausted keeping things up without 
 any help from them. But this vagary of yours — I 
 really can't consider it anything else — is most dis- 
 tressing. To live in a dirty little cabin and cook your 
 
EN FAMILLE 205 
 
 own food, to associate with such men — it 's simply 
 dreadful! Haven't you any regard for our position? " 
 
 " I 'm fed up with our position," Norman retorted. 
 A sullen look was gathering about his mouth. " What 
 does it amount to? A lot of people running around 
 in circles, making a splash with their money. You, and 
 the sort of thing you call our position, made a sissy of 
 me right up till the war came along. There was noth- 
 ing I was good for but parlor tricks. And you and 
 everybody else expected me to react from that and set 
 things afire overseas. I didn't. I didn't begin to 
 come up to your expectations at all. But if I didn't 
 split Germans with a sword or do any heroics I did get 
 some horse sense knocked into me — unbelievable as 
 that may appear to you. I learned that there was a 
 sort of satisfaction in doing things. I 'm having a try 
 at that now. And you needn't imagine I'm going to 
 be wet-nursed along by your money. 
 
 " As for my associates, and the degrading influence* 
 that fill you with such dismay," Norman's voice flared 
 into real anger, " they may not have much polish — 
 but they're human. I like them, so far as they go. 
 I 've been frostbitten enough by the crowd I grew up 
 with, since I came home, to appreciate being taken for 
 what I am, not what I may or may not have done. 
 Since I have discovered myself to have a funny sort of 
 feeling about living on your money, it behooves me to 
 get out and make what money I need for myself — in 
 view of the fact that I 'm going to be married quite soon. 
 I am going to marry " — Norman rose and looked down 
 at his mother with something like a flicker of amusement 
 in his eyes as he exploded his final bombshell — "a fish- 
 erman's daughter. A poor but worthy maiden," he 
 finished with unexpected irony. 
 
ao6 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 "Norman!" His mother's voice was a wail. "A 
 common fisherman's daughter? Oh, my son, my son." 
 
 She shed a few beautifully restrained tears. 
 
 "A common fisherman's daughter. Exactly," Nor- 
 man drawled. " Terrible thing, of course. Funny the 
 fish scales on the family income never trouble you." 
 
 Mrs. Gower glared at him through her glasses. 
 
 "Who is this — this woman?" she demanded. 
 
 " Dolly," Betty whispered under her breath. 
 
 "Miss Dolores Ferrara of Squitty Cove," Norman 
 answered imperturbably. 
 
 " A foreigner besides. Great Heavens ! Horace," 
 Mrs. Gower appealed to her husband, "have you no 
 influence whatever with your son ? " 
 
 "Mamma," Betty put in, "I assure you you are 
 making a tremendous fuss about nothing. I can tell 
 you that Dolly Ferrara is really quite a nice girl. / 
 think Norman is rather lucky." 
 
 " Thanks, Bet," Norman said promptly. " That 's 
 the first decent thing I 've heard in this discussion." 
 
 Mrs. Gower turned the battery of her indignant eyes 
 on her daughter. 
 
 "You, I presume," she said spitefully, "will be 
 thinking of marrying some fisherman next? " 
 
 " If she did, Bessie," Gower observed harshly, " it 
 would only be history repeating itself." 
 
 Mrs. Gower flushed, paled a little, and reddened 
 again. She glared — no other word describes her ex- 
 pression — at her husband for an instant. Then she 
 took refuge behind her dignity. 
 
 " There is a downright streak of vulgarity in you, 
 Horace," she said, "which I am sorry to see crop out 
 in my children." 
 
 " Thank you, mamma," Betty remarked evenly. 
 
EN FAMILLE ao7 
 
 Mrs. Gower whirled on Norman. 
 
 " I wash my hands of you completely," she said im- 
 periously. "I am ashamed of you." 
 
 " I 'd rather you 'd be ashamed of me," Norman re- 
 torted, " than that I should be ashamed of myself." 
 
 "And you, sir," — 'he faced his father, speaking in a 
 tone of formal respect which did not conceal a palpable 
 undercurrent of defiance — " you also, I suppose, wash 
 your hands of me? " 
 
 Gower looked at him for a second. His face was a 
 mask, devoid of expression. 
 
 " You 're a man grown," he said. " Your mother has 
 expressed herself as she might be expected to. I say 
 nothing." 
 
 Norman walked to the door. 
 
 " I don't care a deuce of a lot what you say or what 
 you don't say, nor even what you think," he flung at 
 them angrily, with his hand on the knob. *' I have my 
 own row to hoe. I 'm going to hoe it my own style. 
 And that 's all there is to it. If you can't even wish me 
 luck, why, you can go to the devil ! " 
 
 " Norman ! " His mother lifted her voice in protest- 
 ing horror. Gower himself only smiled, a bit cynically. 
 And Betty looked at the door which closed upon her 
 brother with a wistful sort of astonishment. 
 
 Gower first found occasion for speech. 
 
 "Wliile we are on the subject of intimate family 
 affairs, Bessie," he addressed his wife casually, " I may 
 as well say that I shall have to call on you for some 
 funds — about thirty thousand dollars. Forty thou- 
 sand would be better." 
 
 Mrs. Gower stiffened to attention. She regarded 
 her husband with an air of complete disapproval, 
 slightly tinctured with surprise. 
 
2o8 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 "Oh," she said, "really?" 
 
 "I shall need that much properly to undertake this 
 season's operations," he stated calmly, almost in- 
 differently. 
 
 "Really?" she repeated. "Are you in difficulties 
 again ? " 
 
 "Again?" he echoed. "It is fifteen years since I 
 was in a corner where I needed any of your money." 
 
 " It seems quite recent to me," Mrs. Gower observed 
 stiffly. 
 
 " Am I to understand from that that you don't care 
 to advance me whatever sum I require?" he asked 
 gently. 
 
 "I don't see why I should," Mrs. Gower replied 
 after a second's reflection, " even if I were quite able to 
 do so. This place costs something to keep up. I 
 can't very well manage on less than two thousand a 
 month. And Betty and I must be clothed. You have n't 
 contributed much recently, Horace." 
 
 "No? I had the impression that I had been con- 
 tributing pretty freely for thirty years," Gower re- 
 turned dryly. " I paid the bills up to December. Last 
 season wasn't a particularly good one — for me." 
 
 " That was chiefly due to your own mismanagement, 
 I should say," Mrs. Gower commented tartly. "Put- 
 ting the whole cannery burden on Norman when the 
 poor boy had absolutely no experience. Really, you 
 must have mismanaged dreadfully. I heard only the 
 other day that the Robbin-Steele plants did better 
 last season than they ever did. I 'm sure the Abbotts 
 made money last year. If the banks have lost faith in 
 your business ability, I — well, I should consider you 
 a bad risk, Horace. I can't afford to gamble." 
 
 "You never do. You only play cinches," Gower 
 
EN FAMILLE 209 
 
 grunted. " However, your money will be safe enough. 
 I did n't say the banks refuse me credit. I have excel- 
 lent reasons for borrowing of you." 
 
 " I really do not see how I can possibly let you have 
 such a sum," she said. "You already have twenty 
 thousand dollars of my money tied up in your busi- 
 ness, you know." 
 
 " You have an income of twelve thousand a year from 
 the Maple Point place," Gower recited in that un- 
 changing, even tone. " You have over twenty thou- 
 sand cash on deposit. And you have eighty thousand 
 dollars in Victory Bonds. You mean you don't want 
 to, Bessie." 
 
 " You may accept that as my meaning," she returned. 
 
 *' There are times in every man's career," Gower 
 remarked dispassionately, "when the lack of a little 
 money might break him." 
 
 " That is all the more reason why I should safeguard 
 my funds," Mrs. Gower replied. "You are not as 
 young as you were, Horace. If you should fail now, 
 you would likely never get on your feet again. But we 
 could manage, I dare say, on what I have. That is why 
 I do not care to risk any of it." 
 
 "You refuse then, absolutely, to let me have this 
 money ? " he asked. 
 
 "I do," Mrs. Gower replied, with an air of pained 
 but conscious rectitude. "I should consider myself 
 most unwise to do so." 
 
 "All right," Gower returned indifferently. "You 
 force me to a showdown. I have poured money into 
 your hands for years for you to squander in keeping up 
 your position — as you call it. I'm about through 
 doing that. I 'm sick of aping millionaires. All I need 
 is a comfortable place where I can smoke a pipe in 
 
210 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 peace. This house is mine. I shall sell it and repay 
 you your twenty thousand. You — " 
 
 "Horace! Sell this house. Our home! Horace.''^ 
 
 "Our home?" Gower continued inflexibly. "The 
 place where we eat and sleep and entertain, you mean. 
 We never had a home, Bessie. You will have your an- 
 cestral hall at Maple Point. You will be quite able to 
 afford a Vancouver house if you choose. But this is 
 mine, and it 's going into the discard. I shall owe you 
 nothing. I shall still have the cottage at Cradle Bay, 
 if I go smash, and that is quite good enough for me. 
 Do I make myself clear? " 
 
 Mrs. Gower was sniffing. She had taken refuge with 
 the pince-nez and the polishing cloth. But her fingers 
 were tremulous, and her expression was that of a 
 woman who feels herself sadly abused and who is about 
 to indulge in luxurious weeping. 
 
 "But, Horace, to sell this house over my head — 
 what will p— people say ? " 
 
 "I don't care two whoops what people say," Mr. 
 Gower replied unfeelingly. 
 
 " This is simp-ply outrageous ! How is Betty going 
 to m— meet p— people?" 
 
 "You mean," her husband retorted, "how are you 
 going to contrive the proper background against 
 which Betty shall display her charms to the different 
 varieties of saphead which you hit upon as being eligi- 
 ble to marry her? Don't worry. With the carefully 
 conserved means at your disposal you will still be able 
 to maintain yourself in the station in which it has 
 pleased God to place you. You will be able to see that 
 Betty has the proper advantages." 
 
 This straw broke the camel's back, if it is proper so 
 to speak of a middle-aged, delicate- featured lady, de- 
 
EN FAMILLE 211 
 
 liglitfully gowned and coiifed and manicured. Mrs. 
 Gower's grief waxed crescendo. Whereupon her hus- 
 band, with no manifest change of expression beyond 
 an unpleasant narrowing of his eyes, heaved his short, 
 flesh-burdened body out of the chair and left the room. 
 
 Betty had sat silent through this conversation, a 
 look of profound distaste slowly gathering on her 
 fresh young face. She gazed after her father. When 
 the door closed upon him Betty's gray eyes came to rest 
 on her mother's bowed head and shaking shoulders. 
 There was nothing in Betty Gower's expression which 
 remotely suggested sympathy. She said nothing. She 
 leaned her elbows on the table and rested her pretty 
 chin in her cupped palms. 
 
 Mrs. Gower presently became aware of this detached, 
 observing, almost critical attitude. 
 
 " Your f-f ather is p— positively b-brutal," she found 
 voice to declare. 
 
 " There are various sorts of brutality," Betty ob- 
 served enigmatically. " I don't think daddy has a cor- 
 ner on the visible supply. Are you going to let him 
 have that money ? " 
 
 " No. Never," Mrs. Gower snapped. 
 
 "You may lose a great deal more than the house by 
 that," Betty murmured. 
 
 But if Mrs. Gower heard the words they conveyed no 
 meaning to her agitated mind. She was rapidly ap- 
 proaching that incomprehensible state in which a woman 
 laughs and cries in the same breath, and Betty got up 
 with a faintly contemptuous curl to her red lips. She 
 went out into the hall and pressed a button. A maid 
 materialized. 
 
 *'Go into the dining room and attend to mamma, if 
 you please, Mary," Betty said. 
 
212 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 Then she skipped nimbly upstairs, two steps at a 
 time, and went into a room on the second floor, a room 
 furnished something after the fashion of a library in 
 which her father sat in a big leather chair chewing on 
 an unlighted cigar. 
 
 Betty perched on the arm of his chair and ran her 
 fingers through a patch on top of his head where the 
 hair was growing a bit thin. 
 
 "Daddy," she asked, "did you mean that about 
 going smash?" 
 
 " Possibility," he grunted. 
 
 "Are you really going to sell this house and live at 
 Cradle Bay?" 
 
 "Sure. You sorry?" 
 
 "About the house? Oh, no. It's only a place for 
 mamma to make a splash, as Norman said. If you 
 hibernate at the cottage I '11 come and keep house for 
 you." 
 
 Gower considered this. 
 
 "You ought to stay with your mother," he said 
 finally. " She '11 be able to give you a lot I would n't 
 make an effort to provide. You don't know what it 
 means really to work. You 'd find it pretty slow at 
 Squitty." 
 
 " Maybe," Betty said. " But we managed very well 
 last winter, just you and me. If there is going to be 
 a break-up of the family I shall stay with you. I 'm a 
 daddy's girl." 
 
 Gower drew her face down and kissed it. 
 
 ** You are that," he said huskily. " You 're all 
 Gower. There 's real stuff in you. You 're free of that 
 damned wishy-washy Morton blood. She made a poodle 
 dog of Norman, but she couldn't spoil you. We'll 
 manage, eh, Betty ? " 
 
EN FAMILLE 213 
 
 "Of course," Betty returned. "But I don't know 
 that Norman is such a hopeless case. Did n't he rather 
 take your breath away with his declaration of inde- 
 pendence?" 
 
 "It takes more than aJ declaration to win inde- 
 pendence," Gower answered grimly. " Wait till the 
 going gets hard. However, I '11 say there 's a chance 
 for Norman. Now, you run along, Betty. I've got 
 some figuring to do." 
 
CHAPTER XVII 
 
 , Business as Usual 
 
 Late in March Jack MacRae came down to Vancouver 
 and quartered himself at the Granada again. He liked 
 the quiet luxury of that great hostelry. It was a 
 trifle expensive, but he was not inclined to worry about 
 expense. At home, or aboard his carriers in the season, 
 living was a negligible item. He found a good deal 
 of pleasure in swinging from one extreme to the other. 
 Besides, a man stalking big game does not arm himself 
 with a broomstick. 
 
 He had not come to town solely for his pleasure, 
 although he was not disposed to shy from any diver- 
 sion that offered. He had business in hand, business 
 of prime importance since it involved spending a little 
 matter of twelve thousand dollars. In brief, he had to 
 replace the BlacJahird, and he was replacing her with 
 a carrier of double the capacity, of greater speed, 
 equipped with special features of his own choosing. The 
 new boat was designed to carry ten thousand salmon. 
 There was installed in her holds an ammonia refrig- 
 erating plant which would free him from the labor and 
 expense and uncertainty of crushed ice. Science bent 
 to the service of money-making. MacRae grinned to 
 himself when he surveyed the coiled pipes, the pumping 
 engine. His new boat was a floating, self-contained 
 cold-storage plant. He could maintain a freezing tem- 
 perature so long as he wished by chemico-mechanical 
 
BUSINESS AS USUAL 215 
 
 means. That meant a full load every trip, since he 
 could follow the trollers till he got a load, if it took a 
 week, and his salmon would still be fresh. 
 
 He wondered why this had not been done before. 
 Stubby enlightened him. 
 
 "Partly because it's a costly rig to install. But 
 mostly because salmon and ice have always been both 
 cheap and plentiful, and people have got into a habit 
 of doing things in the same old way. You know. Until 
 the last season or two salmon have been so cheap that 
 neither canneries nor buyers bothered about anything 
 so up-to-date. If they lost their ice in hot weather and 
 the fish rotted — why, there were plenty more fish. 
 There have been times when the Fraser River stunk 
 with rotten salmon. They used to pay the fishermen 
 ten cents apiece for six-pound sockeyes and limit them 
 to two hundred fish to the boat if there was a big run. 
 The giU-netter would take five hundred in one drift, 
 come in to the cannery loaded to the guards, find him- 
 self up against a limit. He would sell the two hundred 
 and dump more than that overboard. And the Eraser 
 River canneries wonder why sockeye is getting scarce. 
 My father used to rave about the waste. Criminal, he 
 used to say." 
 
 "When the fishermen were getting only ten cents 
 apiece for sockeyes, salmon was selling at fifteen cents 
 a pound tin," MacRae observed. 
 
 " Oh, the canneries made barrels of money." Stubby] 
 shrugged his shoulders. "They thought the salmon 
 would always run in millions, no matter how many 
 they destroyed. Some of 'em think so yet." 
 
 "We're a nation of wasters, compared to Europe," 
 MacRae said thoughtfully. "The only thing they are 
 prodigal with over there is human flesh and blood. 
 
2i6 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 That is cheap and plentiful. But they take care of 
 their natural resources. We destroy as much as we 
 use, fish, timber — everything. Everybody for himself 
 and the devil take the hindmost." 
 
 "Well, I don't know what we can do about it," 
 Stubby drawled. 
 
 " Keep from being the hindmost," MacRae answered. 
 " But I sometimes feel sorry for those who are." 
 
 "Man," Stubby observed, "is a predatory animal. 
 You can't make anything else of him. Nobody develops 
 philanthropy and the public spirit until he gets rich 
 and respectable. Social service is nothing but a theory 
 yet. God only helps those who help themselves." 
 
 "How does he arrange it for those who canH help 
 themselves ? " MacRae inquired. 
 
 Stubby shrugged his shoulders. 
 
 " Search me," he said. 
 
 "Do you even believe in this anthropomorphic God 
 of the preachers ? " MacRae asked curiously. 
 
 "Well, there must be something, don't you think.?" 
 Stubby hedged. 
 
 " There may be," MacRae pursued the thought. " I 
 read a book by Wells not long ago in which he speaks 
 of God as the Great Experimenter. If there is an all- 
 powerful Deity, it strikes me that in his attitude toward 
 humanity he is a good deal like a referee at a football 
 game who would say to the teams, ' Here is the ball 
 and the field and the two goals. Go to it,' and then 
 goes off to the side lines to smoke his pipe while the 
 players foul and gouge and trip and generally run 
 amuck in a frenzied effort to win the game." 
 
 " You 're a pessimist," Stubby declared. 
 
 "What is a pessimist.?" MacRae demanded. 
 
 But Stubby changed the subject. He was not con- 
 
 ^-'fA. 
 
BUSINESS AS USUAL 217 
 
 cemed with abstractions. And he was vitally concerned 
 with the material factors of his everyday life, believing 
 that he was able to dominate those material factors 
 and bend them to his will if only he were clever enough 
 and energetic enough. 
 
 Stubby wanted to get in on the blueback salmon 
 run again. He had put a big pack through Crow Har- 
 bor and got a big price for the pack. In a period of 
 mounting prices canned salmon was still ascending. 
 Food in any imperishable, easily transported form was 
 sure of a market in Europe. There was a promise of 
 even bigger returns for Pacific salmon packers in the 
 approaching season. But Stubby was not sure enough 
 yet of where he stood to make any definite arrangement 
 with MacRae. He wanted to talk things over, to feel 
 his way. 
 
 There were changes in the air. For months the in- 
 dustrial pot had been spasmodically boiling over in 
 strikes, lockouts, boycotts, charges of profiteering, 
 loud and persistent complaints from consumers, organ- 
 ized labor and rapidly organizing returned soldiers. 
 Among other things the salmon packers' monopoly and 
 the large profits derived therefrom had not escaped 
 attention. 
 
 From her eight millions of population during those 
 years of war effort Canada had withdrawn over six 
 hundred thousand able-bodied men. Yet the wheels of 
 industry turned apace. She had supplied munitions, 
 food for armies, ships, yet her people had been fed and 
 clothed and housed, — all their needs had been liberally 
 supplied. 
 
 And in a year these men had come back. Not all. 
 There were close on to two hundred thousand to be 
 checked off the lists. There was the lesser army of the 
 
2i8 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 slightly and totally disabled, the partially digested food 
 of the war machine. But there were still a quarter of a 
 million men to be reabsorbed into a civil and industrial 
 life which had managed to function tolerably well with- 
 out them. 
 
 These men, for the most part, had somehow conceived 
 the idea that they were coming back to a better world, 
 a world purged of dross by the bloody sweat of the war. 
 And they found it pretty much the same old world. 
 They had been uprooted. They found it a little difficult 
 to take root again. They found living costly, good 
 jobs not so plentiful, masters as exacting as they had 
 been before. The Golden Rule was no more a common 
 practice than it had ever been. Yet the country was 
 rich, bursting with money. Big business throve, even 
 while it howled to high heaven about ruinous, confisca- 
 tory taxation. 
 
