Poor man's rock

Contents

PAGE

PROLOGUE—LONG, LONG AGO ‘ : ? t THE HOUSE IN CRADLE BAY. | ‘ : : 12 HIS OWN COUNTRY : ‘ ‘ : ‘ 18 THE FLUTTER OF SABLE WINGS : ; ‘ 27 INHERITANCE ; ; : . 3 : 39 FROM THE BOTTOM UP . : : : DZ THE SPRINGBOARD ; 2 : : ; 60 SEA BOOTS AND SALMON ; 3 : : 75 VESTED RIGHTS . ; : : : : 85 THE COMPLEXITY OF SIMPLE MATTERS . . 94 THRUST AND COUNTERTHRUST : : - 108 PERIL OF THE SEA ; : 2 4 eet ars BETWEEN SUN AND SUN : ; 3 . 148 AN INTERLUDE . ; : ’ : 2. VLOS THE SWING OF THE PENDULUM ‘ ; . 176 HEARTS ARE NOT ALWAYS TRUMPS ; LST eR

CHAP.

Chapter I The House in Cradle Bay

On an afternoon in the first week of November, 1918, under a sky bank full of murky cloud and an air freighted with a chill which threatened untimely snow, a man came rowing up along the western side of Squitty Island and turned into Cradle Bay, which lies under the lee of Point Old. He was a young man, almost boyishlooking. He had on a pair of fine tan shoes, brown overalls, a new grey mackinaw coat buttoned to his chin. He was bareheaded. Also he wore a patch of pink celluloid over his right eye.

When he turned into the small half-moon bight, he let up on his oars and drifted, staring with a touch of surprise at a white cottage-roofed house with wide porches sitting amid an acre square of bright green lawn on a gentle slope that ran up from a narrow beach backed by a low sea-wall of stone where the gravel ended and the earth began.

‘*Hm-m-m,” he muttered. ‘° It wasn’t built yesterday, either. Funny he never mentioned that.”

He pushed on the oars and the boat slid nearer shore, the man’s eyes still steadfast on the house. It stood out bold against the grass and the deeper green of the forest behind. Back of it-opened a hillside brown with dead ferns, dotted with great solitary firs and gnarly branched arbutus.

No life appeared there. The chimneys were dead. Two moorings bobbed in the bay, but there was no

The House in Cradle Bay 13 craft save a white rowboat hauled high above tide-water and canted on its side.

‘* I wonder, now.’ He spoke again.

While he wondered and pushed his boat slowly in on the gravel, a low pr-r-r and a sibilant ripple of water caused him to look behind. A high-bowed, shining mahogany cruiser, seventy feet or more over all, rounded _ the point and headed into the bay. The smooth sea parted with a whistling sound where her brass-shod stem split it like a knife. She slowed down from this trainlike speed, stopped, picked up a mooring, made fast. The swell from her rolled in, swashing heavily on the beach.

The man in the rowboat turned his attention to the cruiser. There were people aboard to the number of a dozen, men and women, clustered on her flush afterdeck. He could hear the clatter of their tongues, low ripples of laughter, through all of which ran the impatient note of a male voice issuing peremptory orders.

The cruiser blew her whistle repeatedly,—shrill, imperative blasts. The man in the rowboat smiled. The air was very still. Sounds carry over quiet water as if telephoned. He could not help hearing what was said.

** Wise management,” he observed ironically, under his breath.

The power yacht, it seemed, had not so much as a dinghy aboard.

A figure on the deck detached itself from the group and waved a beckoning hand to the rowboat.

The rower hesitated, frowning. Then he shrugged his shoulders and pulled out and alongside. The deck crew lowered a set of steps.

‘*' Take a couple of us ashore, will you?” He was addressed by a short, stout man. He was very round and pink of face, very well dressed, and by the manner in which he spoke to the others, and the glances he cast ashore, a person of some consequence in great impatience.

The young man laid his rowboat against the steps.

‘* Climb in,” he said briefly.

‘* You, Smith, come along,’ the round-faced one addressed a youth in tight blue jersey and peaked cap.

The deck boy climbed obediently down. A girl in white duck and heavy blue sweater put her foot on the steps.

