“I’m McKaye, from the Skookum River, Washington,” he announced, without preamble.

“I’ve been expecting you, Mr. McKaye,” Darrow replied.  “Got a proposition to submit?”

“Naturally, or I wouldn’t have come to St. Paul.  I notice you have a weakness for the timber on the south bank of the Skookum.  You’ve opposed me there half a dozen times and won.  I have also observed that I have a free hand with claims north of the river.  That’s fair—­and there’s timber enough for two.  Hereafter, I’ll keep to my own side of the river.”

“I see we’re going to come to an understanding, Mr. McKaye.  What will you give me to stick to my side of the river?”

“An outlet through the bight for your product when you commence manufacturing.  I control the lower half-mile of the river and the only available mill-sites.  I’ll give you a mill-site if you’ll pay half the expense of digging a new channel for the Skookum, and changing its course so it will emerge into the still, deep water under the lee of Tyee Head.”

“We’ll do business,” said Martin Darrow—­and they did, although it was many years after Hector McKaye had incorporated the Tyee Lumber Company and founded his town of Port Agnew before Darrow began operations.

True to his promise, McKaye deeded him a mill-and town-site, and he founded a settlement on the eastern edge of Port Agnew, but quite distinct from it, and called it Darrow, after himself.  It was not a community that Hector McKaye approved of, for it was squalid and unsanitary, and its untidy, unpainted shacks of rough lumber harbored southern European labor, of which Hector McKaye would have none.  In Darrow, also, there were three groggeries and a gambling-house, with the usual concomitant of women whose profession is the oldest and the saddest in the world.

Following his discovery of the Bight of Tyee, a quarter of a century passed.  A man may prosper much in twenty-five years, and Hector McKaye, albeit American born, was bred of an 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.]