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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Over the Pass, by Frederick Palmer
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Over the Pass
+
+Author: Frederick Palmer
+
+Release Date: February 4, 2004 [EBook #10932]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OVER THE PASS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Audrey Longhurst, Mary Meehan, and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+                              OVER THE PASS
+
+                           BY FREDERICK PALMER
+
+                AUTHOR OF THE VAGABOND, DANBURY RODD, ETC.
+
+                                   1912
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+PART I--AN EASY TRAVELLER
+
+CHAPTER
+
+      I YOUTH IN SPURS
+
+     II DINOSAUR OR DESPERADO
+
+    III JACK RIDES IN COMPANY
+
+     IV HE CARRIES THE MAIL
+
+      V A SMILE AND A SQUARE CHIN
+
+     VI OBLIVION IS NOT EASY
+
+    VII WHAT HAPPENED AT LANG'S
+
+   VIII ACCORDING TO CODE
+
+     IX THE DEVIL IS OUT
+
+      X MARY EXPLAINS
+
+     XI SEÑOR DON'T CARE RECEIVES
+
+    XII MARY BRINGS TRIBUTE
+
+   XIII A JOURNEY ON CRUTCHES
+
+    XIV "HOW FAST YOU SEW!"
+
+     XV WHEN THE DESERT BLOOMS
+
+    XVI A CHANGE OF MIND
+
+   XVII THE DOGE SNAPS A RUBBER BAND
+
+  XVIII ANOTHER STRANGER ARRIVES
+
+    XIX LOOKING OVER PRECIPICES
+
+     XX A PUZZLED AMBASSADOR
+
+    XXI "GOOD-BY, LITTLE RIVERS!"
+
+   XXII "LUCK, JACK, LUCK!"
+
+
+PART II--HE FINDS HIMSELF
+
+  XXIII LABELLED AND SHIPPED
+
+   XXIV IN THE CITADEL OF THE MILLIONS
+
+    XXV "BUT WITH YOU, YES, SIR!"
+
+  XXVII BY RIGHT OF ANCESTRY
+
+ XXVIII JACK GETS A RAISE
+
+   XXIX A MEETING ON THE AVENUE TRAIL
+
+    XXX WITH THE PHANTOMS
+
+   XXXI PRATHER WOULD NOT WAIT
+
+  XXXII A CRISIS IN THE WINGFIELD LIBRARY
+
+ XXXIII PRATHER SEES THE PORTRAIT
+
+  XXXIV "JOHN WINGFIELD, YOU--"
+
+
+PART III--HE FINDS HIS PLACE IN LIFE
+
+   XXXV BACK TO LITTLE RIVERS
+
+  XXXVI AROUND THE WATER-HOLE
+
+ XXXVII THE END OF THE WEAVING
+
+XXXVIII THEIR SIDE OF THE PASS
+
+
+
+
+PART I
+
+AN EASY TRAVELLER
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+YOUTH IN SPURS
+
+Here time was as nothing; here sunset and sunrise were as incidents
+of an uncalendared, everlasting day; here chaotic grandeur was that
+of the earth's crust when it cooled after the last convulsive
+movement of genesis.
+
+In all the region about the Galeria Pass the silence of the dry Arizona
+air seemed luminous and eternal. Whoever climbed to the crotch of that V,
+cut jagged against the sky for distances yet unreckoned by tourist
+folders, might have the reward of pitching the tents of his imagination
+at the gateway of the clouds.
+
+Early on a certain afternoon he would have noted to the eastward a speck
+far out on a vast basin of sand which was enclosed by a rim of tumbling
+mountains. Continued observation at long range would have shown the speck
+to be moving almost imperceptibly, with what seemed the impertinence of
+infinitesimal life in that dead world; and, eventually, it would have
+taken the form of a man astride a pony.
+
+The man was young, fantastically young if you were to judge by his garb,
+a flamboyant expression of the romantic cowboy style which might have
+served as a sensational exhibit in a shop-window. In place of the
+conventional blue wool shirt was one of dark blue silk. The
+_chaparejos_, or "chaps," were of the softest leather, with the fringe
+at the seams generously long; and the silver spurs at the boot-heels
+were chased in antique pattern and ridiculously large. Instead of the
+conventional handkerchief at the neck was a dark red string tie; while
+the straight-brimmed cowpuncher hat, out of keeping with the general
+effect of newness and laundered freshness, had that tint which only
+exposure to many dewfalls and many blazing mid-days will produce in
+light-colored felt.
+
+There was vagrancy in the smile of his singularly sensitive mouth and
+vagrancy in the relaxed way that he rode. From the fondness with which
+his gaze swept the naked peaks they might have been cities _en fête_
+calling him to their festivities. If so, he was in no haste to let
+realization overtake anticipation. His reins hung loose. He hummed
+snatches of Spanish, French, and English songs. Their cosmopolitan
+freedom of variety was as out of keeping with the scene as their lilt,
+which had the tripping, self-carrying impetus of the sheer joy of living.
+
+Lapsing into silence, his face went ruminative and then sad. With a
+sudden indrawing of breath he freed himself from his reverie, and bending
+over from his saddle patted a buckskin neck in affectionate tattoo. Tawny
+ears turned backward in appreciative fellowship, but without any break in
+a plodding dog-trot. Though the rider's aspect might say with the desert
+that time was nothing, the pony's expressed a logical purpose. Thus the
+speed of their machine-like progress was entirely regulated by the
+prospect of a measure of oats at the journey's end.
+
+When they came to the foot-hills and the rider dismounted and led the
+way, with a following muzzle at times poking the small of his back, up
+the tortuous path, rounding pinnacles and skimming the edge of abysses,
+his leg muscles answered with the readiness of familiarity with climbing.
+At the top he saw why the pass had received its name of Galeria from the
+Spanish. A great isosceles of precipitous walls formed a long, natural
+gallery, which the heaving of the earth's crust had rent and time had
+eroded. It lay near the present boundary line of two civilizations: in
+the neutral zone of desert expanses, where the Saxon pioneer, with his
+lips closed on English _s's_, had paused in his progress southward; and
+the _conquistadore_, with tongue caressing Castilian vowels, had paused
+in his progress northward.
+
+At the other side the traveller beheld a basin which was a thousand
+feet higher than the one behind him. It approached the pass at a
+gentler slope. It must be cooler than the other, its ozone a little
+rarer. A sea of quivering and singing light in the afternoon glow, it
+was lost in the horizon.
+
+Not far from the foot-hills floated a patch of foliage, checkered by the
+roofs of the houses of an irrigation colony, hanging kitelike at the end
+of the silver thread of a river whose waters had set gardens abloom in
+sterile expanses. There seemed a refusal of intimacy with the one visible
+symbol of its relations with the outer world; for the railroad, with its
+lines of steel flashing across the gray levels, passed beyond the outer
+edge of the oasis.
+
+"This beats any valley I've seen yet," and the traveller spoke with the
+confidence of one who is a connoisseur of Arizona valleys.
+
+He paused for some time in hesitancy to take a farewell of the rapturous
+vista. A hundred feet lower and the refraction of the light would present
+it in different coloring and perspective. With his spell of visual
+intoxication ran the consciousness of being utterly alone. But the egoism
+of his isolation in the towering infinite did not endure; for the sound
+of voices, a man's and a woman's, broke on his ear.
+
+The man's was strident, disagreeable, persistent. Its timbre was such as
+he had heard coming out of the doors of border saloons. The woman's was
+quiet and resisting, its quality of youth peculiarly emphasized by its
+restrained emotion.
+
+Now the easy traveller took stock of his immediate surroundings, which
+had interested him only as a foothold and vantage-point for the panorama
+that he had been breathing in. Here, of all conceivable places, he was in
+danger of becoming eavesdropper to a conversation which was evidently
+very personal. Rounding the escarpment at his elbow he saw, on a shelf of
+decaying granite, two waiting ponies. One had a Mexican saddle of the
+cowboy type. The other had an Eastern side-saddle, which struck him as
+exotic in a land where women mostly ride astride. And what woman,
+whatever style of riding she chose, should care to come to this pass?