‘* T think I shall go too, papa,”’ she said.

Her father nodded and followed her.

The rowboat nosed in beside the end of a narrow float that ran from the sea wall. The boy in the jersey sprang out, reached a steadying hand to his employer. The girl stepped lightly to the planked logs.

‘* Give the boy a lift on that boat to the chuck, will you?’’ the stout person made further request, indi cating the white boat bottom up on shore.

A queer expression gleamed momentarily in the eyes of the boatman. But it passed. He did not speak, but made for the dinghy, followed by the hand from the yacht. They turned the boat over, slid it down and afloat. The sailor got in and began to ship his oars.

The man and the girl stood by till this was done. Then the girl turned away. The man extended his hand.

‘* Thanks,” he said curtly.

The other’s hand had involuntarily moved. The short, stout man dropped a silver dollar in it, swung on his heel and followed his daughter,—passed her, in fact, for she had only taken a step or two and halted.

The young fellow eyed the silver coin in his hand

The House in Cradle Bay 15 with an expression that passed from astonishment to anger and broke at last into a smile of sheer amusement. He jiggled the coin, staring at it thoughtfully. Then he faced about on the jerseyed youth about to dip his blades.

** Smith,” he said, ‘‘I suppose if I heaved this silver dollar out into the chuck you’d think I was crazy.”

The youth only stared at him.

** You don’t object to tips, do you, Smith? ”’ the man in the mackinaw inquired.

‘* Gee, no,’ the boy observed. ‘* Ain’t you got no use for money ? ”’

** Not this kind. You take it and buy smokes.”

He flipped the dollar into the dinghy. It fell clinking on the slatted floor and the youth salvaged it, looked it over, put it in his pocket.

** Gee,” he said. ‘‘ Any time a guy hands me money I keep it, believe me.”

His gaze rested curiously on the man with the patch over his eye. His familiar grin faded. He touched his cap.

**' Thank y’, sir.”

He heaved on his oars. The boat slid out. The man stood watching, hands deep in his pockets. A displeased look replaced the amused smile as his glance rested a second on the rich man’s toy of polished mahogany and shining brass. Then he turned to look again at the house up the slope and found the girl at his elbow.

He did not know if she had overheard him, and he did not at the moment care. He met her glance with one as impersonal as her own.

‘*T’m afraid I must apologize for my father,’ she

= said simply. ‘‘I hope you aren’t offended. It was awfully good of you to bring us ashore.”

‘*That’s quite all right,” he answered casually. ‘Why should I be offended? When a roughneck does something for you, it’s proper to hand him some of your loose change. Perfectly natural.”

‘* But you aren’t anything of the sort,’ she said frankly. ‘‘ I feel sure you resent being tipped for an act of courtesy. It was very thoughtless of papa.”

‘* Some people are so used to greasing their way with money that they’ll hand St. Peter a ten-dollar bill when they pass the heavenly gates,” he observed. ‘* But it really doesn’t matter. Tell me something. Whose house is that, and how long has it been there ? ”’

** Ours,” she answered. ‘‘ Two years. We stay here a good deal in the summer.”

‘* Ours, I dare say, means Horace A. Gower,” he remarked. ‘‘ Pardon my curiosity, but you see I used to know this place rather well. Dve been away for some time. Things seem to have changed a bit.”

** Youre just back from overseas?’ she asked quickly.

He nodded. She looked at him with livelier interest.

** Tm no wounded hero,” he forestalled the inevitable question. “‘I merely happened to get a splinter of wood in one eye, so I have leave until it gets well.”

‘If you are merely on leave, why are you not in uniform?” she asked quickly, in a puzzled tone.

**T am,” he replied shortly. ‘‘ Only it is covered up with overalls and mackinaw. Well, I must be off. Good-bye, Miss Gower.”

He pushed his boat off the beach, rowed to the opposite side of the bay, and hauled the small craft up over a log. Then he took his bag in hand and climbed the

The House in Cradle Bay 17 rise that lifted to the backbone of Point Old. Half-way up he turned to look briefly backward over beach and yacht and house, up the verandah steps of which the girl in the blue sweater was now climbing.

