Long Tom Spence had suddenly relocated them.  Some working agreement had included Uncle Peter and young Gower.  Long Tom went about hinting mysteriously of fortunes.  Peter Ferrara even admitted that there was a good showing.  Norman had been there for weeks, living with Spence in a shack, sweating day after day in the tunnel.  They were all beginning to speak of it as “the mine.”

Norman had rid himself of that grouchy frown.  He was always singing or whistling or laughing.  His fair, rather florid face glowed with a perpetual good nature.  He treated MacRae to the same cheerful, careless air that he had for everything and everybody.  And when he was about Uncle Peter’s house at the Cove he monopolized Dolly, an attitude which Dolly herself as well as her uncle seemed to find agreeable and proper.

MacRae finally found himself compelled to accept Norman Gower as part of the group.  He was a little surprised to find that he harbored no decided feeling about young Gower, one way or the other.  If he felt at all, it was a mild impatience that another man had established a relation with Dolly Ferrara which put aside old friendships.  He found himself constrained more and more to treat Dolly like any other pleasant young woman of his acquaintance.  He did not quite like that.  He and Dolly Ferrara had been such good chums.  Besides, he privately considered that Dolly was throwing herself away on a man weak enough to make the tragic blunder young Gower had made in London.  But that was their own affair.  Altogether, MacRae found it quite impossible to muster up any abiding grudge against young Gower on his own account.

So he let matters stand and celebrated Christmas with them.  Afterward they got aboard the Bluebird and went to a dance at Potter’s Landing, where for all that Jack MacRae was the local hero, both of the great war and the salmon war of the past season, both Dolly and Norman, he privately conceded, enjoyed themselves a great deal more than he did.  Their complete absorption in each other rather irritated him.

They came back to the Cove early in the morning.  The various Ferraras disposed themselves about Peter’s house to sleep, and MacRae went on to his own place.  About an hour after daybreak he saw Norman Gower pass up the bush trail to the mine with a heavy pack of provisions on his back.  And MacRae wondered idly if Norman was bucking the game in earnest, strictly on his own, and why?

Late in January the flash of a white skirt and a sky-blue sweater past his dooryard apprised MacRae that Betty was back.  And he did not want to see Betty or talk with her.  He hoped her stay would be brief.  He even asked himself testily why people like that wanted to come to a summer dwelling in the middle of winter.  But her sojourn was not so brief as he hoped.  At divers times thereafter he saw her in the distance, faring to and fro from Peter Ferrara’s house, out on the trail that ran to the Knob, several