So Jack went back to Squitty and stayed in the old house, talked with the fishermen, spent a lot of his time with old Peter Ferrara and Dolly. Always he was casting about for a course of action which would give him scope for two things upon which his mind was set: to get the title to that six hundred acres revested in the MacRae name, and, in Jack's own words to Dolores Ferrara, to take a fall out of Horace Gower that would jar the bones of his ancestors.
With Christmas the Ferrara clan gathered at the Cove, all the stout and able company of Dolly Ferrara's menfolk. It had seemed to MacRae a curious thing that Dolly was the only woman of all the Ferraras. There had been mothers in the Ferrara family, or there could not have been so many capable uncles and cousins. But in MacRae's memory there had never been any mothers or sisters or daughters save Dolly.
There were nine male Ferraras when Jack MacRae went to France. Dolores' father was dead. Uncle Peter was a bachelor. He had two brothers, and each brother had bred three sons. Four of these sons had left their boats and gear to go overseas. Two of them would never come back. The other two were home,--one after a whiff of gas at Ypres, the other with a leg shorter by two inches than when he went away. These two made nothing of their disabilities, however; they were home and they were nearly as good as ever. That was enough for them. And with the younger boys and their fathers they came to old Peter's house for a week at Christmas, after an annual custom. These gatherings in the old days had always embraced Donald MacRae and his son. And his son was glad that it included him now. He felt a little less alone.
They were of the sea, these Ferraras, Castilian Spanish, tempered and diluted by three generations in North America. Their forebears might have sailed in caravels. They knew the fishing grounds of the British Columbia coast as a schoolboy knows his _a, b, c_'s. They would never get rich, but they were independent fishermen, making a good living. And they were as clannish as the Scotch. All of them had chipped in to send Dolly to school in Vancouver. Old Peter could never have done that, MacRae knew, on what he could make trolling around Poor Man's Rock. Peter had been active with gill net and seine when Jack MacRae was too young to take thought of the commercial end of salmon fishing. He was about sixty-five now, a lean, hardy old fellow, but he seldom went far from Squitty Cove. There was Steve and Frank and Vincent and Manuel of the younger generation, and Manuel and Peter and Joaquin of the elder. Those three had been contemporary with Donald MacRae. They esteemed old Donald. Jack heard many things about his father's early days on the Gulf that were new to him, that made his blood tingle and made him wish he had lived then too. Thirty years back the Gulf of Georgia was no place for any but two-handed men.