Poor Mans Rock | Page 7

nearly four years. It seemed to him but yesterday that
he left. The picture was unchanged,--save for that white cottage in its
square of green. He stared at that with a doubtful expression, then his
uncovered eye came back to the long sweep of the Gulf, to the brown
cliffs spreading away in a ragged line along a kelp-strewn shore. He put
down the bag and seated himself on a mossy rock close by a stunted,
leaning fir and stared about him like a man who has come a great way
to see something and means to look his fill.
CHAPTER II
His Own Country
Squitty Island lies in the Gulf of Georgia midway between a mainland
made of mountains like the Alps, the Andes, and the Himalayas all
jumbled together and all rising sheer from the sea, and the low
delta-like shore of Vancouver Island. Southward from Squitty the Gulf
runs in a thirty-mile width for nearly a hundred miles to the San Juan
islands in American waters, beyond which opens the sheltered beauty
of Puget Sound. Squitty is six miles wide and ten miles long, a blob of
granite covered with fir and cedar forest, with certain parklike patches
of open grassland on the southern end, and a hump of a mountain
lifting two thousand feet in its middle.
The southeastern end of Squitty--barring the tide rips off Cape
Mudge--is the dirtiest place in the Gulf for small craft in blowy weather.
The surges that heave up off a hundred miles of sea tortured by a
southeast gale break thunderously against Squitty's low cliffs. These
walls face the marching breakers with a grim, unchanging front. There
is nothing hospitable in this aspect of Squitty. It is an ugly shore to

have on the lee in a blow.
Yet it is not so forbidding as it seems. The prevailing summer winds on
the Gulf are westerly. Gales of uncommon fierceness roar out of the
northwest in fall and early winter. At such times the storms split on
Squitty Island, leaving a restful calm under those brown, kelp-fringed
cliffs. Many a small coaster has crept thankfully into that lee out of the
whitecapped turmoil on either side, to lie there through a night that was
wild outside, watching the Ballenas light twenty miles away on a pile
of bare rocks winking and blinking its warning to less fortunate craft.
Tugs, fishing boats, salmon trollers, beach-combing launches, all that
mosquito fleet which gets its bread upon the waters and learns bar,
shoal, reef, and anchorage thoroughly in the getting,--these knew that
besides the half-moon bight called Cradle Bay, upon which fronted
Horace Gower's summer home, there opened also a secure,
bottle-necked cove less than a mile northward from Point Old.
By day a stranger could only mark the entrance by eagle watch from a
course close inshore. By night even those who knew the place as they
knew the palm of their hand had to feel their way in. But once inside, a
man could lie down in his bunk and sleep soundly, though a southeaster
whistled and moaned, and the seas roared smoking into the narrow
mouth. No ripple of that troubled the inside of Squitty Cove. It was a
finger of the sea thrust straight into the land, a finger three hundred
yards long, forty yards wide, with an entrance so narrow that a man
could heave a sounding lead across it, and that entrance so masked by a
rock about the bigness of a six-room house that one holding the channel
could touch the rock with a pike pole as he passed in. There was a mud
bottom, twenty-foot depth at low tide, and a little stream of cold fresh
water brawling in at the head. A cliff walled it on the south. A low,
grassy hill dotted with solitary firs, red-barked arbutus, and clumps of
wild cherry formed its northern boundary. And all around the mouth, in
every nook and crevice, driftwood of every size and shape lay in great
heaps, cast high above tidewater by the big storms.
So Squitty had the three prime requisites for a harbor,--secure
anchorage, fresh water, and firewood. There was good fertile land, too,

behind the Cove,--low valleys that ran the length of the island. There
were settlers here and there, but these settlers were not the folk who
intermittently frequented Squitty Cove. The settlers stayed on their land,
battling with stumps, clearing away the ancient forest, tilling the soil.
Those to whom Squitty Cove gave soundest sleep and keenest joy were
tillers of the sea. Off Point Old a rock brown with seaweed, ringed with
a bed of kelp, lifted its ugly head now to the one good, blue-gray eye of
Jack MacRae, the same rock upon which Donald MacRae's sloop broke