ed. "The
fishermen say so."

"If he doesn't in one way he will another," MacRae answered
indifferently. "But that doesn't help Steve. The boat doesn't matter.
One can build boats. You can't bring a man back to life when he's dead."

"If Steve could talk he'd say he didn't care," Dolly declared sadly.
"You know he wasn't getting much out of living, Jack. There was nothing
for him to look forward to but a few years of discomfort and
uncertainty. A man who has been strong and active rebels against dying
by inches. Steve told me--not so very long ago--that if something would
finish him off quickly he would be glad."

If that had been Steve's wish, MacRae thought, then fate had hearkened
to him. He knew it was true. He had lived at elbows with Steve all
summer. Steve never complained. He was made of different stuff. It was
only a gloomy consolation, after all, to think of Steve as being better
off. MacRae knew how men cling to life, even when it has lost all its
savor. There is that imperative will-to-live which refuses to be denied.

Dolly went away. After a time Wallis came over from the cottage at
Cradle Bay. He was a young and genial medico from Seattle, who had just
returned from service with the American forces overseas, and was
holidaying briefly before he took up private practice again. He had
very little more than a casual interest in MacRae, however, and he did
not stay long once he had satisfied himself that his patient had little
further need of professional services. And MacRae, who was weaker than
he expected to find himself, rested in his bed until late afternoon
brought bars of sunlight streaming through openings in the cloud bank
which still ran swift before the wind.

Then he rose, dressed, made his way laboriously and painfully down to
the Cove's edge and took a brief look at the hull of the _Blackbird_
sunk to her deck line, her rail and cabins broken and twisted. After
that he hailed a fisherman, engaged him to go across to Solomon River
and apprise the _Bluebird_. That accomplished he went back to the house.
Thereafter he spent days lying on his bed, resting in a big chair before
the fireplace while his wounds healed and his strength came back to him,
thinking, planning, chafing at inaction.

There was a perfunctory inquest, after which Steve's body went away to
Hidalgo Island to rest beside the bodies of other Ferraras in a plot of
ground their grandfather had taken for his own when British Colum