 The common man himself lifted up his voice in pro- 
 test and backed his protest with such action as he could 
 take. Besides the parent body of the Great War Veter- 
 ans' Association other kindred groups of men who had 
 fought on both sea and land sprang into being. The 
 labor organizations were strengthened in their cam- 
 paign for shorter hours and longer pay by thousands 
 of their own members returned, all semi-articulate, all 
 more or less belligerent. The war had made fighters 
 of them. War does not teach men sweet reasonable- 
 ness. They said to themselves and to each other that 
 they had fought the greatest war in the world's his- 
 tory and were worse off than they were before. From 
 coast to coast society was infiltrated with men who wore 
 a small bronze button in the left lapel of their coats, 
 men who had acquired a new sense of their relation to 
 society, men who asked embarrassing questions in public 
 
BUSINESS AS USUAL 219 
 
 meetings, in clubs, in legislative assemblies, in Parlia- 
 ment, and who demanded answers to the questions. 
 
 British Columbia was no exception. The British 
 Columbia coast fishermen did not escape the influence of 
 this general unrest, this critical inquiry. Wealthy, re- 
 spectable, middle-aged citizens viewed with alarm and 
 denounced pernicious agitation. The common man 
 retorted with the epithet of " damned profiteer " and 
 worse. Army scandals were aired. Ancient political 
 graft was exhumed. Strident voices arose in the wilder- 
 ness of contention crying for a fresh deal, a clean-up, 
 a new dispensation. 
 
 When MacRae first began to run bluebacks there 
 were a few returned soldiers fishing salmon, men like the 
 Ferrara boys who had been fishermen before they were 
 soldiers, who returned to their old calling when they put 
 off the uniform. Later, through the season, he came 
 across other men, frankly neophytes, trying their hand 
 at a vocation which at least held the lure of freedom 
 from a weekly pay check and a boss. These men were 
 not slow to comprehend the cannery grip on the salmon 
 grounds and the salmon fishermen. They chafed 
 against the restrictions which, they said, put them at 
 the canneries' mercy. They growled about the swarms 
 of Japanese who could get privileges denied a white 
 man because the Japs catered to the packers. They 
 swelled with their voices the feeble chorus that white 
 fishermen had raised long before the war. 
 
 All of this, like wavering gusts before the storm, was 
 informing the sentient ears of politicians who governed 
 by grace of electoral votes. Soldiers, who had been 
 citizens before they became soldiers, who were frankly 
 critical of both business and government, won in by- 
 elections. In the British Columbia legislature there 
 
220 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 was a major from an Island district and a lieutenant 
 from North Vancouver. They were exponents of a 
 new deal, enemies of the profiteer and the professional 
 politician, and they were thorns in the side of a pro- 
 vincial government which yearned over vested rights as 
 a mother over her ailing babe. In the Dominion capital 
 it was much the same as elsewhere, — a government 
 which had grasped office on a win-the-war platform 
 found its grasp wavering over the knotty problems of 
 peace. 
 
 The British Columbia salmon fisheries were con- 
 trolled by the Dominion, through a department political 
 in its scope. Whether the Macedonian cry penetrated 
 through bureaucratic swaddlings, whether the fact 
 that fishermen had votes and might use them with scant 
 respect for personages to whom votes were a prerequi- 
 site to political power, may remain a riddle. But about 
 the time Jack MacRae's new carrier was ready to take 
 the water, there came a shuffle in the fishery regulations 
 which fell like a bomb in the packers' camp. 
 
 The ancient cannery monopoly of purse-seining 
 rights on given territory was broken into fine large 
 fragments. The rules which permitted none but a can- 
 nery owner to hold a purse-seine license and denied all 
 other men that privilege were changed. The new regu- 
 lations provided that any male citizen of British birth 
 or naturalization could fish if he paid the license fee. 
 The cannery men shouted black ruin, — but they girded 
 up their loins to get fish. 
 
 MacRae was still in Vancouver when this change of 
 policy was announced. He heard the roaring of the 
 cannery lions. Their spokesmen filled the correspond- 
 ence columns of the daily papers with their views. 
 MacRae had not believed such changes imminent or 
 
BUSINESS AS USUAL 221 
 
 even possible. But taking them as an accomplished 
 fact, he foresaw strange developments in the salmon 
 industry. Until now the packers could always be de- 
 pended upon to stand shoulder to shoulder against the 
 fishermen and the consumer, to dragoon one another into 
 the line of a general policy. The American buyers, 
 questing adventurously from over the line, had alone 
 saved the individual fisherman from eating humbly 
 out of the British Columbia canner's hand. 
 
 The fishermen had made a living, such as it was. The 
 cannery men had dwelt in peace and amity with one an- 
 other. They had their own loosely knit organization, 
 held together by the ties of financial interest. They sat 
 behind mahogany desks and set the price of salmon to 
 the fishermen and very largely the price of canned fish 
 to the consumer, and their most arduous labor had been 
 to tot up the comfortable balance after each season's 
 operations. All this pleasantness was to be done away 
 with, they mourned. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry was 
 to be turned loose on the salmon with deadly gear and 
 greedy intent to exterminate a valuable species of fish 
 and wipe out a thriving industry. The salmon would 
 all be killed off, so did the packers cry. What few small 
 voices arose, suggesting that the deadly purse seine had 
 never been considered deadly when only canneries had 
 been permitted to use such gear and that they had not 
 worried about the extermination of the salmon so long 
 as they did the exterminating themselves and found it 
 highly profitable, — these few voices, alas, arose only 
 in minor strains and were for the most part drowned 
 by the anvil chorus of the cannery men. 
 
 MacRae observed, listened, read the papers, and 
 prophesied to himself a scramble. But he did not see 
 where it touched him, — not until Robbin-Steele Senior 
 
222 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 asked him to come to his office in the Bond Building 
 one afternoon. 
 
 MacRae faced the man over a broad table in an 
 office more like the library of a well-appointed home 
 than a place of calculated profit-mongering. Robbin- 
 Steele, Senior, was tall, thin, sixty years of age, sandy- 
 haired, with a high, arched nose. His eyes, MacRae 
 thought, were disagreeably like the eyes of a dead fish, 
 lusterless and sunken ; a cold man with a suave manner 
 seeking his own advantage. Robbin-Steele was a Scotch- 
 man of tolerably good family who had come to British 
 Columbia with an inherited fortune and made that 
 fortune grow to vast proportions in the salmon trade. 
 He had two pretty and clever daughters, and three of 
 his sons had been notable fighters overseas. MacRae 
 knew them all, liked them well enough. But he had 
 never come much in contact with the head of the family. 
 What he had seen of Robbin-Steele, Senior, gave him 
 the impression of cold, calculating power. 
 
 " I wonder," MacRae heard him saying after a brief 
 exchange of courtesies, " if we could make an arrange- 
 ment with you to deliver all the salmon you can get this 
 season to our Fraser River plant." 
 
 " Possibly," MacRae replied. " But there is no cer- 
 tainty that I will get any great number of salmon." 
 
 " If you were as uncertain as that," Robbin-Steele said 
 idryly, '*you would scarcely be putting several thou- 
 sand dollars into an elaborately equipped carrier. We 
 may presume that you intend to get the salmon — as 
 you did last year." 
 
 " You seem to know a greal deal about my business," 
 MacRae observed. 
 
 " It is our policy to know, in a general way, what goes 
 on in the salmon industry," Robbin-Steele assented. 
 
BUSINESS AS USUAL 223 
 
 MacRae waited for him to continue. 
 
 " You have a good deal of both energy and ability," 
 Robbin-Steele went on. "It is obvious that you have 
 pretty well got control of the blueback situation 
 around Squitty Island. You must, however, have an 
 outlet for your fish. We can use these salmon to ad- 
 vantage. On what basis will you deliver them to us on 
 the Fraser if we give you a contract guaranteeing to 
 accept all you can dehver.'' " 
 
 " Twenty per cent, over Folly Bay prices," MacRae 
 answered promptly. 
 
 The cannery man shook his head. 
 
 "No. We can't afford to boost the cost of salmon 
 like that. It '11 ruin the business, which is in a bad 
 enough way as it is. The more you pay a fisherman, 
 the more he wants. We must keep prices down. That 
 is to your interest, too." 
 
 " No," MacRae disagreed. " I think it is to my 
 interest to pay the fishermen top prices, so long as I 
 make a profit on the deal. I don't want the earth — 
 only a moderate share of it." 
 
 " Twenty per cent, on Folly Bay prices is too uncer- 
 tain a basis." Robbin-Steele changed his tactics. " We 
 can send our own carriers there to buy at far less 
 cost." 
 
 MacRae smiled. 
 
 " You can send your carriers," he drawled, " but 
 I doubt if you would get many fish. I don't think you 
 quite grasp the Squitty situation." 
 
 "Yes, I think I do," Robbin-Steele returned. 
 "Gower had things pretty much his own way until 
 you cut in on his grounds. You have undoubtedly se- 
 cured quite an advantage in a peculiar manner, and 
 possibly you feel secure against competition. But your 
 
224 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 hold is not so strong as Gower's once was. Let me tell 
 you, your hold on that business can be broken, my 
 young friend." 
 
 "Undoubtedly," MacRae readily admitted. "But 
 there is a world-wide demand for canned salmon, and 
 I have not suffered for a market — even when influence 
 was used last season to close the home market against 
 me, on Folly Bay's behalf. And I am quite sure, from 
 what I have seen and heard, that many of the big Brit- 
 ish Columbia packers like yourself are so afraid the 
 labor situation will get out of hand that they would 
 shut down their plants rather than pay fishermen what 
 they could afford to pay if they would be content with 
 a reasonable profit. So I am not at all afraid of you 
 seducing the Squitty troUers with high prices." 
 
 "You are laboring under the common error about 
 cannery profits," Robbin-Steele declared pointedly. 
 " Considering the capital invested, the total of the pack, 
 the risk and uncertainty of the business, our returns 
 are not excessive." 
 
 MacRae smiled amusedly. 
 
 " That all depends on what you regard as excessive. 
 But there is nothing to be gained by an argument on 
 that subject. Canning salmon is a highly profitable 
 business, but it would not be the gold mine it has been 
 if canneries had n't been fostered at the expense of the 
 men who actually catch the fish, if the government 
 had n't bestowed upon cannery men the gift of a stran- 
 gle hold on the salmon grounds, and license privileges 
 that gave them absolute control. I have n't any quarrel 
 with cannery men for making money. You only amuse 
 me when you speak of doubtful returns. I wish I could 
 have your cinch for a season or two." 
 
 "You shouldn't have any quarrel with us. You 
 
BUSINESS AS USUAL 225 
 
 started with nothing and made twenty thousand dol- 
 lars in a single season," Robbin-Steele reminded. 
 
 " I worked like a dog. I took chances. And I was 
 very lucky," MacRae agreed. "I did make a lot of 
 money. But I paid the fishermen more than they ever 
 got for salmon — a great deal more than they would 
 have got if I hadn't broken into the game. Abbott 
 made money on the salmon I delivered him. So every- 
 body was satisfied, except Gower — who perhaps feels 
 that he is ordained by the Almighty to get cheap 
 salmon." 
 
 "You're spoiling those men," Robbin-Steele de- 
 clared irritably.. "My observation of that class of 
 labor is that the more money they get the less they 
 will do and the more they will want. You can't carry 
 on any industry on that basis. But that's beside the 
 point. We're getting away from the question. We 
 want you to deliver those fish to us, if you can do so 
 at a reasonable price. We should like to have some sort 
 of agreement, so that we may know what to expect." 
 
 "I can deliver the fish," MacRae asserted confi- 
 dently. " But I don't care to bind myself to anything. 
 Not this far in advance. Wait till the salmon run." 
 
 ** You are a very shrewd young man, I should say." 
 Robbin-Steele paid him a reluctant compliment and let 
 a gleam of appreciation flicker in his dead-fish eyes. 
 " I imagine you will get on. Come and see me when you 
 feel like considering this matter seriously." 
 
 MacRae went down the elevator wondering if the 
 gentleman's agreement among the packers was off, if 
 there was going to be something in the nature of com- 
 petition among them for the salmon. There would be 
 a few more gill-net licenses issued. More important, 
 the gill-netters would be free to fish where they chose, 
 
226 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 for whosoever paid the highest price, and not for the 
 cannery which controlled their license. There would 
 be scores of independent purse seiners. Would the 
 packers bid against one another for the catch? It 
 rather seemed to MacRae as if they must. They could 
 no longer sit back secure in the knowledge that the sal- 
 mon from a given area must come straight to their 
 waiting cans. And British Columbia packers had al- 
 ways dreaded American competition. 
 
 Following that, MacRae took train for Bellingham. 
 The people he had dealt with there at the close of the 
 last season had dealt fairly. American salmon packers 
 had never suffered the blight of a monopoly. They 
 had established their industry in legitimate competition, 
 without governmental favors. They did not care how 
 much money a fisherman made so long as he caught fish 
 for them which they could profitably can. 
 
 MacRae had no contract with them. He did not 
 want a contract. If he made hard and fast agreements 
 with any one it would be with Stubby Abbott. But he 
 did want to fortify himself with all the information 
 he could get. He did not know what line Folly Bay 
 would take when the season opened. He was not sure 
 what shifts might occur among the British Columbia 
 canneries. If such a thing as free and unlimited com- 
 petition for salmon took place he might need more than 
 one outlet for his carriers. MacRae was not engaged 
 in a hazardous business for pastime. He had an ob- 
 jective, and this objective was contingent upon making 
 money. 
 
 From the American source he learned that a good 
 season was anticipated for the better grades of salmon. 
 He found out what prices he could expect. They were 
 liberal enough to increase his confidence. These men 
 
BUSINESS AS USUAL 227 
 
 were anxious to get the thousands of British Columbia 
 salmon MacRae could supply. 
 
 MacRae returned to Vancouver. Before he had 
 finished unpacking his bag the telephone rang. Hurley, 
 of the Northwest Cold Storage, spoke when he took 
 down the receiver. Could he drop into the Northwest 
 office.'^ MacRae grinned to himself and went down to 
 the grimy wharf where deep-sea halibut schooners 
 rubbed against the dock, their stubby top-hamper 
 swaying under the office windows as they rocked to 
 the swell of passing harbor craft. 
 
 He talked with Hurley, — the same gentleman whom 
 he had once approached with no success in the matter 
 of selling salmon. The situation was reversed now. The 
 Northwest was eager to buy. They would pay him, 
 sub rosa, two cents a pound over the market price for 
 fresh salmon if he would supply them with the largest 
 possible quantity from the beginning of the blueback 
 run. 
 
 As with Robbin-Steele, MacRae refused to commit 
 himself. More clearly he perceived that the scramble 
 was beginning. The packers and the cold-storage 
 companies had lost control. They must have fish to 
 function, to make a profit. They would cut one an- 
 other's throats for salmon. So much the better, Mac- 
 Rae cynically reflected. He told Hurley, at last, as he 
 had told Robbin-Steele, to wait till the salmon began to 
 run. 
 
 He left the Northwest offices with the firm conviction 
 that it was not going to be a question of markets, but 
 a question of getting the salmon. And he rather fancied 
 he could do that. 
 
 Last of all on the list of these men who approached 
 him in this fashion came Stubby Abbott. Stubby did 
 
228 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 not ask him to call. He came to the Granada in search 
 of Jack and haled him, nothing loth, out to the stone 
 house in the West End. It happened that Betty Gower, 
 Etta Robbin-Steele, and two gilded youths, whom Mac- 
 Rae did not know, were there. They had been walk- 
 ing in the Park. Nelly and her mother were serving 
 tea. 
 
 It happened, too, that as they chatted over the tea- 
 cups, a blue-bodied limousine drew up under the Abbott 
 pergola and deposited Mrs. Horace A. Gower for a 
 brief conversation with Mrs. Abbott. It was MacRae's 
 first really close contact with the slender, wonderfully 
 preserved lady whose life had touched his father's so 
 closely in the misty long ago. He regarded her with 
 a reflective interest. She must have been very beautiful 
 then, he thought. She was almost beautiful still. Cer- 
 tainly she was a very distinguished person, with her 
 costly clothing, her rich furs, her white hair, and that 
 faded rose-leaf skin. The petulant, querulous droop 
 of her mouth escaped MacRae. He was not a physiog- 
 nomist. But the distance of her manner did not escape 
 him. She acknowledged the introduction and thereafter 
 politely overlooked MacRae. He meant nothing at all 
 to Mrs. Horace A. Gower, he saw very clearly. Merely 
 a young man among other young men; a young man 
 of no particular interest. Thirty years is a long time, 
 MacRae reflected. But his father had not forgotten. 
 He wondered if she had; if those far-off hot-blooded 
 days had grown dim and unreal to her? 
 
 He turned his head once and caught Betty as intent 
 upon him as he was upon her mother, under cover of 
 the general conversation. He gathered that there was 
 a shade of reproach, of resentment, in her eyes. But 
 he could not be sure. Certainly there was nothing like 
 
BUSINESS AS USUAL 229 
 
 that in her manner. But the manner of these people, 
 he understood very well, was pretty much a mask. 
 Whatever went on in their secret bosoms, they smiled 
 and joked and were unfailingly courteous. 
 
 He made another discovery within a few minutes. 
 Stubby maneuvered himself close to Etta Robbin-Steele. 
 Stubby was not quite so adept at repression as most 
 of his class. He was a little more naive, more prone 
 to act upon his natural, instinctive impulses. MacRae 
 was aware of that. He saw now a swift by-play that 
 escaped the rest. Nothing of any consequence, — a 
 look, the motion of a hand, a fleeting something on the 
 girl's face and Stubby's. Jack glanced at Nelly Abbott 
 sitting beside him, her small blonde head pertly in- 
 clined. Nelly saw it too. She smiled knowingly. 
 
 "Has the brunette siren hooked Stubby? " MacRae 
 inquired in a discreet undertone. 
 
 " I think so. I 'm not sure. Etta 's such an outra- 
 geous flirt," Nelly said. " I hope not, anyway. I 'm 
 afraid I can't quite appreciate Etta as a prospective 
 sister-in-law." 
 
 "No.?" 
 
 " She 's catty — and vain as a peacock. Stubby 
 ought to marry a nice sensible girl who 'd mother him," 
 Nelly observed with astonishing conviction ; " like 
 Betty, for instance." 
 
 " Oh, you seem to have very definite ideas on that 
 subject," MacRae smiled. He did not commit himself 
 further. But he resented the suggestion. There was 
 also an amusing phase of Nelly's declaration which did 
 not escape him, — the pot calling the kettle black. Etta 
 Robbin-Steele did flirt. She had dancing black eyes 
 that flung a challenge to men. But Nelly herself was 
 no shrinking violet, for all her baby face. She was like 
 
230 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 an elf. Her violet eyes were capable of infinite shades 
 of expression. She, herself, had a way of appropriating 
 men who pleased her, to the resentful dismay of other 
 young women. It pleased her to do that with Jack 
 MacRae whenever he was available. And until Betty 
 had preempted a place in his heart without even try- 
 ing, Jack MacRae had been quite willing to let his 
 fancy linger romantically on Nelly Abbott. 
 
 As it was, — he looked across the room at Betty 
 chatting with young Lane. What a damned fool he 
 was, — he, MacRae! All his wires were crossed. If 
 some inescapable human need urged him to love, how 
 much better to love this piquant bit of femininity be- 
 side him? But he couldn't do it. It wasn't possible. 
 All the old rebellion stirred in him. The locked cham- 
 bers of his mind loosed pictures of Squitty, memories 
 of things which had happened there, as he let his eyes 
 drift from Betty, whom he loved, to her mother, whom 
 his father had loved and lost. She had made his father 
 suffer through love. Her daughter was making Donald 
 MacRae's son suffer likewise. Again, through some 
 fantastic quirk of his imagination, the stodgy figure 
 of Horace Gower loomed in the background, shadowy 
 and sinister. There were moments, like the present, 
 when he felt hatred of the man concretely, as he could 
 feel thirst or hunger. 
 
 " A penny for your thoughts," Nelly bantered. 
 
 "They'd be dear at half the price," MacRae said, 
 forcing a smile. 
 
 He was glad when those people went their way. 
 Nelly put on a coat and went with them. Stubby 
 drew Jack up to his den. 
 
 "I have bought up the controlling interest in the 
 Terminal Fish Company since I saw you last," Stubby 
 
BUSINESS AS USUAL 231 
 
 began abruptly. " I 'm going to put up a cold-storage 
 plant and do what my father started to do early in the 
 war — give people cheaper fish for food." 
 