+
+Judging by the direction from which the voices came, the speakers were
+hidden by still another turn in the defile. A few more steps brought eye
+as well as ear back to the living world with the sight of a girl seated
+on a bowlder. He could see nothing of her face except the cheek, which
+was brown, and the tip of a chin, which he guessed was oval, and her
+hair, which was dark under her hatbrim and shimmering with gold where it
+was kissed by the rays of the sun. An impression as swift as a flash of
+light could not exclude inevitable curiosity as to the full face; a
+curiosity emphasized by the poised erectness of her slender figure.
+
+The man was bending over her in a familiar way. He was thirty, perhaps,
+in the prime of physical vigor, square-jawed, cocksure, a six-shooter
+slung at his hip. Though she was not giving way before him, her attitude,
+in its steadiness, reflected distress in a bowstrung tremulousness.
+Suddenly, at something he said which the easy traveller could not quite
+understand, she sprang up aflame, her hand flying back against the rock
+wall behind her for support. Then the man spoke so loud that he was
+distinctly audible.
+
+"When you get mad like that you're prettier'n ever," he said.
+
+It was a peculiar situation. It seemed incredible, melodramatic, unreal,
+in sight of the crawling freight train far out on the levels.
+
+"Aren't you overplaying your part, sir?" the easy traveller asked.
+
+The man's hand flew to his six-shooter, while the girl looked around in
+swift and eager impulse to the interrupting voice. Its owner, the color
+scheme of his attire emphasized by the glare of the low sun, expressed in
+his pose and the inquiring flicker of a smile purely the element of the
+casual. Far from making any movement toward his own six-shooter, he
+seemed oblivious of any such necessity. With the first glimpse of her
+face, when he saw the violet flame of her anger go ruddy with surprise
+and relief, then fluid and sparkling as a culminating change of emotion,
+he felt cheap for having asked himself the question--which now seemed so
+superficial--whether she were good-looking or not. She was, undoubtedly,
+yes, undoubtedly good-looking in a way of her own.
+
+"What business is it of yours?" demanded the man, evidently under the
+impression that he was due to say something, while his fingers still
+rested on his holster.
+
+"None at all, unless she says so," the deliverer answered. "Is it?" he
+asked her.
+
+After her first glance at him she had lowered her lashes. Now she raised
+them, sending a direct message beside which her first glance had been
+dumb indifference. He was seeing into the depths of her eyes in the
+consciousness of a privilege rarely bestowed. They gave wing to a
+thousand inquiries. He had the thrill of an explorer who is about to
+enter on a voyage of discovery. Then the veil was drawn before his ship
+had even put out from port. It was a veil woven with fine threads of
+appreciative and conventional gratitude.
+
+"It is!" she said decisively.
+
+"I'll be going," said the persecutor, with a grimace that seemed mixed
+partly of inherent bravado and partly of shame, as his pulse slowed down
+to normal.
+
+"As you please," answered that easy traveller. "I had no mind to exert
+any positive directions over your movements."
+
+His politeness, his disinterestedness, and his evident disinclination to
+any kind of vehemence carried an implication more exasperating than an
+open challenge. They changed melodrama into comedy. They made his
+protagonist appear a negligible quantity.
+
+"There's some things I don't do when women are around," the persecutor
+returned, grudgingly, and went for his horse; while oppressive silence
+prevailed. The easy traveller was not looking at the girl or she at him.
+He was regarding the other man idly, curiously, though not contemptuously
+as he mounted and started down the trail toward the valley, only to draw
+rein as he looked back over his shoulder with a glare which took the easy
+traveller in from head to foot.
+
+"Huh! You near-silk dude!" he said chokingly, in his rancor which had
+grown with the few minutes he had had for self-communion.
+
+"If you mean my shirt, it was sold to me for pure silk," the easy
+traveller returned, in half-diffident correction of the statement.
+
+"We'll meet again!" came the more definite and articulate defiance.
+
+"Perhaps. Who can tell? Arizona, though a large place, has so few people
+that it is humanly very small."
+
+Now the other man rose in his stirrups, resting the weight of his body on
+the palm of the hand which was on the back of his saddle. He was rigid,
+his voice was shaking with very genuine though dramatic rage drawn to a
+fine point of determination.
+
+"When we do meet, you better draw! I give you warning!" he called.
+
+There was no sign that this threat had made the easy traveller tighten a
+single muscle. But a trace of scepticism had crept into his smile.
+
+"Whew!" He drew the exclamation out into a whistle.
+
+"Whistle--whistle while you can! You won't have many more chances! Draw,
+you tenderfoot! But it won't do any good--I'll get you!"
+
+With this challenge the other settled back into the saddle and proceeded
+on his way.
+
+"Whew!" The second whistle was anything but truculent and anything but
+apologetic. It had the unconscious and spontaneous quality of the delight
+of the collector who finds a new specimen in wild places.
+
+From under her lashes the girl had been watching the easy traveller
+rather than her persecutor; first, studiously; then, in the confusion of
+embarrassment that left her speechless.
+
+"Well, well," he concluded, "you must take not only your zoology, but
+your anthropology as you find it!"
+
+His drollness, his dry contemplation of the specimen, and his
+absurdly gay and unpractical attire, formed a combination of elements
+suddenly grouped into an effect that touched her reflex nerves after
+the strain with the magic of humor. She could not help herself: she
+burst out laughing. At this, he looked away from the specimen; looked
+around puzzled, quizzically, and, in sympathetic impulse, began
+laughing himself. Thus a wholly unmodern incident took a whimsical
+turn out of a horror which, if farcical in the abstract, was no less
+potent in the concrete.
+
+"Quite like the Middle Ages, isn't it?" he said.
+
+"But Walter Scott ceased writing in the thirties!" she returned, quick to
+fall in with his cue.
+
+"The swooning age outlasted him--lasted, indeed, into the era of
+hoop-skirts; but that, too, is gone."
+
+"They do give medals," she added.
+
+"For rescuing the drowning only; and they are a great nuisance to carry
+around in one's baggage. Please don't recommend me!"
+
+Both laughed again softly, looking fairly at each other in
+understanding, twentieth-century fashion. She was not to play the
+classic damsel or he the classic rescuer. Yet the fact of a young man
+finding a young woman brutally annoyed on the roof of the world, five
+or six miles from a settlement--well, it was a fact. Over the bump of
+their self-introduction, free of the serious impression of her
+experience, she could think for him as well as for herself. This struck
+her with sudden alarm.
+
+"I fear I have made you a dangerous enemy," she said. "Pete Leddy is the
+prize ruffian of our community of Little Rivers."
+
+"I thought that this would be an interesting valley," he returned, in
+bland appreciation of her contribution of information about the habits of
+the specimen.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+DINOSAUR OR DESPERADO
+
+
+She faced a situation irritating and vitalizing, and inevitably, under
+its growing perplexity, her observation of his appearance and
+characteristics had been acute with feminine intuition, which is so
+frequently right, that we forget that it may not always be. She imagined
+him with a certain amiable aimlessness turning his pony to one side so as
+not to knock down a danger sign, while he rode straight over a precipice.
+
+What would have happened if Leddy had really drawn? she asked herself.
+Probably her deliverer would have regarded the muzzle of Leddy's gun in
+studious vacancy before a bullet sent him to kingdom come. All
+speculation aside, her problem was how to rescue her rescuer. She felt
+almost motherly on his account, he was so blissfully oblivious to
+realities. And she felt, too, that under the circumstances, she ought to
+be formal.
+
+"Now, Mister--" she began; and the Mister sounded odd and stilted in her
+ears in relation to him.
+
+"Jack is my name," he said simply.
+
+"Mine is Mary," she volunteered, giving him as much as he had given
+and no more. "Now, sir," she went on, in peremptory earnestness, "this
+is serious."
