It took nearly as much courage and endurance to work as it had taken to fight; indeed it took rather more, at times, to keep on working. Theoretically he should not lose caste. Yet MacRae knew he would,—unless he made a barrel of money. There had been stray straws in the past month. There were, it seemed, very nice people who could not quite understand why an officer and a gentleman should do work that wasn't,—well, not even clean. Not clean in the purely objective, physical sense, like banking or brokerage, or teaching, or any of those semi-genteel occupations which permit people to make a living without straining their backs or soiling their hands. He wasn't even sure that Stubby Abbott—MacRae was ashamed of his cynicism when he got that far. Stubby was a real man. Even if he needed a man or a man's activities in his business Stubby wouldn't cultivate that man socially merely because he needed his producing capacity.

The solace for long hours and aching flesh and sleep-weary eyes was a glimpse of concrete reward,—money which meant power, power to repay a debt, opportunity to repay an ancient score. It seemed to Jack MacRae that his personal honor was involved in getting back all that broad sweep of land which his father had claimed from the wilderness, that he must exact an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. That was the why of his unceasing energy, his uncomplaining endurance of long hours in sea boots, the impatient facing of storms that threatened to delay. Man strives under the spur of a vision, a deep longing, an imperative squaring of needs with desires. MacRae moved under the whip of all three.

He was quite sanguine that he would succeed in this undertaking. But he had not looked much beyond the first line of trenches which he planned to storm. They did not seem to him particularly formidable. The Scotch had been credited with uncanny knowledge of the future. Jack MacRae, however, though his Highland blood ran undiluted, had no such gift of prescience. He did not know that the highway of modern industry is strewn with the casualties of commercial warfare.

CHAPTER VIII

Vested Rights

Vested Rights

A small balcony over the porch of Gower's summer cottage commanded a wide sweep of the Gulf south and east. That was one reason he had built there. He liked to overlook the sea, the waters out of which he had taken a fortune, the highway of his collecting boats. He had to keep in touch with the Folly Bay cannery while the rush of the pack was on. 

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