e's chief expression.

The _Blackbird_ went her rounds. At noon the next day she met Vincent
Ferrara with her sister ship, and the two boats made one load for the
_Blackbird_. She headed south. With high noon, too, came the summer
westerly, screeching and whistling and lashing the Gulf to a brief fury.

It was the regular summer wind, a yachtsman's gale. Four days out of six
its cycle ran the same, a breeze rising at ten o'clock, stiffening to a
healthy blow, a mere sigh at sundown. Midnight would find the sea smooth
as a mirror, the heaving swell killed by changing tides.

So the _Blackbird_ ran down Squitty, rolling and yawing through a
following sea, and turned into Squitty Cove to rest till night and calm
settled on the Gulf.

When her mudhook was down in that peaceful nook, Steve Ferrara turned
into his bunk to get a few hours' sleep against the long night watch.
MacRae stirred wakeful on the sun-hot deck, slushing it down with
buckets of sea water to save his ice and fish. He coiled ropes, made his
vessel neat, and sat him down to think. Squitty Cove always stirred him
to introspection. His mind leaped always to the manifold suggestions of
any well-remembered place. He could shut his eyes and see the old log
house behind its leafy screen of alder and maple at the Cove's head. The
rosebushes before it were laden with bloom now. At his hand were the
gray cliffs backed by grassy patches, running away inland to virgin
forest. He felt dispossessed of those noble acres. He was always seeing
them through his father's eyes, feeling as Donald MacRae must have felt
in those last, lonely years of which he had written in simple language
that had wrung his son's heart.

But it never occurred to Jack MacRae that his father, pouring out the
tale of those troubled years, had bestowed upon him an equivocal
heritage.

He slid overboard the small skiff the _Blackbird_ carried and rowed
ashore. There were rowboat trollers on the beach asleep in their tents
and rude lean-tos. He walked over the low ridge behind which stood Peter
Ferrara's house. It was hot, the wooded heights of the island shutting
off the cool westerly. On such a day Peter Ferrara should be dozing on
his porch and Dolly perhaps mending stockings or sewing in a rocker
beside him.

But the porch was bare. As MacRae drew near the house a man came out the
door and down the three low steps. He was short and thick-set, young,
quite fair, inclined already to floridn