+
+"It _was_," he answered. "At least, unpleasant."
+
+"It is, _now_. Pete Leddy meant what he said when he said that he
+would draw."
+
+"He ought to, from his repeated emphasis," answered Jack, in agreeable
+affirmation.
+
+"He has six notches on his gun-handle--six men that he has killed!"
+Mary went on.
+
+"Whew!" said Jack. "And he isn't more than thirty! He seems a hard worker
+who keeps right on the job."
+
+She pressed her lips together to control her amusement, before she asked
+categorically, with the precision of a school-mistress:
+
+"Do you know how to shoot?"
+
+He was surprised. He seemed to be wondering if she were not making
+sport of him.
+
+"Why should I carry a six-shooter if I did not?" he asked.
+
+This convinced her that his revolver was a part of his play cowboy
+costume. He had come out of the East thinking that desperado etiquette of
+the Bad Lands was _opéra bouffe_.
+
+"Leddy is a dead shot. He will give you no chance!" she insisted.
+
+"I should think not," Jack mused. "No, naturally not; otherwise there
+might have been no sixth notch. The third or the fourth, even the second
+object of his favor might have blasted his fair young career as a
+wood-carver. Has he set any limit to his ambition? Is he going to make it
+an even hundred and then retire?"
+
+"I don't know!" she gasped.
+
+"I must ask," he added, thoughtfully.
+
+Was he out of his head? Certainly his eye was not insane. Its bluish-gray
+was twinkling enjoyably into hers.
+
+"You exasperated him with that whistle. It was a deadly insult to his
+desperado pride. You are marked--don't you see, marked?" she persisted.
+"And I brought it on! I am responsible!"
+
+He shook his head in a denial so unmoved by her appeal that she was sure
+he would send Job into an apoplectic frenzy.
+
+"Pardon me, but you're contradicting your own statement. You just said it
+was the whistle," he corrected her. "It's the whistle that gives me Check
+Number Seven. You haven't the least bit of responsibility. The whistle
+gets it all, just as you said."
+
+This was too much. Confuting her with her own words! Quibbling with his
+own danger in order to make her an accomplice of murder! She lost her
+temper completely. That fact alone could account for the audacity of her
+next remark.
+
+"I wonder if you really know enough to come in out of the rain!"
+she stormed.
+
+"That's the blessing of living in Arizona," he returned. "It is such a
+dry climate."
+
+She caught herself laughing; and this only made her the more intense a
+second later, on a different tack. Now she would plead.
+
+"Please--please promise me that you will not go to Little Rivers
+to-night. Promise that you will turn back over the pass!"
+
+"You put me between the devil and the dragon. What you ask is impossible.
+I'll tell you why," he went on, confidentially. "You know this is the
+land of fossil dinosaurs."
+
+"I had a brute on my hands," she thought; "now I have the Mad Hatter and
+the March Hare in collaboration!"
+
+"There is a big dinosaur come to life on the other side," he proceeded.
+"I just got through the pass in time. I could feel his breath on my
+back--a hot, gun-powdery breath! It was awful, simply awful and horrible,
+too. And just as I had resigned myself to be his entrée, by great luck
+his big middle got wedged in the bottom of the V, and his scales scraped
+like the plates of a ship against a stone pier!"
+
+To her disgust she was laughing again.
+
+"If I went back now out of fear of Pete Leddy," he continued, "that
+dinosaur would know that I was such insignificant prey he would not even
+take the trouble to knock me down with a forepaw. He would swallow me
+alive and running! Think of that slimy slide down the red upholstery of
+his gullet, not to mention the misery of a total loss of my dignity and
+self-respect!"
+
+He had spoken it all as if he believed it true. He made it seem
+almost true.
+
+"I like nonsense as much as anybody," she began, "and I do not forget
+that you did me a great kindness."
+
+"Which any stranger, any third person coming at the right moment might
+have done," he interrupted. "Sir Walter's age has passed."
+
+"Yes, but Pete Leddy belongs still farther back. We may laugh at his
+ruffianly bravado, but no one may laugh at a forty-four calibre bullet!
+Think what you are going to make me pay for your kindness! I must pay
+with memory of the sound of a shot and the fall of a body there in the
+streets of Little Rivers--a nightmare for life! Oh, I beg of you, though
+it is fun for you to be killed, consider me! Don't go down into that
+valley! I beg of you, go back over the pass!"
+
+There was no acting, no suspicion of a gesture. She stood quite still,
+while all the power of her eyes reflected the misery which she pictured
+for herself. The low pitch of her voice sounded its depths with that
+restraint which makes for the most poignant intensity. As she reached her
+climax he had come out of his languid pose. He was erect and rigid. She
+saw him as some person other than the one to whom she had begun her
+appeal. He was still smiling, but his smile was of a different sort.
+Instead of being the significant thing about him in expression of his
+casualness, it seemed the softening compensation for his stubbornness.
+
+"I'd like to, but it is hardly in human nature for me to do that. I
+can't!" And he asked if he might bring up her pony.
+
+"Yes," she consented.
+
+She thought that the faint bow of courtesy with which he had accompanied
+the announcement of his decision he would have given, in common
+politeness, to anyone who pointed at the danger sign before he rode over
+the precipice.
+
+"May I ride down with you, or shall I go ahead?" he inquired, after he
+had assisted her to mount.
+
+"With me!" she answered, quickly. "You are safe while you are with me."
+
+The decisive turn to her mobile lips and the faint wrinkles of a frown,
+coming and going in various heraldry, formed a vividly sentient and
+versatile expression of emotions while she watched his silhouette against
+the sky as he turned to get his own pony.
+
+"Come, P.D.--come along!" he called.
+
+In answer to his voice an equine face, peculiarly reflective of trail
+wisdom, bony and large, particularly over the eyes, slowly turned toward
+its master. P.D. was considering.
+
+"Come along! The trail, P.D.!" And P.D. came, but with democratic
+independence, taking his time to get into motion. "He is never fast,"
+Jack explained, "but once he has the motor going, he keeps at it all day.
+So I call him P.D. without the Q., as he is never quick."
+
+"Pretty Damn, you mean!" she exclaimed, with a certain spontaneous pride
+of understanding. Then she flushed in confusion.
+
+"Oh, thank you! It was so human of you to translate it out loud! It isn't
+profane. Look at him now. Don't you think it is a good name for him?"
+Jack asked, seriously.
+
+"I do!"
+
+She was laughing again, oblivious of the impending tragedy.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+JACK RIDES IN COMPANY
+
+
+Let not the Grundy woman raise an eyebrow of deprecation at the informal
+introduction of Jack and Mary, or we shall refute her with her own
+precepts, which make the steps to a throne the steps of the social
+pyramid. If she wishes a sponsor, we name an impeccable majesty of the
+very oldest dynasty of all, which is entirely without scandal. We remind
+her of the ancient rule that people who meet at court, vouched for by
+royal favor, need no introduction.
+
+These two had met under the roof of the Eternal Painter. His palette is
+somewhere in the upper ether and his head in the interplanetary spaces.
+His heavy eyebrows twinkle with star-dust. Dodging occasional flying
+meteors, which harass him as flies harass a landscapist out of doors on a
+hot day, he is ever active, this mighty artist of the changing desert
+sky. So fickle his moods, so versatile his genius, so quick to creation
+his fancy, that he never knows what his next composition will be till the
+second that it is begun.
+
+No earthly rival need be jealous of him. He will never clog the
+galleries. He always paints on the same canvas, scraping off one picture
+to make room for another. And you do not mind the loss of the old. You
+live for the new.
+
+His Majesty has no artistic memory. He is as young as he was the day
+that he flung out his first tentative lunette after chaos. He is the
+patron saint of all pilgrims from the city's struggle, where they found
+no oases of rest. He melts "pasts" and family skeletons and hidden
+stories of any kind whatsoever into the blue as a background with the
+abandoned preoccupation of his own brushwork. His lieges, who seek
+oblivion in the desert, need not worry about the water that will never
+run over the millwheel again, or dwell in prophecy on floods to come. The
+omnipotence of the moment transports and soothes them.
