Poor Man's Rock

But his eyes did not linger there nor his thoughts upon shipwreck and sudden death. His gaze turned across the Gulf to a tongue of land outthrusting from the long purple reach of Vancouver Island. Behind that point lay the Morton estate, and beside the Morton boundaries, matching them mile for mile in wealth of virgin timber and fertile meadow, spread the Gower lands.

His face, streaked and blotched with drying bloodstains, scarred with a red gash that split his cheek from the hair above one ear to a corner of his mouth, hardened into ugly lines. His eyes burned again.

This happened many years ago, long before a harassed world had to reckon with bourgeois and Bolshevik, when profiteer and pacifist had not yet become words to fill the mouths of men, and not even the politicians had thought of saving the world for democracy. Yet men and women were strangely a