Kindred of the Dust | Page 3

acquisitive race. When
his Gethsemane came upon him, he was rated the richest lumberman in
the state of Washington; his twenty-thousand board-feet capacity per
day sawmill had grown to five hundred thousand, his ten thousand
acres to a hundred thousand. Two thousand persons looked to him and
his enterprise for their bread and butter; he owned a fleet of half a
dozen steam-schooners and sixteen big wind-jammers; he owned a
town which he had called Port Agnew, and he had married and been
blessed with children. And because his ambition no longer demanded it,
he was no longer a miser.

[Illustration: HECTOR MCKAYE WAS BRED OF AN
ACQUISITIVE RACE.]
In a word, he was a happy man, and in affectionate pride and as a
tribute to his might, his name and an occasional forget-me-not of
speech which clung to his tongue, heritage of his Scotch forebears, his
people called him "The Laird of Tyee." Singularly enough, his
character fitted this cognomen rather well. Reserved, proud,
independent, and sensitive, thinking straight and talking straight, a man
of brusque yet tender sentiment which was wont to manifest itself
unexpectedly, it had been said of him that in a company of a hundred of
his mental, physical, and financial peers, he would have stood forth
preeminently and distinctively, like a lone tree on a hill.
Although The Laird loved his town of Port Agnew, because he had
created it, he had not, nevertheless, resided in it for some years prior to
the period at which this chronicle begins. At the very apex of the
headland that shelters the Bight of Tyee, in a cuplike depression several
acres in extent, on the northern side and ideally situated two hundred
feet below the crest, thus permitting the howling southeasters to blow
over it, Hector McKaye, in the fulness of time, had built for himself a
not very large two-story house of white stone native to the locality.
This house, in the center of beautiful and well-kept grounds, was
designed in the shape of a letter T, with the combination living-room
and library forming the entire leg of the T and enclosed on all three
sides by heavy plate-glass French windows.
Thus, The Laird was enabled to command a view of the bight, with
Port Agnew nestled far below; of the silver strip that is the Skookum
River flowing down to the sea through the logged-over lands, now
checker-boarded into little green farms; of the rolling back country with
its dark-green mantle of fir and white cedar, fading in the distance to
dark blue and black; of the yellow sandstone bluffs of the coast-line to
the north, and the turquoise of the Pacific out to the horizon.
This room Hector McKaye enjoyed best of all things in life, with the
exception of his family; of his family, his son Donald was nearest and
dearest to him. This boy he loved with a fierce and hungry love,
intensified, doubtless, because to the young Laird of Tyee, McKaye
was still the greatest hero in the world. To his wife, The Laird was no
longer a hero, although in the old days of the upward climb, when he

had fiercely claimed her and supported her by the sweat of his brow, he
had been something akin to a god. As for Elizabeth and Jane, his
daughters, it must be recorded that both these young women had long
since ceased to regard their father as anything except an unfailing
source of revenue--an old dear who clung to Port Agnew, homely
speech, and homely ways, hooting good-naturedly at the pretensions of
their set, and, with characteristic Gaelic stubbornness, insisting upon
living and enjoying the kind of life that appealed to him with peculiar
force as the only kind worth living.
Indeed, in more than one humble home in Port Agnew, it had been said
that the two McKaye girls were secretly ashamed of their father. This
because frequently, in a light and debonair manner, Elizabeth and Jane
apologized for their father and exhibited toward him an indulgent
attitude, as is frequently the case with overeducated and supercultured
young ladies who cannot recall a time when their slightest wish has not
been gratified and cannot forget that the good fairy who gratified it
once worked hard with his hands, spoke the language and acquired the
habits of his comrades in the battle for existence.
Of course, Elizabeth and Jane would have resented this analysis of their
mental attitude toward their father. Be that as it may, however, the fact
remained that both girls were perfunctory in their expressions of
affection for their father, but wildly extravagant in them where their
mother was concerned. Hector McKaye liked it so. He was a man who
never thought about himself, and he had discovered that if he