m a
course close inshore. By night even those who knew the place as they
knew the palm of their hand had to feel their way in. But once inside, a
man could lie down in his bunk and sleep soundly, though a southeaster
whistled and moaned, and the seas roared smoking into the narrow mouth.
No ripple of that troubled the inside of Squitty Cove. It was a finger
of the sea thrust straight into the land, a finger three hundred yards
long, forty yards wide, with an entrance so narrow that a man could
heave a sounding lead across it, and that entrance so masked by a rock
about the bigness of a six-room house that one holding the channel could
touch the rock with a pike pole as he passed in. There was a mud bottom,
twenty-foot depth at low tide, and a little stream of cold fresh water
brawling in at the head. A cliff walled it on the south. A low, grassy
hill dotted with solitary firs, red-barked arbutus, and clumps of wild
cherry formed its northern boundary. And all around the mouth, in every
nook and crevice, driftwood of every size and shape lay in great heaps,
cast high above tidewater by the big storms.

So Squitty had the three prime requisites for a harbor,--secure
anchorage, fresh water, and firewood. There was good fertile land, too,
behind the Cove,--low valleys that ran the length of the island. There
were settlers here and there, but these settlers were not the folk who
intermittently frequented Squitty Cove. The settlers stayed on their
land, battling with stumps, clearing away the ancient forest, tilling
the soil. Those to whom Squitty Cove gave soundest sleep and keenest joy
were tillers of the sea. Off Point Old a rock brown with seaweed, ringed
with a bed of kelp, lifted its ugly head now to the one good, blue-gray
eye of Jack MacRae, the same rock upon which Donald MacRae's sloop broke
her back before Jack MacRae was born. It was a sunken menace at any
stage of water, heartily cursed by the fishermen. In the years between,
the rock had acquired a name not written on the Admiralty charts. The
hydrographers would look puzzled and shake their heads if one asked
where in the Gulf waters lay Poor Man's Rock.

But Poor Man's Rock it is. Greek and Japanese, Spaniard and Italian,
American and Canadian--and there are many of each--who follow the
silver-sided salmon when they run in the Gulf of Georgia, these know
that Poor Man's Rock lies half a cable south southwest of Point Old on
Squitty Island. Most of them know,