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Poor Man's Rock By: Bertrand W. Sinclair (1881-1972) |
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BERTRAND W. SINCLAIR North of Fifty Three
Big Timber
Burned Bridges
Poor Man's Rock
POOR MAN'S ROCK BY BERTRAND W. SINCLAIR BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY Published September, 1920 THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, MASS., U.S.A. CONTENTS Prologue Long, Long Ago CHAPTER I. The House in Cradle Bay II. His Own Country III. The Flutter of Sable Wings IV. Inheritance V. From the Bottom Up VI. The Springboard VII. Sea Boots and Salmon VIII. Vested Rights IX. The Complexity of Simple Matters X. Thrust and Counterthrust XI. Peril of the Sea XII. Between Sun and Sun XIII. An Interlude XIV. The Swing of the Pendulum XV. Hearts are not Always Trumps XVI. En Famille XVII. Business as Usual XVIII. A Renewal of Hostilities XIX. Top Dog XX. The Dead and Dusty Past XXI. As it was in the Beginning POOR MAN'S ROCK PROLOGUE Long, Long Ago
The Gulf of Georgia spread away endlessly, an immense, empty stretch of
water bared to the hot eye of an August sun, its broad face only saved
from oily smoothness by half hearted flutterings of a westerly breeze.
Those faint airs blowing up along the Vancouver Island shore made
tentative efforts to fill and belly out strongly the mainsail and jib of
a small half decked sloop working out from the weather side of Sangster
Island and laying her snub nose straight for the mouth of the Fraser
River, some sixty sea miles east by south. In the stern sheets a young man stood, resting one hand on the tiller,
his navigating a sinecure, for the wind was barely enough to give him
steerageway. He was, one would say, about twenty five or six, fairly
tall, healthily tanned, with clear blue eyes having a touch of steely
gray in their blue depths, and he was unmistakably of that fair type
which runs to sandy hair and freckles. He was dressed in a light colored
shirt, blue serge trousers, canvas shoes; his shirt sleeves, rolled to
the elbows, bared flat, sinewy forearms. He turned his head to look back to where in the distance a white speck
showed far astern, and his eyes narrowed and clouded. But there was no
cloud in them when he turned again to his companion, a girl sitting on
a box just outside the radius of the tiller. She was an odd looking
figure to be sitting in the cockpit of a fishing boat, amid recent
traces of business with salmon, codfish, and the like. The heat was
putting a point on the smell of defunct fish. The dried scales of them
still clung to the small vessel's timbers. In keeping, the girl should
have been buxom, red handed, coarsely healthy. And she was anything but
that. No frail, delicate creature, mind you, but she did not belong in
a fishing boat. She looked the lady, carried herself like
one, patrician from the top of her russet crowned head to the tips of
her white kid slippers. Yet her eyes, when she lifted them to the man at
the tiller, glowed with something warm. She stood up and slipped a
silk draped arm through his. He smiled down at her, a tender smile
tempered with uneasiness, and then bent his head and kissed her. "Do you think they will overtake us, Donald?" she asked at length. "That depends on the wind," he answered. "If these light airs hold they
may overhaul us, because they can spread so much more cloth. But if
the westerly freshens and it nearly always does in the afternoon I can
outsail the Gull . I can drive this old tub full sail in a blow that
will make the Gull tie in her last reef." "I don't like it when it's rough," the girl said wistfully. "But I'll
pray for a blow this afternoon." If indeed she prayed and her attitude was scarcely prayerful, for it
consisted of sitting with one hand clasped tight in her lover's her
prayer fell dully on the ears of the wind god. The light airs fluttered
gently off the bluish haze of Vancouver Island, wavered across the
Gulf, kept the sloop moving, but no more. Sixty miles away the mouth of
the Fraser opened to them what security they desired. But behind them
power and authority crept up apace... Continue reading book >>
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Fiction |
Literature |
Romance |
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