Here the speakers moved to another part of the boat, while Jack sat as still as if he were dead, his hands clenched and his eyes red with passion, staring out upon the white foam the boat left in its track. Once he started up, half resolved to throw himself overboard into that foaming water and disappear forever. He was shaken to his very soul with what he had heard. His suspicions were more than confirmed. His stepmother did not want him, Clarice did not want him, Paul did not want him, and this hurt him more than all the rest. Paul had always been friendly; now he had turned against him. “I wish I had stayed away,” he said to himself, growing dizzy from the motion of the boat and the strong excitement under which he was laboring. His brain whirled like a top, and everything grew dark around him. Brandy would stop that and steady his nerves, if taken moderately. Thanks to his Chicago friends, he had it in his side pocket, and when sure no one was looking he took out the bottle and drank a swallow or two of the clear fluid, which burned as it went down and spread itself over his system in a pleasant glow which quieted him in one sense and roused him in another. He didn’t care for his stepmother, nor Clarice, nor Paul, nor the whole world, except one. He gasped when he thought of that one, then put the thought aside and was only conscious of a hard, dogged feeling, which would make him dare and do almost anything,—shame Clarice, if he felt like it,—thrash Paul Ralston, if he felt like it,—and be a devil generally, if he felt like it. In this state of mind he reached Oak City and passed unrecognized through the crowd of people, some of whom would have known him had they stopped to look at him. They were, however, too eager to push on either to their cottages, where they were expected, or to the hotels, where many of them were not expected. When Jack left Samona he had intended going directly to his stepmother’s as the natural place for him to go. Now nothing could tempt him to go there. Once he thought to take the next boat which left for New Bedford and go back to the Rockies. Then he thought, “I’ll stay till Monday, and maybe get a glimpse of her. It will be something to take away with me.”