The trailers who combed the Squitty waters were taking now close to five thousand salmon a day. Approximately 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 salmon—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'll 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 theBlancoand theBluebirdinto 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 theBlancoand 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 theBluebirdwas 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 monopoly 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 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 obvious 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 MacRae 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 despairingly 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. Therowboat men had three hundred 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 collector 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 Flattery 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, 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 theBlancoso close that MacRae left his dinghy on the outer fringe and walked across their decks to the deck of his own vessel. TheBlancoloomed 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 clambered up and taken seats on theBlanco'slow 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 sheepishly. "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 gunwales, 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 spokesman 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 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'tyou 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 amusement 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'll 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. 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 hesitated 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 interest 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 kindness to you is so keen that youwould 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 easy money isn't always so good as it looks. Fly at it in the morning, and I'll 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.
Top Dog
Some ten days later theBluebirdswung at anchor in the kelp just clear of Poor Man's Rock. From a speck on the horizon theBlancogrew 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 theBlanco'shold. At the same time the larger carrier's short, stout boom swung back and forth, dumping into theBluebird'sfish pens at each trip a hundred pounds of cracked ice. Presently this work was done, theBluebird'ssalmon transferred to theBlanco, theBluebird'spens 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 troller 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 everywhere."
They sat in the shade of theBlanco'spilot house. The sun beat mercilessly, a dog-day sun blazing upon 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 undershirt 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."
MacRae made no comment, and their talk turned into other channels until Vin hauled his hook and bore away. MacRae saw to dropping theBlanco'sanchor. He would lie 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 reëstablish 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'll probably marry somebody with money. I know two or three fellows who would be tickled to death to get her."
"Why don'tyougo 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?"
"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'll 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 satisfaction. 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 born, 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 seamen are. They come ashore when they are old and feeble, to give their bodies at last to the earth. MacRae 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 approaching 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.
MacRae sat on theBlanco'sdeck, nursing his chin in his palms, 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 joined the rowers who were putting out to the Rock for the evening run. He passed close by theBlancobut MacRae 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, 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 sleeping, 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 making 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.
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 MacRae'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 theBlanco'sfenders 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 theBlanco, one after the other, unloaded, 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 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 theBlanco'sguard 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 acquaintance. "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 down 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 beating sun, had blisters in the palm. Gower's face, like his hands, was brick red. Already shreds of skin were peeling 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."
"Didja?" Sproul snarled. "Kain't buy 'em cheap 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, softness 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 forgotten 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 theBlancoor theBluebird, 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 theBlancowas 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 satisfaction 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 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 cliffs 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 MacRae for the bluebacks. They had approached him with such propositions. 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 scorching 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 conception 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 MacRae did not wish to talk to him, and that he conceded this to be a proper attitude. He talked with the fishermen. 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, seeking 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 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 achievement, 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 devised 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 have drunk deeply the pleasant wine of material success, 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 sneered at him with contempt. As it was, in spite of the rancor he had nursed, the feeling which had driven him 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 almost 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 hecould, 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, 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 forestalled him by picking the salmon up and heaving them on theBlanco'sdeck. 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 nojoy 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 accomplished the last move in his plan and driven Gower off the island, then he would have a chance to forget 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 which his father and Horace Gower and Elizabeth Morton had set for him years before he was born.
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. TheBluebirdcontinued to scuttle from one outlying point to another, and theBlancowallowed 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 alongside 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 mountains,—for the salmon strike when a sea is on, and a troller 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 hundred and forty fishermen to care for in the matter of taking their catch, keeping them supplied with fuel, bringing them foodstuffs such as they desired. TheBlancocame up from Vancouver sometimes as heavily loaded as when she went down. But he welcomed 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 machinesat Crow Harbor,—red 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 survive without food.
