"I wonder if they've come to hold out the olive branch to an erring daughter?" Isabel said lightly. "Dad might--possibly. Still, I don't think he'd care to trespass on your bailiwick, Rod, even for that." "What has very likely happened," Rod shrewdly surmised, "is that she's on her way somewhere north and has simply taken shelter on account of the fog. This passage is dangerous in thick weather." He sauntered away to the workings after a little. The _Kowloon_ was of no interest to him, save as a reminder of old days. At the inner end of the bay already a widening field of stumps lifted flat heads among a litter of discarded tops and broken boughs over many acres. With tools and machinery his loggers were eating into the heart of that ancient forest as a mouse gnaws into a slice of cheese. The fog lifted and closed intermittently. Rod came back in the course of an hour to find a stout figure with a cigar jutting from its teeth standing in the edge of the logging watching the high-lead donkey spit smoke and steam and shudder under enormous strains. John P. Wall greeted him impassively. His small gray eyes met Rod's for a second, wandered off among the stumps, the dimly seen men, the black iron monsters huffing and puffing, the reddish-brown logs floating by hundreds in the bay, swept over the unkept grounds rank with grass, the gray stone house casting a great shadow, and came back to Rod. "Damn shame to do this," Wall flirted one hand toward the untidy logged-off ground. Rod shrugged his shoulders. "I'll give you two hundred thousand for Dent Island just as it stands," Wall offered abruptly. "Take your outfit and go log somewhere else. Two hundred thousand cash." Rod looked at him. A hundred and fifty thousand would shift his last burden. That was the maximum he could realize from his timber, if he sheared Dent Island as a farmer shears his sheep's fleece in the spring. And with the forest stripped, Dent Island had no money value. It would consist only of an old stone house standing gaunt amid a few acres of grass, its background a stony stump-littered waste. Whatever associations Hawk's Nest had for him and his could be less than nothing to John P. Wall. What stirred the man? Had his iron bowels been moved to compassion? Was he obliquely trying to make amends? Or did he think that by purchase he could put on the intangible mantle the Norquays had woven about themselves in five generations? Rod smiled wanly. "Why should you wish to buy Hawk's Nest at more than its market value? Does your conscience hurt?" "Conscience?" A flicker of expression crossed Wall's heavy face. "No. Don't use it in my business. Took a notion to the place. Always did like it. That's all. You're destroying it."