** It’s queer,” he muttered. 3 He went on. In another minute he was on the ridge. The Gulf opened out, a dead dull grey. The skies were hidden behind drab clouds. The air was clammy, cold, hushed, as if the god of storms were gathering his

breath for a great effort.

And Jack MacRae himself, when he topped the height which gave clear vision for many miles of shore and sea, drew a deep breath and halted for a long look .at many familiar things.

He had been gone nearly four years. It seemed to him but yesterday that he left. The picture was unchanged,—save for that white cottage in its square of green. He stared at that with a doubtful expression, then his uncovered eye came back to the long sweep of the Gulf, to the brown cliffs spreading away in a ragged line along a kelp-strewn shore. He put down the bag and seated himself on a mossy rock close by a stunted, leaning fir and stared about him like a man who has come a great way to see something and means to look his fill.

Chapter TT; IMs Own Country

Squitty IsLanpD lies in the Gulf of Georgia midway between a mainland made of mountains like the Alps, the Andes, and the Himalayas all jumbled together and all rising sheer from the sea, and the low delta-like shore of Vancouver Island. Southward from Squitty the Gulf runs in a thirty-mile width for nearly a hundred miles to the San Juan islands in American waters, beyond which opens the sheltered beauty of Puget Sound. Squitty is six miles wide and ten miles long, a blob of granite covered with fir and cedar forest, with certain park-like patches of open grass-land on the southern end, and a hump of a mountain lifting two thousand feet in its middle.

The south-eastern end of Squitty—barring the tide rips off Cape Mudge—is the dirtiest place in the Gulf for small craft in blowy weather. The surges that heave up off a hundred miles of sea tortured by a south-east gale break thunderously against Squitty’s low cliffs. These walls face the marching breakers with a grim, unchanging front. There is nothing hospitable in this aspect of Squitty. It is an ugly shore to have on the lee in a blow.

Yet it is not so forbidding as it seems. The prevailing summer winds on the Gulf are westerly. Gales of uncommon fierceness roar out of the north-west in fall and early winter. At such times the storms split on Squitty Island, leaving a restful calm under those

His Own Country 19 brown, kelp-fringed cliffs. Many a small coaster has crept thankfully into that lee out of the white-capped turmoil on either side, to lie there through a night that was wild outside, watching the Ballenas light twenty miles away on a pile of bare rocks winking and blinking its warning to less fortunate craft. Tugs, fishing boats, salmon trollers, beach-combing launches, all that mosquito fleet which gets its bread upon the waters and learns bar, shoal, reef, and anchorage thoroughly in the getting,—these knew that besides the half-moon bight called Cradle Bay, upon which fronted Horace Gower’s summer home, there opened also a secure, bottle-necked cove less than a mile northward from Point Old.

By day a stranger could only mark the entrance by eagle watch from a course close inshore. By night even those who knew the place as they knew the palm of their hand had to feel their way in. But once inside, a man could lie down in his bunk and sleep soundly, though a south-easter whistled and moaned, and the seas roared smoking into the narrow mouth. No ripple of that troubled the inside of Squitty Cove. It was a finger of the sea thrust straight into the land, a finger three hundred yards long, forty yards wide, with an entrance so narrow that a man could heave a sounding lead across it, and that entrance so masked by a rock about the bigness of a six-room house that one holding the channel could touch the rock with a pike pole as he passed in. There was a mud bottom, twenty-foot depth at low tide, and a little stream of cold fresh water brawling in at the head. A cliff walled it on the south. A low, grassy hill dotted with solitary firs, red-barked arbutus, and clumps of wild cherry formed its northern boundary. And all around the mouth, in every nook and crevice, driftwood of every size and shape lay in great heaps, cast high above tide-water by the big storms.