 " Can you make it stick," MacRae asked curiously, 
 ''with the other wholesalers against you.'* Their sys- 
 tem seems to be to get all the traffic will bear, to boost 
 the price to the consumer by any means they can use. 
 And there is the Packers' Association. They are not 
 exactly — well, favorable to cheap retailing of fish. 
 Everybody seems to think the proper caper is to tack 
 on a cent or two a pound wherever he can." 
 
 "I know I can," Stubby declared. "The pater 
 would have succeeded only he trusted too much to men 
 who didn't see it his way. Look at Cunningham — " 
 Stubby mentioned a fish merchant who had made a 
 resounding splash in matters piscatorial for a year or 
 two, and then faded, along with his great cheap-fish 
 markets, into oblivion — "he made it go like a house afire 
 until he saw a chance to make a quick and easy clean-up 
 by sticking people. It can be done, all right, if a man 
 will be satisfied with a small profit on a big turnover. 
 I know it." 
 
 MacRae made no comment on that. Stubby was full 
 of his plan, eager to talk about its possibilities. 
 
 " I wanted to do it last year," he said, " but I 
 could n't. I had to play the old game — make a bunch 
 of money and make it quick. Between you and Gower's 
 pig-headedness, and the rest of the cannery crowd 
 letting me go till it was too late to stop me, and a 
 climbing market, I made more money in one season 
 than I thought was possible. I 'm going to use that 
 money to make more money and to squash some of these 
 damned fish pirates. I tell you it's jolly awful. We 
 had baked cod for lunch to-day. That fish cost twenty 
 
232 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 cents a pound. Think of it ! When the fisherman sells 
 it for six cents within fifty miles of us. No wonder 
 everybody is howling. I don't know anything about 
 other lines of food supply, but I can sure put my 
 finger on a bunch of fish profiteers. And I feel like 
 putting my foot on them. Anyway, I've got the Ter- 
 minal for a starter; also I have a tweAty-five-year 
 lease on the water frontage there. I have the capital 
 to go ahead and build a cold-storage plant. The whole- 
 sale 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 chuck- 
 led. " There '11 be a lot of independent purse seiners. 
 If the canneries don't pay good prices these inde- 
 pendent 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 ex- 
 port 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 are n't going to be any special 
 privileges for British Columbia salmon packers any 
 more. I know, because I 'm on the inside. The fisher- 
 men 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 
 
A RENEWAL OF HOSTILITIES 249 
 
 pains. Between Folly Bay and the swirling tide races 
 off the desolate head of Cape Mudge the blueback dis- 
 appeared. But at Squitty the runs held constant. 
 There were off days, but the fish were always there. 
 The trollers hung at the south end, sheltering at night 
 in the Cove, huddled rubstrake to rubstrake and bow to 
 stem, so many were they in that little space, on days 
 when the southeaster made the cliffs shudder under the 
 shock of breaking seas. If fishing slackened for a day 
 or two they did not scatter as in other days. There 
 would be another run hard on the heels of the last. And 
 there was. 
 
 MacRae ran the Blanco into Squitty Cove one after- 
 noon and made fast alongside the Bliiehird which lay 
 to fore and aft moorings in the narrow gut of the Cove. 
 The Gulf outside was speckled with trollers, but there 
 were many at anchor, resting, or cooking food. 
 
 One of the mustard pots was there, a squat fifty-foot 
 carrier painted a gaudy yellow — the Folly Bay house 
 color — flying a yellow flag with a black C in the center. 
 She was loading fish from two trollers, one lying on 
 each side. One or two more were waiting, edging up. 
 
 " He came in yesterday afternoon after you left," 
 Vin Ferrara told Jack. "And he offered forty-five 
 cents. Some of them took it. To-day he's paying 
 fifty and hinting more if he has to." 
 
 MacRae laughed. 
 
 " We '11 match Gower's price till he boosts us out of 
 the bidding," he said. "And he won't make much on 
 his pack if he does that." 
 
 " Say, Folly Bay," Jack called across to the mustard- 
 pot carrier, "what are you paying for bluebacks? " 
 
 The skipper took his eye off the tallyman counting 
 in fish. 
 
250 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 "Fifty cents," he answered in a voice that echoed 
 up and down the Cove. 
 
 " That must sound good to the fishermen," MacRae 
 called back pleasantly. " Folly Bay 's getting gener- 
 ous in its declining years." 
 
 It was the oif period between tides. There were forty 
 boats at rest in the Cove and more coming in. The 
 ripple of laughter that ran over the fleet was plainly^ 
 audible. They could appreciate that. MacRae sat 
 down on the Blanco's after cabin and lit a cigarette. 
 
 " Looks like they mean to get the fish," Vin hazarded. 
 ^' Can you tilt that and make anything.? " 
 
 "Let them do the tilting," MacRae answered. "If 
 the fish run heavy I can make a little, even if prices go 
 higher. If he boosts them to seventy-five, I 'd have to 
 quit. At that price only the men who catch the fish will 
 make anything. I really don't know how much we will 
 be able to pay when Crow Harbor opens up." 
 
 "We'll have some fun anyway." Vin's black eyes 
 sparkled. 
 
 It took MacRae three days to get a load. Human 
 nature functions pretty much the same among all men. 
 The trollers distrusted Folly Bay. They said to one 
 another that if Gower could kill off competition he 
 would cut the price to the bone. He had done that 
 before. But when a fisherman rises wearily from his 
 bunk at three in the morning and spends the bulk of the 
 next eighteen hours hauling four one hundred and fifty 
 foot lines, each weighted with from six to fifteen pounds 
 of lead, he feels that he is entitled to every cent he can 
 secure for his day's labor. 
 
 The Gower boats got fish. The mustard pot came 
 I)ack next day, paying fifty-five cents. A good many 
 trollers sold him their fish before they learned that 
 
A RENEWAL OF HOSTILITIES 251 
 
 MacRae was paying the same. And the mustard pot 
 evidently had his orders, for he tilted the price to sixty, 
 which forced MacRae to do the same. 
 
 When the Blanco unloaded her cargo of eight-thou- 
 sand-odd salmon into the Terminal and MacRae checked 
 his receipts and expenditures for that trip, he dis- 
 covered that he had neither a profit nor a loss. 
 
 He went to see Stubby, explained briefly the situa- 
 tion. 
 
 " You can't get any more cheap salmon for cold stor- 
 age until the seiners begin to take coho, that 's certain," 
 he declared. " How far can you go in this price fight 
 when you open the cannery? " 
 
 "Gower appears to have gone a bit wild, doesn't 
 he?" Stubby ruminated. "Let's see. Those fish are 
 running about five pounds now. They'll get a bit 
 heavier as we go along. Well, I can certainly pack as 
 cheaply as he can. I tell you, go easy for a week, till 
 I get Crow Harbor under way. Then you can pay up 
 to seventy-five cents and I '11 allow you five cents a fish 
 commission. I don't believe he'll dare pay more than 
 that before late in July. If he does, why, we '11 see what 
 we can do." 
 
 MacRae went back to Squitty. He could make 
 money with the Blanco on a five-cent commission, — 
 if he could get the salmon within the price limit. So for 
 the next trip or two he contented himself with meeting 
 Gower's price and taking what fish came to him. The 
 Folly Bay mustard pots — three of them great and 
 small — scurried here and there among the trollers, 
 dividing the catch with the Bluebird and the Blanco, 
 There was always a mustard-pot collector in sight. 
 The weather was getting hot. Salmon would not keep 
 in a troller's hold. Part of the old guard stuck tight 
 
252 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 to MacRae. But there were new men fishing ; there were 
 Japanese and illiterate Greeks. It was not to be ex- 
 pected that these men should indulge in far-sighted 
 calculations. But it was a trifle disappointing to see 
 how readily any troller would unload his catch into a 
 mustard pot if neither of MacRae's carriers happened 
 to be at hand. 
 
 " Why don't you tie up your boats, Jack.? " Vin asked 
 angrily. "You know what would happen. Gower 
 would drop the price with a bang. You 'd think these 
 damned idiots would know that. Yet they're feeding 
 him fish by the thousand. They don't appear to care 
 a hoot whether you get any or not. I used to think 
 fishermen had some sense. These fellows can't see an 
 inch past their cursed noses. Pull off your boats for a 
 couple of weeks and let them get their bumps." 
 
 '•» What do you expect.? " MacRae said lightly. " It 's 
 a scramble, and they are acting precisely as they might 
 be expected to act. I don't blame them. They're 
 under the same necessity as the rest of us — to get it 
 while they can. Did you think they'd sell me fish for 
 sixty if somebody else offered sixty-five.? You know 
 how big a nickel looks to a man who earns it as hard as 
 these fellows do.'^ 
 
 "No, but they don't seem to care who gets their 
 salmon," Vin growled. "Even when you're paying 
 the same, they act like they'd just as soon Gower got 
 'em as you. You paid more than Folly Bay all last 
 season. You put all kinds of money in their pockets 
 that you didn't have to." 
 
 " And when the pinch comes, they '11 remember that," 
 MacRae said. " You watch, Vin. The season is young 
 yet. Gower may beat me at this game, but he won't 
 make any money at it.'* 
 
A RENEWAL OF HOSTILITIES 253 
 
 MacRae kept abreast of Folly Bay for ten days and 
 emerged from that period with a slight loss, because at 
 the close he was paying more than the salmon were 
 worth at the Terminal warehouse. But when he ran 
 his first load into Crow Harbor Stubby looked over 
 the pile of salmon his men were forking across the floor 
 and drew Jack into his office. 
 
 " I 've made a contract for delivery of my entire sock- 
 eye and blueback pack," he said. "I know precisely 
 where I stand. I can pay up to ninety cents for all 
 July fish. I want all the Squitty bluebacks you can 
 get. Go after them. Jack." 
 
 And MacRae went after them. Wherever a Folly 
 Bay collector went either the Blanco or the Bluebird 
 was on his heels. MacRae could cover more ground and 
 carry more cargo, and keep it fresh, than any mustard 
 pot. The Bluebird covered little outlying nooks, the 
 stragglers, the rowboat men in their beach camps. 
 The Blanco kept mostly in touch with the main fleet 
 patrolling the southeastern end of Squitty like a naval 
 flotilla, wheeling and counterwheeling over the grounds 
 where the blueback played. MacRae forced the issue. 
 He raised the price to sixty-five, to seventy, to seventy- 
 five, to eighty, and the boats under the yellow house 
 flag had to pay that to get a fish. MacRae crowded 
 them remorselessly to the limit. So long as he got five 
 cents a fish he could make money. He suspected that 
 it cost Gower a great deal more than five cents a sal- 
 mon to collect what he got. And he did not get so 
 many now. With the opening of the sockeye season on 
 the Fraser and in the north the Japs abandoned trol- 
 ling for the gill net. The white troUers returned to 
 their first love because he courted them assiduously. 
 There was always a MacRae carrier in the offing. It 
 
254 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 cost MacRae his sleep and rest, but he drove himself 
 tirelessly. He could leave Squitty at dusk, unload his 
 salmon at Crow Harbor, and be back at sunrise. He 
 did it many a time, after tallying fish all day. Three 
 hours' sleep was like a gift from the gods. But he kept 
 it up. He had a sense of some approaching crisis. 
 
 By the third week in July MacRae was taking three 
 fourths of the bluebacks caught between the Ballenas 
 and Folly Bay. He would lie sometimes within a stone's 
 throw of Gower's cannery, loading salmon. 
 
 He was swinging at anchor there one day when a 
 rowboat from the cannery put out to the Blanco, The 
 man in it told MacRae that Gower would like to see him. 
 MacRae's first impulse was to grin and ignore the re- 
 quest. Then he changed his mind, and taking his own 
 dinghy rowed ashore. Some time or other he would 
 have to meet his father's enemy, face him, talk to him, 
 listen to what he might say, tell him things. Curiosity 
 was roused in him a little now. He desired to know 
 what Gower had to say. He wondered if (iower was 
 weakening; what he could want. 
 
 He found Gower in a cubby-hole of an office behind 
 the cannery store. 
 
 " You wanted to see me," MacRae said curtly. 
 
 He was in sea boots, bareheaded. His shirt sleeves 
 were rolled above sun-browned forearms. He stood 
 before Gower with his hands thrust in the pockets of 
 duck overalls speckled with fish scales, smelling of sal- 
 mon. Gower stared at him silently, critically, it seemed 
 to MacRae, for a matter of seconds. 
 
 " What 's the sense in our cutting each other's throats 
 over these fish?" Gower asked at length. "I've been 
 wanting to talk to you for quite a while. Let 's get 
 together. I ' — " 
 
A RENEWAL OF HOSTILITIES 255 
 
 MacRae's temper flared. 
 
 " If that 's what you want," he said, " I '11 see you in 
 hell first." 
 
 He turned on his heel and walked out of the office. 
 When he stepped into his dinghy he glanced up at the 
 wharf towering twenty feet above his head. Betty 
 Gower was sitting on a pile head. She was looking 
 down at him. But she was not smiling. And she did 
 not speak. MacRae rowed back to the Blanco in an 
 ugly mood. 
 
 In the next forty-eight hours Folly Bay jumped the 
 price of bluebacks to ninety cents, to ninety-five, to a 
 dollar. The Blanco wallowed down to Crow Harbor 
 with a load which represented to MacRae a dead loss of 
 four hundred dollars cash. 
 
 "He must be crazy," Stubby fumed. "There's no 
 use canning salmon at a loss." 
 
 "Has he reached the loss point yet.'"' MacRae in- 
 quired. 
 
 " He 's shaving close. No cannery can make any- 
 thing worth reckoning at a dollar or so a case profit." 
 
 "Is ninety cents and five cents' commission your 
 limit? " MacRae demanded. 
 
 "Just about," Stubby grunted. "Well" — reluc- 
 tantly — "I can stand a dollar. That's the utmost 
 limit, though. I can't go any further." 
 
 " And if he gets them all at a dollar or more, he '11 be 
 canning at a dead loss, eh.'^" 
 
 "He certainly will," Stubby declared. "Unless he 
 cans 'em heads, tails, and scales, and gets a bigger price 
 per case than has been offered yet." 
 
 MacRae went back to Squitty with a definite idea 
 in his mind. Gower had determined to have the salmon. 
 Very well, then, he should have them. But he would 
 
256 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 have to take them at a loss, in so far as MacRae could 
 inflict loss upon him. He knew of no other way to 
 hurt effectively such a man as Gower. Money was 
 life blood to him, and it was not of great value to 
 MacRae as yet. With deliberate calculation he de- 
 cided to lose the greater part of what he had made, if 
 for every dollar he lost himself he could inflict equal or 
 greater loss on Gower. 
 
 The trollers who combed the Squitty waters were 
 taking now close to five thousand salmon a day. Ap- 
 proximately half of these went to Folly Bay. MacRae 
 took the rest. In this battle of giants the fishermen 
 had lost sight of the outcome. They ceased to care 
 who got fish. They only watched eagerly for him who 
 paid the biggest price. They were making thirty, 
 forty, fifty dollars a day. They no longer held sal- 
 mon — only a few of the old-timers — for MacRae's 
 carriers. It was nothing to them who made a profit or 
 suffered a loss. Only a few of the older men wondered 
 privately how long MacRae could stand it and what 
 would happen when he gave up. 
 
 MacRae met every raise Folly Bay made. He saw 
 bluebacks go to a dollar ten, then to a dollar fifteen. 
 He ran cargo after cargo to Crow Harbor and dropped 
 from three to seven hundred dollars on each load, until 
 even Stubby lost patience with him. 
 
 " What 's the sense in bucking him till you go broke ? 
 I 'm in too deep to stand any loss myself. Quit. Tie 
 up your boats. Jack. Let him have the salmon. Let 
 those blockheads of fishermen see what he '11 do to 'em 
 once you stop." 
 
 But MacRae held on till the first hot days of August 
 were at hand and his money was dwindling to the 
 vanishing point. Then he ran the Blanco and the Blue- 
 
A RENEWAL OF HOSTILITIES 257 
 
 bird into Squltty Cove and tied them to permanent 
 moorings in shoal water near the head. For a day or 
 two the salmon had shifted mysteriously to the top end, 
 around Folly Bay and the Siwash Islands and Jenkins 
 Pass. The bulk of the fleet had followed them. Only 
 a few stuck to the Cove and Poor Man's Rock. To 
 these and the rowboat trollers MacRae said: 
 
 " Sell your fish to Folly Bay. I 'm through." 
 
 Then he lay down in his bunk in the airy pilot 
 house of the Blanco and slept the clock around, the first 
 decent rest he had taken in two months. He had not 
 realized till then how tired he was. 
 
 When he wakened he washed, ate, changed his clothes 
 and went for a walk along the cliffs to stretch his legs. 
 Vin had gone up to the Knob to see Dolly and Uncle 
 Peter. His helper on the Bluebird was tinkering about 
 his engine. MacRae's two men loafed on the clean- 
 slushed deck. They were none of them company for 
 MacRae in his present mood. He sought the cliffs to 
 be alone. 
 
 Gower had beaten him, it would seem. And MacRae 
 did not take kindly to being beaten. But he did not 
 think this was the end yet. Gower would do as he had 
 done before. When he felt himself secure in his mo- 
 nopoly he would squeeze the fishermen, squeeze them 
 hard. And as soon as he did that MacRae would buy 
 again. He could not make any money himself, perhaps. 
 But he could make Gower operate at a loss. That 
 would be something accomplished. 
 
 MacRae walked along the cliffs until he saw the 
 white cottage, and saw also that some one sat on the 
 steps in the sun. Whereupon he turned back. He 
 did n't want to see Betty. He conceived that to be an 
 ended chapter in his experiences. He had hurt her, and 
 
258 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 she had put on her armor against another such hurt. 
 There was a studied indifference about her now, when 
 he met her, which hurt him terribly. He supposed that 
 in addition to his own incomprehensible attitude which 
 she resented, she took sides with her father in this ob- 
 vious commercial warfare which was bleeding them both 
 financially. Very likely she saw in this only the open 
 workings of his malice toward Gower. In which Mac- 
 Rae admitted she would be quite correct. He had not 
 been able to discover in that flaring-up of passion for 
 Betty any reason for a burial of his feud with Gower. 
 There was in him some curious insistence upon carrying 
 this to the bitter end. And his hatred of Gower was 
 something alive, vital, coloring his vision somberly. 
 The shadow of the man lay across his life. He could 
 not ignore this, and his instinct was for reprisal. The 
 fighting instinct in MacRae lurked always very near 
 the surface. 
 
 He spent a good many hours during the next three 
 or four days lying in the shade of a gnarly arbutus 
 which gave on the cliffs. He took a book up there with 
 him, but most of the time he lay staring up at the blue 
 sky through the leaves, or at the sea, or distant shore 
 lines, thinking always in circles which brought him de- 
 spairingly out where he went in. He saw a mustard 
 pot slide each day into the Cove and pass on about its 
 business. There was not a great deal to be got in the 
 Cove. The last gas boat had scuttled away to the top 
 end, where the blueback were schooling in vast numbers. 
 There were still salmon to be taken about Poor Man's 
 Rock. The rowboat men took a few fish each day and 
 hoped for another big run. 
 
 There came a day when the mustard pot failed to 
 show in the Cove. The rowboat men had three hundred 
 
A RENEWAL OF HOSTILITIES 259 
 
 salmon, and they cursed Folly Bay with a fine flow of 
 epithet as they took their rotting fish outside the Cove 
 and dumped them in the sea. Nor did a Gower col- 
 lector come, although there was nothing in the wind or 
 weather to stop them. The rowboat trollers fumed and 
 stewed and took their troubles to Jack MacRae. But 
 he could neither inform nor help them. 
 
 Then upon an evening when the sun rested on the 
 serrated backbone of Vancouver Island, a fiery ball 
 against a sky of burnished copper, flinging a red haze 
 down on a slow swell that furrowed the Gulf, Jack 
 MacRae, perched on a mossy boulder midway between 
 the Cove and Point Old, saw first one boat and then 
 another come slipping and lurching around Poor Man's 
 Rock. Converted Columbia River sailboats. Cape Flat- 
 tery trollers, double-enders, all the variegated craft 
 that fishermen use and traffic with, each rounded the 
 Rock and struck his course for the Cove, broadside on 
 to the rising swell, their twenty-foot trolling poles 
 lashed aloft against a stumpy mast and swinging in a 
 great arc as they rolled. One, ten, a dozen, an endless 
 procession, sometimes three abreast, again a string in 
 single file. MacRae was reminded of the march of the 
 oysters — 
 
 "So thick and fast they came at last. 
 And more and more and more." 
 