+
+"Time is nothing!" says the Eternal Painter. "If you feel important,
+remember that man's hectic bustling makes but worm-work on the planet.
+Live and breathe joyfully and magnificently! Do not strain your eyes over
+embroidery! Come to my open gallery! And how do you like the way I set
+those silver clouds a-tumbling? Do you know anything better under the
+dome of any church or capitol? Shall I bank them? Line them with purple?
+It is done! But no! Let us wipe it all out, change the tint of our
+background, and start afresh!"
+
+With his eleven hundred million billionth sunset, or thereabouts, His
+Majesty held a man and a woman who had met on the roof of the world in
+thrall. He was lurid at the outset, dipping his camel's hair in at the
+round furnace door sinking toward the hills, whose red vortex shot
+tongues of flame into canyons and crevasses and drove out their lurking
+shadows with the fire of its inquisition. The foliage of Little Rivers
+became a grove of quivering leaves of gold, set on a vast beaten platter
+of gold. And the man and the woman, like all things else in the
+landscape, were suffused in this still, Parnassian, penetrating
+brilliancy, which ought to make even a miser feel that his hoarded eagles
+and sovereigns are ephemeral dross.
+
+"I love it all--all the desert!" said Mary Ewold.
+
+"And I, too!"
+
+"I have for six years."
+
+"I for five."
+
+The sentences had struck clearly as answering chimes, impersonally, in
+their preoccupied gazing.
+
+"It gave me life!" he added.
+
+"And it gave me life!"
+
+Then they looked at each other in mutual surprise and understanding; each
+in wonder that the other had ever been anything but radiant of
+out-of-doors health. That fleck on the lungs which brought a doctor's
+orders had long ago been healed by the physician of the ozone they were
+breathing.
+
+"And you remained," he said.
+
+"And you, also," she answered.
+
+Their own silence seemed to become a thing apart from the silence of the
+infinite. It was as if both recognized a common thought that even the
+Eternal Painter could not compel oblivion of the past to which they did
+not return; of the faith of cities to which they had been bred. But it is
+one of the Eternal Painter's rules that no one of his subjects should ask
+another of his subjects why he stays on the desert. Jack was the first to
+speak, and his voice returned to the casual key.
+
+"Usually I watch the sunset while we make camp," he said. "I am very late
+to-night--late beyond all habit; and sunset and sunrise do make one a
+creature of habit out here. Firio and my little train will grow impatient
+waiting for me."
+
+"You mean the Indian and the burro with the silver bells that came over
+the pass some time before you?"
+
+Of course they belonged to him, she was thinking, even as she made the
+inquiry. This play cowboy, with his absurdly enormous silver spurs, would
+naturally put bells on his burro.
+
+"Yes, I sent Firio with Wrath of God and Jag Ear on ahead and told him to
+wait at the foot of the descent. Wrath of God will worry--he is of a
+worrying nature. I must be going."
+
+In view of the dinosaur nonsense she was already prepared for a variety
+of inventional talk from him. As they started down from the pass in
+single file, she leading, the sun sank behind the hills, leaving the
+Eternal Painter, unhindered by a furnace glare in the centre of the
+canvas, to paint with a thousand brushes in the radiant tints of the
+afterglow.
+
+"You don't like that one, O art critics!" we hear him saying. "Well, here
+is another before you have adjusted your _pince-nez,_ and I will brush it
+away before you have emitted your first Ah! I do not criticise. I
+paint--I paint for the love of it. I paint with the pigments of the
+firmament and the imagination of the universe."
+
+The two did not talk of that sky which held their averted glances, while
+knowing hoofs that bore their weight kept the path. For how can you talk
+of the desert sky except in the banality of exclamations? It is _lèse
+majesté_ to the Eternal Painter to attempt description.
+
+At times she looked back and their eyes met in understanding, as true
+subjects of His Majesty, and then they looked skyward to see what changes
+the Master's witchery had wrought. In supreme intoxication of the
+senses, breathing that dry air which was like cool wine coming in long
+sips to the palate, they rode down the winding trail, till, after a
+surpassing outburst, the Eternal Painter dropped his brush for the night.
+
+It was dusk. Shadows returned to the crevasses. Free of the magic of the
+sky, with the curtains of night drawing in, the mighty savagery of the
+bare mountains in their disdain of man and imagination reasserted itself.
+It dropped Mary Ewold from the azure to the reality of Pete Leddy. She
+was seeing, the smoking end of a revolver and a body lying in a pool of
+blood; and there, behind her, rode this smiling stranger, proceeding so
+genially and carelessly to the fate which she had provided for him.
+
+With the last turn, which brought them level with the plain, they came
+upon an Indian, a baggage burro, and a riding-pony. The Indian sprang up,
+grinning: his welcome and doffing a Mexican steeple-hat.
+
+"I must introduce you all around," Jack told Mary.
+
+She observed in his manner something new!--a positive enthusiasm for his
+three retainers, which included a certain well-relished vanity in their
+loyalty and character.
+
+"Firio has Sancho Panza beaten to a frazzle," Jack said. "Sancho was fat
+and unresourceful; even stupid. Fancy him broiling a quail on a spit!
+Fancy what a lot of trouble Firio could have saved Don Quixote de la
+Mancha! Why, confound it, he would have spoiled the story!"
+
+Firio was a solid grain, to take Jack's view, winnowed out of bushels of
+aboriginal chaff; an Indian, all Indian, without any strain of Spanish
+blood in the primitive southern strain.
+
+"And Firio rides Wrath of God," Jack continued, nodding to a pony with a
+low-hung head and pendant lip, whose lugubrious expression was
+exaggerated by a scar. "He looks it, don't you think?--always miserable,
+whether his nose is in the oats or we run out of water. He is our sad
+philosopher, who has just as dependable a gait as P.D. I have many
+theories about the psychology of his ego. Sometimes I explain it by a
+desire both to escape and to pursue unhappiness, which amounts to a
+solemn kind of perpetual motion. But he has a positively sweet nature.
+There is no more malice in his professional mournfulness than in the
+cheerful humor of Jag Ear."
+
+"It is plain to see which is Jag Ear," she observed, "and how he earned
+his name."
+
+Every time a burro gets into the corn, an Indian master cuts off a bit
+of long, furry ear as a lesson. Before Jag Ear passed into kindlier
+hands he had been clipped closer than a Boston terrier. Only a single
+upstanding fragment remained in token of a graded education which had
+availed him nothing.
+
+"There's no curtailing Jag Ear's curiosity," said Jack. "To him,
+everything is worth trying. That is why he is a born traveller. He
+has been with me from Colorado to Chihuahua, on all my wanderings
+back and forth."
+
+While he spoke, Firio mounted Wrath of God and, with Jag Ear's bells
+jingling, the supply division set out on the road. Jack and Mary
+followed, this time riding side by side, pony nose to pony nose, in an
+intimacy of association impossible in the narrow mountain trail. It was
+an intimacy signalized by silence. There was an end to the mighty
+transports of the heights; the wells of whimsicality had dried up. The
+weight of the silence seemed balancing on a brittle thread. All the
+afternoon's events aligned themselves in a colossal satire. In the half
+light Jack became a gaunt and lonely figure that ought to be confined in
+some Utopian kindergarten.
+
+Mary could feel her temples beating with the fear of what was waiting for
+him in Little Rivers, now a dark mass on the levels, just dark, without
+color or any attraction except the mystery that goes with the shroud of
+night. She knew how he would laugh at her fears; for she guessed that he
+was unafraid of anything in the world which, however, was no protection
+from Pete Leddy's six-shooter.
+
+"I--I have a right to know--won't you tell me how you are going to defend
+yourself against Pete Leddy?" she demanded, in a sudden outburst.
