And if MacRae needed other evidence concerning Gower, he had it daily before his eyes.  To labor at the oars, to troll early and late in drizzling rain or scorching sunshine, a man only does that because he must.  MacRae’s father had done it.  As a matter of course, without complaint, with unprotesting patience.

So did Gower.  That did not fit Jack MacRae’s conception of the man.  If he had not known Gower he would have set him down as a fat, good-natured, kindly man with an infinite capacity for hard, disagreeable work.

He never attempted to talk to MacRae.  He spoke now and then.  But there was no hint of rancor in his silences.  It was simply as if he understood that MacRae did not wish to talk to him, and that he conceded this to be a proper attitude.  He talked with the fishermen.  He joked with them.  If one slammed out at him now and then with a touch of the old resentment against Folly Bay he laughed as if he understood and bore no malice.  He baffled MacRae.  How could this man who had walked on fishermen’s faces for twenty years, seeking and exacting always his own advantage, playing the game under harsh rules of his own devising which had enabled him to win—­until this last time—­how could he see the last bit of prestige wrested from him and still be cheerful?  How could he earn his daily bread in the literal sweat of his brow, endure blistered hands and sore muscles and the sting of slime-poison in fingers cut by hooks and traces, with less outward protest than men who had never known anything else?

MacRae could find no answer to that.  He could only wonder.  He only knew that some shift of chance had helped him to put Gower where Gower had put his father.  And there was no satisfaction in the achievement, no sense of victory.  He looked at the man and felt sorry for him, and was uncomfortably aware that Gower, taking salmon for his living with other poor men around Poor Man’s Rock, was in no need of pity.  This podgy man with the bright blue eyes and heavy jaw, who had been Donald MacRae’s jealous Nemesis, had lost everything that was supposed to make life worth living to men of his type.  And he did not seem to care.  He seemed quite content to smoke a pipe and troll for salmon.  He seemed to be a stranger to suffering.  He did not even seem to be aware of discomfort, or of loss.

MacRae had wanted to make him suffer.  He had imagined that poverty and hard, dirty work would be the fittest requital he could bestow.  If Jack MacRae had been gifted with omnipotence when he read that penned history of his father’s life, he would have devised no fitter punishment, no more fitting vengeance for Gower than that he should lose his fortune and his prestige and spend his last years getting his bread upon the waters by Poor Man’s Rock in sun and wind and blowy weather.

And MacRae was conscious that if there were any suffering involved in this matter now, it rested upon him, not upon Gower.  Most men past middle age, who have drunk deeply the pleasant wine of material success, shrink from the gaunt specter of poverty.  They have shot their bolt.  They cannot stand up to hard work.  They cannot endure privation.  They lose heart.  They go about seeking sympathy, railing against the fate.  They lie down and the world walks unheeding over their prone bodies.