So the Blackbird ran down Squitty, rolling and yawing through a following sea, and turned into Squitty Cove to rest till night and calm settled on the Gulf.

When her mudhook was down in that peaceful nook, Steve Ferrara turned into his bunk to get a few hours’ sleep against the long night watch.  MacRae stirred wakeful on the sun-hot deck, slushing it down with buckets of sea water to save his ice and fish.  He coiled ropes, made his vessel neat, and sat him down to think.  Squitty Cove always stirred him to introspection.  His mind leaped always to the manifold suggestions of any well-remembered place.  He could shut his eyes and see the old log house behind its leafy screen of alder and maple at the Cove’s head.  The rosebushes before it were laden with bloom now.  At his hand were the gray cliffs backed by grassy patches, running away inland to virgin forest.  He felt dispossessed of those noble acres.  He was always seeing them through his father’s eyes, feeling as Donald MacRae must have felt in those last, lonely years of which he had written in simple language that had wrung his son’s heart.

But it never occurred to Jack MacRae that his father, pouring out the tale of those troubled years, had bestowed upon him an equivocal heritage.

He slid overboard the small skiff the Blackbird carried and rowed ashore.  There were rowboat trollers on the beach asleep in their tents and rude lean-tos.  He walked over the low ridge behind which stood Peter Ferrara’s house.  It was hot, the wooded heights of the island shutting off the cool westerly.  On such a day Peter Ferrara should be dozing on his porch and Dolly perhaps mending stockings or sewing in a rocker beside him.

But the porch was bare.  As MacRae drew near the house a man came out the door and down the three low steps.  He was short and thick-set, young, quite fair, inclined already to floridness of skin.  MacRae knew him at once for Norman Gower.  He was a typical Gower,—­a second edition of his father, save that his face was less suggestive of power, less heavily marked with sullenness.

He glanced with blank indifference at Jack MacRae, passed within six feet and walked along the path which ran around the head of the Cove.  MacRae watched him.  He would cross between the boathouse and the roses in MacRae’s dooryard.  MacRae had an impulse to stride after him, to forbid harshly any such trespass on MacRae ground.  But he smiled at that childishness.  It was childish, MacRae knew.  But he felt that way about it, just as he often felt that he himself had a perfect right to range the whole end of Squitty, to tramp across greensward and through forest depths, despite Horace Gower’s legal title to the land.  MacRae was aware of this anomaly in his attitude, without troubling to analyze it.

He walked into old Peter’s house without announcement beyond his footsteps on the floor, as he had been accustomed to do as far back as he could remember.  Dolly was sitting beside a little table, her chin in her palms.  There was a droop to her body that disturbed MacRae.  She had sat for hours like that the night his father died.  And there was now on her face something of the same look of sad resignation and pity.  Her big, dark eyes were misty, troubled, when she lifted them to MacRae.