+
+"I hadn't thought of that. Certainly, I shall leave it to Pete himself to
+open hostilities. I hadn't thought of it because I have been too busy
+thinking out how I was going to break a piece of news to Firio. I have
+been an awful coward about it, putting it off and putting it off. I had
+planned to do it on my birthday two weeks ago, and then he gave me these
+big silver spurs--spent a whole month's wages on them, think of that! I
+bought this cowboy regalia to go with them. You can't imagine how that
+pleased him. It certainly was great fun."
+
+Mary could only shake her head hopelessly.
+
+"Firio and Jag Ear and Wrath of God and old P.D. here--we've sort of
+grown used to one another's foolishness. Now I can't put it off any
+longer, and I'd about as soon be murdered as tell him that I am going
+East in the morning."
+
+"You mean you are going to leave here for good?" She mistrusted her
+own hearing. She was dazzled by this sudden burst of light through
+the clouds.
+
+"Yes, by the first train. This is my last desert ride."
+
+Why had he not said so at first? It would not only have saved her from
+worry, but from the humiliation of pleading with a stranger. Doubtless he
+had enjoyed teasing her. But no matter. The affair need not last much
+longer, now. She told herself that, if necessary, she would mount guard
+over him for the remaining twelve hours of his stay. Once he was aboard
+the Pullman he would be out of danger; her responsibility would be over
+and the whole affair would become a bizarre memory; an incident closed.
+
+"Back to New York," he said, as one who enters a fog without a
+compass. "Back to fight pleosaurs, dinosaurs, and all kinds of
+monsters," he added, with a cheeriness which rang with the first false
+note she had heard from him. "I don't care," he concluded, and broke
+into a Spanish air, whose beat ran with the trickling hoof-beats of
+the ponies in the sand.
+
+"That is it!" she thought. "That explains. He just does not care about
+anything."
+
+Ahead, the lamps were beginning to twinkle in the little settlement which
+had sent such a contrast in citizenship as Mary Ewold and Pete Leddy out
+to the pass. They were approaching a single, isolated building, from the
+door of which came a spray of light and the sound of men's voices.
+
+"That is Bill Lang's place," Mary explained. "He keeps a store, with a
+bar in the rear. He also has the post-office, thanks to his political
+influence, and this is where I have to stop for the mail when I return
+from the pass."
+
+She had not spoken with any sense of a hint which it was inevitable he
+should accept.
+
+"Let me get it for you;" and before she had time to protest, he had
+dismounted, drawing rein at the edge of the wooden steps.
+
+She rode past where his pony was standing. When he entered the door, his
+tallness and lean ease of posture silhouetted in the light, she could
+look in on the group of idling male gossips.
+
+"Don't!"
+
+It was a half cry from her, hardly audible in an intensity which she knew
+was futile in the surge of her torturing self-incrimination. Why had she
+not thought that it would be here that Pete Leddy was bound to wait for
+anyone coming in by the trail from Galeria? The loungers suddenly dropped
+to the cover of boxes and barrels, as a flicker of steel shot upward, and
+behind the gleaming rim of a revolver muzzle held rigid was a brown hand
+and Leddy's hard, unyielding face.
+
+What matter if the easy traveller could shoot? He was caught like a man
+coming out of an alley. He had no chance to draw in turn. In the click of
+a second-hand the thing would be over. Mary's eyes involuntarily closed,
+to avoid seeing the flash from the revolver. She listened for the report;
+for the fall of a body which should express the horror she had visualized
+for the hundredth time. A century seemed to pass and there was no sound
+except the beat of her heart, which ran in a cataract throb to her
+temples; no sound except that and what seemed to be soft, regular steps
+on the bare floor of the store.
+
+"Coward!" she told herself, with the agony of her suspense
+breaking. "He saved you from inexpressible humiliation and you are
+afraid even to look!"
+
+She opened her eyes, prepared for the worst. Had she gone out of her
+head? Could she no longer trust her own eyesight? What she saw was
+inconceivable. The startled faces of the loungers were rising from
+behind the boxes and barrels. Pete Leddy's gun had dropped to his side
+and his would-be victim had a hand on Pete's shoulder. Jack was talking
+apparently in a kindly and reasoning tone, but she could not make out
+his words.
+
+One man alone evidently had not taken cover. It was Jim Galway, a
+rancher, who had been standing at the mail counter. To judge by his
+expression, what Jack was saying had his approval.
+
+With a nod to Leddy and then a nod to the others, as if in amicable
+conclusion of the affair, Jack wheeled around to the counter, disclosing
+Leddy's face wry with insupportable chagrin. His revolver was still in
+his hand. In the swift impulse of one at bay who finds himself released,
+he brought it up. There was murder, murder from behind, in the catlike
+quickness of his movement; but Jim Galway was equally quick. He threw his
+whole weight toward Leddy in a catapult leap, as he grasped Leddy's wrist
+and bore it down. Jack faced about in alert readiness. Seeing that Galway
+had the situation pat, he put up his hand in a kind of questioning,
+puzzled remonstrance; but Mary noticed that he was very erect. He spoke
+and Galway spoke in answer. Evidently he was asking that Leddy be
+released. To this Galway consented at length, but without drawing back
+until he had seen Leddy's gun safe in the holster.
+
+Then Leddy raised himself challengingly on tiptoes to Jack, who turned to
+Galway in the manner of one extending an invitation. On his part, Leddy
+turned to Ropey Smith, another of Little Rivers' ruffians. After this,
+Leddy went through the door at the rear; the loungers resumed their seats
+on the cracker barrels and gazed at one another with dropped jaws, while
+Bill Lang proceeded with his business as postmaster.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+HE CARRIES THE MAIL
+
+
+When the suspense was over for Mary, the glare of the store lamp went
+dancing in grotesque waves, and abruptly, uncannily, fell away into the
+distant, swimming glow of a lantern suffused with fog. She swayed. Only
+the leg-rest kept her from slipping off the pony. Her first returning
+sense of her surroundings came with the sound of a voice, the same
+careless, pleasant voice which she had heard at Galeria asking Pete Leddy
+if he were not overplaying his part.
+
+"You were right," said the voice. "It was the whistle that made him
+so angry."
+
+Indistinctly she associated a slowly-shaping figure with the voice and
+realized that she had been away in the unknown for a second. Yes, it was
+all very well to talk about Sir Walter being out of fashion, but she had
+been near to fainting, and in none of the affectation of the hoop-skirt
+age, either. Had she done any foolish thing in expression of a weakness
+that she had never known before? Had she extended her hand for support?
+Had he caught her as she wobbled in the saddle? No. She was relieved to
+see that he was not near enough for that.
+
+"By no stretch of ethics can you charge yourself with further
+responsibility or fears," he continued. "Pete and I understand each other
+perfectly, now."
+
+But in his jocularity ran something which was plain, if unspoken. It was
+that he would put an end to a disagreeable subject. His first words to
+her had provided a bridge--and burned it--from the bank of the
+disagreeable to the bank of agreeable. Her own desire, with full mastery
+of her faculties coming swiftly, fell in with his. She wanted to blot out
+that horror and scotch a sudden uprising of curiosity as to the exact
+nature of the gamble in death through which he had passed. It was enough
+that he was alive.
+
+The blurry figure became distinct, smiling with inquiry in a glance from
+her to the stack of papers, magazines, and pamphlets which crowded his
+circling arms. He seemed to have emptied the post-office. There had not
+been any Pete Leddy; there had been no display of six-shooters. He had
+gone in after the mail. Here he was ready to deliver it by the bushel,
+while he waited for orders. She had to laugh at his predicament as he
+lowered his chin to steady a book on the top of the pile.
+
+"Oh, I meant to tell you that you were not to bring the second-class
+matter!" she told him. "We always send a servant with a basket for that.
+You see what comes of having a father who is not only omnivorous, but has
+a herbivorous capacity."
+
+He saw that the book had a row of Italian stamps across the wrapper.
+Unless that popular magazine stopped slipping, both the book and a heavy
+German pamphlet would go. He took two hasty steps toward her, in mock
+distress of appeal.
