Poor Mans Rock | Page 4

jerk on the sheet.
Ten minutes later she jibed again. This time the mainsheet parted. Only
stout, heavily ironed backstays kept mainsail and boom from being
blown straight ahead. The boom end swung outboard till it dragged in
the seas as she rolled. Only by a miracle and the stoutest of standing
gear had she escaped dismasting. Now, with the mainsail broaded off to
starboard, and the jib by some freak of wind and sea winged out to port,
the sloop drove straight before the wind, holding as true a course as if
the limp body on the cockpit floor laid an invisible, controlling hand on

sheet and tiller.
And he, while that fair wind grew to a yachtsman's gale and lashed the
Gulf of Georgia into petty convulsions, lay where he had fallen, his
head rolling as his vessel rolled, heedless when she rose and raced on a
wave-crest or fell laboring in the trough when a wave slid out from
under her.
The sloop had all but doubled on her course,--nearly but not quite,--and
the few points north of west that she shifted bore her straight to
destruction.
MacRae opened his eyes at last. He was bewildered and sick. His head
swam. There was a series of stabbing pains in his lacerated face. But he
was of the sea, of that breed which survives by dint of fortitude,
endurance, stoutness of arm and quickness of wit. He clawed to his feet.
Almost before him lifted the bleak southern face of Squitty Island.
Point Old jutted out like a barrier. MacRae swung on the tiller. But the
wind had the mainsail in its teeth. Without control of that boom his
rudder could not serve him.
And as he crawled forward to try to lower sail, or get a rope's end on
the boom, whichever would do, the sloop struck on a rock that stands
awash at half-tide, a brown hummock of granite lifting out of the sea
two hundred feet off the tip of Point Old.
She struck with a shock that sent MacRae sprawling, arrested full in an
eight-knot stride. As she hung shuddering on the rock, impaled by a
jagged tooth, a sea lifted over her stern and swept her like a watery
broom that washed MacRae off the cabin top, off the rock itself into
deep water beyond.
He came up gasping. The cool immersion had astonishingly revived
him. He felt a renewal of his strength, and he had been cast by luck into
a place from which it took no more than the moderate effort of an able
swimmer to reach shore. Point Old stood at an angle to the smashing
seas, making a sheltered bight behind it, and into this bight the flooding
tide set in a slow eddy. MacRae had only to keep himself afloat.

In five minutes his feet touched on a gravel beach. He walked dripping
out of the languid swell that ran from the turbulence outside and turned
to look back. The sloop had lodged on the rock, bilged by the ragged
granite. The mast was down, mast and sodden sails swinging at the end
of a stay as each sea swept over the rock with a hissing roar.
MacRae climbed to higher ground. He sat down beside a stunted,
leaning fir and watched his boat go. It was soon done. A bigger sea
than most tore the battered hull loose, lifted it high, let it drop. The
crack of breaking timbers cut through the boom of the surf. The next
sea swept the rock clear, and the broken, twisted hull floated awash.
Caught in the tidal eddy it began its slow journey to join the vast
accumulation of driftwood on the beach.
MacRae glanced along the island shore. He knew that shore slightly,--a
bald, cliffy stretch notched with rocky pockets in which the surf beat
itself into dirty foam. If he had grounded anywhere in that mile of
headland north of Point Old, his bones would have been broken like the
timbers of his sloop.
But his eyes did not linger there nor his thoughts upon shipwreck and
sudden death. His gaze turned across the Gulf to a tongue of land
outthrusting from the long purple reach of Vancouver Island. Behind
that point lay the Morton estate, and beside the Morton boundaries,
matching them mile for mile in wealth of virgin timber and fertile
meadow, spread the Gower lands.
His face, streaked and blotched with drying bloodstains, scarred with a
red gash that split his cheek from the hair above one ear to a corner of
his mouth, hardened into ugly lines. His eyes burned again.
This happened many years ago, long before a harassed world had to
reckon with bourgeois and Bolshevik, when profiteer and pacifist had
not yet become