 He sat watching them pass, wondering why the great 
 trek. The trolling fleet normally shifted by pairs and 
 dozens. This was a squadron movement, the Grand 
 Fleet steaming to some appointed rendezvous. MacRae 
 watched till the sun dipped behind the hills, and the 
 reddish tint left the sea to linger briefly on the summit 
 of the Coast Range flanking the mainland shore. The 
 fish boats were still coming, one behind the other, 
 
26o POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 lurching and swinging in the trough of the sea, rising 
 and falling, with wheeling gulls crying above them. 
 On each deck a solitary fisherman humped over his 
 steering gear. From each cleaving stem the bow-wave 
 curled in white foam. 
 
 There was something in the wind. MacRae felt it 
 like a premonition. He left his boulder and hurried 
 back toward the Cove. 
 
 The trolling boats were packed about the Blanco so 
 close that MacRae left his dinghy on the outer fringe 
 and walked across their decks to the deck of his own 
 vessel. The Blanco loomed in the midst of these lesser 
 craft like a hen over her brood of chicks. The fishermen 
 had gathered on the nearest boats. A dozen had clam- 
 'bered up and taken seats on the Blanco^s low bulwarks. 
 MacRae gained his own deck and looked at them. 
 
 "What's coming off?" he asked quietly. "You 
 fellows holding a convention of some sort.^ " 
 
 One of the men sitting on the big carrier's rail spoke. 
 
 "Folly Bay's quit — shut down," he said sheep- 
 ishly. " We come to see if you 'd start buying again." 
 
 MacRae sat down on one sheave of his deck winch. 
 He took out a cigarette and lighted it, swung one foot 
 back and forth. He did not make haste to reply. An 
 expectant hush fell on the crowd. In the slow-gathering 
 dusk there was no sound but the creak of rubbing gun- 
 wales, the low snore of the sea breaking against the 
 cliffs, and the chug-chug of the last stragglers beating 
 into the shelter of the Cove. 
 
 " He shut down the cannery," the fishermen's spokes- 
 man said at last. " We ain't seen a buyer or collector 
 for three days. The water 's full of salmon, an' we been 
 suckin' our thumbs an' watching 'em play. If you won't 
 buy here again we got to go where there is buyers. And 
 
A RENEWAL OF HOSTILITIES 261 
 
 we 'd rather not do that. There 's no place on the Gulf 
 as good fishin' as there is here now." 
 
 "What was the trouble.'"' MacRae asked absently. 
 " Could n't you supply him with fish ? " 
 
 " Nobody knows. There was plenty of salmon. He 
 cut the price the day after you tied up. He cut it to 
 six bits. Then he shut down. Anyway, we don't care 
 why he shut down. It don't make no difference. What 
 we want is for you to start buyin' again. Hell, we 're 
 losin' money from daylight to dark ! The water 's alive 
 with salmon. An' the season 's short. Be a sport, 
 MacRae." 
 
 MacRae laughed. 
 
 "Be a sport, eh? " he echoed with a trace of amuse- 
 ment in his tone. "I wonder how many of you would 
 have listened to me if I 'd gone around to you a week 
 ago and asked you to give me a sporting chance ? " 
 
 No one answered. MacRae threw away his half- 
 smoked cigarette. He stood up. 
 
 " All right, I '11 buy salmon again," he said quietly. 
 "And I won't ask you to give me first call on your 
 catch or a chance to make up some of the money I lost 
 bucking Folly Bay, or anything like that. But I want 
 to tell you something. You know it as well as I do, but 
 I want to jog your memory with it." 
 
 He raised his voice a trifle. 
 
 "You fellows know that I've always given you a 
 square deal. You aren't fishing for sport. You're 
 at this to make a living, to make money if you can. So 
 am I. You are entitled to all you can get. You earn 
 it. You work for it. So am I entitled to what I can 
 make. I work, I take certain chances. Neither of us 
 is getting something for nothing. But there is a limit 
 to what either of us can get. We can't dodge thaL 
 
262 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 You fellows have been dodging it. Now you have to 
 come back to earth. 
 
 " No fisherman can get the prices you have had lately. 
 No cannery can pack salmon at those prices. Sockeye, 
 the finest canning salmon that swims in the sea, is 
 bringing eighty cents on the Fraser. Bluebacks are 
 sixty-five cents at Nanaimo, sixty at Cape Mudge, 
 sixty at the Euclataws. 
 
 "I can do a little better than that," MacRae hesi- 
 tated a second. " I can pay a little more, because the 
 cannery I'm supplying is satisfied with a little less 
 profit than most. Stubby Abbott is not a hog, and 
 neither am I. I can pay seventy-five cents and make 
 money. I have told you before that it is to your inter- 
 est as well as mine to keep me running. I will always 
 pay as much as salmon are worth. But I cannot pay 
 more. If your appreciation of Folly Bay's past kind- 
 ness to you is so keen that you would rather sell him 
 your fish, why, that 's your privilege." 
 
 "Aw, that's bunk," a man called. "You know 
 blamed well we wouldn't. Not after him blowin' up 
 like this." 
 
 "How do I know.?" MacRae laughed. "If Gower 
 opened up to-morrow again and offered eighty or ninety 
 cents, he 'd get the salmon — even if you knew he would 
 make you take thirty once he got you where he wanted 
 you." 
 
 "Would he.'^" another voice uprose. "The next 
 time a mustard pot gets any salmon from me, it'll be 
 because there's no other buyer and no other grounds 
 to fish." 
 
 A growled chorus backed this reckless statement. 
 
 "That's all right," MacRae said good-naturedly. 
 " I don't blame you for picking up easy money. Only 
 
A RENEWAL OF HOSTILITIES 263 
 
 easy money is n't always so good as it looks. Fly at it 
 in the morning, and I '11 take the fish at the price I 've 
 said. If Folly Bay gets into the game again, it's up 
 to you." 
 
 When the lights were doused and every fisherman 
 was stretched in his bunk, falling asleep to the slow 
 beat of a dead swell breaking in the Cove's mouth, Vin 
 Ferrara stood up to seek his own bed. 
 
 " I wonder," he said to Jack, " I wonder why Gower 
 shut down at this stage of the game?" 
 
 MacRae shook his head. He was wondering that 
 himself. 
 
CHAPTER XIX 
 
 Top Dog 
 
 Some ten days later the Bluebird swung at anchor in 
 the kelp just clear of Poor Man's Rock. From a speck 
 on the horizon the Blanco grew to full shape, flaring 
 bow and pilot house, walking up the Gulf with a bone 
 in her teeth. She bore down upon her consort, sidled 
 alongside and made fast with lines to the bitts fore and 
 aft. Vin Ferrara threw back his hatch covers, ffis 
 helper forked up salmon with a picaroon. Vin tossed 
 them across into the Blanco's hold. At the same time 
 the larger carrier's short, stout boom swung back and 
 forth, dumping into the Bluebird's fish pens at each 
 trip a hundred pounds of cracked ice. Presently this 
 work was done, the Bluebird's salmon transferred to the 
 BlancOy the Bluebird's pens replenished with four tons 
 of ice. 
 
 Vin checked his tabs with the count of fish. The 
 other men slushed decks clean with buckets of sea 
 water. 
 
 "Twenty-seven hundred," MacRae said. "Big 
 morning. Every troUer in the Gulf must be here." 
 
 " No, I have to go to Folly Bay and Siwash Islands 
 to-night," Vin told him. " There 's about twenty boats 
 working there and at Jenkins Pass. Salmon every- 
 where." 
 
 They sat in the shade of the Bla/nco's pilot house. 
 The sun beat mercilessly, a dog-day sun blazing upon 
 
A RENEWAL OF HOSTILITIES 249 
 
 pains. Between Folly Bay and the swirling tide races 
 off the desolate head of Cape Mudge the blueback dis- 
 appeared. But at Squitty the runs held constant. 
 There were off days, but the fish were always there. 
 The trollers hung at the south end, sheltering at night 
 in the Cove, huddled rubstrake to rubstrake and bow to 
 stem, so many were they in that little space, on days 
 when the southeaster made the cliffs shudder under the 
 shock of breaking seas. If fishing slackened for a day 
 or two they did not scatter as in other days. There 
 would be another run hard on the heels of the last. And 
 there was. 
 
 MacRae ran the Blanco into Squitty Cove one after- 
 noon and made fast alongside the Bluebird which lay 
 to fore and aft moorings in the narrow gut of the Cove. 
 The Gulf outside was speckled with trollers, but there 
 were many at anchor, resting, or cooking food. 
 
 One of the mustard pots was there, a squat fifty-foot 
 carrier painted a gaudy yellow — the Folly Bay house 
 color — flying a yellow flag with a black C in the center. 
 She was loading fish from two trollers, one lying on 
 each side. One or two more were waiting, edging up. 
 
 " He came in yesterday afternoon after you left," 
 Vin Ferrara told Jack. "And he offered forty-five 
 cents. Some of them took it. To-day he's paying 
 fifty and hinting more if he has to." 
 
 MacRae laughed. 
 
 " We '11 match Gower's price till he boosts us out of 
 the bidding," he said. "And he won't make much on 
 his pack if he does that." 
 
 " Say, FoUy Bay," Jack called across to the mustard- 
 pot carrier, " what are you paying for bluebacks ? " 
 
 The skipper took his eye off the tallyman counting 
 in fish. 
 
250 POOR MAN^S ROCK 
 
 "Fifty cents," he answered in a voice that echoed 
 up and down the Cove. 
 
 " That must sound good to the fishermen," MacRae 
 called back pleasantly. " Folly Bay 's getting gener- 
 ous in its declining years." 
 
 It was the off period between tides. There were forty 
 boats at rest in the Cove and more coming in. The 
 ripple of laughter that ran over the fleet was plainly 
 audible. They could appreciate that. MacRae sat 
 down on the Blanco's after cabin and lit a cigarette. 
 
 " Looks like they mean to get the fish," Vin hazarded. 
 *' Can you tilt that and make anything.? " 
 
 "Let them do the tilting," MacRae answered. "If 
 the fish run heavy I can make a little, even if prices go 
 higher. If he boosts them to seventy-five, I 'd have to 
 quit. At that price only the men who catch the fish will 
 make anything. I really don't know how much we will 
 be able to pay when Crow Harbor opens up." 
 
 "We'll have some fun anyway." Vin's black eyes 
 sparkled. 
 
 It took MacRae three days to get a load. Human 
 nature functions pretty much the same among all men. 
 The troUers distrusted Folly Bay. They said to one 
 another that if Gower could kill off competition he 
 would cut the price to the bone. He had done that 
 before. But when a fisherman rises wearily from his 
 bunk at three in the morning and spends the bulk of the 
 next eighteen hours hauling four one hundred and fifty 
 foot lines, each weighted with from six to fifteen pounds 
 of lead, he feels that he is entitled to every cent he can 
 secure for his day's labor. 
 
 The Gower boats got fish. The mustard pot came 
 back next day, paying fifty-five cents. A good many 
 troUers sold him their fish before they learned that 
 
A RENEWAL OF HOSTILITIES 251 
 
 MacRae was paying the same. And the mustard pot 
 evidently had his orders, for he tilted the price to si^ty, 
 which forced MacRae to do the same. 
 
 When the Blanco unloaded her cargo of eight-thou- 
 sand-odd salmon into the Terminal and MacRae checked 
 his receipts and expenditures for that trip, he dis- 
 covered that he had neither a profit nor a loss. 
 
 He went to see Stubby, explained briefly the situa- 
 tion. 
 
 " You can't get any more cheap salmon for cold stor- 
 age until the seiners begin to take coho, that 's certain," 
 he declared. " How far can you go in this price fight 
 when you open the cannery?" 
 
 " Gower appears to have gone a bit wild, does n't 
 he.'"' Stubby ruminated. "Let's see. Those fish are 
 running about five pounds now. They'll get a bit 
 heavier as we go along. Well, I can certainly pack as 
 cheaply as he can. I tell you, go easy for a week, till 
 I get Crow Harbor under way. Then you can pay up 
 to seventy-five cents and I '11 allow you ^ve cents a fish 
 commission. I don't believe he'll dare pay more than 
 that before late in July. If he does, why, we '11 see what 
 we can do." 
 
 MacRae went back to Squitty. He could make 
 money with the Blanco on a five-cent commission, — 
 if he coulfl get the salmon within the price limit. So for 
 the next trip or two he contented himself with meeting 
 Gower's price and taking what fish came to him. The 
 Folly Bay mustard pots — three of them great and 
 small — scurried here and there among the trollers, 
 dividing the catch with the Bltuehird and the Blanco. 
 There was always a mustard-pot collector in sight. 
 The weather was getting hot. Salmon would not keep 
 in a troller's hold. Part of the old guard stuck tight 
 
252 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 to MacRae. But there were new men fishing ; there were 
 Japanese and illiterate Greeks. It was not to be ex- 
 pected that these men should indulge in far-sighted 
 calculations. But it was a trifle disappointing to see 
 how readily any troller would unload his catch into a 
 mustard pot if neither of MacRae's carriers happened 
 to be at hand. 
 
 " Why don't you tie up your boats, Jack.'' " Vin asked 
 angrily. "You know what would happen. Gower 
 would drop the price with a bang. You 'd think these 
 damned idiots would know that. Yet they're feeding 
 him fish by the thousand. They don't appear to care 
 a hoot whether you get any or not. I used to think 
 fishermen had some sense. These fellows can't see an 
 inch past their cursed noses. PuU off your boats for a 
 couple of weeks and let them get their bumps." 
 
 '^ What do you expect?" MacRae said lightly. "It 's 
 a scramble, and they are acting precisely as they might 
 be expected to act. I don't blame them. They 're 
 under the same necessity as the rest of us — to get it 
 while they can. Did you think they'd sell me fish for 
 sixty if somebody else offered sixty-five.'' You know 
 how big a nickel looks to a man who earns it as hard as 
 these fellows do." 
 
 "No, but they don't seem to care who gets their 
 salmon," Vin growled. " Even when you 're paying 
 the same, they act like they'd just as soon Gower got 
 'em as you. You paid more than Folly Bay all last 
 season. You put all kinds of money in their pockets 
 that you didn't have to." 
 
 " And when the pinch, comes, they '11 remember that," 
 MacRae said. " You watch, Vin. The season is young 
 yet. Gower may beat me at this game, but he won't 
 make any money at it." 
 
A RENEWAL OF HOSTILITIES 253 
 
 MacRae kept abreast of Folly Bay for ten days and 
 emerged from that period with a slight loss, because at 
 the close he was paying more than the salmon were 
 worth at the Terminal warehouse. But when he ran 
 his first load into Crow Harbor Stubby looked over 
 the pile of salmon his men were forking across the floor 
 and drew Jack into his office. 
 
 " I 've made a contract for delivery of my entire sock- 
 eye and blueback pack," he said. "I know precisely 
 where I stand. I can pay up to ninety cents for all 
 July fish. I want all the Squitty bluebacks you can 
 get. Go after them. Jack." 
 
 And MacRae went after them. Wherever a Folly 
 Bay collector went either the Blanco or the Bluebird 
 was on his heels. MacRae could cover more ground and 
 carry more cargo, and keep it fresh, than any mustard 
 pot. The Bluebird covered little outlying nooks, the 
 stragglers, the rowboat men in their beach camps. 
 The Blanco kept mostly in touch with the main fleet 
 patrolling the southeastern end of Squitty like a naval 
 flotilla, wheeling and counterwheeling over the grounds 
 where the blueback played. MacRae forced the issue. 
 He raised the price to sixty-five, to seventy, to seventy- 
 five, to eighty, and the boats under the yellow house 
 flag had to pay that to get a fish. MacRae crowded 
 them remorselessly to the limit. So long as he got five 
 cents a fish he could make money. He suspected that 
 it cost Gower a great deal more than five cents a sal- 
 mon to collect what he got. And he did not get so 
 many now. With the opening of the sockeye season on 
 the Fraser and in the north the Japs abandoned trol- 
 ling for the gill net. The white trollers returned to 
 their first love because he courted them assiduously. 
 There was always a MacRae carrier in the offing. It 
 
254 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 cost MacRae his sleep and rest, but he drove himself 
 tirelessly. He could leave Squitty at dusk, unload his 
 salmon at Crow Harbor, and be back at sunrise. He 
 did it many a time, after tallying fish all day. Three 
 hours' sleep was like a gift from the gods. But he kept 
 it up. He had a sense of some approaching crisis. 
 
 By the third week in July MacRae was taking three 
 fourths of the bluebacks caught between the Ballenas 
 and Folly Bay. He would lie sometimes within a stone's 
 throw of Gower's cannery, loading salmon. 
 
 He Was swinging at anchor there one day when a 
 rowboat from the cannery put out to the Blanco. The 
 man in it told MacRae that Gower would like to see him. 
 MacRae's first impulse was to grin and ignore the re- 
 quest. Then he changed his mind, and taking his own 
 dinghy rowed ashore. Some time or other he would 
 have to meet his father's enemy, face him, talk to him, 
 listen to what he might say, tell him things. Curiosity 
 was roused in him a little now. He desired to know 
 what Gower had to say. He wondered if Gower was 
 weakening; what he could want. 
 
 He found Gower in a cubby-hole of an office behind 
 the cannery store. 
 
 "You wanted to see me," MacRae said curtly. 
 
 He was in sea boots, bareheaded. His shirt sleeves 
 were rolled above sun-browned forearms. He stood 
 before Gower with his hands thrust in the pockets of 
 duck overalls speckled with fish scales, smelling of sal- 
 mon. Gower stared at him silently, critically, it seemed 
 to MacRae, for a matter of seconds. 
 
 " What 's the sense in our cutting each other's throats 
 over these fish?" Gower asked at length. "I've been 
 wanting to talk to you for quite a while. Let 's get 
 together. I — " 
 
A RENEWAL OF HOSTILITIES 255 
 
 MacRae's temper flared. 
 
 " If that 's what you want," he said, " I '11 see you in 
 hell first." 
 
 He turned on his heel and walked out of the office. 
 When he stepped into his dinghy he glanced up at the 
 wharf towering twenty feet above his head. Betty 
 Gower was sitting on a pile head. She was looking 
 down at him. But she was not smiling. And she did 
 not speak. MacRae rowed back to the Blanco in an 
 ugly mood. 
 
 In the next forty-eight hours Folly Bay jumped the 
 price of bluebacks to ninety cents, to ninety-five, to a 
 dollar. The Blanco wallowed down to Crow Harbor 
 with a load which represented to MacRae a dead loss of 
 four hundred dollars cash. 
 
 "He must be crazy," Stubby fumed. "There's no 
 use canning salmon at a loss." 
 
 "Has he reached the loss point yet.?" MacRae in- 
 quired. 
 
 " He 's shaving close. No cannery can make any- 
 thing worth reckoning at a dollar or so a case profit." 
 
 "Is ninety cents and five cents' commission your 
 limit? " MacRae demanded. 
 
 "Just about," Stubby grunted. "Well" — reluc- 
 tantly — "I can stand a dollar. That 's the utmost 
 limit, though. I can't go any further." 
 
 " And if he gets them all at a dollar or more, he '11 be 
 canning at a dead loss, eh?" 
 
 "He certainly will," Stubby declared. "Unless he 
 cans 'em heads, tails, and scales, and gets a bigger price 
 per case than has been offered yet." 
 
 MacRae went back to Squitty with a definite idea 
 in his mind. Gower had determined to have the salmon. 
 Very well, then, he should have them. But he would 
 
256 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 have to take them at a loss, in so far as MacRae could 
 inflict loss upon him. He knew of no other way to 
 hurt effectively such a man as Gower. Money was 
 life blood to him, and it was not of great value to 
 MacRae as yet. With deliberate calculation he de- 
 cided to lose the greater part of what he had made, if 
 for every dollar he lost himself he could inflict equal or 
 greater loss on Gower, 
 
 The trollers who combed the Squitty waters were 
 taking now close to five thousand salmon a day. Ap- 
 proximately half of these went to Folly Bay. MacRae 
 took the rest. In this battle of giants the fishermen 
 had lost sight of the outcome. They ceased to care 
 who got fish. They only watched eagerly for him who 
 paid the biggest price. They were making thirty, 
 forty, fifty dollars a day. They no longer held sal- 
 mon — only a few of the old-timers — for MacRae's 
 carriers. It was nothing to them who made a profit or 
 suffered a loss. Only a few of the older men wondered 
 privately how long MacRae could stand it and what 
 would happen when he gave up. 
 
