Poor Man's Rock Part 4

Dolly went to him at once. MacRae lingered to divest himself of the brown overalls so that he stood forth in his uniform, the R.A.F. uniform with the two black wings joined to a circle on his left breast and below that the multicolored ribbon of a decoration. Then he went in to his father.

Donald MacRae was far gone. His son needed no M.D. to tell him that. He burned with a high fever which had consumed his flesh and strength in its furnace. His eyes gleamed unnaturally, with no light of recognition for either his son or Dolly Ferrara. And there was a peculiar tinge to the old man's lips that chilled young MacRae, the mark of the Spanish flu in its deadliest manifestation. It made him ache to see that gray head shift from side to side, to listen to the incoherent babble, to mark the feeble shiftings of the nervous hands.

For a terrible half hour he endured the sight of his father struggling for breath, being racked by spasms of coughing. Then the reaction came and the sick man slept,--not a healthy, restful sleep; it was more like the dying stupor of exhaustion. Young MacRae knew that.

He knew with disturbing certainty that without skilled treatment--perhaps even in spite of that--his father's life was a matter of hours. Again he and Dolly Ferrara tiptoed out to the room where the fire glowed on the hearth. MacRae sat thinking. Dusk was coming on, the long twilight shortened by the overcast sky. MacRae glowered at the fire. The girl watched him expectantly.

"I have an idea," he said at last. "It's worth trying."

He opened his bag and, taking out the wedge-shaped cap of the birdmen, set it on his head and went out. He took the same path he had followed home. On top of the cliff he stopped to look down on Squitty Cove. In a camp or two ash.o.r.e the supper fires of the rowboat trollers were burning. Through the narrow entrance the gasboats were chugging in to anchorage, one close upon the heels of another.

MacRae considered the power trollers. He shook his head.

"Too slow," he muttered. "Too small. No place to lay him only a doghouse cabin and a fish hold."

He strode away along the cliffs. It was dark now. But he had ranged all that end of Squitty in daylight and dark, in sun and storm, for years, and the old instinctive sense of direction, of location, had not deserted him. In a little while he came out abreast of Cradle Bay. The Gower house, all brightly gleaming windows, loomed near. He struck down through the dead fern, over the unfenced lawn.

Halfway across that he stopped. A piano broke out loudly. Figures flittered by the windows, gliding, turning. MacRae hesitated. He had come reluctantly, driven by his father's great need, uneasily conscious that Donald MacRae, had he been cognizant, would have forbidden harshly the request his son had come to make. Jack MacRae had the feeling that his father would rather die than have him ask anything of Horace Gower.

He did not know why. He had never been told why. All he knew was that his father would have nothing to do with Gower, never mentioned the name voluntarily, let his catch of salmon rot on the beach before he would sell to a Gower cannery boat,--and had enjoined upon his son the same aloofness from all things Gower. Once, in answer to young Jack's curious question, his natural "why," Donald MacRae had said:

"I knew the man long before you were born, Johnny. I don't like him. I despise him. Neither I nor any of mine shall ever truck and traffic with him and his. When you are a man and can understand, I shall tell you more of this."

But he had never told. It had never been a mooted point. Jack MacRae knew Horace Gower only as a short, stout, elderly man of wealth and consequence, a power in the salmon trade. He knew a little more of the Gower clan now than he did before the war. MacRae had gone overseas with the Seventh Battalion. His company commander had been Horace Gower's son. Certain aspects of that young man had not heightened MacRae's esteem for the Gower family. Moreover, he resented this elaborate summer home of Gower's standing on land he had always known to be theirs, the MacRaes'. That puzzled him, as well as affronted his sense of ownership.

But these things, he told himself, were for the moment beside the point.

He felt his father's life trembling in the balance. He wanted to see affectionate, prideful recognition light up those gray-blue eyes again, even if briefly. He had come six thousand miles to cheer the old man with a sight of his son, a son who had been a credit to him. And he was willing to pocket pride, to call for help from the last source he would have chosen, if that would avail.

He crossed the lawn, waited a few seconds till the piano ceased its syncopated frenzy and the dancers stopped.

Betty Gower herself opened at his knock.