+
+"I'll allow salvage if you act promptly!" he said.
+
+She lifted the tottering apex just in time to prevent its fall.
+
+"I'll take the book," she said. "Father has been waiting months for
+it. We can separate the letters and leave the rest in the store to be
+sent for."
+
+"The railroad station is on the other side of the town, isn't it?" he
+asked.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I shall camp nearby, so it will be no trouble to leave my burden at your
+door as I pass."
+
+"He does have the gift of oiling the wheels in either, big or little
+moments," she thought, as she realized how simple and considerate had
+been his course from the first. He was a stranger going on his way,
+stopping, however, to do her or any other traveller a favor _en route_.
+
+"Firio, we're ready to hear Jag Ear's bells!" he called.
+
+"_Sí_!" answered Firio.
+
+All the while the Indian had kept in the shadow, away from the spray of
+light from the store lamp, unaware of the rapid drama that had passed
+among the boxes and barrels. He had observed nothing unusual in the young
+lady, whose outward manifestation of what she had, witnessed was the
+closing of her eyes.
+
+It was out of the question that Jack should mount a horse when both
+arms were crowded with their burden. He walked beside Mary's stirrup
+leather in the attitude of that attendant on royalty who bears a crown
+on a cushion.
+
+"Little Rivers is a new town, isn't it?" he asked.
+
+"Yes, the Town Wonderful," she answered. "Father founded it."
+
+She spoke with an affection which ran as deep into the soil as young
+roots after water. If on the pass she had seemed a part of the desert,
+of great, lonely distances and a far-flung carpet of dreams, here she
+seemed to belong to books and gardens.
+
+"I wish I had time to look over the Town Wonderful in the morning, but my
+train goes very early, I believe."
+
+After his years of aimless travelling, to which he had so readily
+confessed, he had tied himself to a definite hour on a railroad
+schedule as something commanding and inviolable. Such inconsistency
+did not surprise her. Had she not already learned to expect
+inconsistencies from him?
+
+"Oh, it is all simple and primitive, but it means a lot to us," she said.
+
+"What one's home and people mean to him is pretty well all of one's own
+human drama," he returned, seriously.
+
+The peace of evening was in the air and the lights along the single
+street were a gentle and persistent protest of human life against the
+mighty stretch of the enveloping mantle of night. From the cottages of
+the ranchers came the sound of voices. The twang of a guitar quivering
+starward made medley with Jag Ear's bells.
+
+Here, for a little distance, the trail, in its long reach on the desert,
+had taken on the dignity of the urban name of street. On either side,
+fronting the cottages, ran the slow waters of two irrigation ditches,
+gleaming where lamp-rays penetrated the darkness. The date of each
+rancher's settlement was fairly indicated by the size of the
+quick-growing umbrella and pepper-trees which had been planted for shade.
+Thus all the mass of foliage rose like a mound of gentle slope toward the
+centre of the town, where Jack saw vaguely the outlines of a rambling
+bungalow, more spacious if no more pretentious than its neighbors in its
+architecture. At a cement bridge over the ditch, leading to a broad
+veranda under the soft illumination of a big, wrought-iron lantern, Mary
+drew rein.
+
+"This is home," she said; "and--and thank you!"
+
+He could not see her face, which was in the shadow turned toward him, as
+he looked into the light of the lantern from the other side of her pony.
+
+"And--thank you!"
+
+It was as if she had been on the point of saying something else and
+could not get the form of any sentence except these two words. Was there
+anything further to say except "Thank you"? Anything but to repeat
+"Thank you"?
+
+There he stood, this stranger so correctly introduced by the Eternal
+Painter, with his burden, waiting instructions in this moment of awkward
+diffidence. He looked at her and at the porch and at his bundle of mail
+in a quizzical appeal. Then she realized that, in a peculiar lapse of
+abstraction, she had forgotten about his encumberment.
+
+Before she could speak there was a sonorous hail from the house; a hail
+in keeping with the generous bulk of its owner, who had come through the
+door. He was well past middle-age, with a thatch of gray hair half
+covering his high forehead. In one hand he held the book that he had been
+reading, and in the other a pair of big tortoise-shell glasses.
+
+"Mary, you are late--and what have we here?"
+
+He was beaming at Jack as he came across the bridge and he broke into
+hearty laughter as he viewed Jack's preoccupation with the
+second-class matter.
+
+"At last! At last we have rural free delivery in Little Rivers! We are
+the coming town! And your uniform, sir"--Jasper Ewold took in the cowboy
+outfit with a sweeping glance which warmed with the picturesque
+effect--"it's a great improvement on the regulation; fit for free
+delivery in Little Rivers, where nobody studies to be unconventional in
+any vanity of mistaking that for originality, but nobody need be
+conventional."
+
+He took some of the cargo in his own hands. With the hearty breeze of his
+personality he fairly blew Jack onto the porch, where magazines and
+pamphlets were dropped indiscriminately in a pile on a rattan settee.
+
+"You certainly have enough reading matter," said Jack. "And I must be
+getting on to camp."
+
+For he had no invitation to stay from Mary and the conventional fact
+that he had to recognize is that a postman's call is not a social call.
+As he turned to go he faced her coming across the bridge. An Indian
+servant, who seemed to have materialized out of the night, had taken
+charge of her pony.
+
+"To camp! Never!" said Jasper Ewold. "Sir Knight, slip your lance in the
+ring of the castle walls--but having no lance and this being no castle,
+well, Sir Knight in _chaparejos_--that is to say, Sir Chaps--let me
+inform you"--here Jasper Ewold threw back his shoulders and tossed his
+mane of hair, his voice sinking to a serious basso profundo--"yes, inform
+you, sir, that there is one convention, a local rule, that no stranger
+crosses this threshold at dinner-time without staying to dinner." There
+was a resonance in his tone, a liveliness to his expression, that was
+infectious.
+
+"But Firio and Jag Ear and Wrath of God wait for me," Jack said, entering
+with real enjoyment into the grandiose style.
+
+"High sounding company, sir! Let me see them!" demanded Jasper Ewold.
+
+Jack pointed to his cavalcade waiting in the half shadows, where the
+lamp-rays grew thin. Wrath of God's bony face was pointed lugubriously
+toward the door; Jag Ear was wiggling his fragment of ear.
+
+"And Moses on the mountain-top says that you stay!" declared
+Jasper Ewold.
+
+Jack looked at Mary. She had not spoken yet and he waited on her word.
+
+"Please do!" she said. "Father wants someone to talk to."
+
+"Yes, Sir Chaps, I shall talk; otherwise, why was man given a tongue in
+his head and ideas?"
+
+Refusal was out of the question. Accordingly, Firio was sent on to make
+camp alone.
+
+"Now, Sir Chaps, now, Mr.--" began Jasper Ewold, pausing blankly. "Why,
+Mary, you have not given me his city directory name!"
+
+"Mr.--" and Mary blushed. She could only pass the, blame back to the
+Eternal Painter's oversight in their introduction.
+
+"Jack Wingfield!" said Jack, on his own account.
+
+"Jack Wingfield!" repeated Jasper Ewold, tasting the name.
+
+A flicker of surprise followed by a flicker of drawn intensity ran over
+his features, and he studied Jack in a long glance, which he masked just
+in time to save it from being a stare. Jack was conscious of the
+scrutiny. He flushed slightly and waited for some word to explain it;
+but none came. Jasper Ewold's Olympian geniality returned in a
+spontaneous flood.
+
+"Come inside, Jack Wingfield," he said. "Come inside, Sir Chaps--for that
+is how I shall call you."
+
+The very drum-beat of hospitality was in his voice. It was a wonderful
+voice, deep and warm and musical; not to be forgotten.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+A SMILE AND A SQUARE CHIN
+
+
+When a man comes to the door book in hand and you have the testimony of
+the versatility and breadth of his reading in half a bushel of mail for
+him, you expect to find his surroundings in keeping. But in Jasper
+Ewold's living-room Jack found nothing of the kind.