He came up to Squitty one bright afternoon when the sea was flat and still, unharassed by the westerly. The Cove was empty. All the fleet was scattered over a great area. TheBluebirdwas somewhere on her rounds. MacRae dropped theBlanco'shook 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 MacRae 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 issufficiently 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 abona fidepurchaser.We therefore suggest that you take the matter up with Mr. Gower personally.
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 abona fidepurchaser.
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 the untrimmed lawn, up the path that ran along the cliffs, and pass slowly out of sight among the stunted, 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 the 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.
The Dead and Dusty Past
Gower sat in a deep grass chair, a pipe sagging one corner 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 particular 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 expecting you."
"Oh?" MacRae failed to conceal altogether his surprise at this statement. "I understand you are willing to sell this place. I want to buy it."
"It was yours once, wasn'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'll 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 unfinished 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?"
"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 demanded harshly.
"The night you came to ask for theArrowto take him to town you had no such feeling against me as you have had since," Gower said. "I know you didn't. You wouldn't have come if you had. I cut no figure in your eyes, one 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 onebut 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 didn't even stop when the war made everything 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 myself 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 everything, 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 hesitation, "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, MacRae, many a time. I struck him an ugly blow once. Yes. I wasyoung 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. 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 didn'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 illusion. Perhaps he did. But he had nothing real to regret, 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 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 everything. 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 arrested 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 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 couldn't do that."
He stopped a moment and shook his head gently.
"No," he resumed, "she couldn'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 prevailed. 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 hasn'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 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 couldn'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 illusions. She would have driven him mad with her petty whims, her petty emotions. She doesn't know the meaning of loyalty, consideration, or even an open, honest hatred. And I've stood it all these years—because I don't shirk responsibilities, 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 honestly 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 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 deliberate on my part—but only, mind you, when I knew that he was bound to lose it. Perhaps it was bad judgment 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 wasn'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 getting 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 misunderstanding. The tone of Gower's voice, his attitude, carried 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 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 between 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 alike. And this was a shrewd old man, sadly wise in human weaknesses, and much more tolerant than MacRae 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 commercial 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 MacRae 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.
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 shinein it—nor her mother."
"Nor do I," MacRae muttered to himself.
He stood looking over the porch rail down on the sea where theBlancoswung at her anchor chain. There seemed nothing more to say. Yet he was aware of Gower's eyes upon him with something akin to expectancy. 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 suppose 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 widerunning down to the beach."
"All right," MacRae agreed. "We can arrange that later. I'll 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 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 tremendous amount of unnecessary noise and gesture. There was something suspiciously like moisture brightening his eyes.
But when he saw MacRae stand in the dinghy alongside theBlancoand 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 suspicious 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.
As it Was in the Beginning
MacRae followed the path along the cliffs. He did not look for Betty. His mind was on something else, engrossed in considerations which had little to do with love. If it be true that a man keeps his loves 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 toconvey.
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 relieve 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. TheBlancocame 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 profoundly in the beginning. He believed that Gower hated him and had put the weight of his power against 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 understand or cope with until he had achieved a wistful tolerance for both things and men.
Both these old men, MacRae perceived, had made a terrible hash of their lives. Neither of them had succeeded in getting out of life much that a man instinctively 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 beendiligently bestowing pain on Betty, who 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 inhibition, 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 penalties by exalting revenge for old, partly imagined wrongs above that strange magnetic something which drew them together.
Twilight was at hand. Looking through the maple and alder fringe before his house MacRae saw the fishing boats coming one after the other, clustering about theBlanco. He went down and slid the old green dugout 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 theBlanco'schilly hold.
He found it hard to keep his mind on the count of salmon, on money to be paid each man, upon these common details of his business. His thought reached out 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, dimming 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 theBlanco'sdinghy 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 mainland far to his left lifted rugged mountains sharp against the sky. From the 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 stillness except for the low, spaced mutter of the surf.
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 ofa 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."
"But because one wants a thing badly it doesn'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 animaginary 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 doesn'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.
"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 military 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 Norman showed his teeth—when he cut loose from everything 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 exquisite 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?"