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It was a fierce coast line, harsh, unyielding and honeycombed with every trap for destruction that the wit of Nature could conceive. Shoals and sunken rocks littered every inlet, and fierce, sweeping currents and cross-currents made the smiling waters a nightmare of chaos. Then, behind everything, lay those merciless reserve forces of sudden wind squalls which howled down the mountain slopes without warning, or reason, and blasted the coast line into a churning of fierce tempest.

Pitiless in its treachery, this long, tattered coast line was for the most part completely shunned by man. Yet here, well within the mouth of the Lias River, a white man was labouring at his craft, indifferent to the terror of his surroundings.

The man was sturdily built. He was broad and stocky and stood something less than six feet in height. For all the warming of the clear, spring day he was clad in the thick clothing with which the men of the North are loth to part until the summer heat makes it intolerable. He was a man of something over thirty, with a strong face that was clean-shaven, or was supposed to be, and with a pair of such pale blue eyes as to be devoid of all expression. They were curious eyes, curious in that they revealed not a glimmer of the mind behind them, curious in that their stony expression was unchanging under any and every emotion.