 MacRae met every raise Folly Bay made. He saw 
 bluebacks go to a dollar ten, then to a dollar fifteen. 
 He ran cargo after cargo to Crow Harbor and dropped 
 from three to seven hundred dollars on each load, until 
 even Stubby lost patience with him. 
 
 " What 's the sense in bucking him till you go broke? 
 I 'm in too deep to stand any loss myself. Quit. Tie 
 up your boats. Jack. Let him have the salmon. Let 
 those blockheads of fishermen see what he '11 do to 'em 
 once you stop." 
 
 But MacRae held on till the first hot days of August 
 were at hand and his money was dwindling to the 
 vanishing point. Then he ran the Blanco and the Blue- 
 
A RENEWAL OF HOSTILITIES 257 
 
 bird into Squitty Cove and tied them to permanent 
 moorings in shoal water near the head. For a day or 
 two the salmon had shifted mysteriously to the top end, 
 around Folly Bay and the Siwash Islands and Jenkins 
 Pass. The bulk of the fleet had followed them. Only 
 a few stuck to the Cove and Poor Man's Rock. To 
 these and the rowboat trollers MacRae said: 
 
 " Sell your fish to Folly Bay. I 'm through." 
 
 Then he lay down in his bunk in the airy pilot 
 house of the Blanco and slept the clock around, the first 
 decent rest he had taken in two months. He had not 
 realized till then how tired he was. 
 
 When he wakened he washed, ate, changed his clothes 
 and went for a walk along the cliffs to stretch his legs. 
 Vin had gone up to the Knob to see Dolly and Uncle 
 Peter. His helper on the Bluebird was tinkering about 
 his engine. MacRae's two men loafed on the clean- 
 slushed deck. They were none of them company for 
 MacRae in his present mood. He sought the cliffs to 
 be alone. 
 
 Gower had beaten him, it would seem. And MacRae 
 did not take kindly to being beaten. But he did not 
 think this was the end yet. Gower would do as he had 
 done before. When he felt himself secure in his mo- 
 nopoly he would squeeze the fishermen, squeeze them 
 hard. And as soon as he did that MacRae would buy 
 again. He could not make any money himself, perhaps. 
 But he could make Gower operate at a loss. That 
 would be something accomplished. 
 
 MacRae walked along the cliffs until he saw the 
 white cottage, and saw also that some one sat on the 
 steps in the sun. Whereupon he turned back. He 
 didn't want to see Betty. He conceived that to be an 
 ended chapter in his experiences. He had hurt her, and 
 
258 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 she had put on her armor against another such hurt. 
 There was a studied indifference about her now, when 
 he met her, which hurt him terribly. He supposed that 
 in addition to his own incomprehensible attitude which 
 she resented, she took sides with her father in this ob- 
 vious commercial warfare which was bleeding them both 
 financially. Very likely she saw in this only the open 
 workings of his malice toward Gower. In which Mac- 
 Rae admitted she would be quite correct. He had not 
 been able to discover in that flaring-up of passion for 
 Betty any reason for a burial of his feud with Gower. 
 There was in him some curious insistence upon carrying 
 this to the bitter end. And his hatred of Gower was 
 something alive, vital, coloring his vision somberly. 
 The shadow of the man lay across his life. He could 
 not ignore this, and his instinct was for reprisal. The 
 fighting instinct in MacRae lurked always very near 
 the surface. 
 
 He spent a good many hours during the next three 
 or four days lying in the shade of a gnarly arbutus 
 which gave on the cliffs. He took a book up there with 
 him, but most of the time he lay staring up at the blue 
 sky through the leaves, or at the sea, or distant shore 
 lines, thinking always in circles which brought him de- 
 spairingly out where he went in. He saw a mustard 
 pot slide each day into the Cove and pass on about its 
 business. There was not a great deal to be got in the 
 Cove. The last gas boat had scuttled away to the top 
 end, where the blueback were schooling in vast numbers. 
 There were stiU salmon to be taken about Poor Man's 
 Rock. The rowboat men took a few fish each day and 
 hoped for another big run. 
 
 There came a day when the mustard pot failed to 
 show in the Cove. The rowboat men had three hundred 
 
A RENEWAL OF HOSTILITIES 259 
 
 salmon, and they cursed Folly Bay with a fine flow of 
 epithet as they took their rotting fish outside the Cove 
 and dumped them in the sea. Nor did a Gower col- 
 lector come, although there was nothing in the wind or 
 weather to stop them. The rowboat trollers fumed and 
 stewed and took their troubles to Jack MacRae. But 
 he could neither inform nor help them. 
 
 Then upon an evening when the sun rested on the 
 serrated backbone of Vancouver Island, a fiery ball 
 against a sky of burnished copper, flinging a red haze 
 down on a slow swell that furrowed the Gulf, Jack 
 MacRae, perched on a mossy boulder midway between 
 the Cove and Point Old, saw first one boat and then 
 another come slipping and lurching around Poor Man's 
 Rock. Converted Columbia River sailboats, Cape Flat- 
 tery trollers, double-enders, all the variegated craft 
 that fishermen use and traffic with, each rounded the 
 Rock and struck his course for the Cove, broadside on 
 to the rising swell, their twenty-foot trolling poles 
 lashed aloft against a stumpy mast and swinging in a 
 great arc as they rolled. One, ten, a dozen, an endless 
 procession, sometimes three abreast, again a string in 
 single file. MacRae was reminded of the march of the 
 oysters — 
 
 "So thick and fast they came at last. 
 And more and more and more.'* 
 
 He sat watching them pass, wondering why the great 
 trek. The trolling fleet normally shifted by pairs and 
 dozens. This was a squadron movement, the Grand 
 Fleet steaming to some appointed rendezvous. MacRae 
 watched till the sun dipped behind the hills, and the 
 reddish tint left the sea to linger briefly on the summit 
 of the Coast Range flanking the mainland shore. The 
 fish boats were still coming, one behind the other, 
 
26o POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 lurching and swinging in the trough of the sea, rising 
 and falling, with wheeling gulls crying above them. 
 On each deck a solitary fisherman humped over his 
 steering gear. From each cleaving stem the bow-wave 
 curled in white foam. 
 
 There was something in the wind. MacRae felt it 
 like a premonition. He left his boulder and hurried 
 back toward the Cove. 
 
 The trolling boats were packed about the Blanco so 
 close that MacRae left his dinghy on the outer fringe 
 and walked across their decks to the deck of his own 
 vessel. The Blanco loomed in the midst of these lesser 
 craft like a hen over her brood of chicks. The fishermen 
 had gathered on the nearest boats. A dozen had clam- 
 bered up and taken seats on the Blanco^s low bulwarks. 
 MacRae gained his own deck and looked at them. 
 
 "What's coming off?" he asked quietly. "You 
 fellows holding a convention of some sort.'' " 
 
 One of the men sitting on the big carrier's rail spoke. 
 
 "Folly Bay's quit — shut down," he said sheep- 
 ishly. " We come to see if you 'd start buying again." 
 
 MacRae sat down on one sheave of his deck winch. 
 He took out a cigarette and lighted it, swung one foot 
 back and forth. He did not make haste to reply. An 
 expectant hush fell on the crowd. In the slow-gathering 
 dusk there was no sound but the creak of rubbing gun- 
 wales, the low snore of the sea breaking against the 
 cliffs, and the chug-chug of the last stragglers beating 
 into the shelter of the Cove. 
 
 " He shut down the cannery," the fishermen's spokes- 
 man said at last. " We ain't seen a buyer or collector 
 for three days. The water 's full of salmon, an' we been 
 suckin' our thumbs an' watching 'em play. If you won't 
 buy here again we got to go where there is buyers. And 
 
A RENEWAL OF HOSTILITIES 261 
 
 we 'd rather not do that. There 's no place on the Gulf 
 as good fishin' as there is here now." 
 
 "What was the trouble?" MacRae asked absently. 
 "Couldn't you supply him with fish?" 
 
 " Nobody knows. There was plenty of salmon. He 
 cut the price the day after you tied up. He cut it to 
 six bits. Then he shut down. Anyway, we don't care 
 why he shut down. It don't make no difference. What 
 we want is for you to start buyin' again. Hell, we 're 
 losin' money from daylight to dark ! The water 's alive 
 with salmon. An' the season's short. Be a sport, 
 MacRae." 
 
 MacRae laughed. 
 
 "Be a sport, eh? " he echoed with a trace of amuse- 
 ment in his tone. "I wonder how many of you would 
 have listened to me if I 'd gone around to you a week 
 ago and asked you to give me a sporting chance ? " 
 
 No one answered. MacRae threw away his half- 
 smoked cigarette. He stood up. 
 
 " All right, I '11 buy salmon again," he said quietly. 
 "And I won't ask you to give me first call on your 
 catch or a chance to make up some of the money I lost 
 bucking Folly Bay, or anything like that. But I want 
 to tell you something. You know it as well as I do, but 
 I want to jog your memory with it." 
 
 He raised his voice a trifle. 
 
 **You fellows know that I've always given you a 
 square deal. You aren't fishing for sport. You're 
 at this to make a living, to make money if you can. So 
 am I. You are entitled to all you can get. You earn 
 it. You work for it. So am I entitled to what I can 
 make. I work, I take certain chances. Neither of us 
 is getting something for nothing. But there is a limit 
 to what either of us can get. We can't dodge that. 
 
262 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 You fellows have been dodging it. Now you have to 
 come back to earth. 
 
 " No fisherman can get the prices you have had lately. 
 No cannery can pack salmon at those prices. Sockeye, 
 the finest canning salmon that swims in the sea, is 
 bringing eighty cents on the Fraser. Bluebacks are 
 sixty-five cents at Nanaimo, sixty at Cape Mudge, 
 sixty at the Euclataws. 
 
 "I can do a little better than that," MacRae hesi- 
 tated a second. " I can pay a little more, because the 
 cannery I'm supplying is satisfied with a little less 
 profit than most. Stubby Abbott is not a hog, and 
 neither am I. I can pay seventy-five cents and make 
 money. I have told you before that it is to your inter- 
 est as well as mine to keep me running. I will always 
 pay as much as salmon are worth. But I cannot pay 
 more. If your appreciation of Folly Bay's past kind- 
 ness to you is so keen that you would rather sell him 
 your fish, why, that's your privilege." 
 
 "Aw, that's bunk," a man called. "You know 
 blamed well we wouldn't. Not after him blowin' up 
 like this." 
 
 "How do I know.?" MacRae laughed. "If Gower 
 opened up to-morrow again and oflPered eighty or ninety 
 cents, he 'd get the salmon — even if you knew he would 
 make you take thirty once he got you where he wanted 
 you." 
 
 "Would he.^^" another voice uprose. "The next 
 time a mustard pot gets any salmon from me, it '11 be 
 because there's no other buyer and no other grounds 
 to fish." 
 
 A growled chorus backed this reckless statement. 
 
 " That 's all right," MacRae said good-naturedly. 
 " I don't blame you for picking up easy money. Only 
 
A RENEWAL OF HOSTILITIES 263 
 
 easy money is n't always so good as it looks. Fly at it 
 in the morning, and I '11 take the fish at the price I 've 
 said. If Folly Bay gets into the game again, it's up 
 to you." 
 
 When the lights were doused and every fisherman 
 was stretched in his bunk, falling asleep to the slow 
 beat of a dead swell breaking in the Cove's mouth, Vin 
 Ferrara stood up to seek his own bed. 
 
 " I wonder," he said to Jack, " I wonder why Gower 
 shut down at this stage of the game?" 
 
 MacRae shook his head. He was wondering that 
 himself. 
 
CHAPTER XIX 
 
 Top Dog 
 
 Some ten days later the Bluebird swung at anchor in 
 the kelp just clear of Poor Man's Rock. From a speck 
 on the horizon the Blanco grew to full shape, flaring 
 bow and pilot house, walking up the Gulf with a bone 
 in her teeth. She bore down upon her consort, sidled 
 alongside and made fast with lines to the bitts fore and 
 aft. Vin Ferrara threw back his hatch covers. His 
 helper forked up salmon with a picaroon. Vin tossed 
 them across into the Blanco's hold. At the same time 
 the larger carrier's short, stout boom swung back and 
 forth, dumping into the Bluebird's fish pens at each 
 trip a hundred pounds of cracked ice. Presently this 
 work was done, the Bluebird's salmon transferred to the 
 Blanco, the Bluebird's pens replenished with four tons 
 of ice. 
 
 Vin checked his tabs with the count of fish. The 
 other men slushed decks clean with buckets of sea 
 water. 
 
 *' Twenty-seven hundred," MacRae said. "Big 
 morning. Every troUer in the Gulf must be here." 
 
 " No, I have to go to Folly Bay and Siwash Islands 
 to-night," Vin told him. " There 's about twenty boats 
 working there and at Jenkins Pass. Salmon every- 
 where." 
 
 They sat in the shade of the Blanco's pilot house. 
 The sun beat mercilessly, a dog-day sun blazing upon 
 
TOP DOG 265 
 
 glassy waters, reflected upward in eye-straining shafts. 
 The heat seared. Within a radius of a mile outside the 
 Rock the trollers chug-chugged here and there, driving 
 straight ahead, doubling short, wheeling in slow circles, 
 working the eddies. They stood in the small cockpit 
 aft, the short tiller between their legs, leaving their 
 hands free to work the gear. They stood out in the 
 hot sun without shade or cover, stripped to undersliirt 
 and duck trousers, many of them barefooted, brown 
 arms bare, wet lines gleaming. Wherever a man looked 
 some fisherman hauled a line. And everywhere the 
 mirror of the sea was broken by leaping salmon, silver 
 crescents flashing in the sun. 
 
 " Say, what do you know about it ? " Vin smiled at 
 MacRae. " Old Gower is trolling." 
 
 "Trolling!" 
 
 " Rowboat. Plugging around the Rock. He was at 
 it when daylight came. He sold me fifteen fish. Think 
 of it. Old H. A. rowboat trolling. Selling. his fish to 
 you." 
 
 Vincent chuckled. His eyes rested curiously on 
 Jack's face. 
 
 "Haughty spirit that goes before destruction, as 
 Dolly used to say," he rambled on. " Some come-down 
 for him. He must be broke flat as a flounder." 
 
 " He sold you his salmon? " 
 
 "Sure. Nobody else to sell 'em to, is there? Said 
 he was trying his hand. Seemed good-natured about 
 it. Kinda pleased, in fact, because he had one more 
 than Doug Sproul. He started joshin' Doug. You 
 know what a crab old Doug is. He got crusty as blazes. 
 Old Gower just grinned at him and rowed off." 
 
 ^lacRae made no comment, and their talk turned into 
 other channels until Vin hauled his hook and bore away. 
 
266 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 MacRae saw to dropping the Blanco's anchor. He 
 would He there till dusk. Then he sat in the shade 
 again, looking up at the Gower cottage. 
 
 Gower was finished as an exploiter. There was no 
 question about that. When a man as big as he went 
 down the crash set tongues wagging. All the current 
 talk reached MacRae through Stubby. That price-war 
 had been Gower's last kick, an incomprehensible, ill- 
 judged effort to reestablish his hold on the Squitty 
 grounds, so it was said. 
 
 " He never was such a terribly big toad in the cannery 
 puddle," Stubby recited, " and I guess he has made his 
 last splash. They always cut a wide swath in town, 
 and that sort of thing can sure eat up coin. I 'm kind 
 of sorry for Betty. Still, she '11 probably marry some- 
 body with money. I know two or three fellows who 
 would be tickled to death to get her." 
 
 "Why don't you go to the rescue?" MacRae had 
 suggested, with an irony that went wide of the mark. 
 
 Stubby looked reflectively at his crippled arm, 
 
 " Last summer I would have," he said. " But she 
 couldn't see me with a microscope. And I've found a 
 girl who seems to think a winged duck is worth while." 
 
 "You'll be able to get hold of that ranch of yours 
 again, probably," Stubby had also said. " The chances 
 are old H. A. will raise what cash he can and try to make 
 a fresh start. It seems there has been friction in the 
 family, and his wife refused to come through with any 
 of her available cash. Seems kind of a complicated hole 
 he got into. He 's cleaned, anyway. Robbin-Steele got 
 all his cannery tenders and took over several thousand 
 cases of salmon. I hear he still has a few debts to be 
 settled when the cannery is sold. Why don't you figure 
 a way of getting hold of that cannery. Jack.? " 
 
TOP DOG 267 
 
 " I 'm no cannery man," MacRae replied. " Why 
 don't you? I thought you made him an offer." 
 
 " I withdrew it," Stubby said. " I have my hands 
 full without that. You've knocked about a hundred 
 per cent, off its value anyway." 
 
 " If I can get my father's land back I '11 be satisfied," 
 MacRae had said. 
 
 He was thinking about that now. He had taken the 
 first steps toward that end, which a year ago had seemed 
 misty and rather hopeless. Gower rich, impregnable, 
 would hold that land for his own pleasure and satisfac- 
 tion. Beaten in the commercial scramble he might be 
 forced to let it go. And MacRae was ready to pay any 
 price in reason to get it back. That seemed a debt he 
 owed old Donald MacRae, apart from his own craving 
 to sometime carry out plans they had made together 
 long before he went away to France. The lives of some 
 men are rooted in the soil where they were bom, where 
 they grow to manhood. Jack MacRae was of that 
 type. He loved the sea in all its moods and colors, its 
 quiet calm and wildest storms. But the sea was only 
 his second love. He was a landsman at heart. All sea- 
 men are. They come ashore when they are old and 
 feeble, to give their bodies at last to the earth. Mac- 
 Rae loved the sea, but he loved better to stand on the 
 slopes running back from Squitty's cliffs, to look at 
 those green meadows and bits of virgin forest and think 
 that it would all be his again, to have and to hold. 
 
 So he had set a firm in Vancouver the task of ap- 
 proaching Gower, to sound him, to see if he would sell, 
 while he kept in the background. He believed that 
 it was necessary for him to remain in the background. 
 He believed that Gower would never willingly relinquish 
 that land into his hands. 
 
268 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 MacRae sat on the Blanco^s deck, nursing his chin in 
 his pahns, staring at Poor Man's Rock with a grim 
 satisfaction. About that lonely headland strange 
 things had come to pass. Donald MacRae had felt his 
 first abiding grief there and cried his hurt to a windy 
 sky. He had lived his last years snatching a precarious 
 living from the seas that swirled about the Rock. The 
 man who had been the club with which fate bludgeoned 
 old Donald was making his last stand in sight of the 
 Rock, just as Donald MacRae had done. And when 
 they were all dead and gone. Poor Man's Rock would 
 still bare its brown hummock of a head between tides, 
 the salmon would still play along the kelp beds, in the 
 eddies about the Rock. Other men would ply the gear 
 and take the silver fish. It would all be as if it had 
 never happened. The earth and the sea endured and 
 men were passing shadows. ^ 
 
 Afternoon waned. Faint, cool airs wavered off the 
 land, easing the heat and the sun-glare. MacRae saw 
 Betty and her father come down to the beach. She 
 helped him slide his rowboat afloat. Then Gower j oined 
 the rowers who were putting out to the Rock for the 
 evening run. He passed close by the Blanco but Mac- 
 Rae gave him scant heed. His eyes were all for the 
 girl ashore. Betty sat on a log, bareheaded in the sun. 
 MacRae had a feeling that she looked at him. And she 
 would be thinking, ^ — God only knew what. 
 
 In MacRae's mind arose the inevitable question, — 
 one that he had choked back dozens of times : Was it 
 worth while to hurt her so, and himself, because their 
 fathers had fought, because there had been wrongs and 
 injustices? MacRae shook himself impatiently. He 
 was backsliding. Besides that unappeasable craving 
 for her, vivid images of her with tantalizing mouth, 
 
TOP DOG 269 
 
 wayward shining hair, eyes that answered the passion 
 in his own, besides these luring pictures of her which 
 troubled him sometimes both in waking hours and sleep- 
 ing, there was a strange, deep-seated distrust of Betty 
 because she was the daughter of her father. That was 
 irrational, and Jack MacRae knew it was irrational. 
 But he could not help it. It colored his thought of 
 her. It had governed his reactions. 
 
