efore, journeyed Hector McKaye, and
sought an audience with Martin Darrow.

"I'm McKaye, from the Skookum River, Washington," he announced,
without preamble.

"I've been expecting you, Mr. McKaye," Darrow replied. "Got a
proposition to submit?"

"Naturally, or I wouldn't have come to St. Paul. I notice you have a
weakness for the timber on the south bank of the Skookum. You've
opposed me there half a dozen times and won. I have also observed that
I have a free hand with claims north of the river. That's fair--and
there's timber enough for two. Hereafter, I'll keep to my own side of
the river."

"I see we're going to come to an understanding, Mr. McKaye. What will
you give me to stick to my side of the river?"

"An outlet through the bight for your product when you commence
manufacturing. I control the lower half-mile of the river and the only
available mill-sites. I'll give you a mill-site if you'll pay half the
expense of digging a new channel for the Skookum, and changing its
course so it will emerge into the still, deep water under the lee of
Tyee Head."

"We'll do business," said Martin Darrow--and they did, although it was
many years after Hector McKaye had incorporated the Tyee Lumber
Company and founded his town of Port Agnew before Darrow began
operations.

True to his promise, McKaye deeded him a mill-and town-site, and he
founded a settlement on the eastern edge of Port Agnew, but quite
distinct from it, and called it Darrow, after himself. It was not a
community that Hector McKaye approved of, for it was squalid and
unsanitary, and its untidy, unpainted shacks of rough lumber harbored
southern European labor, of which Hector McKaye would have none. In
Darrow, also, there were three groggeries and a gambling-house, with
the usual concomitant of women whose profession is the oldest and the
saddest in the world.

Following his discovery of the Bight of Tyee, a quarter of a century
passed. A man may prosper much in twenty-five years, and Hector
McKaye, albeit American born, was bred of an acquisitive race. When
his Gethsemane came upon him, he was rated the richest lumberman in
the state of Washington; his twenty-thousand board-feet capacity per
day sawmill had grown to five hundred thousand, his ten thousand acres
to a hundred thousand. Two thousand persons looked to him and his
enterprise for their bread and butter; he owned a fleet of half a
dozen steam-schooners and sixteen big wind-jammers; he ow