So Squitty had the three prime requisites for a harbour,—secure anchorage, fresh water, and firewood. There was good fertile land, too, behind the Cove,— low valleys that ran the length of the island. There were settlers here and there, but these settlers were not the folk who intermittently frequented Squitty Cove. The settlers stayed on their land, battling with stumps, clearing away the ancient forest, tilling the soil. Those to whom Squitty Cove gave soundest sleep and keenest joy were tillers of the sea. Off Point Old a rock brown with seaweed,-ringed with a bed of kelp, lifted its ugly head now to the one good, blue-grey eye of Jack MacRae, the same rock upon which Donald MacRae’s sloop broke her back before Jack MacRae was born. It was a sunken menace at any stage of water, heartily cursed by the fishermen. In the years between, the rock had acquired a name not written on the Admiralty charts. The hydrographers would look puzzled and shake their heads if one asked where in the Gulf waters lay Poor Man’s Rock.

But Poor Man’s Rock it is. Greek and Japanese, Spaniard and Italian, American and Canadian—and there are many of each—who follow the silver-sided salmon when they run in the Gulf of Georgia, these know that Poor Man’s Rock lies half a cable southsouth-west of Point Old on Squitty Island. Most of them know, too, why it is called Poor Man’s Rock. ~

Under certain conditions of sea and sky the Rock is as lonely and forbidding a spot as ever a ship’s timbers were broken upon. Point Old thrusts out like the stubby thumb on a clenched fist. The Rock and the outer nib of the Point are haunted by quarrelling

His Own Country 21 flocks of gulls and coots and the black Siwash duck with his stumpy wings and brilliant yellow bill. The south-easter sends endless battalions of waves rolling up there when it blows. These rear white heads over the Rock and burst on the Point with shuddering impact and showers of spray. When the sky is dull and grey, and the wind whips the stunted trees on the Point—trees that lean inland with branches all twisted to the landward side from pressure of many gales in their growing years—and the surf is booming out its basso harmonies, the Rock is no place for a fisherman. Even the gulls desert it then.

But in good weather, in the season, the blueback and spring salmon swim in vast schools across the end of Squitty. They feed upon small fish, baby herring, tiny darting atoms of finny life that swarm in countless numbers. What these inch-long fishes feed upon no man knows, but they begin to show in the Gulf early in spring. The water is alive with them,—minute, darting streaks of silver. The salmon follow these schools, pursuing, swallowing, eating to live. Seal and dogfish follow the salmon. Shark and the giant blackfish follow dogfish and seal. And man follows them all, pursuing and killing that he himself may live.

Around Poor Man’s Rock the tide sets strongly at certain stages of ebb and flood. The cliffs north of Point Old and the area immediately surrounding the Rock are thick strewn with kelp. In these brown patches of seaweed the tiny fish, the schools of baby herring, take refuge from their restless enemy, the swift and _ voracious salmon.

For years Pacific Coast salmon have been taken by net and trap, to the profit of the salmon packers and the satisfaction of those who cannot get fish save out of tin cans. The salmon swarmed in millions on their way to spawn in fresh-water streams. They were plentiful and cheap. But even before the war came to send the price of linen-mesh net beyond most fishermen’s pocket-books, men had discovered that salmon could be taken commercially by trolling lines. The lordly spring, which attains to seventy pounds, the small, swift blueback, and the fighting coho could all be lured to a hook on a wobbling bit of silver or brass at the end of a long line weighted with lead to keep it at a certain depth behind a moving boat. From a single line over the stern it was but a logical step to two, four, even six lines spaced on slender poles boomed out on each side of a power launch,—once the fisherman learned that with this gear he could take salmon in open water. So trolling was launched. Odd trollers grew to trolling fleets. A new method became established in the salmon industry.

But there are places where the salmon run and a gasboat trolling her battery of lines cannot go without loss of gear. The power boats cannot troll in shallows. They cannot operate in kelp without fouling. So they hold to deep open water and leave the kelp and shoals to the rowboats.

And that is how Poor Man’s Rock got its name. In the kelp that surrounded it and the greater beds that fringed Point Old, the small feed sought refuge from the salmon and the salmon pursued them there among the weedy granite and the boulders, even into shallows where their back fins cleft the surface as they dashed after the little herring. The foul ground and the tidal currents that swept by the Rock held no danger to the gear of a rowboat troller. He fished a single short line with a pound or so of lead. He could stop dead in a

His Own Country 23 boat length if his line fouled. So he pursued the salmon as the salmon pursued the little fish among the kelp and boulders.