+
+Heavy, natural beams supported the ceiling. On the gray cement walls were
+four German photographs of famous marbles. The Venus de Milo looked
+across to the David of Michael Angelo; the Flying Victory across to
+Rodin's Thinker. In the centre was a massive Florentine table, its broad
+top bare except for a big ivory tusk paper-knife free from any mounting
+of silver. On the shelf underneath were portfolios of the reproductions
+of paintings.
+
+An effect which at first was one of quiet spaciousness became impressive
+and compelling. Its simplicity was without any of the artificiality that
+sometimes accompanies an effort to escape over-ornamentation. No one
+could be in the room without thinking through his eyes and with his
+imagination. Wherever he sat he would look up to a masterpiece as the
+sole object of contemplation.
+
+"This is my room. Here, Mary lets me have my way," said Jasper Ewold.
+"And it is not expensive."
+
+"The Japanese idea of concentration," said Jack.
+
+Jasper Ewold, who had been watching the effect of the room on Jack, as he
+watched it on every new-comer, showed his surprise and pleasure that this
+young man in cowboy regalia understood some things besides camps and
+trails; and this very fact made him answer in the vigorous and enjoyed
+combatancy of the born controversialist.
+
+"Japanese? No!" he declared. "The little men with their storks and vases
+have merely discovered to us in decoration a principle which was Greek in
+a more majestic world than theirs. It was the true instinct of the
+classic motherhood of our art before collectors mistook their residences
+for warehouses."
+
+"And the books?" Jack asked, boyishly. "Where are they? Yes, what do you
+do with all the second-class matter?"
+
+The question was bait to Jasper Ewold. It gave him an opportunity for
+discourse.
+
+"When I read I want nothing but a paper-cutter close at hand--a good, big
+paper-cutter, whose own weight carries it through the leaves. And I want
+to be alone with that book. If I am too lazy to go to the library for
+another, then it is not worth reading. When I get head-achy with print
+and look up, I don't want to stare at the backs of more books. I want
+something to rest and fill the eye. I--"
+
+"Father," Mary admonished him, "I fear this is going to be long. Why not
+continue after Mr. Wingfield has washed off the dust of travel and we are
+at table?"
+
+"Mary is merely jealous. She wants to hurry you to the dining-room, which
+was designed to her taste," answered her father, with an affectation of
+grand indignation. "The dust of travel here is clean desert dust--but I
+admit that it is gritty. Come with me, Sir Chaps!"
+
+He bade Jack precede him through a door diagonally opposite the one by
+which he had entered from the veranda. On the other side Jack found
+himself surrounded by walls of books, which formed a parallelogram around
+a great deal table littered with magazines and papers. Here, indeed, the
+printed word might riot as it pleased in the joyous variety and chaos of
+that truly omnivorous reader of herbivorous capacity. Out of the library
+Jack passed into Jasper Ewold's bedroom. It was small, with a soldier's
+cot of exaggerated size that must have been built for his amplitude of
+person, and it was bare of ornament except for an old ivory crucifix.
+
+"There's a pitcher and basin, if you incline to a limited operation for
+outward convention," said Jasper Ewold; "and through that door you will
+find a shower, if you are for frank, unlimited submersion of the
+altogether."
+
+"Have I time for the altogether?" Jack asked.
+
+"When youth has not in this house, it marks a retrocession toward
+barbarism for Little Rivers which I refuse to contemplate. Take your
+shower, Sir Chaps, and"--a smile went weaving over the hills and valleys
+of Jasper Ewold's face--"and, mind, you take off those grand boots or
+they will get full of water! You will find me in the library when you are
+through;" and, shaking with subterranean enjoyment of his own joke, he
+closed the door.
+
+Cool water from the bowels of the mountains fell on a figure as slender
+as that of the great Michael's David pictured in the living-room; a
+figure whose muscles ran rippling with leanness and suppleness, without
+the bunching over-development of the athlete. He bubbled in shivery
+delight with the first frigid sting of the downpour; he laughed in
+ecstasy as he pulled the valve wide open, inviting a Niagara.
+
+While he was still glowing with the rough intimacy of the towel, he
+viewed the trappings thrown over the chair and his revolver holster on
+the bureau in a sense of detachment, as if in the surroundings of
+civilization some voice of civilization made him wish for flannels in
+which to dine. Then there came a rap at the door, and an Indian appeared
+with an envelope addressed in feminine handwriting. On the corner of the
+page within was a palm-tree--a crest to which anybody who dwelt on the
+desert might be entitled; and Jack read:
+
+"DEAR MR. WINGFIELD:
+
+"Please don't tell father about that horrible business on the pass. It
+will worry him unnecessarily and might interfere with my afternoon rides,
+which are everything to me. There is not the slightest danger in the
+future. After this I shall always go armed.
+
+"Sincerely yours,
+
+"MARY EWOLD."
+
+The shower had put him in such lively humor that his answer was born in a
+flash from memory of her own catechising of him on Galeria.
+
+"First, I must ask if you know how to shoot," he scribbled beneath her
+signature.
+
+The Indian seemed hardly out of the doorway before he was back
+with a reply:
+
+"I do, or I would not go armed," it said.
+
+She had capped his satire with satire whose prick was, somehow,
+delicious. He regarded the sweep of her handwriting with a lingering
+interest, studying the swift nervous strokes before he sent the note back
+with still another postscript:
+
+"Of course I had never meant to tell anybody," he wrote. "It is not a
+thing to think of in that way."
+
+This, he thought, must be the end of the correspondence; but he was
+wrong. The peripatetic go-between reappeared, and under Jack's last
+communication was written, "Thank you!" He could hardly write "Welcome!"
+in return. It was strictly a case of nothing more to say by either
+duelist. In an impulse he slipped the sheet, with its palm symbolic of
+desert mystery and oasis luxuriance, into his pocket.
+
+"Here I am in the midst of the shucks and biting into the meat of the
+kernel," said Jasper Ewold, as Jack entered the library to find him
+standing in the midst of wrappings which he had dropped on the floor;
+"yes, biting into very rich meat."
+
+He held up the book which was evidently the one that had balanced
+uncertainly on the pile which Jack had brought from the post-office.
+
+"Professor Giuccamini's researches! It is as interesting as a novel. But
+come! You are hungry!"
+
+Book in hand, and without removing his tortoise-shell spectacles, he
+passed out into the garden at the rear. There a cloth was laid under
+a pavilion.
+
+"In a country where it never rains," said the host, "where it is eternal
+spring, walls to a house are conventions on which to stack books and hang
+pictures. Mary has chosen nature for her decorative effect--cheaper,
+even, than mine. In the distance is Galeria; in the foreground, what was
+desert six years ago."
+
+The overhead lamp deepened to purple the magenta of the bougainvillea
+vines running up the pillars of the pavilion; made the adjacent rows of
+peony blossoms a pure, radiant white; while beyond, in the shadows, was a
+broad path between rows of young palms.
+
+Mary appeared around a hedge which hid the open-air kitchen. The girl of
+the gray riding-habit was transformed into a girl in white. Jack saw her
+as a domestic being. He guessed that she had seen that the table was set
+right; that she had had a look-in at the cooking; that the hands whose
+boast it was that they could shoot, had picked the jonquils in the
+slender bronze vase on the table.
+
+"Father, there you are again, bringing a book to the dining-room against
+the rules," she warned him; "against all your preachments about reading
+at meals!"
+
+"That's so, Mary," said Jasper Ewold, absently, regarding the book as if
+some wicked genius had placed it in his hand quite unbeknown to him.
+"But, Mary, it is Professor Giuccamini at last! Giuccamini that I have
+waited for so long! I beg your pardon, Sir Chaps! When I have somebody to
+talk to I stand doubly accused. Books at dinner! I descend into dotage!"
+
+In disgust he started toward the house with the book. But in the very
+doorway he paused and, reopening the book, turned three or four pages
+with ravenous interest.
