ughing. Then the reaction came
and the sick man slept,--not a healthy, restful sleep; it was more like
the dying stupor of exhaustion. Young MacRae knew that.

He knew with disturbing certainty that without skilled
treatment--perhaps even in spite of that--his father's life was a matter
of hours. Again he and Dolly Ferrara tiptoed out to the room where the
fire glowed on the hearth. MacRae sat thinking. Dusk was coming on, the
long twilight shortened by the overcast sky. MacRae glowered at the
fire. The girl watched him expectantly.

"I have an idea," he said at last. "It's worth trying."

He opened his bag and, taking out the wedge-shaped cap of the birdmen,
set it on his head and went out. He took the same path he had followed
home. On top of the cliff he stopped to look down on Squitty Cove. In a
camp or two ashore the supper fires of the rowboat trollers were
burning. Through the narrow entrance the gasboats were chugging in to
anchorage, one close upon the heels of another.

MacRae considered the power trollers. He shook his head.

"Too slow," he muttered. "Too small. No place to lay him only a doghouse
cabin and a fish hold."

He strode away along the cliffs. It was dark now. But he had ranged all
that end of Squitty in daylight and dark, in sun and storm, for years,
and the old instinctive sense of direction, of location, had not
deserted him. In a little while he came out abreast of Cradle Bay. The
Gower house, all brightly gleaming windows, loomed near. He struck down
through the dead fern, over the unfenced lawn.

Halfway across that he stopped. A piano broke out loudly. Figures
flittered by the windows, gliding, turning. MacRae hesitated. He had
come reluctantly, driven by his father's great need, uneasily conscious
that Donald MacRae, had he been cognizant, would have forbidden harshly
the request his son had come to make. Jack MacRae had the feeling that
his father would rather die than have him ask anything of Horace Gower.

He did not know why. He had never been told why. All he knew was that
his father would have nothing to do with Gower, never mentioned the name
voluntarily, let his catch of salmon rot on the beach before he would
sell to a Gower cannery boat,--and had enjoined upon his son the same
aloofness from all things Gower. Once, in answer to young Jack's curious
question, his natural "why," Donald MacRae had said:

"I knew the man long before you were born, Johnny. I don't like him. I