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Novels by:
BERTRAND W. SINCLAIR
North of Fifty-Three
Big Timber
Burned Bridges
Poor Man's Rock
POOR MAN'S ROCK
BY
BERTRAND W. SINCLAIR
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
Published September, 1920
THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, MASS., U.S.A.
CONTENTS
Prologue--Long, Long Ago
CHAPTER
I. The House in Cradle Bay
II. His Own Country
III. The Flutter of Sable Wings
IV. Inheritance
V. From the Bottom Up
VI. The Springboard
VII. Sea Boots and Salmon
VIII. Vested Rights
IX. The Complexity of Simple Matters
X. Thrust and Counterthrust
XI. Peril of the Sea
XII. Between Sun and Sun
XIII. An Interlude
XIV. The Swing of the Pendulum
XV. Hearts are not Always Trumps
XVI. En Famille
XVII. Business as Usual
XVIII. A Renewal of Hostilities
XIX. Top Dog
XX. The Dead and Dusty Past
XXI. As it was in the Beginning
POOR MAN'S ROCK
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 shore 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 cockpit 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, coarsely 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 attitude 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 god. 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 brass. 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.
"Damn them!" he broke out passionately 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, sturdy fellow
in flannels, tending the mainsheet with a frowning glance.
The man in the sloop held his course.
"Damn 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 cockpit 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 trespass 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
hoarseness, 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_ cockpit 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 compass. 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 cockpit 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 cockpit 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.
The sloop had all but doubled on her course,--nearly but not
quite,--and the few points north of west that she shifted bore her
straight to destruction.
MacRae opened his eyes at last. He was bewildered and sick. His head
swam. There was a series of stabbing pains in his lacerated face. But he
was of the sea, of that breed which survives by dint of fortitude,
endurance, stoutness of arm and quickness of wit. He clawed to his feet.
Almost before him lifted the bleak southern face of Squitty Island.
Point Old jutted out like a barrier. MacRae swung on the tiller. But the
wind had the mainsail in its teeth. Without control of that boom his
rudder could not serve him.
And as he crawled forward to try to lower sail, or get a rope's end on
the boom, whichever would do, the sloop struck on a rock that stands
awash at half-tide, a brown hummock of granite lifting out of the sea
two hundred feet off the tip of Point Old.
She struck with a shock that sent MacRae sprawling, arrested full in an
eight-knot stride. As she hung shuddering on the rock, impaled by a
jagged tooth, a sea lifted over her stern and swept her like a watery
broom that washed MacRae off the cabin top, off the rock itself into
deep water beyond.
He came up gasping. The cool immersion had astonishingly revived him. He
felt a renewal of his strength, and he had been cast by luck into a
place from which it took no more than the moderate effort of an able
swimmer to reach shore. Point Old stood at an angle to the smashing
seas, making a sheltered bight behind it, and into this bight the
flooding tide set in a slow eddy. MacRae had only to keep himself
afloat.
In five minutes his feet touched on a gravel beach. He walked dripping
out of the languid swell that ran from the turbulence outside and turned
to look back. The sloop had lodged on the rock, bilged by the ragged
granite. The mast was down, mast and sodden sails swinging at the end of
a stay as each sea swept over the rock with a hissing roar.
MacRae climbed to higher ground. He sat down beside a stunted, leaning
fir and watched his boat go. It was soon done. A bigger sea than most
tore the battered hull loose, lifted it high, let it drop. The crack of
breaking timbers cut through the boom of the surf. The next sea swept
the rock clear, and the broken, twisted hull floated awash. Caught in
the tidal eddy it began its slow journey to join the vast accumulation
of driftwood on the beach.
MacRae glanced along the island shore. He knew that shore slightly,--a
bald, cliffy stretch notched with rocky pockets in which the surf beat
itself into dirty foam. If he had grounded anywhere in that mile of
headland north of Point Old, his bones would have been broken like the
timbers of his sloop.
But his eyes did not linger there nor his thoughts upon shipwreck and
sudden death. His gaze turned across the Gulf to a tongue of land
outthrusting from the long purple reach of Vancouver Island. Behind that
point lay the Morton estate, and beside the Morton boundaries, matching
them mile for mile in wealth of virgin timber and fertile meadow, spread
the Gower lands.
His face, streaked and blotched with drying bloodstains, scarred with a
red gash that split his cheek from the hair above one ear to a corner of
his mouth, hardened into ugly lines. His eyes burned again.
This happened many years ago, long before a harassed world had to
reckon with bourgeois and Bolshevik, when profiteer and pacifist had not
yet become words to fill the mouths of men, and not even the politicians
had thought of saving the world for democracy. Yet men and women were
strangely as they are now. A generation may change its manners, its
outward seeming; it does not change in its loving and hating, in its
fundamental passions, its inherent reactions.
MacRae's face worked. His lips quivered as he stared across the troubled
sea. He lifted his hands in a swift gesture of appeal.
"O God," he cried, "curse and blast them in all their ways and
enterprises if they deal with her as they have dealt with me."
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 boyish-looking. He had on a pair of fine
tan shoes, brown overalls, a new gray 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 craft save a white rowboat hauled high above
tidewater 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.
"I 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, indicating 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 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.
"I'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 daresay, means Horace A. Gower," he remarked. "Pardon my
curiosity, but you see I used to know this place rather well. I've been
away for some time. Things seem to have changed a bit."
"You're just back from overseas?" she asked quickly.
He nodded. She looked at him with livelier interest.
"I'm 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.
"I am," he replied shortly. "Only it is covered up with overalls and
mackinaw. Well, I must be off. Good-by, 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 rise that lifted to the backbone of Point Old. Halfway
up he turned to look briefly backward over beach and yacht and house, up
the veranda steps of which the girl in the blue sweater was now
climbing.
"It's queer," he muttered.
He went on. In another minute he was on the ridge. The Gulf opened out,
a dead dull gray. 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.