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.