“It is lonesome, yes,” read Anse’s journal. “But so is any wild place, and I have seen plenty of those. I cannot help but see how foolish I am to feel that this lonesome has anything behind it. A place is a place, no more than that. A man can do his work anywhere. But remembered when small, a time I was stealing apples and looked up to see a hairy head poked out of the bushes, old black hat, shag eyebrows and whiskers, little eyes, looking, not winking. It was only Old Ellick, he owned the orchard, a neighbor who never hurt anyone, nobody to be scared of. Yet, all of a sudden, what there was in the world to be afraid of, hidden but not seen in any dark woods or secret place, now was here. The old wild, the come-to-get-you. It is all damn foolishness to feel that a place can be your enemy. I made a bargain and I will keep it. But I do not believe that we will ever make a scratch on that island, and I told Robert so.”

“I thought I had,” MacKechnie went on saying. “But on that day as we were sailing home in the sloop, he looked back at the island, and said, ‘It’s a hell of a place, Robert, and we’ll never make a scratch on it.’ ”

MacKechnie, in the eighty-fifth year of his life, in the year 1908, from his bed pointed out how he had been right, Anse Gilman wrong.

“As for scratches,” said MacKechnie, “we made them.”

The enterprise, as MacKechnie said, in the beginning was “tairrific.” On his good days, when he felt like talking and could remember, he never tired of telling how they did, back there, when they built the quarry. If the place were an enemy, and there were times when it seemed to be, they fought it tooth and nail. Heavy equipment of all kinds, tools, wagons, forges, anvils, chains, had to be loaded aboard a vessel at a mainland wharf, sailed across, and somehow landed on the shore, from the anchorage out in the bay. The light stuff they handled in dories, and other small boats; for the heavy, they built timber rafts, loaded them deep, and hauled them ashore with cables.

It took a long time; they could work only on days when the wind did not blow, and those days were few.

“It was a devilish landing place,” MacKechnie said. “Boulders everywhere, even at high tide, to trip up a raft, and we waded to our shoulders in the cold water every time we brought one in.”

And Anse had written in his journal, “The damn southwest wind still blows. Today we drove the horses overboard from the deck of the vessel and made them swim ashore. Robert thinking that horses might go when boats could not. We lost three.”