Thompson had seen these yards in the distance.  He read newspapers and he knew that local shipbuilding was playing the dual purpose of confounding the enemy and adding a huge pay-roll to Vancouver’s other material advantages.  Both of which were highly desirable.

But few details of this came personally to his attention until an evening when he happened to foregather with Tommy Ashe and two or three others at Carr’s home—­upon one of those rare evenings when Sophie was free of her self-imposed duties and in a mood to play the hostess.

They had dined, and were gathered upon a wide verandah watching the sun sink behind the rampart of Vancouver Island in a futurist riot of yellow and red that died at last to an afterglow which lingered on the mountain tops like a benediction.  A bit of the Gulf opened to them, steel-gray, mirror-smooth, more like a placid, hill-ringed lake than the troubled sea.

But there was more in the eye’s cast than beauty of sea and sky and setting sun.  From their seats they could look down on the curious jumble of long sheds and giant scaffolding that was the great Coughlan steel shipyard in False Creek.  Farther distant, on the North Shore, there was the yellowish smudge of what a keen vision discerned to be six wooden schooners in a row, sister ships in varying stages of construction.

Some one said something about wooden shipbuilding.

“There’s another big yard starting on the North Shore,” Sophie said.  “One of our committee was telling me to-day.  Her husband has something to do with it.”

“Yes.  I can verify that,” Tommy Ashe smiled.  “That’s my contribution—­the Vancouver Construction Company.  I organized it.  We have contracted to supply the Imperial Munitions Board with ten auxiliary schooners, three thousand tons burden each.”

The fourth man of the party, the lean, suave, enterprising head of a local trust company, nodded approval, eyeing Tommy with new interest.

“Good business,” he commented.  “We’ve got to beat those U-boats.”

“Yes,” Tommy agreed, “and until the Admiralty devises some effectual method of coping with them, the only way we can beat the subs is to build ships faster than they can sink them.  It’s quite some undertaking, but it has to be done.  If we fail to keep supplies pouring into England and France.  Well—­”

He spread his hands in an expressive gesture.  Tommy was that type of Englishman in which rugged health and some generations of breeding and education have combined to produce what Europe calls a “gentleman.”  He was above middle height, very stoutly and squarely built, ruddy faced—­the sort of man one may safely prophesy will acquire a paunch and double chin with middle age.  But Tommy was young and vigorous yet.  He looked very capable, almost aggressive, as he sat there speaking with the surety of patriotic conviction.