h himself, knew that he must pay a
penalty for working with his hands. If he were a drone in
uniform--necessarily a drone since the end of war--he could dance and
play, flirt with pretty girls, be a welcome guest in great houses, make
the heroic past pay social dividends.

It took nearly as much courage and endurance to work as it had taken to
fight; indeed it took rather more, at times, to keep on working.
Theoretically he should not lose caste. Yet MacRae knew he
would,--unless he made a barrel of money. There had been stray straws in
the past month. There were, it seemed, very nice people who could not
quite understand why an officer and a gentleman should do work that
wasn't,--well, not even clean. Not clean in the purely objective,
physical sense, like banking or brokerage, or teaching, or any of those
semi-genteel occupations which permit people to make a living without
straining their backs or soiling their hands. He wasn't even sure that
Stubby Abbott--MacRae was ashamed of his cynicism when he got that far.
Stubby was a real man. Even if he needed a man or a man's activities in
his business Stubby wouldn't cultivate that man socially merely because
he needed his producing capacity.

The solace for long hours and aching flesh and sleep-weary eyes was a
glimpse of concrete reward,--money which meant power, power to repay a
debt, opportunity to repay an ancient score. It seemed to Jack MacRae
that his personal honor was involved in getting back all that broad
sweep of land which his father had claimed from the wilderness, that he
must exact an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. That was the why
of his unceasing energy, his uncomplaining endurance of long hours in
sea boots, the impatient facing of storms that threatened to delay. Man
strives under the spur of a vision, a deep longing, an imperative
squaring of needs with desires. MacRae moved under the whip of all
three.

He was quite sanguine that he would succeed in this undertaking. But he
had not looked much beyond the first line of trenches which he planned
to storm. They did not seem to him particularly formidable. The Scotch
had been credited with uncanny knowledge of the future. Jack MacRae,
however, though his Highland blood ran undiluted, had no such gift of
prescience. He did not know that the highway of modern industry is
strewn with the casualties of commercial warfare.

CHAPTER VIII

Vested Rights

A small balcony over the porch