Poor Man's Rock Part 1

Poor Man's Rock.

by Bertrand W. Sinclair.

PROLOGUE

Long, Long Ago

The Gulf of Georgia spread away endlessly, an immense, 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 sh.o.r.e 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 stern 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 tall, healthily tanned, with clear blue eyes having a touch of steely gray in their blue depths, and he was unmistakably 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 distance a white speck showed far astern, and his eyes narrowed and clouded. But there was no cloud in them 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 c.o.c.kpit 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, coa.r.s.ely 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.

"Do 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 freshens--and it nearly always does in the afternoon--I can outsail the _Gull_. 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 wistfully. "But I'll pray for a blow this afternoon."

If indeed she prayed--and her att.i.tude 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 G.o.d. The light airs fluttered gently off the bluish haze of Vancouver Island, wavered 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 sternward 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 light 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 bra.s.s. She looked her name, the _Gull_, a thing of exceeding 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."

"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 spilled 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 lookout. Do you want to go back, Bessie? Are you doubtful 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 alongside, 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 no next time, Bessie," he said slowly. "You will never get another chance. I know the Gowers and Mortons better than you do, for all you're one of them. They'll make you wish you had never been born, that you'd never seen me. I'd rather fight it out now. Isn'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.

"d.a.m.n them!" he broke out pa.s.sionately 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 forefoot, her wide mainsail bellying out in a snowy curve.

There were three men in her. The helmsman was a patriarch, his head showing white, a full white beard descending from his chin, a fierce-visaged, vigorous old man. Near him stood a man of middle age, a ruddy-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, st.u.r.dy fellow in flannels, tending the mainsheet with a frowning glance.

The man in the sloop held his course.

"d.a.m.n you, MacRae; lay to, or I'll 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 extended to help her, and sprang lightly into the c.o.c.kpit of the _Gull_.

"As for you, you calculating blackguard," her father addressed MacRae, "if you ever set foot on Maple Point again, I'll have you horsewhipped first and jailed for trespa.s.s after."

For a second MacRae made no answer. His nostrils dilated; his blue-gray eyes darkened till they seemed black. Then he said with a curious hoa.r.s.eness, 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 cutter'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 _Gull's_ c.o.c.kpit 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 compa.s.s. 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 c.o.c.kpit floor Donald MacRae sprawled unheeding.

Blood from his broken face oozed over the boards.

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 darkened, 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 broaded off 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 c.o.c.kpit 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 convulsions, 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.