Strangely enough, Jack managed to grasp the full measure of what his father’s love for Elizabeth Morton must have been without resenting the secondary part his mother must have played.  For old Donald was frank in his story.  He made it clear that he had loved Bessie Morton with an all-consuming passion, and that when this burned itself out he had never experienced so headlong an affection again.  He spoke with kindly regard for his wife, but she played little or no part in his account.  And Jack had only a faint memory of his mother, for she had died when he was seven.  His father filled his eyes.  His father’s enemies were his.  Family ties superimposed on clan clannishness, which is the blood heritage of the Highland Scotch, made it impossible for him to feel otherwise.  That blow with a pike pole was a blow directed at his own face.  He took up his father’s feud instinctively, not even stopping to consider whether that was his father’s wish or intent.

He got up out of his chair at last and went outside, down to where the Cove waters, on a rising tide, lapped at the front of a rude shed.  Under this shed, secure on a row of keel-blocks, rested a small knockabout-rigged boat, stowed away from wind and weather, her single mast, boom, and gaff unshipped and slung to rafters, her sail and running gear folded and coiled and hung beyond the wood-rats’ teeth.  Beside this sailing craft lay a long blue dugout, also on blocks, half filled with water to keep it from checking.

These things belonged to him.  He had left them lying about when he went away to France.  And old Donald had put them here safely against his return.  Jack stared at them, blinking.  He was full of a dumb protest.  It didn’t seem right.  Nothing seemed right.  In young MacRae’s mind there was nothing terrible about death.  He had become used to that.  But he had imagination.  He could see his father going on day after day, month after month, year after year, enduring, uncomplaining.  Gauged by what his father had written, by what Dolly Ferrara had supplied when he questioned her, these last months must have been gray indeed.  And he had died without hope or comfort or a sight of his son.

That was what made young MacRae blink and struggle with a lump in his throat.  It hurt.

He walked away around the end of the Cove without definite objective.  He was suddenly restless, seeking relief in movement.  Sitting still and thinking had become unbearable.  He found himself on the path that ran along the cliffs and followed that, coming out at last on the neck of Point Old where he could look down on the broken water that marked Poor Man’s Rock.

The lowering cloud bank of his home-coming day had broken in heavy rain.  That had poured itself out and given place to a southeaster.  The wind was gone now, the clouds breaking up into white drifting patches with bits of blue showing between, and the sun striking through in yellow shafts which lay glittering areas here and there on the Gulf.  The swell that runs after a blow still thundered all along the southeast face of Squitty, bursting boom—­boom—­boom against the cliffs, shooting spray in white cascades.  Over the Rock the sea boiled.