"Is Mr. Gower here?" he asked.

"Yes. Won't you come in?" she asked courteously.

The door opened direct into a great living room, from the oak floor of which the rugs had been rolled aside for dancing. As MacRae came in out of the murk along the cliffs, his one good eye was dazzled at first.

Presently he made out a dozen or more persons in the room,--young people nearly all. They were standing and sitting about. One or two were in khaki--officers. There seemed to be an abrupt cessation of chatter and laughing at his entrance. It did not occur to him at once that these people might be avidly curious about a strange young man in the uniform of the Flying Corps. He apprehended that curiosity, though, politely veiled as it was. In the same glance he became aware of a middle-aged woman sitting on a couch by the fire. Her hair was pure white, elaborately arranged, her eyes were a pale blue, her skin very delicate and clear. Her face somehow reminded Jack MacRae of a faded rose leaf.

In a deep armchair near her sat Horace Gower. A young man, a very young man, in evening clothes, holding a long cigarette daintily in his fingers, stood by Gower.

MacRae followed Betty Gower across the room to her father. She turned.

Her quick eyes had picked out the insignia of rank on MacRae's uniform.

"Papa," she said. "Captain--" she hesitated.

"MacRae," he supplied.

"Captain MacRae wishes to see you."

MacRae wished no conventionalities. He did not want to be introduced, to be shaken by the hand, to have Gower play host. He forestalled all this, if indeed it threatened.

"I have just arrived home on leave," he said briefly. "I find my father desperately ill in our house at the Cove. You have a very fast and able cruiser. Would you care to put her at my disposal so that I may take my father to Vancouver? I think that is his only chance."

Gower had risen. He was not an imposing man. At his first glimpse of MacRae's face, the pink-patched eye, the uniform, he flushed slightly,--recalling that afternoon.

"I'm sorry," he said. "You'd be welcome to the _Arrow_ if she were here.

But I sent her to Nanaimo an hour after she landed us. Are you Donald MacRae's boy?"

"Yes," MacRae said. "Thank you. That's all."

He had said his say and got his answer. He turned to go. Betty Gower put a detaining hand on his arm.

"Listen," she put in eagerly. "Is there anything any of us could do to help? Nursing or--or anything?"

MacRae shook his head.

"There is a girl with him," he answered. "Nothing but skilled medical aid would help him at this stage. He has the flu, and the fever is burning his life out."

"The flu, did you say?" The young man with the long cigarette lost his bored air. "Hang it, it isn't very sporting, is it, to expose us--these ladies--to the infection? I'll say it isn't."

Jack MacRae fixed the young man--and he was not, after all, much younger than MacRae--with a steady stare in which a smoldering fire glowed. He bestowed a scrutiny while one might count five, under which the other's gaze began to shift uneasily. A constrained silence fell in the room.

"I would suggest that you learn how to put on a gas mask," MacRae said coldly, at last.

Then he walked out. Betty Gower followed him to the door, but he had asked his question and there was nothing to wait for. He did not even look back until he reached the cliff. He did not care if they thought him rude, ill-bred. Then, as he reached the cliff, the joyous jazz broke out again and shadows of dancing couples flitted by the windows. MacRae looked once and went on, moody because chance had decreed that he should fail.

When a ruddy dawn broke through the gray cloud battalions Jack MacRae sat on a chair before the fireplace in the front room, his elbows on his knees, his chin in his cupped palms. He had been sitting like that for two hours. The fir logs had wasted away to a pile of white ash spotted with dying coals. MacRae sat heedless that the room was growing cold.

He did not even lift his head at the sound of heavy footsteps on the porch. He did not move until a voice at the door spoke his name in accents of surprise.

"Is that you, yourself, Johnny MacRae?"

The voice was deep and husky and kind, and it was not native to Squitty Cove. MacRae lifted his head to see his father's friend and his own, Doctor Laidlaw, physician and fisherman, bulking large. And beyond the doctor he saw a big white launch at anchor inside the Cove.

"Yes," MacRae said.

"How's your father?" Laidlaw asked. "That wire worried me. I made the best time I could."

"He's dead," MacRae answered evenly. "He died at midnight."

CHAPTER IV

Inheritance