Poor Man's Rock

by Bertrand W. Sinclair

MacRae had taken ninety per cent. of the Folly Bay bluebacks. He had made tremendous inroads on Folly Bay's take of coho and humpback. He did not care greatly if Gower filled his cans with "dogs." But the Bellingham packers cried for salmon of whatsoever quality, and so MacRae drove the Bluebird hard in a trade which gave him no great profit, chiefly to preserve his connection with the American canners, to harass Folly Bay, and to let the fishermen know that he was still a factor and could serve them well.

He was sick of the smell of salmon, weary of the eternal heaving of the sea under his feet, of long cold tricks at the wheel, of days in somber, driving rain and nights without sleep. But he kept on until the salmon ceased to run, until the purse seiners tied up for the season, and the fishermen put by their gear.

MacRae had done well,—far better than he expected. His knife had cut both ways. He had eighteen thousand dollars in cash and the Bluebird. The Folly Bay pack was twelve thousand cases short. How much that shortage meant in lost profit MacRae could only guess, but it was a pretty sum. Another season like that,—he smiled grimly. The next season would be better,—for him. The trollers were all for him. They went out of their way to tell him that. He had organized good will behind him. The men who followed the salmon schools believed he did not want the earth, only a decent share. He did not sit behind a mahogany desk in town and set the price of fish. These men had labored a long time under the weighty heel of a controlled industry, and they were thankful for a new dispensation. It gave MacRae a pleasant feeling to know this. It gave him also something of a contempt for Gower, who had sat tight with a virtual monopoly for ten years and along with his profits had earned the distrust and dislike of a body of men who might as easily have been loyal laborers in his watery vineyards,—if he had not used his power to hold them to the most meager return they could wring from the sea.

He came home to the house at Squitty Cove with some odds and ends from town shops to make it more comfortable, flooring to replace the old, worn boards, a rug or two, pictures that caught his fancy, new cushions for the big chairs old Donald MacRae had fashioned by hand years before, a banjo to pick at, and a great box of books which he had promised to read some day when he had time. And he knew he would have time through long winter evenings when the land was drenched with rain, when the storm winds howled in the swaying firs and the sea beat clamorously along the cliffs. He would sit with his feet to a glowing fire and read books.

He did, for a time. When late November laid down a constant barrage of rain and the cloud battalions marched and countermarched along the coast, MacRae had settled down. He had no present care upon his shoulders. Although he presumed himself to be resting, he was far from idle. He found many ways of occupying himself about the old place. It was his pleasure that the old log house should be neat within and without, the yard clean, the garden restored to order. It had suffered a season's neglect. He remedied that with a little labor and a little money, wishing, as the place took on a sprightlier air, that old Donald could be there to see. MacRae was frank in his affection for the spot. No other place that he had ever seen meant quite the same to him. He was always glad to come back to it; it seemed imperative that he should always come back there. It was home, his refuge, his castle. Indeed he had seen castles across the sea from whose towers less goodly sights spread than he could command from his own front door, now that winter had stripped the maple and alder of their leafy screen. There was the sheltered Cove at his feet, the far sweep of the Gulf—colored according to its mood and the weather—great mountain ranges lifting sheer from blue water, their lower slopes green with forest and their crests white with snow. Immensities of land and trees. All his environment pitched upon a colossal scale. It was good to look at, to live among, and MacRae knew that it was good.

He sat on a log at the brink of the Cove one morning, in a burst of sunshine as grateful as it was rare. He looked out at the mainland shore, shading away from deep olive to a faint and misty blue. He cast his gaze along Vancouver Island, a three-hundred-mile barrier against the long roll of the Pacific. He thought of England, with its scant area and its forty million souls. He smiled. An empire opened within range of his vision. He had had to go to Europe to appreciate his own country. Old, old peoples over there. Outworn, bewildered aristocracies and vast populations troubled with the specter of want, swarming like rabbits, pressing always close upon the means of subsistence. No room; no chance. Born in social stratas solidified by centuries. No wonder Europe was full of race and class hatred, of war and pestilence. Snap judgment,—but Jack MacRae had seen the peasants of France and Belgium, the driven workmen of industrial France and England. He had seen also something of the forces which controlled them, caught glimpses of the iron hand in the velvet glove, a hand that was not so sure and steady as in days gone by.

Here a man still had a chance. He could not pick golden apples off the fir trees. He must use his brains as well as his hands. A reasonable measure of security was within a man's grasp if he tried for it. To pile up a fortune might be a heavy task. But getting a living was no insoluble problem. A man could accomplish either without selling his soul or cutting throats or making serfs of his fellow men. There was room to move and breathe,—and some to spare.

Perhaps Jack MacRae, in view of his feelings, his cherished projects, was a trifle inconsistent in the judgments he passed, sitting there on his log in the winter sunshine. But the wholly consistent must die young. Their works do not appear in this day and hour. The normal man adjusts himself to, and his actions are guided by, moods and circumstances which are seldom orderly and logical in their sequence.

MacRae cherished as profound an animosity toward Horace Gower as any Russian ever felt for bureaucratic tyranny. He could smart under injustice and plan reprisal. He could appreciate his environment, his opportunities, be glad that his lines were cast amid rugged beauty. But he did not on that account feel tolerant toward those whom he conceived to be his enemies. He was not, however, thinking concretely of his personal affairs or tendencies that bright morning. He was merely sitting more or less quiescent on his log, nursing vagrant impressions, letting the sun bathe him.

He was not even conscious of trespassing on Horace Gower's land. When he thought of it, of course he realized that this was legally so. But the legal fact had no reality for MacRae. Between the Cove and Point Old, for a mile back into the dusky woods, he felt free to come and go as he chose. He had always believed and understood and felt that area to be his, and he still held to that old impression. There was not a foot of that six hundred acres that he had not explored alone, with his father, with Dolly Ferrara, season after season. He had gone barefoot over the rocks, dug clams on the beaches, fished trout in the little streams, hunted deer and grouse in the thickets, as far back as he could remember. He had loved the cliffs and the sea, the woods around the Cove with an affection bred in use and occupancy, confirmed by the sense of inviolate possession. Old things are dear, if a man has once loved them. They remain so. The aura of beloved familiarity clings to them long after they have passed into alien hands. When MacRae thought of this and turned his eyes upon this noble sweep of land and forest which his father had claimed for his own from the wilderness, it was as if some one had deprived him of an eye or an arm by trickery and unfair advantage.