 MacRae himself could comprehend all too clearly the 
 tragedy of his father's life. But he doubted if any one 
 else could. He shrank from unfolding it even to Betty, 
 
 — even to make clear to her why his hand must be 
 against her father. MacRae knew, or thought he knew 
 
 — he had reasoned the thing out many times in the last 
 few months — that Betty would not turn to him against 
 her own flesh and blood without a valid reason. He 
 could not, even in the name of love, cut her off from all 
 that she had been, from all that had made her what she 
 was, and make her happy. And MacRae knew that if 
 they married and Betty were not happy and contented, 
 they would both be tigerishly miserable. There was 
 only one possible avenue, one he could not take. He 
 could not seek peace with Gower, even for Betty's sake. 
 
 MacRae considered moodily, viewing the matter from 
 every possible angle. He could not see where he could 
 do other than as he was doing: keep Betty out of his 
 mind as much as possible and go on determinedly mak- 
 ing his fight to be top dog in a world where the weak 
 get little mercy and even the strong do not always come 
 off unscarred. 
 
 Jack MacRae was no philosopher, nor an intellectual 
 superman, but he knew that love did not make the world 
 go round. It was work. Work and fighting. Men 
 spent most of their energies in those two channels. 
 
270 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 This they could not escape. Love only shot a rosy glow 
 across life. It did not absolve a man from weariness or 
 scars. By it, indeed, he might suffer greater stress and 
 deeper scars. To MacRae, love, such as had troubled 
 his father's life and his own, seemed to be an emotion 
 pregnant with sorrow. But he could not deny the 
 strange power of this thing called love, when it stirred 
 men and women. 
 
 His deck hand, who was also cook, broke into Mac- 
 Rae's reflections with a call to supper. Jack went down 
 the companion steps into a forepeak stuffy with the 
 heat of the sun and a galley stove, a cramped place 
 where they ate heartily despite faint odors of distillate 
 and -burned lubricating oil from the engine room and 
 bilge water that smelled of fish. 
 
 A troller's boat was rubbing against the Blanco's 
 fenders when they came on deck again. Others were 
 hoisting the trolling poles, coming in to deliver. The 
 sun was gone. The long northern twilight cast a pearly 
 haze along far shores. MacRae threw open his hatches 
 and counted the salmon as they came flipping off the 
 point of a picaroon. For over an hour he stood at one 
 hatch and his engineer at the other, counting fish, 
 making out sale slips, paying out money. It was still 
 light — light enough to read. But the bluebacks had 
 stopped biting. The rowboat men quit last of all. 
 They sidled up to the Blanco, one after the other, un- 
 loaded, got their money, and tied their rowboats on 
 behind for a tow around to the Cove. 
 
 Gower had rowed back and forth for three hours. 
 MacRae had seen him swing around the Rock, up under 
 the cliffs and back again, pulling slow and steady. He 
 was last to haul in his gear. He came up to the carrier 
 and lay alongside Doug Sproul while that crabbed 
 
TOP DOG 271 
 
 ancient chucked his salmon on deck. Then he moved 
 into the place Sproul vacated. The bottom of his boat 
 was bright with salmon. He rested one hand on the 
 Blanco'' s guard rail and took the pipe out of his mouth 
 with the other. 
 
 "Hello, MacRae," he said, as casually as a man 
 would address another with whom he had slight ac- 
 quaintance. " I 've got some fish. D' you want 'em.? " 
 
 MacRae looked down at him. He did not want 
 Gower's fish or anything that was Gower's. He did 
 not want to see him or talk to him. He desired, in so 
 far as he was conscious of any desire in the matter, that 
 Gower should keep his distance. But he had a horror 
 of meanness, of petty spite. He could knock a man 
 <;Jown with a good heart, if occasion arose. It was not 
 in him to kick a fallen enemy. 
 
 " Chuck them up," he said. 
 
 He counted them silently as they flipped over the 
 bulwark and fell into the chilly hold, marked a slip, 
 handed Gower the money for them. The hand that 
 took the money, a pudgy hand all angry red from beat- 
 ing sun, had blisters in the palm. Gower's face, like his 
 hands, was brick red. Already shreds of skin were peel- 
 ing from his nose and cheeks. August sun on the Gulf. 
 MacRae knew its bite and sting. So had his father 
 known. He wondered if Gower ever thought about that 
 now. 
 
 But there was in Gower's expression no hint of any 
 disturbing thought. He uttered a brief " thanks " and 
 pocketed his money. He sat down and took his oars 
 in hand, albeit a trifle gingerly. And he said to old 
 Doug Sproul, almost jovially: 
 
 "Well, Doug, I got as many as you did, this trip." 
 
 " Didj a ? " Sproul snarled. " Kain't buy 'em cheap 
 
272 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 enough, no more, huh? Gotta ketch 'em yourself, 
 huh?" 
 
 "Hard-boiled old crab, aren't you, Doug?" Gower 
 rumbled in his deep voice. But he laughed. And he 
 rowed away to the beach before his house. MacRae 
 watched. Betty came down to meet him. Together 
 they hauled the heavy rowboat out on skids, above the 
 tide mark. 
 
 Nearly every day after that he saw Gower trolling 
 around the Rock, sometimes alone, sometimes with 
 Betty sitting forward, occasionally relieving him at the 
 oars. No matter what the weather, if a rowboat could 
 work a line Gower was one of them. Rains came, and 
 he faced them in yellow oilskins. He sweltered under 
 that fiery sun. If his life had been soft and easy, soft- 
 ness and ease did not seem to be wholly necessary to his 
 existence, not even to his peace of mind. For he had 
 that. MacRae often wondered at it, knowing the man's 
 history. Gower joked his way to acceptance among the 
 rowboat men, all but old Doug Sproul, who had for- 
 gotten what it was to speak pleasantly to any one. 
 
 He caught salmon for salmon with these old men who 
 had fished all their lives. He sold his fish to the Blanco 
 or the Bluebird, whichever was on the spot. The run 
 held steady at the Cove end of Squitty, a phenomenal 
 abundance of salmon at that particular spot, and the 
 Blanco was there day after day. 
 
 And MacRae could not help pondering over Gower 
 and his ways. He was puzzled, not alone about Gower, 
 but about himself. He had dreamed of a fierce satis- 
 faction in beating this man down, in making him know 
 poverty and work and privation, — rubbing his nose 
 in the dirt, he had said to himself. 
 
 He had managed it. Gower had joined the ranks of 
 
TOP DOG 273 
 
 broken men. He was finished as a figure in industry, 
 a financial power. MacRae knew that, beyond a doubt. 
 Gower had debts and no assets save his land on the 
 Squitty cliifs and the closed cannery at Folly Bay. 
 The cannery was a white elephant, without takers in 
 the market. No cannery man would touch it unless he 
 could first make a contract with IMacRae for the blue- 
 backs. They had approached him with such proposi- 
 tions. Like wolves, MacRae thought, seeking to pick 
 the bones of one of their own pack who had fallen. 
 
 And if MacRae needed other evidence concerning 
 Gower, he had it daily before his eyes. To labor at the 
 oars, to troll early and late in drizzling rain or scorch- 
 ing sunshine, a man only does that because he must. 
 MacRae's father had done it. As a matter of course, 
 without complaint, with unprotesting patience. 
 
 So did Gower. That did not fit Jack MacRae's con- 
 ception of the man. If he had not known Gower he 
 would have set him down as a fat, good-natured, kindly 
 man with an infinite capacity for hard, disagreeable 
 work. 
 
 He never attempted to talk to MacRae. He spoke 
 now and then. But there was no hint of rancor in his 
 silences. It was simply as if he understood that Mac- 
 Rae did not wish to talk to him, and that he conceded 
 this to be a proper attitude. He talked with the fisher- 
 men. He joked with them. If one slammed out at him 
 now and then with a touch of the old resentment against 
 Folly Bay he laughed as if he understood and bore no 
 malice. He baffled MacRae. How could this man who 
 had walked on fishermen's faces for twenty years, seek- 
 ing and exacting always his own advantage, playing the 
 game under harsh rules of his own devising which had 
 enabled him to win — until this last time — how could he 
 
274 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 see the last bit of prestige wrested from him and still 
 be cheerful? How could he earn his daily bread in the 
 literal sweat of his brow, endure blistered hands and 
 sore muscles and the sting of slime-poison in fingers cut 
 by hooks and traces, with less outward protest than 
 men who had never known anything else? 
 
 MacRae could find no answer to that. He could only 
 wonder. He only knew that some shift of chance had 
 helped him to put Gower where Gower had put his 
 father. And there was no satisfaction in the achieve- 
 ment, no sense of victory. He looked at the man and 
 felt sorry for him, and was uncomfortably aware that 
 Gower, taking salmon for his living with other poor 
 men around Poor Man's Rock, was in no need of pity. 
 This podgy man with the bright blue eyes and heavy jaw, 
 who had been Donald MacRae's jealous Nemesis, had 
 lost everything that was supposed to make life worth 
 living to men of his type. And he did not seem to care. 
 He seemed quite content to smoke a pipe and troll for 
 salmon. He seemed to be a stranger to suffering. He 
 did not even seem to be aware of discomfort, or of loss. 
 
 MacRae had wanted to make him suffer. He had 
 imagined that poverty and hard, dirty work would be 
 the fittest requital he could bestow. If Jack MacRae 
 had been gifted with omnipotence when he read that 
 penned history of his father's life, he would have de- 
 vised no fitter punishment, no more fitting vengeance 
 for Gower than that he should lose his fortune and his 
 prestige and spend his last years getting his bread 
 upon the waters by Poor Man's Rock in sun and wind 
 and blowy weather. 
 
 And MacRae was conscious that if there were any 
 suffering involved in this matter now, it rested upon 
 him, not upon Gower. Most men past middle age, who 
 
TOP DOG 275 
 
 have drunk deeply the pleasant wine of material suc- 
 cess, shrink from the gaunt specter of poverty. They 
 have shot their bolt. They cannot stand up to hard 
 work. They cannot endure privation. They lose heart. 
 They go about seeking sympathy, railing against the 
 fate. They lie down and the world walks unheeding 
 over their prone bodies. 
 
 Gower was not doing that. If he had done so, 
 MacRae would have sne; r.d at him with contempt. As 
 it was, in spite of the rancor he had nursed, the feeling 
 which had driven h m to reprisal, he found himself 
 sorry — sorry for himself, sorry for Betty. He had 
 set out to bludgeon Gower, to humiliate him, and the 
 worst arrows he could sling had blunted their points 
 against the man's invulnerable spirit. 
 
 Betty had been used to luxury. It had not spoiled 
 her. MacRae granted that. It had not made her set 
 great store by false values. MacRae was sure of that. 
 She had loved him simply and naturally, with an al- 
 most primitive directness. Spoiled daughters of the 
 leisure class are not so simple and direct. MacRae 
 began to wonder if she could possibly escape resenting 
 his share in the overturning of her father's fortunes, 
 whereby she herself must suffer. 
 
 By the time MacRae came slowly to these half-formed, 
 disturbing conclusions he was already upon the verge 
 of other disturbing discoveries in the realm of material 
 facts. 
 
 For obvious reasons he could not walk up to Gower's 
 house and talk to Betty. At least he did not see 
 how he could, although there were times when he was 
 tempted. When he did see her he was acutely sensitive 
 to a veiled reproach in her eyes, a courteous distance 
 in her speech. She came off the beach one day alone, 
 
276 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 a few minutes after MacRae dropped anchor in the 
 usual spot. She had a dozen salmon in the boat. 
 When she came alongside MacRae set foot over the 
 bulwark with intent to load them himself. She fore- 
 stalled him by picking the salmon up and heaving 
 them on the Blanco's deck. She was dressed for the 
 work, in heavy nailed shoes, a flannel blouse, a rough 
 tweed skirt. 
 
 " Oh, say, take the picaroon, won't you ? " He held it 
 out to her, the six-foot wooden shaft with a slightly 
 curving point of steel on the end. 
 
 She turned on him with a salmon dangling by the 
 gills from her fingers. 
 
 " You don't think I 'm afraid to' get my hands dirty, 
 do you?" she asked. "Me — a fisherman's daughter. 
 Besides, I'd probably miss the salmon and jab that 
 pointed thing through the bottom of the boat." 
 
 She laughed lightly, with no particular mirth in her 
 voice. And MacRae was stricken dumb. She was 
 angry. He knew it, felt it intuitively. Angry at him, 
 warning him to keep his distance. He watched her 
 dabble her hands in the salt chuck, dry them coolly on a 
 piece of burlap. She took the money for the fish with 
 a cool "thanks" and rowed back to shore. 
 
 Jack lay in his bunk that night blasted by a gloomy 
 sense of futility in everything. He had succeeded in 
 his undertaking beyond all the expectations which had 
 spurred him so feverishly in the beginning. But there 
 was no joy in it; not when Betty Gower looked at him 
 with that cold gleam in her gray eyes. Yet he told 
 himself savagely that if he had to take his choice he 
 would not have done otherwise. And when he had ac- 
 complished the last move in his plan and driven Gower 
 off the island, then he would have a chance to forget 
 
TOP DOG 277 
 
 that such people had ever existed to fill a man's days 
 with unhappiness. That, it seemed to him, must be the 
 final disposition of this problem whicli his father and 
 Horace Gower and Elizabeth Morton had set for him 
 years before he was bom. 
 
 There came a burst of afternoon westerlies which 
 blew small hurricanes from noon to sundown. But 
 there was always fishing under the broad lee of the 
 cliffs. The Bltiebird continued to scuttle from one out- 
 lying point to another, and the Blanco wallowed down 
 to Crow Harbor every other day with her hold crammed. 
 When she was not under way and the sea was fit the 
 big carrier rode at anchor in the kelp close by Poor 
 Man's Rock, convenient for the trollers to come along- 
 side and deliver when they chose. There were squalls 
 that blew up out of nowhere and drove them all to 
 cover. There were days when a dead swell rolled and 
 the trolling boats dipped and swung and pointed their 
 bluff bows skyward as they climbed the green moun- 
 tains,^ — for the salmon strike when a sea is on, and a 
 t roller runs from heavy weather only when he can no 
 longer handle his gear. 
 
 MacRae was much too busy to brood long at a time. 
 The phenomenal run of blueback still held, with here 
 and there the hook-nosed coho coming in stray schools. 
 He had a himdred and forty fishermen to care for in 
 the matter of taking their catch, keeping them supplied 
 with fuel, bringing them foodstuffs such as they de- 
 sired. The Blanca came up from Vancouver sometimes 
 as heavily loaded as when she went down. But he wel- 
 comed the work because it kept him from too intense 
 thinking. He shepherded his seafaring flock for his 
 profit and theirs alike and poured salmon by tens of 
 thousands into the macliines at Crow Harbor, — red 
 
278 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 meat to be preserved in tin cans which in months to 
 come should feed the hungry in the far places of the 
 earth. 
 
 MacRae sometimes had the strange fancy of being 
 caught in a vast machine for feeding the world, a 
 machine which did not reckon such factors as pain and 
 sorrow in its remorseless functioning. Men could live 
 without love or ease or content. They could not sur- 
 vive without food. 
 
 He came up to Squitty one bright afternoon when 
 the sea was flat and still, unliarassed by the westerly. 
 The Cove was empty. All the fleet was scattered over 
 a great area. The Bluebird was somewhere on her 
 rounds. MacRae dropped the Blanco's hook in the 
 middle of Cradle Bay, a spot he seldom chose for 
 anchorage. But he had a purpose in this. When the 
 bulky carrier swung head to the faint land breeze Mac- 
 Rae was sitting on his berth in the pilot house, glancing 
 over a letter he held in his hand. It was from a land- 
 dealing firm in Vancouver. One paragraph is sufiiciently 
 illuminating : 
 
 In regard to the purchase of this Squitty Island 
 property we beg to advise you that Mr. Gower, after 
 some correspondence, states distinctly that while he is 
 willing to dispose of this property he will only deal 
 directly with a bona fide purchaser. 
 
 We therefore suggest that you take the matter up 
 with Mr. Gower personally. 
 
 MacRae put the sheet back in its envelope. He 
 stared thoughtfully through an open window which 
 gave on shore and cottage. He could see Gower sitting 
 on the porch, the thick bulk of the man clean-cut against 
 the white wall. As he looked he saw Betty go across 
 
TOP DOG 279 
 
 the untrimmed lawn, up the path that ran along the 
 cliffs, and pass slowly out of sight among the stimted, 
 wind-twisted firs. 
 
 He walked to the after deck, laid hold of the dinghy, 
 and slid it overboard. Five minutes later he had beached 
 it and was walking up the gravel path to the house. 
 
 He was conscious of a queer irritation against Gower. 
 If he were willing to sell tlie place, why did he sit like 
 a spider in his web and demand that victims come to 
 him.? MacRae was wary, distrustful, suspicious, as he 
 walked up the slope. Some of the old rancor revived 
 in him. Gower might have a shaft in his quiver yet, 
 and the will to use it. 
 
CHAPTER XX 
 The Dead and Dusty Past 
 
 GowER sat in a deep grass chair, a pipe sagging one 
 comer of his mouth, his slippered feet crossed on a low 
 stool. His rubber sea boots lay on the porch floor as 
 if he had but discarded them. MacRae took in every 
 detail of his appearance in one photographic glance, as 
 a man will when his gaze rests upon another with whom 
 he may be about to clash. 
 
 Gower no longer resembled the well-fed plutocrat. 
 He scarcely seemed the same man who, nearly two years 
 before, had absently bestowed upon MacRae a dollar for 
 an act of simple courtesy. He wore nondescript trousers 
 which betrayed a shrunken abdominal line, a blue flannel 
 shirt that bared his short, thick neck. And in that par- 
 ticular moment, at least, the habitual sullenness of his 
 heavy face was not in evidence. He looked placid in 
 spite of the fiery redness which sun and wind had 
 burned into his skin. He betrayed no surprise at 
 MacRae's coming. The placidity of his blue eyes did 
 not alter in any degree. 
 
 " Hello, MacRae," he said. 
 
 " How d' do," MacRae answered. " I came to speak 
 to you about a little matter of business." 
 
 " Yes ? " Gower rumbled. " I 've been sort of expect- 
 ing you." 
 
 " Oh ? " MacRae failed to conceal altogether his 
 
THE DEAD AND DUSTY PAST 281 
 
 surprise at this statement. " I understand you are 
 willing to sell this place. I want to buy it." 
 
 " It was yours once, was n't it.'' " 
 
 The words were more of a comment than a question, 
 but MacRae answered : 
 
 " You know that, I think." 
 
 "And you want it back?" 
 
 " Naturally." 
 
 *' If that 's what you want," Gower said slowly. 
 "I '11 see you in " 
 
 He cut off the sentence. His round stomach — less 
 round by far than it had been two months earlier — 
 shook with silent laughter. His eyes twinkled. His 
 thick, stubby fingers drummed on the chair arm. 
 
 MacRae's face grew hot. He recognized the unfin- 
 ished sentence as one of his own, words he had flung in 
 Gower's face not so long since. If that was. the way of 
 it he could save his breath. He turned silently. 
 
 "Wait." 
 
 He faced about at the changed quality of Gower's 
 tone. The amused expression had vanished. Gower 
 leaned forward a little. There was something very 
 like appeal in his expression. MacRae was suddenly 
 conscious of facing a still different man, — an oldish, 
 fat man with thinning hair and tired, wistful eyes. 
 
 "I just happened to think of what you said to me 
 not long ago," Gower explained. " It struck me as 
 funny. But that isn't how I feel. If you want this 
 land you can have it. Take a chair. Sit down. I 
 want to talk to you." 
 
 " There is nothing the matter with my legs," MacRae 
 said shortly. " I do want this land. I will pay you the 
 price you paid for it, in cash, when you execute a legal 
 transfer. Is that satisfactory.?" 
 
282 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 "What about this house?" Gower asked casually. 
 "It's worth something, isn't it? " 
 
 " Not to me," MacRae replied. " I don't want the 
 house. You can take it away with you, if you like." 
 
 Gower looked at him thoughtfully. 
 
 " The Scotch," he said, " cherish a grudge like a 
 family heirloom." 
 
 "Perhaps they do," MacRae answered. "Why 
 not? If you knock a man down you don't expect him 
 to jump up and shake hands with you. You had your 
 inning. It was a long one." 
 
 "I wonder," Gower said slowly, "why old Donald 
 MacRae kept his mouth closed to you about trouble 
 between us until he was ready to die? " 
 
 "How do you know he did that?" MacRae de- 
 manded harshly. 
 
