ld that land for his own pleasure and satisfaction.
Beaten in the commercial scramble he might be forced to let it go. And
MacRae was ready to pay any price in reason to get it back. That seemed
a debt he owed old Donald MacRae, apart from his own craving to sometime
carry out plans they had made together long before he went away to
France. The lives of some men are rooted in the soil where they were
born, where they grow to manhood. Jack MacRae was of that type. He loved
the sea in all its moods and colors, its quiet calm and wildest storms.
But the sea was only his second love. He was a landsman at heart. All
seamen are. They come ashore when they are old and feeble, to give their
bodies at last to the earth. MacRae loved the sea, but he loved better
to stand on the slopes running back from Squitty's cliffs, to look at
those green meadows and bits of virgin forest and think that it would
all be his again, to have and to hold.

So he had set a firm in Vancouver the task of approaching Gower, to
sound him, to see if he would sell, while he kept in the background. He
believed that it was necessary for him to remain in the background. He
believed that Gower would never willingly relinquish that land into his
hands.

MacRae sat on the _Blanco's_ deck, nursing his chin in his palms,
staring at Poor Man's Rock with a grim satisfaction. About that lonely
headland strange things had come to pass. Donald MacRae had felt his
first abiding grief there and cried his hurt to a windy sky. He had
lived his last years snatching a precarious living from the seas that
swirled about the Rock. The man who had been the club with which fate
bludgeoned old Donald was making his last stand in sight of the Rock,
just as Donald MacRae had done. And when they were all dead and gone,
Poor Man's Rock would still bare its brown hummock of a head between
tides, the salmon would still play along the kelp beds, in the eddies
about the Rock. Other men would ply the gear and take the silver fish.
It would all be as if it had never happened. The earth and the sea
endured and men were passing shadows.

Afternoon waned. Faint, cool airs wavered off the land, easing the heat
and the sun-glare. MacRae saw Betty and her father come down to the
beach. She helped him slide his rowboat afloat. Then Gower joined the
rowers who were putting out to the Rock for the evening run. He passed
close by the _Blanco_ but MacRae gave him scant heed. His eyes were all
for