Poor Man's Rock Part 33

A troller's boat was rubbing against the _Blanco's_ fenders when they came on deck again. Others were hoisting the trolling poles, coming in to deliver. The sun was gone. The long northern twilight cast a pearly haze along far sh.o.r.es. MacRae threw open his hatches and counted the salmon as they came flipping off the point of a picaroon. For over an hour he stood at one hatch and his engineer at the other, counting fish, making out sale slips, paying out money. It was still light--light enough to read. But the bluebacks had stopped biting. The rowboat men quit last of all. They sidled up to the _Blanco_, one after the other, 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 the _Blanco's_ guard rail and took the pipe out of his mouth with the other.

"h.e.l.lo, 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 the _Blanco_ or the _Bluebird_, whichever was on the spot. The run held steady at the Cove end of Squitty, a phenomenal abundance of salmon at that particular spot, and the _Blanco_ was there day after day.

And MacRae could not help pondering over Gower and his ways. He was puzzled, not alone about Gower, but about himself. He had dreamed of a fierce 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 a.s.sets 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 att.i.tude. 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 p.r.o.ne 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 cla.s.s are not so simple and direct. MacRae began to wonder if she could possibly escape resenting his share in the overturning of her father's fortunes, whereby she herself must suffer.

By the time MacRae came slowly to these half-formed, disturbing conclusions he was already upon the verge of other disturbing discoveries in the realm of material facts.

For obvious reasons he could not walk up to Gower's house and talk to Betty. At least he did not see how he could, although there were times when he was tempted. When he did see her he was acutely sensitive to a veiled reproach in her eyes, a courteous distance in her speech. She came off the beach one day alone, 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 the _Blanco's_ deck. She was dressed for the work, in heavy nailed shoes, a flannel blouse, a rough tweed skirt.

"Oh, say, take the picaroon, won't you?" He held it out to her, the six-foot wooden shaft with a slightly curving point of steel on the end.

She turned on him with a salmon dangling by the gills from her fingers.

"You don't think I'm afraid to get my hands dirty, do you?" she asked.

"Me--a fisherman's daughter. Besides, I'd probably miss the salmon and jab that pointed thing through the bottom of the boat."

She laughed lightly, with no particular mirth in her voice. And MacRae was stricken dumb. She was angry. He knew it, felt it intuitively. Angry at him, warning him to keep his distance. He watched her dabble her hands in the salt chuck, dry them coolly on a piece of burlap. She took the money for the fish with a cool "thanks" and rowed back to sh.o.r.e.

Jack lay in his bunk that night blasted by a gloomy sense of futility in everything. He had succeeded in his undertaking beyond all the expectations which had spurred him so feverishly in the beginning. But there was no joy in it; not when Betty Gower looked at him with that cold gleam in her gray eyes. Yet he told himself savagely that if he had to take his choice he would not have done otherwise. And when he had 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. The _Bluebird_ continued to scuttle from one outlying point to another, and the _Blanco_ wallowed down to Crow Harbor every other day with her hold crammed. When she was not under way and the sea was fit the big carrier rode at anchor in the kelp close by Poor Man's Rock, convenient for the trollers to come 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. The _Blanco_ came 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 machines at 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, unhara.s.sed by the westerly. The Cove was empty. All the fleet was scattered over a great area. The _Bluebird_ was somewhere on her rounds.

MacRae dropped the _Blanco's_ hook in the middle of Cradle Bay, a spot he seldom chose for anchorage. But he had a purpose in this. When the bulky carrier swung head to the faint land breeze 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 is sufficiently illuminating:

In regard to the purchase of this Squitty Island property we beg to advise you that Mr. Gower, after some correspondence, states distinctly that while he is willing to dispose of this property he will only deal directly with a _bona fide_ purchaser.

We therefore suggest that you take the matter up with Mr. Gower personally.

MacRae put the sheet back in its envelope. He stared thoughtfully through an open window which gave on sh.o.r.e 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 pa.s.s 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.

CHAPTER XX

The Dead and Dusty Past

Gower sat in a deep gra.s.s 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.

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

"How d' do," MacRae answered. "I came to speak to you about a little matter of business."