“ ‘And what do you plan to build a causeway out of?’ he said, and that was unreasonable, because he knew as well as I did, having seen it, that there was a part of the hill which could be blasted away, an overhang which would fall. I didna trouble to explain it to him, a child could have seen it. So I said in short words, as though to a child, ‘Yon hill is not so steep but you could ease loaded flatcars down with winches and cables. They would roll of their own weight to the shore. You’d not need any power, even, only iron rails for the cars to roll on, and cables to ease them down.’

“ ‘Why bother to ease them down,’ Anse says. ‘Take out the chocks and let them roll. They might travel fast enough to jump the gap between the shore and a vessel’s hold out in the bay. Because that’s the only living God’s way you’d ever get a vessel loaded here. Or set your granite afloat and a man with a crowbar on each block to paddle it down to Boston. There’s no harbor here. How would you load a vessel? Or have you got that figured out, too?’

“‘I have,’ I said. ‘In Scotland, on a difficult shore, we build a breakwater.’

“‘Build a causeway, build a breakwater!’ he says. ‘There are dozens of places on the mainland where we wouldn’t need to do either. Are you crazy, man?’

“So then I tried to tell him a little of what I had in mind. I did not come from Scotland, I said, to work for other men, in places they have already interfered with and chumbled over. I could have done that at home. But nobody had touched this island, and I had it in mind that we could build something lasting here on good foundations.

“He said, ‘To hell with it, Robert! I have it in mind to start a stone quarry, not a kingdom. You’ve got bees in your bonnet. Go ahead, if you want to, but count me out,’ and he started down the shore for the punt.

“It was then that I began taking off my jacket.

“I said, ‘I won’t quit the partnership, Anse, over this bee I’ve got in my bonnet, but I’ll fight you for it; win, we stay, lose, we go elsewhere,’ and I let him have a backhander, and we went to it, there on the shore.