at thicket, an old
game trail widened by men's feet, that ran along the seaward slope to
Cradle Bay. He went up now to this path. His eye, used to the practice
of woodcraft, easily picked up tiny heel marks, toe prints, read their
message mechanically. Betty had been running. She had gone home.

He went back to the beach. The rowboat and the rising tide caught his
attention. He hauled the boat up on the driftwood so that it should not
float away. Then he busied himself on the deer's legs with a knife for a
minute and shouldered the carcass.

It was a mile and a half across country to the head of Squitty Cove. He
had intended to hang his deer in a tree by the beach and come for it
later with a boat. Now he took up this hundred-pound burden for the
long carry over steep hills and through brushy hollows in the spirit of
the medieval flagellantes, mortifying his flesh for the ease of his
soul.

An hour or so later he came out on a knoll over-looking all the
southeastern face of Squitty. Below, the wind-harassed Gulf spread its
ruffled surface. He looked down on the cliffs and the Cove and Cradle
Bay. He could see Gower's cottage white among the green, one chimney
spitting blue smoke that the wind carried away in a wispy banner. He
could see a green patch behind his own house with the white headboard
that marked his father's grave. He could see Poor Man's Rock bare its
kelp-grown head between seas, and on the point above the Rock a solitary
figure, squat and brown, that he knew must be Horace Gower.

MacRae laid down his pack to rest his aching shoulders. But there was no
resting the ache in his heart. Nor was it restful to gaze upon any of
these things within the span of his eye. He was reminded of too much
which it was not good to remember. As he sat staring down on the distant
Rock and a troubled sea with an intolerable heaviness in his breast, he
recalled that so must his father have looked down on Poor Man's Rock in
much the same anguished spirit long ago. And Jack MacRae's mind reacted
morbidly to the suggestion, the parallel. His eyes turned with
smoldering fire to the stumpy figure on the tip of Point Old.

"I'll pay it all back yet," he gritted. "Betty or no Betty, I'll make
him wish he'd kept his hands off the MacRaes."

* * * * *

About the time Jack MacRae with his burden of venison drew near his own
dooryard, Betty Gower came out upon the winter-sodden lawn before their
cot