He knew a little about every one he met that evening, for in Vancouver as in any other community which has developed a social life beyond the purely primitive stages of association, people gravitate into sets and cliques.  They lived in good homes, they had servants, they week-ended here and there.  Of the dozen or more young men and women present, only himself and Stubby Abbott made any pretense at work.

Yet somebody paid for all they had and did.  Men in offices, in shops, in fishing boats and mines and logging camps worked and sweated to pay for all this well-being in which they could have no part.  MacRae even suspected that a great many men had died across the sea that this sort of thing should remain the inviolate privilege of just such people as these.  It was not an inspiring conclusion.

He smiled to himself.  How they would stare if he should voice these stray thoughts in plain English.  They would cry out that he was a Bolshevik.  Absolutely!  He wondered why he should think such things.  He wasn’t disgruntled.  He wanted a great many things which these young people of his own age had gotten from fairy godmothers,—­in the shape of pioneer parents who had skimmed the cream off the resources of a developing frontier and handed it on to their children, and who themselves so frequently kept in the background, a little in awe of their gilded offspring.  MacRae meant to beat the game as it was being played.  He felt that he was beating it.  But nothing would be handed him on a silver salver.  Fortune would not be bestowed upon him in any easy, soft-handed fashion.  He would have to render an equivalent for what he got.  He wondered if the security of success so gained would have any greater value for him than it would have for those who took their blessings so lightly.

This kink of analytical reasoning was new to MacRae, and it kept him from entering whole-heartedly into the joyous frivolity which functioned in the Abbott home that evening.  He had never found himself in that critical mood before.  He did not want to prattle nonsense.  He did not want to think, and he could not help thinking.  He had a curious sense of detachment from what was going on, even while he was a part of it.  So he did not linger late.

The Blackbird had discharged at Crow Harbor late in the afternoon.  She lay now at a Vancouver slip.  By eleven o’clock he was aboard in his bunk, still thinking when he should have been asleep, staring wide-eyed at dim deck beams, his mind flitting restlessly from one thing to another.  Steve Ferrara lay in the opposite bunk, wheezing his breath in and out of lungs seared by poison gas in Flanders.  Smells of seaweed and tide-flat wafted in through open hatch and portholes.  A full moon thrust silver fingers through deck openings.  Gradually the softened medley of harbor noises lulled MacRae into a dreamless sleep.  He only wakened at the clank of the engine and the shudder of the Blackbird’s timbers as Steve backed her out of her berth in the first faint gleam of dawn.