He knew with disturbing certainty that without skilled treatment—­perhaps even in spite of that—­his father’s life was a matter of hours.  Again he and Dolly Ferrara tiptoed out to the room where the fire glowed on the hearth.  MacRae sat thinking.  Dusk was coming on, the long twilight shortened by the overcast sky.  MacRae glowered at the fire.  The girl watched him expectantly.

“I have an idea,” he said at last.  “It’s worth trying.”

He opened his bag and, taking out the wedge-shaped cap of the birdmen, set it on his head and went out.  He took the same path he had followed home.  On top of the cliff he stopped to look down on Squitty Cove.  In a camp or two ashore the supper fires of the rowboat trollers were burning.  Through the narrow entrance the gasboats were chugging in to anchorage, one close upon the heels of another.

MacRae considered the power trollers.  He shook his head.

“Too slow,” he muttered.  “Too small.  No place to lay him only a doghouse cabin and a fish hold.”

He strode away along the cliffs.  It was dark now.  But he had ranged all that end of Squitty in daylight and dark, in sun and storm, for years, and the old instinctive sense of direction, of location, had not deserted him.  In a little while he came out abreast of Cradle Bay.  The Gower house, all brightly gleaming windows, loomed near.  He struck down through the dead fern, over the unfenced lawn.

Halfway across that he stopped.  A piano broke out loudly.  Figures flittered by the windows, gliding, turning.  MacRae hesitated.  He had come reluctantly, driven by his father’s great need, uneasily conscious that Donald MacRae, had he been cognizant, would have forbidden harshly the request his son had come to make.  Jack MacRae had the feeling that his father would rather die than have him ask anything of Horace Gower.

He did not know why.  He had never been told why.  All he knew was that his father would have nothing to do with Gower, never mentioned the name voluntarily, let his catch of salmon rot on the beach before he would sell to a Gower cannery boat,—­and had enjoined upon his son the same aloofness from all things Gower.  Once, in answer to young Jack’s curious question, his natural “why,” Donald MacRae had said: 

“I knew the man long before you were born, Johnny.  I don’t like him.  I despise him.  Neither I nor any of mine shall ever truck and traffic with him and his.  When you are a man and can understand, I shall tell you more of this.”

But he had never told.  It had never been a mooted point.  Jack MacRae knew Horace Gower only as a short, stout, elderly man of wealth and consequence, a power in the salmon trade.  He knew a little more of the Gower clan now than he did before the war.  MacRae had gone overseas with the Seventh Battalion.  His company commander had been Horace Gower’s son.  Certain aspects of that young man had not heightened MacRae’s esteem for the Gower family.  Moreover, he resented this elaborate summer home of Gower’s standing on land he had always known to be theirs, the MacRaes’.  That puzzled him, as well as affronted his sense of ownership.