Only a poor man trolled in a rowboat, tugging at the oars hour after hour without cabin shelter from wind and sun and rain, unable to face even such weather as a thirty by eight-foot gasboat could easily fish in, unable to follow the salmon run when it shifted from one point to another on the Gulf. The rowboat trollers must pick a camp ashore by a likely ground and stay there. If the salmon left they could only wait till another run began. Whereas the power boat could hear of schooling salmon forty miles away and be on the spot in seven hours’ steaming.

Poor Man’s Rock had given many a man his chance. Nearly always salmon could be taken there by a rowboat. And because for many years old men, men with lean purses, men with a rowboat, a few dollars, and a hunger for independence, had camped in Squitty Cove and fished the Squitty headlands and seldom failed to take salmon around the Rock, the name had clung to that brown hummock of granite lifting out of the sea at half tide. From April to November, any day a rowboat could live outside the Cove, there would be half a dozen, eight, ten, more or less, of these solitary rowers bending to their oars, circling the Rock.

Now and again one of these would hastily drop his oars, stand up, and haul in his line hand over hand. There would be a splashing and splattering on the surface, a bright silver fish leaping and threshing the water, to land at last with a plop! inthe boat. Whereupon the fisherman would hurriedly strike this dynamic, glistening fish over the head with a short, thick club, lest his struggles snarl the line, after which he would put out his spoon and bend to the oars again. It was a daylight and dusk job, a matter of infinite patience and hard work, cold and wet at times, and in midsummer the blaze of a scorching sun and the eye-dazzling glitter of reflected light.

But a man must live. Some who came to the Cove trolled long and skilfully, and were lucky enough to gain a power troller in the end, to live on beans and fish, and keep a strangle-hold on every dollar that came in until with a cabin boat powered with gas they joined the trolling fleet and became nomads. They fared well enough then. Their taking at once grew beyond a rowboat’s scope. They could see new country, hearken to the lure of distant fishing grounds. There was the sport of gambling on wind and weather, on the price of fish or the number of the catch. If one locality displeased them they could shift to another, while the rowboat men were chained perforce to the monotony of the same camp, the same cliffs, the same old weary round.

Sometimes Squitty Cove harboured thirty or forty of these power trollers. They would make their night anchorage there while the trolling held good, filling the Cove with talk and laughter and a fine sprinkle of lights when dark closed in. With failing catches, or the first breath of a south-easter that would lock them in the Cove while it blew, they would be up and away,—to the top end of Squitty, to Yellow Rock, to Cape Lazo, anywhere that salmon might be found.

And the rowboat men would lie in their tents and split-cedar lean-tos, cursing the weather, the salmon that would not bite, grumbling at their lot.

There were two or three rowboat men who had fished the Cove almost since Jack MacRae could remember,— old men, fishermen who had shot their bolt, who dwelt

His Own Country 25 in small cabins by the Cove, living somehow from salmon run to salmon run, content if the season’s catch netted three hundred dollars. All they could hope for was a living. They had become fixtures there.

Jack MacRae looked down from the bald tip of Point Old with an eager gleam in his uncovered eye. There was the Rock with a slow swell lapping over it. There was an old withered Portuguese he knew in a green dugout, Long Tom Spence rowing behind the Portuguese, and they carrying on a shouted conversation. He picked out Doug Sproul among three others he did not know,—and there was not a man under fifty among them.

Three hundred yards offshore half a dozen power trollers wheeled and counter-wheeled, working an eddy. He could see them haul the lines hand over hand, casting the hooked fish up into the hold with an easy swing. The salmon were biting.

It was all familiar to Jack MacRae. He knew every nook and cranny on Squitty Island, every phase and mood and colour of the sea. It is a grim birthplace that leaves a man without some sentiment for the place where he was born. Point Old, Squitty Cove, Poor Man’s Rock had been the boundaries of his world for along time. In so far as he had ever played, he had played there.

He looked for another familiar figure or two, without noting them.

