She sprang from the beach to the low pile of driftwood and from that plunged into the thicket.  MacRae did not try to follow.  He did not even move.  He looked after her a minute.  Then he sat down on the log again and stared at the steady march of the swells.  There was a sense of finality in this thing which made him flounder desperately.  Still, he assured himself, it had to be.  And if it had to be that way it was better to have it so understood.  Betty would never look at him again with that disturbing message in her eyes.  He would not be troubled by a futile longing.  But it hurt.  He had never imagined how so abstract a thing as emotion could breed such an ache in a man’s heart.

After a little he got up.  There was a trail behind that 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.”