The Project Gutenberg EBook of Poor Man's Rock, by Bertrand W. Sinclair

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

Title: Poor Man's Rock

Author: Bertrand W. Sinclair

Illustrator: Frank Tenney Johnson

Release Date: August 17, 2005 [EBook #16541]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POOR MAN'S ROCK ***

Produced by Suzanne Shell, Paul Ereaut and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

Novels by:

BERTRAND W. SINCLAIR

North of Fifty-Three
Big Timber
Burned Bridges
Poor Man's Rock

POOR MAN'S ROCK

BY

BERTRAND W. SINCLAIR

BOSTON

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY

Published September, 1920

THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, MASS., U.S.A.

CONTENTS

Prologue--Long, Long Ago

CHAPTER

I. The House in Cradle Bay

II. His Own Country

III. The Flutter of Sable Wings

IV. Inheritance

V. From the Bottom Up

VI. The Springboard

VII. Sea Boots and Salmon

VIII. Vested Rights

IX. The Complexity of Simple Matters

X. Thrust and Counterthrust

XI. Peril of the Sea

XII. Between Sun and Sun

XIII. An Interlude

XIV. The Swing of the Pendulum

XV. Hearts are not Always Trumps

XVI. En Famille

XVII. Business as Usual

XVIII. A Renewal of Hostilities

XIX. Top Dog

XX. The Dead and Dusty Past

XXI. As it was in the Beginning

POOR MAN'S ROCK

PROLOGUE

Long, Long Ago

The Gulf of Georgia spread away endlessly, an immense, empty stretch of
water bared to the hot eye of an August sun, its broad face only saved
from oily smoothness by half-hearted flutterings of a westerly breeze.
Those faint airs blowing up along the Vancouver Island shore made
tentative efforts to fill and belly out strongly the mainsail and jib of
a small half-decked sloop working out from the weather side of Sangster
Island and laying her snub nose straight for the mouth of the Fraser
River, some sixty sea-miles east by south.

In the stern sheets a young man stood, resting one hand on the tiller,
his navigating a sinecure, for the wind was barely enough to give him
steerageway. He was, one would say, about twenty-five or six, fairly
tall, healthily tanned, with clear bl