Poor Man's Rock

by Bertrand W. Sinclair

"Oh, say, take the picaroon, won't you?" He held it out to her, the six-foot wooden shaft with a slightly curving point of steel on the end.

She turned on him with a salmon dangling by the gills from her fingers.

"You don't think I'm afraid to get my hands dirty, do you?" she asked. "Me—a fisherman's daughter. Besides, I'd probably miss the salmon and jab that pointed thing through the bottom of the boat."

She laughed lightly, with no particular mirth in her voice. And MacRae was stricken dumb. She was angry. He knew it, felt it intuitively. Angry at him, warning him to keep his distance. He watched her dabble her hands in the salt chuck, dry them coolly on a piece of burlap. She took the money for the fish with a cool "thanks" and rowed back to shore.

Jack lay in his bunk that night blasted by a gloomy sense of futility in everything. He had succeeded in his undertaking beyond all the expectations which had spurred him so feverishly in the beginning. But there was no joy in it; not when Betty Gower looked at him with that cold gleam in her gray eyes. Yet he told himself savagely that if he had to take his choice he would not have done otherwise. And when he had accomplished the last move in his plan and driven Gower off the island, then he would have a chance to forget that such people had ever existed to fill a man's days with unhappiness. That, it seemed to him, must be the final disposition of this problem which his father and Horace Gower and Elizabeth Morton had set for him years before he was born.

There came a burst of afternoon westerlies which blew small hurricanes from noon to sundown. But there was always fishing under the broad lee of the cliffs. The Bluebird continued to scuttle from one outlying point to another, and the Blanco wallowed down to Crow Harbor every other day with her hold crammed. When she was not under way and the sea was fit the big carrier rode at anchor in the kelp close by Poor Man's Rock, convenient for the trollers to come alongside and deliver when they chose. There were squalls that blew up out of nowhere and drove them all to cover. There were days when a dead swell rolled and the trolling boats dipped and swung and pointed their bluff bows skyward as they climbed the green mountains,—for the salmon strike when a sea is on, and a troller runs from heavy weather only when he can no longer handle his gear.

MacRae was much too busy to brood long at a time. The phenomenal run of blueback still held, with here and there the hook-nosed coho coming in stray schools. He had a hundred and forty fishermen to care for in the matter of taking their catch, keeping them supplied with fuel, bringing them foodstuffs such as they desired. The Blanco came up from Vancouver sometimes as heavily loaded as when she went down. But he welcomed the work because it kept him from too intense thinking. He shepherded his seafaring flock for his profit and theirs alike and poured salmon by tens of thousands into the machines at Crow Harbor,—red meat to be preserved in tin cans which in months to come should feed the hungry in the far places of the earth.

MacRae sometimes had the strange fancy of being caught in a vast machine for feeding the world, a machine which did not reckon such factors as pain and sorrow in its remorseless functioning. Men could live without love or ease or content. They could not survive without food.

He came up to Squitty one bright afternoon when the sea was flat and still, unharassed by the westerly. The Cove was empty. All the fleet was scattered over a great area. The Bluebird was somewhere on her rounds. MacRae dropped the Blanco's hook in the middle of Cradle Bay, a spot he seldom chose for anchorage. But he had a purpose in this. When the bulky carrier swung head to the faint land breeze MacRae was sitting on his berth in the pilot house, glancing over a letter he held in his hand. It was from a land-dealing firm in Vancouver. One paragraph is sufficiently illuminating:

In regard to the purchase of this Squitty Island property we beg to advise you that Mr. Gower, after some correspondence, states distinctly that while he is willing to dispose of this property he will only deal directly with a bona fide purchaser.