"Your granddaughter, I presume?" he addressed Caleb Brent.
"No; my daughter, sir. I was forty when I married, and Nan came ten years later. She's thirteen now, and her mother's been dead ten years."
Hector McKaye had an idea that the departed mother was probably just as well, if not better, off, free of the battle for existence which appeared to confront this futile old man and his elf of a daughter. He glanced at the embryo shack under construction and, comparing it with his own beautiful home on Tyee Head, he turned toward the bight. A short distance off the bulkhead, he observed a staunch forty-foot motor-cruiser at anchor. She would have been the better for a coat of paint; undeniably she was of a piece with Caleb Brent and Nan, for, like them, The Laird had never seen her before.
"Yours?" he queried.
"Yes, sir."
"You arrived in her, then?"
"I did, sir. Nan and I came down from Bremerton in her, sir."
The Laird owned many ships, and he noted the slurring of the "sir" as only an old sailor can slur it. And there was a naval base at Bremerton.
"You're an old sailor, aren't you, Brent?" he pursued.
"Yes, sir. I was retired a chief petty officer, sir. Thirty years' continuous service, sir—and I was in the mercantile marine at sixteen. I've served my time as a shipwright. Am—am I intruding here, sir?"