It was all familiar to Jack MacRae. He knew every nook and cranny on Squitty Island, every phase and mood and color of the sea. It is a grim birthplace that leaves a man without some sentiment for the place where he was born. Point Old, Squitty Cove, Poor Man's Rock had been the boundaries of his world for a long time. In so far as he had ever played, he had played there.

He looked for another familiar figure or two, without noting them.

"The fish are biting fast for this time of year," he reflected. "It's a wonder dad and Peter Ferrara aren't out. And I never knew Bill Munro to miss anything like this."

He looked a little longer, over across the tip of Sangster Island two miles westward, with its Elephant's Head,--the extended trunk of which was a treacherous reef bared only at low tide. He looked at the Elephant's unwinking eye, which was a twenty-foot hole through a hump of sandstone, and smiled. He had fished for salmon along the kelp beds there and dug clams under the eye of the Elephant long, long ago. It did seem a long time ago that he had been a youngster in overalls, adventuring alone in a dugout about these bold headlands.

He rose at last. The November wind chilled him through the heavy mackinaw. He looked back at the Gower cottage, like a snowflake in a setting of emerald; he looked at the Gower yacht; and the puzzled frown returned to his face.

Then he picked up his bag and walked rapidly along the brow of the cliffs toward Squitty Cove.

CHAPTER III

The Flutter of Sable Wings

A path took form on the mossy rock as Jack MacRae strode on. He followed this over patches of gra.s.s, by lone firs and small thickets, until it brought him out on the rim of the Cove. He stood a second on the cliffy north wall to look down on the quiet harbor. It was bare of craft, save that upon the beach two or three rowboats lay hauled out. On the farther side a low, rambling house of logs showed behind a clump of firs. Smoke lifted from its stone chimney.

MacRae smiled reminiscently at this and moved on. His objective lay at the Cove's head, on the little creek which came whispering down from the high land behind. He gained this in another two hundred yards, coming to a square house built, like its neighbor, of stout logs with a high-pitched roof, a patch of ragged gra.s.s in front, and a picket-fenced area at the back in which stood apple trees and cherry and plum, gaunt-limbed trees all bare of leaf and fruit. Ivy wound up the corners of the house. St.u.r.dy rosebushes stood before it, and the dead vines of sweet peas bleached on their trellises.

It had the look of an old place--as age is reckoned in so new a country--old and bearing the marks of many years' labor bestowed to make it what it was. Even from a distance it bore a homelike air. MacRae's face lightened at the sight. His step quickened. He had come a long way to get home.

Across the front of the house extended a wide porch which gave a look at the Cove through a thin screen of maple and alder. From the gra.s.s-bordered walk of beach gravel half a dozen steps lifted to the floor level. As MacRae set foot on the lower step a girl came out on the porch.

MacRae stopped. The girl did not see him. Her eyes were fixed questioningly on the sea that stretched away beyond the narrow mouth of the Cove. As she looked she drew one hand wearily across her forehead, tucking back a vagrant strand of dusky hair. MacRae watched her a moment. The quick, pleased smile that leaped to his face faded to soberness.

"h.e.l.lo, Dolly," he said softly.

She started. Her dark eyes turned to him, and an inexpressible relief glowed in them. She held up one hand in a gesture that warned silence,--and by that time MacRae had come up the steps to her side and seized both her hands in his. She looked at him speechlessly, a curious pa.s.sivity in her att.i.tude. He saw that her eyes were wet.

"What's wrong, Dolly?" he asked. "Aren't you glad to see Johnny come marching home? Where's dad?"

"Glad?" she echoed. "I never was so glad to see any one in my life. Oh, Johnny MacRae, I wish you'd come sooner. Your father's a sick man. We've done our best, but I'm afraid it's not good enough."

"He's in bed, I suppose," said MacRae. "Well, I'll go in and see him.

Maybe it'll cheer the old boy up to see me back."

"He won't know you," the girl murmured. "You mustn't disturb him just now, anyway. He has fallen into a doze. When he comes out of that he'll likely be delirious."

"Good Lord," MacRae whispered, "as bad as that! What is it?"

"The flu," Dolly said quietly. "Everybody has been having it. Old Bill Munro died in his shack a week ago."

"Has dad had a doctor?"

The girl nodded.

"Harper from Nanaimo came day before yesterday. He left medicine and directions; he can't come again. He has more cases than he can handle over there."

They went through the front door into a big, rudely furnished room with a very old and worn rug on the floor, a few pieces of heavy furniture, and bare, uncurtained windows. A heap of wood blazed in an open cobblestone fireplace.

