dozen steam-schooners and sixteen big wind-jammers; he owned a town
which he had called Port Agnew, and he had married and been blessed
with children. And because his ambition no longer demanded it, he was
no longer a miser.

[Illustration: HECTOR MCKAYE WAS BRED OF AN ACQUISITIVE RACE.]

In a word, he was a happy man, and in affectionate pride and as a
tribute to his might, his name and an occasional forget-me-not of
speech which clung to his tongue, heritage of his Scotch forebears,
his people called him "The Laird of Tyee." Singularly enough, his
character fitted this cognomen rather well. Reserved, proud,
independent, and sensitive, thinking straight and talking straight, a
man of brusque yet tender sentiment which was wont to manifest itself
unexpectedly, it had been said of him that in a company of a hundred
of his mental, physical, and financial peers, he would have stood
forth preeminently and distinctively, like a lone tree on a hill.

Although The Laird loved his town of Port Agnew, because he had
created it, he had not, nevertheless, resided in it for some years
prior to the period at which this chronicle begins. At the very apex
of the headland that shelters the Bight of Tyee, in a cuplike
depression several acres in extent, on the northern side and ideally
situated two hundred feet below the crest, thus permitting the howling
southeasters to blow over it, Hector McKaye, in the fulness of time,
had built for himself a not very large two-story house of white stone
native to the locality. This house, in the center of beautiful and
well-kept grounds, was designed in the shape of a letter T, with the
combination living-room and library forming the entire leg of the T
and enclosed on all three sides by heavy plate-glass French windows.