Poor Man's Rock Part 19

"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 couldn't save him. It was done like that." MacRae snapped his fingers.

"I know," Old Peter said. "You're not to blame. Perhaps n.o.body is. Them things happen. Manuel'll 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 instead.

"She was up to Potter's Landing. I sent for her and she's back," Peter told him. "She'll 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 doesn't in one way he will another," MacRae answered indifferently. "But that doesn't help Steve. The boat doesn'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 uncertainty. A man who has been strong and active rebels against dying by inches. Steve told me--not so very long ago--that if something would finish him off quickly he would be glad."

If that had been Steve's 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 imperative will-to-live which refuses to be denied.

Dolly 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 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 streaming 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 fireplace 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 Columbia was a Crown colony.

MacRae carried insurance on both his carriers. There was no need for him to move against Gower in the matter. 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 cohoes were gone. The dog salmon, great-toothed, slimy fish which are canned for European export--for cheap trade, which 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 him no great profit, chiefly to preserve his connection with the American canners, to hara.s.s 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 thousand 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 men 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 controlled industry, and they were thankful for a new dispensation. 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 comfortable, 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 occupying himself about the old place. It was his pleasure that the old log house should be neat within and without, 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 there to see. MacRae was frank in his 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 morning, in a burst of sunshine as grateful as it was rare. He looked out at the mainland sh.o.r.e, shading away from deep olive to a faint and misty blue. He cast his gaze along Vancouver Island, a three-hundred-mile barrier 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. Outworn, bewildered aristocracies and vast populations troubled with the specter of want, swarming like rabbits, pressing always close upon the means of subsistence. No room; no chance.

Born in social stratas solidified by centuries. No wonder Europe was full of race and cla.s.s hatred, of war and pestilence. Snap judgment,--but Jack MacRae had seen the peasants of France and Belgium, the driven workmen of industrial 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 judgments he pa.s.sed, 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 circ.u.mstances 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 trespa.s.sing on Horace 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 explored 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 pa.s.sed into alien hands. When MacRae thought of this and turned his eyes upon this n.o.ble 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 bareheaded, filled with a pa.s.sive 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 of the Cove, MacRae perceived that his guess was correct, for Norman Gower came out on the brow of the cliff that bordered the south side of the Cove. He appeared 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.

"h.e.l.lo, MacRae," he said.

"How d' do," Jack answered. There was no cordiality 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 built, a compact, muscular man somewhat 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 haven't heard him commit himself. He doesn't confide 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 G.o.d, 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 d.a.m.n 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 couldn'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.