There were two rowboats trolling outside the heavy backwash from the cliffs.  MacRae knew them both.  Peter Ferrara was in one, Long Tom Spence in the other.  They did not ride those gray-green ridges for pleasure, nor drop sidling into those deep watery hollows for joy of motion.  They were out for fish, which meant to them food and clothing.  That was their work.

They were the only fisher folk abroad that morning.  The gasboat men had flitted to more sheltered grounds.  MacRae watched these two lift and fall in the marching swells.  It was cold.  Winter sharpened his teeth already.  The rowers bent to their oars, tossing and lurching.  MacRae reflected upon their industry.  In France he had eaten canned salmon bearing the Folly Bay label, salmon that might have been taken here by the Rock, perhaps by the hands of these very men, by his own father.  Still, that was unlikely.  Donald MacRae had never sold a fish to a Gower collector.  Nor would he himself, young MacRae swore under his breath, looking sullenly down upon the Rock.

Day after day, month after month, his father had tugged at the oars, hauled on the line, rowing around and around Poor Man’s Rock, skirting the kelp at the cliff’s foot, keeping body and soul together with unremitting labor in sun and wind and rain, trying to live and save that little heritage of land for his son.

Jack MacRae sat down on a rock beside a bush and thought about this sadly.  He could have saved his father much if he had known.  He could have assigned his pay.  There was a government allowance.  He could have invoked the War Relief Act against foreclosure.  Between them they could have managed.  But he understood quite clearly why his father made no mention of his difficulties.  He would have done the same under the same circumstances himself, played the game to its bitter end without a cry.

But Donald MacRae had made a long, hard fight only to lose in the end, and his son, with full knowledge of the loneliness and discouragement and final hopelessness that had been his father’s lot, was passing slowly from sadness to a cumulative anger.  That cottage amid its green grounds bright in a patch of sunshine did not help to soften him.  It stood on land reclaimed from the forest by his father’s labor.  It should have belonged to him, and it had passed into hands that already grasped too much.  For thirty years Gower had made silent war on Donald MacRae because of a woman.  It seemed incredible that a grudge born of jealousy should run so deep, endure so long.  But there were the facts.  Jack MacRae accepted them; he could not do otherwise.  He came of a breed which has handed its feuds from generation to generation, interpreting literally the code of an eye for an eye.

So that as he sat there brooding, it was perhaps a little unfortunate that the daughter of a man whom he was beginning to regard as a forthright enemy should have chosen to come to him, tripping soundlessly over the moss.