'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
counterwheeled, 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 color 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 a long 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 biting 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 III

The Flutter of Sable Wings

A path took form on the mossy rock as Jack MacRae strode on. He followed
this over patches of grass, by lone firs and small thickets, until it
brought hi