clammy, cold, hushed, as if the god of storms were gathering his breath
for a great effort.

And Jack MacRae himself, when he topped the height which gave clear
vision for many miles of shore and sea, drew a deep breath and halted
for a long look at many familiar things.

He had been gone nearly four years. It seemed to him but yesterday that
he left. The picture was unchanged,--save for that white cottage in its
square of green. He stared at that with a doubtful expression, then his
uncovered eye came back to the long sweep of the Gulf, to the brown
cliffs spreading away in a ragged line along a kelp-strewn shore. He put
down the bag and seated himself on a mossy rock close by a stunted,
leaning fir and stared about him like a man who has come a great way to
see something and means to look his fill.




CHAPTER II

His Own Country


Squitty Island lies in the Gulf of Georgia midway between a mainland
made of mountains like the Alps, the Andes, and the Himalayas all
jumbled together and all rising sheer from the sea, and the low
delta-like shore of Vancouver Island. Southward from Squitty the Gulf
runs in a thirty-mile width for nearly a hundred miles to the San Juan
islands in American waters, beyond which opens the sheltered beauty of