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 fro