People had to shift, to grasp opportunities as they were presented, MacRae knew.  They could not take root and stand still in one spot like the great Douglas firs.  But he missed the familiar voices, the sight of friendly faces.  He had nothing but his own thoughts to keep him company.  A man of twenty-five, a young and lusty animal of abounding vitality, needs more than his own reflections to fill his days.  Denied the outlet of purposeful work in which to release pent-up energy, MacRae brooded over shadows, suffered periods of unaccountable depression.  Nature had not designed him for either a hermit or a celibate.  Something in him cried out for affection, for companionship, for a woman’s tenderness bestowed unequivocally.  The mating instinct was driving him, as it drove the birds.  But its urge was not the general, unspecified longing which turns a man’s eyes upon any desirable woman.  Very clearly, imperiously, this dominant instinct in MacRae had centered upon Betty Gower.

He was at war with his instincts.  His mind stipulated that he could not have her without a revolutionary overturning of his convictions, inhibitions, soundly made and passionately cherished plans of reprisal for old injustices.  That peculiar tenacity of idea and purpose which was inherent with him made him resent, refuse soberly to consider any deviation from the purpose which had taken form with such bitter intensity when he kindled to his father’s account of those drab years which Horace Gower had laid upon him.

Jack MacRae was no angel.  Under his outward seeming his impulses were primitive, like the impulses of all strong men.  He nursed a vision of beating Gower at Gower’s own game.  He hugged to himself the ultimate satisfaction of that.  Even when he was dreaming of Betty, he was mentally setting her aside until he had beaten her father to his knees under the only sort of blows he could deal.  Until he had made Gower know grief and disappointment and helplessness, and driven him off the south end of Squitty landless and powerless, he would go on as he had elected.  When he got this far Jack would sometimes say to himself in a spirit of defiant recklessness that there were plenty of other women for whom ultimately he could care as much.  But he knew also that he would not say that, nor even think it, whenever Betty Gower was within reach of his hand or sound of his voice.

He walked sometimes over to Point Old and stared at the cottage, snowy white against the tender green, its lawn growing rank with uncut grass, its chimney dead.  There were times when he wished he could see smoke lifting from that chimney and know that he could find Betty somewhere along the beach.  But these were only times when his spirits were very low.

Also he occasionally wondered if it were true, as Stubby Abbott declared, that Gower had fallen into a financial hole.  MacRae doubted that.  Men like Gower always got out of a hole.  They were fierce and remorseless pursuers of the main chance.  When they were cast down they climbed up straightway over the backs of lesser men.  He thought of Robbin-Steele.  A man like that would die with the harness of the money-game on his back, reaching for more.  Gower was of the same type, skillful in all the tricks of the game, ruthless, greedy for power and schooled to grasp it in a bewildering variety of ways.