 "The night you came to ask for the Arrow to take 
 him to town you had no such feeling against me as you 
 have had since," Gower said. "I know you didn't. 
 You would n't have come if you had. I cut no figure in 
 your eyes, oue way or the other, until after he was dead. 
 So he must have told you at the very last. What did 
 he tell you? Why did he have to pass that old poison 
 on to another generation?" 
 
 "Why shouldn't he?" MacRae demanded. "You 
 made his life a failure. You put a scar on his face — 
 I can remember when I was a youngster wondering how 
 he got that mark — I remember how it stood like a 
 ridge across his cheek bone when he was dead. You 
 put a scar upon his soul that no one but himself ever 
 saw or felt — except as I have been able to feel it since 
 I knew. You weren't satisfied with that. You had to 
 keep on throwing your weight against him for thirty 
 years. You did n't even stop when the war made every- 
 
THE DEAD AND DUSTY PAST 283 
 
 thing seem different. You might have let up then. We 
 were doing our bit. But you didn't. You kept on 
 until you had deprived him of everything but the power 
 to row around the Rock day after day and take a few 
 salmon in order to live. You made a pauper of him 
 and sat here gloating over it. It preyed on his mind to 
 think that I should come back from France and find my- 
 self a beggar because he was unable to cope with you. 
 He lived his life without whimpering to me, except to 
 say he did not like you. He only wrote this down for 
 me to read — -when he began to feel that he would never 
 see me again — the reasons why he had failed in every- 
 thing, lost everything. When I pieced out the story, 
 from the day you used your pike pole to knock down a 
 man whose fighting hands were tied by a promise to a 
 woman he loved, from then till the last cold-blooded 
 maneuver by which you got this land of ours, I hated 
 you, and I set out to pay you back in your own coin. 
 
 "But," MacRae continued after a momentary hesi- 
 tation, " that is not what I came here to say. Talk — 
 talk 's cheap. I would rather not talk about these 
 things, or think of them, now. I want to buy this land 
 from you if you are willing to sell. That 's all." 
 
 Gower scarcely seemed to hear him. He was nursing 
 his heavy chin with one hand, looking at MacRae with 
 a curious concentration, looking at him and seeing 
 something far beyond. 
 
 " Hell ; it is a true indictment, up to a certain point," 
 he said at last. "What a curse misunderstanding is 
 — and pride ! By God, I have envied your father, Mac- 
 Rae, many a time. I struck him an ugly blow once. 
 Yes. I was young and hot-headed, and I was burning 
 with jealousy. But I did him a good turn at that, I 
 think. I — oh, well, maybe you wouldn't understand. 
 
284 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 I suppose you wouldn't believe me if I say I didn't 
 swoop down on him every time I got a chance; that I 
 didn't bushwhack — no matter if he believed I did." 
 
 "No?" MacRae said incredulously. "You didn't 
 break up a logging venture on the Claha when he had a 
 chance to make a stake.? You didn't show your fine 
 Italian hand in that marble quarry undertaking on 
 Texada.? Nor other things that I could name as he 
 named them. Why crawl now.? It doesn't matter. 
 I 'm not swinging a club over your head." 
 
 Gower shook himself. 
 
 " No," he declared slowly. " He interfered with the 
 Morton interests in that Claha logging camp, and they 
 did whatever was done. The quarry business I know 
 nothing about, except that I had business dealings with 
 the people whom he ran foul of. I tell you, MacRae, 
 after the first short period of time when I was afire with 
 the fury of jealousy, I did not do these things. I did n't 
 even want to do them. I wish you would get that 
 straight. I wanted Bessie Morton and I got her. That 
 was an issue between us, I grant. I gained my point 
 there. I would have gone farther to gain that point. 
 But I paid for it. It was not so long before I knew that 
 I was going to pay dearly for it. I tell you I came to 
 envy Donald MacRae. I don't know if he nursed a 
 disappointment — which I came to know was an illu- 
 sion. Perhaps he did. But he had nothing real to re- 
 gret, nothing to prick, prick him all the time. He 
 married a woman who seemed to care for him. At any 
 rate, she respected him and was a mate, living his life 
 while she did live. 
 
 "Look, MacRae. I married Bessie Morton because 
 I wanted her, wanted her on any terms. She didn't 
 want me. She wanted Donald MacRae. But she had 
 
THE DEAD AND DUSTY PAST 285 
 
 wanted other men. That was the way she was made. 
 She was facile. And she never loved any one half so 
 much as she loved herself. She was only a beautiful 
 peacock preening her feathers and sighing for homage. 
 She was — she is — the essence of self from the top of 
 her head to her shoes. Her feelings, her wants, her 
 wishes, her whims, her two-by-four outlook, nothing else 
 counted. She couldn't comprehend anything outside 
 of herself. She would have made Donald MacRae's life 
 a misery to him when the novelty of that infatuation 
 wore off. The Mortons are like that. They want every- 
 thing. They give nothing. 
 
 " She was cowardly too. Do you think two old men 
 and myself would have taken her, or anything else, 
 from your father out in the middle of the Gulf, if she 
 had had any spirit? You knew your father. He 
 wasn't a tame man. He would have fought — fought 
 like a tiger. We might have killed him. It is more 
 likely that he would have killed us. But we could not 
 have beaten him. But she had to knuckle down — take 
 the easy way for her. She cried, and he promised." 
 
 Gower lay back in his chair. His chin sunk on his 
 breast. He spoke slowly, groping for his words. 
 MacRae did not interrupt. Something compelled him 
 to listen. There was a pained ring in Gower's voice 
 that held him. The man was telling him these things 
 with visible reluctance, with a simple dignity that ar- 
 rested him, even while he felt that he should not listen. 
 
 "She used to taunt me with that," he went on, 
 ** taunt me with striking Donald MacRae. For years 
 after we were married she used to do that. Long 
 after — and that wasn't so long — she had ceased to 
 care if such a man as your father existed. That was 
 only an episode to her, of which she was snobbishly 
 
286 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 ashamed in time. But she often reminded me that I had 
 struck him like a hardened butcher, because she knew 
 she could hurt me with that. So that I used to wish to 
 God I had never followed her out into the Gulf. 
 
 " For thirty years I 've lived and worked and never 
 known any real satisfaction in living — or happiness. 
 I 've played the game, played it hard. I 've been hard, 
 they say. Probably I have. I didn't care. A man 
 had to walk on others or be walked on himself. I made 
 money. Money — I poured it into her hands, like 
 pouring sand in a rat-hole. She lived for herself, her 
 whims, her codfish-aristocracy standards, spending my 
 money like water to make a showing, giving me nothing 
 in return, nothing but whining and recrimination if I 
 crossed her ever so little. She made a lap dog of her 
 son the first twenty-five years of his life. She would 
 have made Betty a cheap imitation of herself. But she 
 could n't do that." 
 
 He stopped a moment and shook Ins head gently. 
 
 " No," he resumed, " she could n't do that. There 's 
 iron in that girl. She's all Gower. I think I should 
 have thrown up my hands long ago only for Betty's 
 sake." 
 
 MacRae shifted uneasily. 
 
 " You see," Gower continued, " my life has been a 
 failure, too. When Donald MacRae and I clashed, I pre- 
 vailed. I got what I wanted. But it was only a shadow. 
 There was no substance. It didn't do me any good. 
 I have made money, barrels of it, and that has not done 
 me any good. I 've been successful at everything I 
 undertook — except lately — but succeeding as the 
 world reckons success has n't made me happy. In my 
 personal life I 've been a damned failure. I 've always 
 been aware of that. And if I have held a feeling toward 
 
THE DEAD AND DUSTY PAST 287 
 
 Donald MacRae these thirty-odd years, it was a feeling 
 of envy. I would have traded places with him and been 
 the gainer. I would have liked to tell him so. But I 
 could n't. He was a dour Scotchman and I suppose he 
 hated me, although he kept it to himself. I suppose he 
 loved Bessie. I know I did. Perhaps he cherished 
 hatred of me for wrecking his dream, and so saw my 
 hand in things where it never was. But he was wrong. 
 Bessie would have wrecked it and him too. She would 
 have whined and sniffled about being a poor man's wife, 
 once she learned what it was to be poor. She could 
 never understand anything but a silk-lined existence. 
 She loved herself and her own illusion"^. She would have 
 driven him mad with her petty whims, her petty emo- 
 tions. She doesn't know the meaning of loyalty, con- 
 sideration, or even an open, honest hatred. And I've 
 stood it all these years — because I don't shirk respon- 
 sibilities, and I had brought it on myself." 
 
 He stopped a second, staring out across the Gulf. 
 
 " But apart from that one thing, I never consciously 
 or deliberately wronged Donald MacRae. He may hon- 
 estly have believed I did. I have the name of being 
 hard. I dare say I am. The world is a hard place. 
 When I had to choose between walking on a man's face 
 and having my own walked on, I never hesitated. There 
 was nothing much to make me soft. I moved along the 
 same lines as most of the men I know. 
 
 " But, I repeat, I never put a straw in your father's 
 way. I know that things went against him. I could 
 see that. I knew why, too. He was too square for his 
 time and place. He trusted men too much. You can't 
 always do that. He was too scrupulously honest. He 
 always gave the other fellow the best of it. That alone 
 beat him. He didn't always consider his own interest 
 
288 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 and follow up every advantage. I don't think he cared 
 to scramble for money, as a man must scramble for it 
 these days. He could have held this place if he had 
 cast about for ways to do so. There were plenty of 
 loopholes. But he had that old-fashioned honor which 
 doesn't seek loopholes. He had borrowed money on 
 it. He would have taken the coat off his back, beggared 
 himself any day to pay a debt. Isn't that right .^^ " 
 
 MacRae nodded. 
 
 " So this place came into my hands. It was deliber- 
 ate on my part — but only, mind you, when I knew 
 that he was bound to lose it. Perhaps it was bad judg- 
 ment on my part. I didn't think that he would see it 
 as an end I 'd been working for. As I grew older, I 
 found myself wanting now and then to wipe out that old 
 score between us. I would have given a good deal to sit 
 down with him over a pipe. A woman, who was n't much 
 as women go, had made us both suffer. So I built this 
 cottage and came here to stay now and then. I liked 
 the place. I liked to think that now he and I were get- 
 ting to be old men, we could be friends. But he was 
 too bitter. And I 'm human. I 've got a bit of pride. 
 I couldn't crawl. So I never got nearer to him than to 
 see him rowing around the Rock. And he died full of 
 that bitterness. I don't like to think of that. Still, 
 it cannot be helped. Do you grasp this, MacRae? Do 
 you believe me ? " 
 
 Incredible as it seemed, MacRae had no choice but 
 to accept that explanation of strangely twisted motives, 
 those misapprehensions, the murky cloud of misunder- 
 standing. The tone of Gower's voice, his attitude, car- 
 ried supreme conviction. And still — 
 
 " Yes," he said at last. " It is all a contradiction of 
 things I have been passionately sure of for nearly two 
 
THE DEAD AND DUSTY PAST 289 
 
 years. But I can see^ — yes, it must be as you say. 
 I'm sorry." 
 
 "Sorry.? For what?" Gower regarded him soberly. 
 
 " Many things. Why did you/ tell me this ? " 
 
 "Why should the anger and bitterness of two old 
 men be passed on to their children ? " Gower asked him 
 gently. 
 
 MacRae stared at him. Did he know.? Had he 
 guessed.? Had Betty told him.? He wondered. It was 
 not like Betty to have spoken of what had passed be- 
 tween them. Yet he did not know how close a bond 
 might exist between this father and daughter, who were, 
 MacRae was beginning to perceive, most singularly 
 ahke. And this was a shrewd old man, sadly wise in 
 human weaknesses, and much more tolerant than Mac- 
 Rae had conceived possible. He felt a little ashamed 
 of the malice with which he had fought this battle of the 
 salmon around Squitty Island. Yet Gower by his own 
 admission was a hard man. He had lived with a com- 
 mercial sword in his hand. He knew what it was to fall 
 by that weapon. He had been hard on the fishermen. 
 He had exploited them mercilessly. Therein lay his 
 weakness, whereby he had fallen, through which Mac- 
 Rae had beaten him. But had he beaten him.? MacRae 
 was not now so sure about that. But it was only a 
 momentary doubt. He struggled a little against the 
 reaction of kindliness, this curious sympathy for Gower 
 which moved him now. He hated sentimentalism, facile 
 yielding to shallow emotions. He wanted to talk and 
 he was dumb. Dumb for appropriate words, because 
 his mind kept turning with passionate eagerness upon 
 Betty Gower. 
 
 "Does Betty know what you have just told me.?" 
 he asked at last. 
 
290 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 Gower shook his head. 
 
 " She knows there is something. I can't tell her. I 
 don't like to. It isn't a nice story. I don't shine in 
 it — nor her mother." 
 
 " Nor do I," MacRae muttered to himself. 
 
 He stood looking over the porch rail down on the 
 sea where the Blanco swung at her anchor chain. There 
 seemed nothing more to say. Yet he was aware of 
 Gower's eyes upon him with something akin to expec- 
 tancy. An uncertain smile flitted across MacRae's face. 
 
 " This has sort of put me on my beam ends," he 
 said, using a sailor's phrase. " Don't you feel as if 
 I 'd rather done you up these two seasons ? " 
 
 Gower's heavy features lightened with a grimace of 
 amusement. 
 
 " Well," he said, " you certainly cost me a lot of 
 money, one way and another. But you had the nerve 
 to go at it — and you used better judgment of men and 
 conditions than anybody has manifested in the salmon 
 business lately, unless it 's young Abbott. So I sup- 
 pose you are entitled to win on your merits. By the 
 way, there is one condition tacked to selling you this 
 ranch. I hesitated about bringing it up at first. I 
 would like to keep this cottage and a strip of ground a 
 hundred and fifty feet wide running down to the beach." 
 
 "All right," MacRae agreed. "We can arrange 
 that later. I '11 come again." 
 
 He set foot on the porch steps. Then he turned 
 back. A faint flush stole up in his sun-browned face. 
 He held out his hand. 
 
 " Shall we cry quits ? " he asked. " Shall we shake 
 hands and forget it? " 
 
 Gower rose to his feet. He did not say anything, 
 but the grip in his thick, stubby fingers almost made 
 
THE DEAD AND DUSTY PAST 291 
 
 Jack MacRae wince, — and he was a strong-handed 
 man himself. 
 
 "I'm glad you came to-day," Gower said huskily. 
 " Come again — soon." 
 
 He stood on the porch and watched MacRae stride 
 down to the beach and put off in his dinghy. Then he 
 took out a handkerchief and blew his nose with a tre- 
 mendous amount of unnecessary noise and gesture. 
 There was something suspiciously like moisture bright- 
 ening his eyes. 
 
 But when he saw MacRae stand in the dinghy along- 
 side the Blanco and speak briefly to his men, then row 
 in under Point Old behind Poor Man's Rock which the 
 tide was slowly baring, when he climbed up over the 
 Point and took the path along the cliff edge, that sus- 
 picious brightness in Gower's keen old eyes was replaced 
 by a twinkle. He sat down in his grass chair and 
 hummed a little tune, the while one slippered foot kept 
 time, rat-a-pat, on the floor of the porch. 
 
CHAPTER XXI 
 
 As IT Was in the Beginneng 
 
 MacRae followed the path along the cliffs. He did not 
 look for Betty. His mind was on something else, en- 
 grossed in considerations which had little to do with 
 love. If it be true that a man keeps his lovest and hates 
 and hobbies and ambitions and appetites in separate 
 chambers, any of which may be for a time so locked that 
 what lies therein neither troubles nor pleases him, then 
 that chamber in which he kept Betty Gower's image 
 was hermetically sealed. Her figure was obscured 
 by other figures, — his father and Horace Gower and 
 himself. 
 
 Not until he had reached the Cove's head and come 
 to his own house did he recall that Betty had gone 
 along the cliffs, and that he had not seen her as he 
 passed. But that could easily happen, he knew, in that 
 mile stretch of trees and thickets, those deep clefts and 
 pockets in the rocky wall that frowned upon the sea. 
 
 He went into the house. Out of a box on a shelf in 
 his room he took the message his father had left him 
 and sitting down in the shadowy coolness of the outer 
 room began to read it again, slowly, with infinite care 
 for the reality his father had meant to convey. 
 
 All his life, as Jack remembered him, Donald MacRae 
 had been a silent man, who never talked of how he felt, 
 how things affected him, who never was stricken with 
 that irresistible impulse to explain and discuss, to re- 
 
AS IT WAS IN THE BEGINNING 293 
 
 lieve his troubled soul with words, which afflicts so 
 many men. It seemed as if he had saved it all for that 
 final summing-up which was to be delivered by his pen 
 instead of his lips. He had become articulate only at 
 the last. It must have taken him weeks upon weeks to 
 write it all down, this autobiography which had been 
 the mainspring of his son's actions for nearly two years. 
 There was wind and sun in it, and blue sky and the gray 
 Gulf heaving; somber colors, passion and grief, an 
 apology and a justification. 
 
 MacRae laid down the last page and went outside 
 to sit on the steps. Shadows were gathering on the 
 Cove. Far out, the last gleam of the sun was touching 
 the Gulf. A slow swell was rising before some far, 
 unheralded wind. The Blanco came gliding in and 
 dropped anchor. Trollers began to follow. They 
 clustered about the big carrier like chickens under the 
 mother wing. By these signs MacRae knew that the 
 fish had stopped biting, that it was lumpy by Poor 
 Man's Rock. He knew there was work aboard. But 
 he sat there, absent-eyed, thinking. 
 
 He was full of understanding pity for his father, 
 and also for Horace Gower. He was conscious of being 
 a little sorry for himself. But then he had only been 
 troubled a short two years by this curious aftermath 
 of old passions, whereas they had suffered all their 
 lives. He had got a new angle from which to approach 
 his father's story. He knew now that he had reacted 
 to something that was not there. He had been filled 
 with a thirst for vengeance, for reprisal, and he had 
 declared war on Gower, when that was not his father's 
 intent. Old Donald MacRae had hated Gower pro- 
 foundly in the beginning. He believed that Gower 
 hated him and had put the weight of his power against 
 
294 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 him, wherever and whenever he could. But life itself 
 had beaten him, — and not Gower. That was what he 
 had been trying to tell his son. 
 
 And life itself had beaten Gower in a strangely similar 
 fashion. He too was old, a tired, disappointed man. 
 He had reached for material success with one hand and 
 happiness with the other. One had always eluded him. 
 The other Jack MacRae had helped wrest from him. 
 MacRae could see Gower's life in detached pictures, life 
 that consisted of making money and spending it, life 
 with a woman who whined and sniffled and complained. 
 These things had been a slow torture. MacRae could 
 no longer regard this man as a squat ogre, merciless, 
 implacable, ready and able to crush whatsoever opposed 
 him. He was only a short, fat, oldish man with tired 
 eyes, who had been bruised by forces he could not under- 
 stand or cope with until he had achieved a wistful toler- 
 ance for both things and men. 
 
 Both these old men, MacRae perceived, had made a 
 terrible hash of their lives. Neither of them had suc- 
 ceeded in getting out of life much that a man instinc- 
 tively feels that he should get. Both had been capable 
 of happiness. Both had struggled for happiness as all 
 men struggle. Neither had ever securely grasped any 
 measure of it, nor even much of content. 
 
 MacRae felt a chilly uncertainty as he sat on his 
 doorstep considering this. He had been traveling the 
 same road for many months, — 'denying his natural 
 promptings, stifling a natural passion, surrendering 
 himself to an obsession of vindictiveness, planning and 
 striving to return evil for what he conceived to be evil, 
 and being himself corrupted by the corrosive forces of 
 hatred. 
 
 He had been diligently bestowing pain on Betty, who 
 
AS IT WAS IN THE BEGINNING 295 
 
 loved him quite openly and frankly as he desired to be 
 loved; Betty, who was innocent of these old coils of 
 bitterness, who was primitive enough in her emotions, 
 MacRae suspected, to let nothing stand between her 
 and her chosen mate when that mate beckoned. 
 
 But she was proud. He knew that he had puzzled 
 her to the point of anger, hurt her in a woman's most 
 vital spot. 
 
 " I 've been several kinds of a fool," MacRae said to 
 himself. "I have been fooling myself." 
 
 He had said to himself once, in a somber mood, that 
 life was nothing but a damned dirty scramble in which 
 a man could be sure of getting hurt. But it struck 
 him now that he had been sedulously inflicting those 
 hurts upon himself. Nature cannot be flouted. She 
 exacts terrible penalties for the stifling, the inliibition, 
 the deflection of normal instincts, fundamental impulses. 
 He perceived the operation of this in his father's life, 
 in the thirty years of petty conflict between Horace 
 Gower and his wife. And he had unconsciously been 
 putting himself and Betty in the way of similar penal- 
 ties by exalting revenge for old, partly imagined wrongs 
 above that strange magnetic sometliing which drew them 
 together. 
 
