Poor Man's Rock

by Bertrand W. Sinclair

"After the fact. Belting around a point in the dark at train speed, regardless of the rules of the road. Destroying a valuable boat, killing a man. Property is supposed to be sacred—if life has no market value. Were you late for dinner?"

In his anger he made a quick movement with his arms, flinging the blanket off, sending intolerable pangs through his bruised and torn body.

Betty rose and bent over him, put the blanket back silently, tucked him in like a mother settling the cover about a restless child. She did not say anything for a minute. She stood over him, nervously plucking bits of lint off the blanket. Her eyes grew wet.

"I don't blame you for feeling that way," she said at last. "It was a terrible thing. You had the right of way. I don't know why or how Robertson let it happen. He has always been a careful navigator. The nearness when he saw you under his bows must have paralyzed him, and with our speed—oh, it isn't any use, I know, to tell you how sorry I am. That won't bring that poor boy back to life again. It won't—"

"You killed him—your kind of people—twice," MacRae said thickly. "Once in France, where he risked his life—all he had to risk—so that you and your kind should continue to have ease and security. He came home wheezing and strangling, suffering all the pains of death without death's relief. And when he was beginning to think he had another chance you finish him off. But that's nothing. A mere incident. Why should you care? The country is full of Ferraras. What do they matter? Men of no social or financial standing, men who work with their hands and smell of fish. If it's a shock to you to see one man dead and another cut and bloody, think of the numbers that suffer as great pains and hardships that you know nothing about—and wouldn't care if you did. You couldn't be what you are and have what you have if they didn't. Sorry! Sympathy is the cheapest thing in the market, cheaper than salmon. You can't help Steve Ferrara with that—not now. Don't waste any on me. I don't need it. I resent it. You may need it all for your own before I get through. I—I am—"

MacRae's voice trailed off into an incoherent murmur. He seemed to be floating off into those dark shadowy spaces again. In reality he was exhausted. A man with his veins half emptied of blood cannot get in a passion without a speedy reaction. MacRae went off into an unconscious state which gradually became transformed into natural, healthy sleep, the deep slumber of utter exhaustion.

At intervals thereafter he was hazily aware of some one beside him, of soft hands that touched him. Once he wakened to find the room empty, the lamp turned low. In the dim light and the hush the place seemed unutterably desolate and forsaken, as if he were buried in a crypt. When he listened he could hear the melancholy drone of the southeaster and the rumble of the surf, two sounds that fitted well his mood. He felt a strange relief when Betty came tiptoeing in from the kitchen. She bent over him. MacRae closed his eyes and slept again.

He awakened at last, alert, refreshed, free of that depression which had rested so heavily on him. And he found that weariness had caught Betty Gower in its overpowering grip. She had drawn her box seat up close beside him. Her body had drooped until her arms rested on the side of the bed, and her head rested on her arms. MacRae found one of his hands caught tight in both hers. She was asleep, breathing lightly, regularly. He twisted his stiffened neck to get a better look at her. He could only see one side of her face, and that he studied a long time. Pretty and piquant, still it was no doll's face. There was character in that firm mouth and round chin. Betty had a beautiful skin. That had been MacRae's first impression of her, the first time he saw her. And she had a heavy mass of reddish-brown hair that shone in the sunlight with a decided wave in it which always made it seem unruly, about to escape from its conventional arrangement.

MacRae made no attempt to free his hand. He was quite satisfied to let it be. The touch of her warm flesh against his stirred him a little, sent his mind straying off into strange channels. Queer that the first woman to care for him when he crept wounded and shaken to the shelter of his own roof should be the daughter of his enemy. For MacRae could not otherwise regard Horace Gower. Anything short of that seemed treason to the gray old man who had died in the next room, babbling of his son and the west wind and some one he called Bessie.