But MacRae soon had enough of that and came back to Squitty, to his fireplace and his books.  He had been accustomed to enjoy the winters, the clear crisp mornings that varied weeks of drenching rain which washed the land clean; to prowl about in the woods with a gun when he needed meat; to bask before a bed of coals in the fireplace through long evenings when the wind howled and the rain droned on the roof and the sea snored along the rocky beaches.  That had been in days before he learned the weight of loneliness, when his father had been there to sit quietly beside the fire smoking a pipe, when Dolly Ferrara ran wild in the woods with him or they rode for pure sport the tumbling seas in a dugout canoe.

Now winter was a dull inaction, a period of discontent, in which thought gnawed at him like an ingrowing toenail.  Everything seemed out of joint.  He found himself feverishly anxious for spring, for the stress and strain of another tilt with Folly Bay.  Sometimes he asked himself where he would come out, even if he won all along the line, if he made money, gained power, beat Gower ultimately to his knees, got back his land.  He did not try to peer too earnestly into the future.  It seemed a little misty.  He was too much concerned with the immediate present, looming big with possibilities of good or evil for himself.  Things did not seem quite so simple as at first.  A great many complications, wholly unforeseen, had arisen since he came back from France.  But he was committed to certain undertakings from which he neither wished nor intended to turn aside,—­not so long as he had the will to choose.

Christmas came again, and with it the gathering of the Ferraras for their annual reunion,—­Old Manuel and Joaquin, young Manuel and Ambrose and Vincent.  Steve they could speak of now quite casually.  He had died in his sea boots like many another Ferrara.  It was a pity, of course, but it was the chance of his calling.  And the gathering was stronger in numbers, even with Steve gone.  Ambrose had taken himself a wife, a merry round-cheeked girl whose people were coaxing Ambrose to quit the sea for a more profitable undertaking in timber.  And also Norman Gower was there.

MacRae did not quite know how to take that young man.  He had had stray contacts with Norman during the last few weeks.  For a rich man’s son he was not running true to form.  He and Long Tom Spence had struck up a partnership in a group of mineral claims on the Knob, that conical mountain which lifted like one of the pyramids out of the middle of Squitty Island.  There had been much talk of those claims.  Years ago Bill Munro—­he who died of the flu in his cabin beside the Cove—­had staked those claims.  Munro was a young man then, a prospector.  He had inveigled other men to share his hopes and labors, to grubstake him while he drove the tunnel that was to cut the vein.  MacRae’s father had taken a hand in this.  So had Peter Ferrara.  But these informal partnerships had always lapsed.  Old Bill Munro’s prospects had never got beyond the purely prospective stage.  The copper was there, ample traces of gold and silver.  But he never developed a showing big enough to lure capital.  When Munro died the claims had been long abandoned.