 Twilight was at hand. Looking through the maple 
 and alder fringe before his house MacRae saw the fish- 
 ing boats coming one after the other, clustering about 
 the Blanco. He went down and slid the old green dug- 
 out afloat and so gained the deck of his vessel. For an 
 hour thereafter he worked steadily until all the salmon 
 were delivered and stowed in the Blanco^s chilly hold. 
 
 ^e found it hard to keep his mind on the count of 
 salmon, on money to be paid each man, upon these com- 
 mon details of his business. His thought reached out 
 
296 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 in wide circles, embracing many things, many persons : 
 Norman Gower and Dolly, who had had courage to put 
 the past behind them and reach for happiness together ; 
 Stubby Abbott and Etta Robbin-Steele, who were being 
 flung together by the same inscrutable forces within 
 them. Love might not truly make the world go round, 
 but it was a tremendous motive power in human actions. 
 Like other dynamic forces it had its dangerous phases. 
 Love, as MacRae had experienced it, was a curious 
 mixture of affection and desire, of flaming passion and 
 infinite tenderness. Betty Gower warmed him like a 
 living flame when he let her take possession of his 
 thought. She was all that his fancy could conjure as 
 desirable. She was his mate. He had felt that, at 
 times, with a conviction beyond reason or logic ever 
 since the night he kissed her in the Granada. If fate, 
 or the circumstances he had let involve him, should 
 juggle them apart, he felt that the years would lead 
 him down long, drab corridors. 
 
 And he was suddenly determined that should not 
 happen. His imagination flung before him kinetoscopic 
 flashes of what his father's life had been and Horace 
 Gower's. That vision appalled MacRae. He would not 
 let it happen, — not to him and Betty. 
 
 He washed, ate his supper, lay on his bunk in the 
 pilot house and smoked a cigarette. Then he went out 
 on deck. The moon crept up in a cloudless sky, dim- 
 ming the stars. There was no wind about the island. 
 But there was wind loose somewhere on the Gulf. The 
 glass was falling. The swells broke more heavily along 
 the cliffs. At the mouth of the Cove white sheets of 
 spray lifted as each comber reared and broke in that 
 narrow place. 
 
 He recollected that he had left the Blanco's dinghy 
 
AS IT WAS IN THE BEGINNING 297 
 
 hauled up on the beach on the tip of Point Old. He 
 got ashore now in the green dugout and walked across 
 to the Point. 
 
 A man is seldom wholly single-track in his ideas, his 
 impulses. MacRae thought of the dinghy. He had a 
 care for its possible destruction by the rising sea. But 
 he thought also of Betty. There was a pleasure in 
 simply looking at the house in which she lived. Lights 
 glowed in the windows. The cottage glistened in the 
 moonlight. 
 
 When he came out on the tip of the Point the dinghy, 
 he saw, lay safe where he had dragged it up on the 
 rocks. And when he had satisfied himself of this he 
 stood with hands thrust deep in his pockets, looking 
 down on Poor Man's Rock, watching the swirl and 
 foam as each swell ran over its sunken head. 
 
 MacRae had a subconscious perception of beauty, 
 beauty of form and color. It moved him without his 
 knowing why. He was in a mood to respond to beauty 
 this night. He had that buoyant, grateful feeling which 
 comes to a man when he has escaped some great disaster, 
 when he is suddenly freed from some grim apprehension 
 of the soul. 
 
 The night was one of wonderful beauty. The moon 
 laid its silver path across the sea. The oily swells came 
 up that moon-path in undulating folds to break in silver 
 fragments along the shore. The great island beyond 
 the piercing shaft of the Ballenas light and the main- 
 land far to his left lifted rugged mountains sharp 
 against the sky. From tlie southeast little fluffs of 
 cloud, little cottony flecks white as virgin snow, sailed 
 before the wind that mothered the swells. But there 
 was no wind on Squitty yet. There was breathless still- 
 ness except for the low, spaced mutter of the surf. 
 
298 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 He stood a long time, drinking in the beauty of it 
 all, — the sea and the moon-path, and the hushed, dark 
 woods behind. 
 
 Then his gaze, turning slowly, fell on something 
 white in the shadow of a bushy, wind-distorted fir a few 
 feet away. He looked more closely. His eyes gradually 
 made out a figure in a white sweater sitting on a flat 
 rock, elbows on knees, chin resting in cupped palms. 
 
 He walked over. Betty's eyes were fixed on him. 
 He stared down at her, suddenly tongue-tied, a queer 
 constricted feeling in his throat. She did not speak. 
 
 "Were you sitting here when I came along?" he 
 asked at last. 
 
 "Yes," she said. "I often come up here. I have 
 been sitting here for half an hour." 
 
 MacRae sat down beside her. His heart seemed to 
 be trying to choke him. He did not know where to 
 begin, or how, and there was much he wanted to say 
 that he must say. Betty did not even take her chin 
 out of her palms. She stared out at the sea, rolling up 
 to Squitty in silver windrows. 
 
 MacRae put one arm around her and drew her up 
 close to him, and Betty settled against him with a 
 little sigh. Her fingers stole into his free hand. For a 
 minute they sat like that. Then he tilted her head back, 
 looked down into the gray pools of her eyes, and kissed 
 her. 
 
 " You stood there looking down at the sea as if you 
 were in a dream," she whispered ; " and all the time 
 I was crying inside of me for you to come to me. And 
 presently, I suppose, you will go away." 
 
 " No," he said. " This time I have come for good." 
 
 " I knew you would, sometime," she murmured. " At 
 least, I hoped you would. I wanted you so badly." 
 
AS IT WAS IN THE BEGINNING 299 
 
 " But because one wants a thing badly it does n't 
 always follow that one gets it." 
 
 MacRae was thinking of his father when he spoke. 
 
 " I know that," Betty said. " But I knew that you 
 wanted me, you see. And I had faith that you would 
 brush away the cobwebs somehow. I 've been awfully 
 angry at you sometimes. It's horrible to feel that 
 there is an imaginary wall between you and some one 
 you care for." 
 
 " There is no wall now," MacRae said. 
 
 " Was there ever one, really ? " 
 
 " There seemed to be." 
 
 "And now there is none?" 
 
 "None at all." 
 
 "Sure.'"' she murmured. 
 
 "Honest Injun," MacRae smiled. "I went to see 
 your father to-day about a simple matter of business. 
 And I found — I learned — oh, well, it does n't matter. 
 I buried the hatchet. We are going to be married and 
 live happily ever after." 
 
 "Well," Betty said judiciously, "we shall have as 
 good a chance as any one, I think. Look at Norman 
 and Dolly. I positively trembled for them — after 
 Norman getting into that mess over in England. He 
 never exactly shone as a real he-man, that brother of 
 mine, you know. But they are really happy. Jack. 
 They make me envious." 
 
 "I think you're a little hard on that brother of 
 yours," MacRae said. He was suddenly filled with a 
 great charity toward all mankind. "He never had 
 much of a chance, from all I can gather." 
 
 He went on to tell her what Norman had told him 
 that afternoon on the hill above the Cove. But Betty 
 interrupted. 
 
300 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 " Oh, I know that now," she declared. " Daddy told 
 me just recently. Daddy knew what Norman was doing 
 over there. In fact, he showed me a letter from some 
 British miHtary authority praising Norman for the 
 work he did. But Daddy kept mum when Norman came 
 home and those nasty rumors began to go around. He 
 thought it better for Norman to take his medicine. 
 He was afraid mother would smother him with money 
 and insist on his being a proper lounge lizard again, 
 and so he would gradually drop back into his old 
 uselessness. Daddy was simply tickled stiff when Nor- 
 man showed his teeth — when he cut loose from every- 
 thing and married Dolly, and all that. He 's a very 
 wise old man, that father of mine, Jack. He hasn't 
 ever got much real satisfaction in his life. He has been 
 more content this last month or so than I can ever 
 remember him. We have always had loads of money, 
 and while it 's nice to have plenty, I don't think it did 
 him any good. My whole life has been lived in an 
 atmosphere of domestic incompatibility. I think I 
 should make a very capable wife — I have had so many 
 object lessons in how not to be. My mother wasn't a 
 success either as a wife or a mother. It is a horrible 
 thing to say, but it 's really true. Jack. Mamma 's a 
 very well-bred, distinguished-looking person with ex- 
 quisite taste in dress and dinner parties, and that's 
 about the only kind thing I can say for her. Do you 
 really love me. Jack? Heaps and heaps? " 
 
 She shot this question at him with a swift change of 
 tone and an earnestness which straightway drove out of 
 MacRae's mind every consideration save the proper and 
 convincing answer to such intimate questions. 
 
 "Look," Betty said after a long interval. "Daddy 
 has built a fire on the beach. He does that sometimes. 
 
AS IT WAS IN THE BEGINNING 301 
 
 and we sit around it and roast clams in the coals. 
 Johnny, Johnny," she squeezed his arm with a quick 
 pressure, " we 're going to have some good times on this 
 island now." 
 
 MacRae laughed indulgently. He was completely in 
 accord with that prophecy. 
 
 The blaze Gower had kindled flickered and wavered, 
 a red spot on the duskier shore, with a yellow nimbus in 
 which they saw him move here and there, and sit down 
 at last with his back to a log and his feet stretched to 
 the fire. 
 
 "Let's go down," MacRae suggested, "and break 
 the news to him." 
 
 "I wonder what he'll say?" Betty murmured 
 thoughtfully. 
 
 "Haven't you any idea?" MacRae asked curiously. 
 
 "No. Honestly, I have n't," Betty replied. "Daddy's 
 something like you. Jack. That is, he does and says 
 unexpected things, now and then. No, I really don't 
 know what he will say." 
 
 "We'U soon find out." 
 
 MacRae took her hand. They went down off the 
 backbone of the Point, through ferns and over the long 
 uncut grass, down to the fire where the wash from the 
 heavy swell outside made watery murmurs along the 
 gravelly beach. 
 
 Gower looked up at them, waited for them to speak. 
 
 " Betty and I are going to be married soon," MacRae 
 announced abruptly. 
 
 " Oh? " Gower took the pipe out of his mouth and 
 rapped the ash out of it in the palm of his hand. " You 
 don't do things half-heartedly, do you, MacRae? 
 You deprive me of a very profitable business. You 
 want my ranch — and now my housekeeper." 
 
302 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 "Daddy!" Betty remonstrated. 
 
 " Oh, well, I suppose I can learn to cook for myself," 
 Gower rumbled. 
 
 He was frowning. He looked at them staring at 
 him, nonplussed. Suddenly he burst into deep, chuck- 
 ling laughter. 
 
 " Sit down, sit down, and look at the fire," he said. 
 " Bless your soul, if you want to get married that 's 
 your own business. 
 
 " Mind you," he chuckled after a minute, when Betty 
 had snuggled down beside him, and MacRae perched on 
 the log by her, " I don't say I like the idea. It don't 
 seem fair for a man to raise a daughter and then have 
 some young fellow sail up and take her away just when 
 she is beginning to make herself useful." 
 
 "Daddy, you certainly do talk awful nonsense," 
 Betty reproved. 
 
 " I expect you have n't talked much else the last Kttle 
 while," he retorted. 
 
 Betty subsided. MacRae smiled. There was a whim- 
 sicality about Gower's way of taking this that pleased 
 MacRae. 
 
 They toasted their feet at the fire until the waver- 
 ing flame burned down to a bed of glowing coals. They 
 talked of this and that, of everything but themselves 
 until the moon was swimming high and the patches of 
 cottony cloud sailing across the moon's face cast intense 
 black patches on the silvery radiance of the sea. 
 
 " I 've got some clams in a bucket," Gower said at 
 last. "Let's roast some. You get plates and forks 
 and salt and pepper and butter. Bet, while I put the 
 clams on the fire." 
 
 Betty went away to the house. Gower raked a flat 
 rock, white-hot, out to the edge of the coals and put 
 
AS IT WAS IN THE BEGINNING 303 
 
 fat quahaugs on it to roast. Then he sat back and 
 looked at MacRae. 
 
 " I wonder if you realize how lucky you are? " he said. 
 
 " I think I do," MacRae answered. " You don't seem 
 much surprised." 
 
 Gower smiled. 
 
 " Well, no. I can't say I am. That first night you 
 came to the cottage to ask for the Arrow I got a good 
 look at you, and you struck me as a fine, clean sort 
 of boy, and I said to myself, 'Old Donald has never 
 told him anything and he has no grudge against me, 
 and would n't it be a sort of compensation if those two 
 should fall naturally and simply in love with each other? ' 
 Yes, it may seem sentimental, but tliat idea occurred 
 to me. Of course, it was just an idea. Betty would 
 marry whoever she wanted to marry. I knew that. 
 Nothing but her own judgment would influence her in 
 a matter of that sort. I know. I 've watched her grow 
 up. Maybe it 's a good quality or maybe it 's a bad 
 one, but she has always had a bull-dog sort of persist- 
 ence about anything that strikes her as really important. 
 
 "And of course I had no way of knowing whether 
 she would take a fancy to you or you to her. So I just 
 watched. And maybe I boosted the game a little, be- 
 cause I 'rti a pretty wise old fish in my own way. I took 
 a few whacks at you, now and then, and she flew the 
 storm signals without knowing it." 
 
 Gower smiled reminiscently, stroking his chin with 
 his hand. 
 
 **I had to fight you, after a fashion, to find out 
 what sort of stuff you were, for my own satisfaction," 
 he continued. "I saw that you had your Scotch up 
 and were after my scalp, and I knew it could n't be any- 
 thing but that old mess. That was natural. But I 
 
304 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 thought I could square that if I could ever get close 
 enough to you. Only I could n't manage that naturally. 
 And this scramble for the salmon got me in deep before 
 I realized where I was. I used to feel sorry for you and 
 Betty. I could see it coming. You both talk with your 
 eyes. I have seen you both when you didn't know I 
 was near. 
 
 "So when I saw that you would fight me till you 
 broke us both, and also that if I kept on I would not 
 only be broke but so deep in the hole that I could never 
 get out, I shut the damned cannery up and let every- 
 thing slide. I knew as soon as you were in shape you 
 would try to get this place back. That was natural. 
 And you would have to come and talk to me about it. 
 I was sure I could convince you that I was partly human. 
 So you see this is no surprise to me. Lord, no ! Why, 
 I've been playing chess for two years — old Donald 
 MacRae's knight against my queen.'' 
 
 He laughed and thumped MacRae on the flat of his 
 sturdy back. 
 
 " It might have been a stalemate, at that," MacRae 
 said. 
 
 "But it wasn^t," Gower declared. "Well, I'll get 
 something out of living, after all. I 've often thought 
 I 'd like to see a big, roomy house somewhere along 
 these cliffs, and kids playing around. You and Betty 
 may have your troubles, but you're starting right. 
 You ought to get a lot out of life. I did n't. I made 
 money. That 's all. Poured it into a rat hole. Bessie 
 is sitting over on Maple Point in a big drafty house 
 with two maids and a butler, a two-thousand-acre estate, 
 and her pockets full of Victory Bonds. She isn't 
 happy, and she never can be. She never cared for any- 
 body but herself, not even her children, and nobody 
 
AS IT WAS IN THE BEGINNING 305 
 
 cares for her. I 'm all but broke, and I 'm better off 
 than she is. I liate to think I ever fought for her. 
 She wasn't worth it, MacRae. That's a hell of a 
 thing for a man to say about a woman he lived with for 
 over tliirty years. But it's true. It took me a good 
 many miserable years to admit that to myself. 
 
 "I suppose she'll cling to her money and go on 
 playing the grande dame. And if she can get any satis- 
 faction out of that I 'm willing. I 've never known as 
 much real peace and satisfaction as I 've got now. All 
 I need is a place to sleep and a comfortable chair to sit 
 in. I don't want to chase dollars any more. All I want 
 is to row around the Rock and catch a few salmon now 
 and then and sit here and look at the sea when I'm 
 tired. You're young, and you have all your life be- 
 fore you — you and Betty. If you need money, you 
 are pretty well able to get it for yourself. But I 'm 
 old, and I don't want to bother." 
 
 He rambled on until Betty came down with plates 
 and other things. The fat clams were opening their 
 shells on the hot rock. They put butter and seasoning 
 on the tender meat and ate, talking of this and that. 
 And when the last clam had vanished, Gower stuffed 
 his pipe and lit it with a coal. He gathered up the 
 plates and forks and rose to his feet. 
 
 " Good night," he said benevolently. " I 'm going to 
 the house and to bed. Don't sit out here dreaming all 
 night, you two." 
 
 He stumped away up the path. MacRae piled drift- 
 wood on the fire. Then he sat down with his back 
 against the log, and Betty snuggled beside him, in the 
 crook of his arm. Beyond the Point the booming of 
 the surf rose like far thunder. The tide was on the ebb. 
 Poor IVIan's Rock bared its kelp-thatched head. The 
 
3o6 POOR MAN'S ROCK 
 
 racing swells covered it with spray that shone in the 
 moonlight. 
 
 They did not talk. Speech had become nonessential. 
 It was enough to be together. 
 
 So they sat, side by side, their backs to the cedar 
 log and their feet to the fire, talking little, dreaming 
 much, until the fluffy clouds scudding across the face 
 of the moon came thicker and faster and lost their 
 snowy whiteness, until the radiance of the night was 
 dimmed. 
 
 Across the low summit of Point Old a new sound was 
 carried to them. Where the moonlight touched the 
 Gulf in patches, far out, whitecaps showed. 
 
 " Listen," MacRae murmured. 
 
 The wind struck them with a puff that sent sparks 
 flying. It rose and fell and rose again until it whistled 
 across the Point in a steady drone, — the chill breath of 
 the storm-god. 
 
 MacRae turned up Betty's wrist and looked at her 
 watch. 
 
 " Look at the time, Betty mine," he said. " And it 's 
 getting cold. There'll be another day." 
 
 He walked with her to the house. When she vanished 
 within, blowing him a kiss from her finger tips, MacRae 
 cut across the Point. He laid hold of the Blanco's 
 dinghy and drew it high to absolute safety, then stood 
 a minute gazing seaward, looking down on the Rock. 
 Clouds obscured the moon now. A chill darkness hid 
 distant shore lines and mountain ranges which had 
 stood plain in the moon-glow, a darkness full of rush- 
 ing, roaring wind and thundering seas. Poor Man's 
 Rock was a vague bulk in the gloom, forlorn and lonely, 
 hidden under great bursts of spray as each wave leaped 
 and broke with a hiss and a roar. 
 
AS IT WAS IN THE BEGINNING 307 
 
 MacRae braced himself against the southeaster. It 
 ruffled his hair, clawed at him with strong, invisible 
 fingers. It shrieked its fury among the firs, stunted and 
 leaning all awry from the buffeting of many storms. 
 
 He took a last look behind him. The lights in Gower's 
 house were out and the white-walled cottage stood dim 
 against the darkened hillside. Then MacRae, smiling 
 to himself in the dark, set out along the path that led 
 to Squitty Cove. 
 
 THE END 
 
By the author of "Big Timber" 
 
 NORTH OF FIFTY-THREE 
 
 By BERTRAND W. SINCLAIR 
 
 Illustrated. 12mo. Cloth. 
 
 He has created the atmosphere of the frozen North with 
 wonderful realism. — Boston Olobe. 
 
 Mr. Sinclair's two characters are exceptionally well-drawn and 
 sympathetic. His style is robust and vigorous. His pictures of 
 Canadian life stimulating. — New York Nation. 
 
 Mr. Sinclair sketches with bold strokes as befits a subject set 
 amid limitless surroundings. The book is readable and shows 
 consistent progress in the art of novel writing.— 5^. Louis Globe- 
 Democrat. 
 
 An unusually good story of the conflict between a man and a 
 woman. It is a readable, well written book showing much observa- 
 tion and good sense. The hero is a fine fellow and manages to 
 have his fling at a good many conventions without being tedious. 
 — New York Sun. 
 
 The story is well written. It is rich in strong situation, romance 
 and heart-stirring scenes, both of the emotional and courage- 
 stirring order. It ranks with the best of its type. — Springfield 
 Republican. 
 
 LITTLE, BROWN & CO., Publishers 
 34 Beacon St., Boston. 
 
I u kJ /v-^v-' I 
 
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