“Why don’t you go to the rescue?” MacRae had suggested, with an irony that went wide of the mark.

Stubby looked reflectively at his crippled arm.

“Last summer I would have,” he said.  “But she couldn’t see me with a microscope.  And I’ve found a girl who seems to think a winged duck is worth while.”

“You’ll be able to get hold of that ranch of yours again, probably,” Stubby had also said.  “The chances are old H.A. will raise what cash he can and try to make a fresh start.  It seems there has been friction in the family, and his wife refused to come through with any of her available cash.  Seems kind of a complicated hole he got into.  He’s cleaned, anyway.  Robbin-Steele got all his cannery tenders and took over several thousand cases of salmon.  I hear he still has a few debts to be settled when the cannery is sold.  Why don’t you figure a way of getting hold of that cannery, Jack?”

“I’m no cannery man,” MacRae replied.  “Why don’t you?  I thought you made him an offer.”

“I withdrew it,” Stubby said.  “I have my hands full without that.  You’ve knocked about a hundred per cent off its value anyway.”

“If I can get my father’s land back I’ll be satisfied,” MacRae had said.

He was thinking about that now.  He had taken the first steps toward that end, which a year ago had seemed misty and rather hopeless.  Gower rich, impregnable, would hold that land for his own pleasure and satisfaction.  Beaten in the commercial scramble he might be forced to let it go.  And MacRae was ready to pay any price in reason to get it back.  That seemed a debt he owed old Donald MacRae, apart from his own craving to sometime carry out plans they had made together long before he went away to France.  The lives of some men are rooted in the soil where they were born, where they grow to manhood.  Jack MacRae was of that type.  He loved the sea in all its moods and colors, its quiet calm and wildest storms.  But the sea was only his second love.  He was a landsman at heart.  All seamen are.  They come ashore when they are old and feeble, to give their bodies at last to the earth.  MacRae loved the sea, but he loved better to stand on the slopes running back from Squitty’s cliffs, to look at those green meadows and bits of virgin forest and think that it would all be his again, to have and to hold.

So he had set a firm in Vancouver the task of approaching Gower, to sound him, to see if he would sell, while he kept in the background.  He believed that it was necessary for him to remain in the background.  He believed that Gower would never willingly relinquish that land into his hands.