MacRae stopped short just within the threshold. Through a door slightly ajar came the sound of stertorous breathing, intermittent in its volume, now barely audible, again rising to a labored harshness. He listened, a look of dismayed concern gathering on his face. He had heard men in the last stages of exhaustion from wounds and disease breathe in that horribly distressed fashion.

He stood a while uncertainly. Then he laid off his mackinaw, walked softly to the bedroom door, looked in. After a minute of silent watching he drew back. The girl had seated herself in a chair. MacRae sat down facing her.

"I never saw dad so thin and old-looking," he muttered. "Why, his hair is nearly white. He's a wreck. How long has he been sick?"

"Four days," Dolly answered. "But he hasn't grown old and thin in four days, Jack. He's been going downhill for months. Too much work. Too much worry also, I think--out there around the Rock every morning at daylight, every evening till dark. It hasn't been a good season for the rowboats."

MacRae stirred uneasily in his chair. He didn't understand why his father should have to drudge in a trolling boat. They had always fished salmon, so far back as he could recall, but never of stark necessity. He nursed his chin in his hand and thought. Mostly he thought with a constricted feeling in his throat of how frail and old his father had grown, the slow-smiling, slow-speaking man who had been father and mother and chum to him since he was an urchin in knee breeches. He recalled him at their parting on a Vancouver railway platform,--tall and rugged, a lean, muscular, middle-aged man, bidding his son a restrained farewell with a longing look in his eyes. Now he was a wasted shadow.

Jack MacRae shivered. He seemed to hear the sable angel's wing-beats over the house.

He looked up at the girl at last.

"You're worn out, aren't you, Dolly?" he said. "Have you been caring for him alone?"

"Uncle Peter helped," she answered. "But I've stayed up and worried, and I am tired, of course. It isn't a very cheerful home-coming, is it, Jack? And he was so pleased when he got your cable from London. Poor old man!"

MacRae got up suddenly. But the clatter of his shoes on the floor recalled him to himself. He sat down again.

"I've got to do something," he a.s.serted.

"There's nothing you can do," Dolly Ferrara said wistfully. "He can't be moved. You can't get a doctor or a nurse. The country's full of people down with the flu. There's only one chance and I've taken that. I wrote a message to Doctor Laidlaw--you remember he used to come here every summer to fish--and Uncle Peter went across to Sechelt to wire it.

I think he'll come if he can, or send some one, don't you? They were such good friends."

"That was a good idea," MacRae nodded. "Laidlaw will certainly come if it's possible."

"And I can keep cool cloths on his head and feed him broth and give him the stuff Doctor Harper left. He said it depended mostly on his own resisting power. If he could throw it off he would. If not--"

She turned her palms out expressively.

"How did you come?" she asked presently.

"Across from Qualic.u.m in a fish carrier to Folly Bay. I borrowed a boat at the Bay and rowed up."

"You must be hungry," she said. "I'll get you something to eat."

"I don't feel much like eating,"--MacRae followed her into the kitchen--"but I can drink a cup of tea."

He sat on a corner of the kitchen table while she busied herself with the kettle and teapot, marveling that in four years everything should apparently remain the same and still suffer such grievous change. There was an air of forlornness about the house which hurt him. The place had run down, as the sands of his father's life were running down. Of the things unchanged the girl he watched was one. Yet as he looked with keener appraisal, he saw that Dolly Ferrara too had changed.

Her dusky cloud of hair was as of old; her wide, dark eyes still mirrored faithfully every shift of feeling, and her incomparable creamy skin was more beautiful than ever. Moving, she had lost none of her lithe grace. And though she had met him as if it had been only yesterday they parted, still there was a difference which somehow eluded him. He could feel it, but it was not to be defined. It struck him for the first time that many who had never seen a battlefield, never heard a screaming sh.e.l.l, nor shuddered at the agony of a dressing station, might still have suffered by and of and through the reactions of war.

They drank their tea and ate a slice of toast in silence. MacRae's comrades in France had called him "Silent" John, because of his lapses into concentrated thought, his habit of a close mouth when he was hurt or troubled or uncertain. One of the things for which he had liked Dolly Ferrara had been her possession of the same trait, uncommon in a girl.

She could sit on the cliffs or lie with him in a rowboat lifting and falling in the Gulf swell, staring at the sea and the sky and the wheeling gulls, dreaming and keeping her dreams shyly to herself,--as he did. They did not always need words for understanding. And so they did not talk now for the sake of talking, pour out words lest silence bring embarra.s.sment. Dolly sat resting her chin in one hand, looking at him impersonally, yet critically, he felt. He smoked a cigarette and held his peace until the labored breathing of the sick man changed to disjointed, muttering, incoherent fragments of speech.