Poor Mans Rock | Page 3

cutter half a cable
astern. The westerly had failed them. The spreading canvas of the yacht
was already blanketing the little sloop, stealing what little wind filled
her sail. And as the sloop's way slackened the other slid down upon her,
a purl of water at her forefoot, her wide mainsail bellying out in a
snowy curve.
There were three men in her. The helmsman was a patriarch, his head
showing white, a full white beard descending from his chin, a
fierce-visaged, vigorous old man. Near him stood a man of middle age,
a ruddy-faced man in whose dark blue eyes a flame burned as he eyed
the two in the sloop. The third was younger still,--a short, sturdy fellow
in flannels, tending the mainsheet with a frowning glance.
The man in the sloop held his course.
"Damn you, MacRae; lay to, or I'll run you down," the patriarch at the
cutter's wheel shouted, when a boat's length separated the two craft.

MacRae's lips moved slightly, but no sound issued therefrom. Leaning
on the tiller, he let the sloop run. So for a minute the boats sailed, the
white yacht edging up on the sloop until it seemed as if her broaded-off
boom would rake and foul the other. But when at last she drew fully
abreast the two men sheeted mainsail and jib flat while the
white-headed helmsman threw her over so that the yacht drove in on
the sloop and the two younger men grappled MacRae's coaming with
boat hooks, and side by side they came slowly up into the wind.
MacRae made no move, said nothing, only regarded the three with
sober intensity. They, for their part, wasted no breath on him.
"Elizabeth, get in here," the girl's father commanded.
It was only a matter of stepping over the rubbing gunwales. The girl
rose. She cast an appealing glance at MacRae. His face did not alter.
She stepped up on the guard, disdaining the hand young Gower
extended to help her, and sprang lightly into the cockpit of the Gull.
"As for you, you calculating blackguard," her father addressed MacRae,
"if you ever set foot on Maple Point again, I'll have you horsewhipped
first and jailed for trespass after."
For a second MacRae made no answer. His nostrils dilated; his
blue-gray eyes darkened till they seemed black. Then he said with a
curious hoarseness, and in a voice pitched so low it was scarcely
audible:
"Take your boat hooks out of me and be on your way."
The older man withdrew his hook. Young Gower held on a second
longer, matching the undisguised hatred in Donald MacRae's eyes with
a fury in his own. His round, boyish face purpled. And when he
withdrew the boat hook he swung the inch-thick iron-shod pole with a
swift twist of his body and struck MacRae fairly across the face.
MacRae went down in a heap as the Gull swung away. The faint breeze
out of the west filled the cutter's sails. She stood away on a long tack

south by west, with a frightened girl cowering down in her cabin,
sobbing in grief and fear, and three men in the _Gull's_ cockpit casting
dubious glances at one another and back to the fishing sloop sailing
with no hand on her tiller.
In an hour the Gull was four miles to windward of the sloop. The
breeze had taken a sudden shift full half the compass. A southeast wind
came backing up against the westerly. There was in its breath a hint of
something stronger.
Masterless, the sloop sailed, laid to, started off again erratically, and
after many shifts ran off before this stiffer wind. Unhelmed, she laid
her blunt bows straight for the opening between Sangster and Squitty
islands. On the cockpit floor Donald MacRae sprawled unheeding.
Blood from his broken face oozed over the boards.
Above him the boom swung creaking and he did not hear. Out of the
southeast a bank of cloud crept up to obscure the sun. Far southward
the Gulf was darkened, and across that darkened area specks and
splashes of white began to show and disappear. The hot air grew
strangely cool. The swell that runs far before a Gulf southeaster began
to roll the sloop, abandoned to all the aimless movements of a vessel
uncontrolled. She came up into the wind and went off before it again,
her sails bellying strongly, racing as if to outrun the swells which now
here and there lifted and broke. She dropped into a hollow, a following
sea slewed her stern sharply, and she jibed,--that is, the wind caught the
mainsail and flung it violently from port to starboard. The boom swept
an arc of a hundred degrees and put her rail under when it brought up
with a