Caleb Brent flushed.

“Why, no, sir.  I’m making shift to build a home here for Nan and me.”

“Is this little one Nan?”

The ragamuffin girl, her head slightly to one side, had been regarding Hector McKaye with alert curiosity mingled with furtive apprehension.  As he glanced at her now, she remembered her manners and dropped him a courtesy—­an electric, half-defiant jerk that reminded The Laird of a similar greeting customarily extended by squinch-owls.

Nan was not particularly clean, and her one-piece dress, of heavy blue navy-uniform cloth was old and worn and spotted.  Over this dress she wore a boy’s coarse red-worsted sweater with white-pearl buttons.  The skin of her thin neck was fine and creamy; the calves, of her bare brown legs were shapely, her feet small, her ankles dainty.

With the quick eye of the student of character, this man, proud of his own ancient lineage for all his humble beginning, noted that her hands, though brown and uncared-for, were small and dimpled, with long, delicate fingers.  She had sea-blue eyes like Caleb Brent’s, and, like his, they were sad and wistful; a frowsy wilderness of golden hair, very fine and held in confinement at the nape of her neck by the simple expedient of a piece of twine, showed all too plainly the lack of a mother’s care.

The Laird returned Nan’s courtesy with a patronizing inclination of his head.

“Your granddaughter, I presume?” he addressed Caleb Brent.

“No; my daughter, sir.  I was forty when I married, and Nan came ten years later.  She’s thirteen now, and her mother’s been dead ten years.”

Hector McKaye had an idea that the departed mother was probably just as well, if not better, off, free of the battle for existence which appeared to confront this futile old man and his elf of a daughter.  He glanced at the embryo shack under construction and, comparing it with his own beautiful home on Tyee Head, he turned toward the bight.  A short distance off the bulkhead, he observed a staunch forty-foot motor-cruiser at anchor.  She would have been the better for a coat of paint; undeniably she was of a piece with Caleb Brent and Nan, for, like them, The Laird had never seen her before.

“Yours?” he queried.

“Yes, sir.”

“You arrived in her, then?”

“I did, sir.  Nan and I came down from Bremerton in her, sir.”

The Laird owned many ships, and he noted the slurring of the “sir” as only an old sailor can slur it.  And there was a naval base at Bremerton.

“You’re an old sailor, aren’t you, Brent?” he pursued.

“Yes, sir.  I was retired a chief petty officer, sir.  Thirty years’ continuous service, sir—­and I was in the mercantile marine at sixteen.  I’ve served my time as a shipwright.  Am—­am I intruding here, sir?”

The Laird smiled, and followed the smile with a brief chuckle.

“Well—­yes and no.  I haven’t any title to this land you’ve elected to occupy, although I created it.  You see, I’m sort of lord of creation around here.  My people call me ‘The Laird of Tyee,’ and nobody but a stranger would have had the courage to squat on the Sawdust Pile without consulting me.  What’s your idea about it, Brent?”