Poor Mans Rock | Page 5

words to fill the mouths of men, and not even the
politicians had thought of saving the world for democracy. Yet men
and women were strangely as they are now. A generation may change
its manners, its outward seeming; it does not change in its loving and
hating, in its fundamental passions, its inherent reactions.

MacRae's face worked. His lips quivered as he stared across the
troubled sea. He lifted his hands in a swift gesture of appeal.
"O God," he cried, "curse and blast them in all their ways and
enterprises if they deal with her as they have dealt with me."
CHAPTER I
The House in Cradle Bay
On an afternoon in the first week of November, 1918, under a sky bank
full of murky cloud and an air freighted with a chill which threatened
untimely snow, a man came rowing up along the western side of
Squitty Island and turned into Cradle Bay, which lies under the lee of
Point Old. He was a young man, almost boyish-looking. He had on a
pair of fine tan shoes, brown overalls, a new gray mackinaw coat
buttoned to his chin. He was bareheaded. Also he wore a patch of pink
celluloid over his right eye.
When he turned into the small half-moon bight, he let up on his oars
and drifted, staring with a touch of surprise at a white cottage-roofed
house with wide porches sitting amid an acre square of bright green
lawn on a gentle slope that ran up from a narrow beach backed by a low
sea-wall of stone where the gravel ended and the earth began.
"Hm-m-m," he muttered. "It wasn't built yesterday, either. Funny he
never mentioned that."
He pushed on the oars and the boat slid nearer shore, the man's eyes
still steadfast on the house. It stood out bold against the grass and the
deeper green of the forest behind. Back of it opened a hillside brown
with dead ferns, dotted with great solitary firs and gnarly branched
arbutus.
No life appeared there. The chimneys were dead. Two moorings
bobbed in the bay, but there was no craft save a white rowboat hauled
high above tidewater and canted on its side.

"I wonder, now." He spoke again.
While he wondered and pushed his boat slowly in on the gravel, a low
_pr-r-r_ and a sibilant ripple of water caused him to look behind. A
high-bowed, shining mahogany cruiser, seventy feet or more over all,
rounded the point and headed into the bay. The smooth sea parted with
a whistling sound where her brass-shod stem split it like a knife. She
slowed down from this trainlike speed, stopped, picked up a mooring,
made fast. The swell from her rolled in, swashing heavily on the beach.
The man in the rowboat turned his attention to the cruiser. There were
people aboard to the number of a dozen, men and women, clustered on
her flush afterdeck. He could hear the clatter of their tongues, low
ripples of laughter, through all of which ran the impatient note of a
male voice issuing peremptory orders.
The cruiser blew her whistle repeatedly,--shrill, imperative blasts. The
man in the rowboat smiled. The air was very still. Sounds carry over
quiet water as if telephoned. He could not help hearing what was said.
"Wise management," he observed ironically, under his breath.
The power yacht, it seemed, had not so much as a dinghy aboard.
A figure on the deck detached itself from the group and waved a
beckoning hand to the rowboat.
The rower hesitated, frowning. Then he shrugged his shoulders and
pulled out and alongside. The deck crew lowered a set of steps.
"Take a couple of us ashore, will you?" He was addressed by a short,
stout man. He was very round and pink of face, very well dressed, and
by the manner in which he spoke to the others, and the glances he cast
ashore, a person of some consequence in great impatience.
The young man laid his rowboat against the steps.
"Climb in," he said briefly.

"You, Smith, come along," the round-faced one addressed a youth in
tight blue jersey and peaked cap.
The deck boy climbed obediently down. A girl in white duck and heavy
blue sweater put her foot on the steps.
"I think I shall go too, papa," she said.
Her father nodded and followed her.
The rowboat nosed in beside the end of a narrow float that ran from the
sea wall. The boy in the jersey sprang out, reached a steadying hand to
his employer. The girl stepped lightly to the planked logs.
"Give the boy a lift on that boat to the chuck, will you?" the stout
person made further request, indicating the white boat bottom up on
shore.
A queer expression gleamed