*“* The fish are Brne fast for this time of year,” he reflected. ‘‘ It’s a wonder dad and Peter Ferrara aren’t out. And I never knew Bill Munro to miss anything like this.”

He looked a little longer, over across the tip of Sangster Island two miles westward, with its

Elephant’s Head,—the extended trunk of which was a treacherous reef bared only at low tide. He looked at the Elephant’s unwinking eye, which was a twenty-foot hole through a hump of sandstone, and smiled. He had fished for salmon along the kelp beds there and dug clams under the eye of the Elephant long, long ago. It did seem a long time ago that he had been a youngster in overalls, adventuring alone in a dugout about these bold headlands.

He rose at last. The November wind chilled him through the heavy mackinaw. He looked back at the Gower cottage, like a snowflake in a setting of emerald; he looked at the Gower yacht; and the puzzled frown returned to his face.

Then he picked up his bag and walked rapidly along the brow of the cliffs toward Squitty Cove.

Chapter II The Flutter of Sable Wings

A patH took form on the mossy rock as Jack Mac- Rae strode on. He followed this over patches of grass, by lone firs and small thickets, until it brought him out on the rim of the Cove. He stood a second on the cliffy north wall to look down on the quiet harbour. It was bare of craft, save that upon the beach two or three rowboats lay hauled out. On the farther side a low, rambling house of logs showed behind a clump of firs. Smoke lifted from its stone chimney.

MacRae smiled reminiscently at this and moved on. His objective lay at the Cove’s head, on the little creek which came whispering down from the high land behind. He gained this in another two hundred yards, coming to a square house built, like its neighbour, of stout logs with a high-pitched roof, a patch of ragged grass in front, and a picket-fenced area at the back in which stood apple trees and cherry and plum, gaunt-limbed trees all bare of leaf and fruit. Ivy wound up the corners of the house. Sturdy rose-bushes stood before it, and the dead vines of sweet peas bleached on their trellises.

It had the look of an old place—as age is reckoned in so new a country—old and bearing the marks of many years’ labour bestowed to make it what it was. Even from a distance it bore a home-like air. MacRae’s face lightened at the sight. His step quickened. He had come a long way to get home.

Across the front of the house extended a wide porch which gave a look at the Cove through a thin screen of maple and alder. From the grass-bordered walk of beach gravel half a dozen steps lifted to the floor level. As MacRae set foot on the lower step a girl came out on the porch.

MacRae stopped. The girl did not see him. Her eyes were fixed questioningly on the sea that stretched away beyond the narrow mouth of the Cove. As she looked she drew one hand wearily across her forehead, tucking back a vagrant strand of dusky hair. MacRae watched her a moment. The quick, pleased smile that leaped to his face faded to soberness.

‘* Hello, Dolly,” he said softly.

She started. Her dark eyes turned to him, and an inexpressible relief glowed in them. She held up one hand in a gesture that warned silence,—and by that time MacRae had come up the steps to her side and seized both her hands in his. She looked at him speechlessly, a curious passivity in her attitude. He saw that her eyes were wet.

‘‘ What’s wrong, Dolly?” he asked. ‘‘ Aren’t you glad to see Johnny come marching home? Where’s dad ? ”’

‘*Glad?’’ she echoed. ‘*I never was so glad to see any one in my life. Oh, Johnny MacRae, I wish you’d come sooner. Your father’s a sick man. We’ve done our best, but [Pm afraid it’s not good enough.”

‘* He’s in bed, I suppose,” said MacRae. ‘‘ Well, I'll go in and see him. Maybe it’ll cheer the old boy up to see me back.”

‘* He won’t know you,” the girl murmured. ‘* You mustn’t disturb him just now, anyway. He has fallen into a doze. When he comes out of that he’ll likely be delirious.”’

** Good Lord,”’ MacRae whispered, ‘“‘ as bad as that ! What is it?”

“The flu,” Dolly said quietly. ‘‘ Everybody has been having it. Old Bill Munro died in his shack a week ago.”

‘* Has dad had a doctor ? ”’

The girl nodded.

** Harper from Nanaimo came day before yesterday. He left medicine and directions; he can’t come again. He has more cases than he can handle over there.”