+
+"Giuccamini and I agree!" he shouted. "He says there is no doubt that
+Burlamacchi and Pico were correct. Cosmo de' Medici did call Savonarola
+to his death-bed, and I am glad of it. I like good stories to turn out
+true! But here I have a listener--a live listener, and I ramble on about
+dead tyrants and martyrs. I apologize--I apologize!" and he disappeared
+in the library.
+
+"Father does not let me leave books in the living-room, which is his.
+Why should he bring them to the dining-room, which is mine?" Mary
+explained.
+
+"There must be law in every household," Jack agreed.
+
+"Yes, somebody fresh to talk to, at, around, and through!" called Jasper
+Ewold, as he reappeared. "Yes, and over your head; otherwise I shall not
+be flattered by my own conversation."
+
+"He glories in being an intellectual snob," Mary said. "Please pretend at
+times not to understand him."
+
+"Thank you, Mary. You are the corrective that keeps my paternal
+superiority in balance," answered her father, with a comprehending wave
+of his hand indicating his sense of humor at the same time as playful
+insistence on his role as forensic master of the universe.
+
+How he did talk! He was a mill to which all intellectual grist was
+welcome. Over its wheel the water ran now singing, again with the roar of
+a cataract. He changed theme with the relish of one who rambles at will,
+and the emotion of every opinion was written on the big expanse of his
+features and enforced with gestures. He talked of George Washington, of
+Andrea del Sarto, of melon-growing, trimming pepper-trees, the Divina
+Commedia, fighting rose-bugs, of Schopenhauer and of Florence--a great
+deal about Florence, a city that seemed to hang in his mind as a sort of
+Renaissance background for everything else, even for melon-growing.
+
+"You are getting over my head!" Jack warned him at times, politely.
+
+"That is the trouble," said Jasper Ewold. "Consider the hardship of
+being the one wise man in the world! I find it lonely, inconvenient,
+stupefying. Why, I can't even convince Jim Galway that I know more about
+dry farming than he!"
+
+Jack listened raptly, his face glowing. Once, when he looked in his
+host's direction suddenly, after speaking to Mary, he found that he was
+the object of the same inquiring scrutiny that he had been on the porch.
+In lulls he caught the old man's face in repose. It had sadness, then,
+the sadness of wreckage; sadness against which he seemed to fence in his
+wordy feints and thrusts.
+
+"Christian civilization began in the Tuscan valley," the philosopher
+proceeded, harking back to the book which had arrived by the evening's
+mail. "Florence was a devil--Florence was divine. They raised geniuses
+and devils and martyrs: the most cloud-topping geniuses, the worst
+devils, the most saintly martyrs. But better than being a drone in a
+Florence pension is all this"--with a wave of his hand to the garden and
+the stars--"which I owe to Mary and the little speck on her lungs which
+brought us here after--after we had found that we had not as much money
+as we thought we had and an old fellow who had been an idling student,
+mostly living abroad all his life, felt the cramp of the material facts
+of board-and-clothes money. It made Mary well. It made me know the
+fulness of wisdom of the bee and the ant, and it brought me back to the
+spirit of America--the spirit of youth and accomplishment. Instead of
+dreaming of past cities, I set out to make a city like a true American.
+Here we came to camp in our first travelled delight of desert spaces for
+her sake; and here we brought what was left of the fortune and started a
+settlement."
+
+The spectator-philosopher attitude of audience to the world's stage
+passed. He became the builder and the rancher, enthusiastically dwelling
+on the growth of orchards and gardens in expert fondness. As Jack
+listened, the fragrance of flowers was in his nostrils and in intervals
+between Jasper Ewold's sentences he seemed to hear the rustle of borning
+leaf-fronds breaking the silence. But the narrative was not an idyll.
+Toil and patience had been the handmaidens of the fecundity of the soil.
+Prosperity had brought an entail of problems. Jasper Ewold mentioned them
+briefly, as if he would not ask a guest to share the shadows which they
+brought to his brow.
+
+"The honey of our prosperity brings us something besides the bees. It
+brings those who would share the honey without work," said he. "It brings
+the Bill Lang hive and Pete Leddy."
+
+At the mention of the name, Jack's and Mary's glances met.
+
+"You have promised not to tell," hers was saying.
+
+"I will not," his was answering.
+
+But clearly he had grasped the fact that Little Rivers was getting out of
+its patron's hands, and every honest man in that community wanted to be
+rid of Pete Leddy.
+
+"I should think your old friend, Cosmo de' Medici, would have found a
+way," Jack suggested.
+
+"Cosmo is for talk," said Mary. "At heart father is a Quaker."
+
+"Some are for lynching," said Jasper Ewold, thoughtfully. "Begin to
+promote order with disorder and where will you end?" he inquired,
+belligerently. "This is not the Middle Ages. This is the Little Rivers
+of peace."
+
+Then, after a quotation from Cardinal Newman, which seemed pretty
+far-fetched to deal with desert ruffians, he was away again, setting out
+fruit trees and fighting the scale.
+
+"And our Date Tree Wonderful!" he continued. "This year we get our first
+fruit, unless the book is wrong. You cannot realize what this first-born
+of promise means to Little Rivers. Under the magic of water it completes
+the cycle of desert fecundity, from Scotch oats and Irish potatoes to the
+Arab's bread. Bananas I do not include. Never where the banana grows has
+there been art or literature, a good priesthood, unimpassioned
+law-makers, honest bankers, or a noble knighthood. It is just a little
+too warm. Here we can build a civilization which neither roasts us in
+summer nor freezes us in winter."
+
+There was a fluid magnetism in the rush of Jasper Ewold's junketing
+verbiage which carried the listener on the bosom of a pleasant stream.
+Jack was suddenly reminded that it must be very late and he had far
+overstayed the retiring hour of the desert, where the Eternal Painter
+commands early rising.
+
+"Going--going so soon!" protested Jasper Ewold.
+
+"So late!" Jack smiled back.
+
+To prove that it was, he called attention to the fact, when they passed
+through the living-room to the veranda, that not a light remained in any
+ranch-house.
+
+"I have not started my talk yet," said Jasper. "But next time you come I
+will really make a beginning--and you shall see the Date Tree Wonderful."
+
+"I go by the morning train," Jack returned.
+
+"So! so!" mused Jasper. "So! so!" he objected, but not gloomily. "I get a
+good listener only to lose him!"
+
+But Jack was hardly conscious of the philosopher's words. In that
+interval he had still another glimpse of Mary's eyes without the veil and
+saw deeper than he had before; saw vast solitudes, inviting yet offering
+no invitation, where bright streams seemed to flash and sing under the
+sunlight and then disappear in a desert. That was her farewell to the
+easy traveller who had stopped to do her a favor on the trail. And he
+seemed to ask nothing more in that spellbound second; nor did he after
+the veil had fallen, and he acquitted himself of some spoken form of
+thanks for an evening of happiness.
+
+"A pleasant journey!" Mary said.
+
+"Luck, Sir Chaps, luck!" called Jasper Ewold.
+
+Jack's easy stride, as he passed out into the night, confirmed the last
+glimpse of his smiling, whimsical "I don't care" attitude, which never
+minded the danger sign on the precipice's edge.
+
+"He does not really want to go back to New York," Mary remarked, and was
+surprised to find that she had spoken her thought aloud.
+
+"I hardly agree with that opinion," said her father absently, his
+thoughts far afield from the fetter of his words. "But of one thing I am
+sure, John Wingfield! A smile and a square chin!"
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+OBLIVION IS NOT EASY
+
+
+"A smile and a square chin!" Mary repeated, as they went back into the
+living-room.
+
+"Yes, hasn't he both, this Wingfield?" asked her father.
+
+"This Wingfield"--on the finish of the sentence there was a halting,
+appreciable accent. He moved toward the table with the listlessness of
+some enormous automaton of a man to whom every step of existence was a
+step in a treadmill. There was a heavy sadness about his features which
+rarely came, and always startled her when it did come with a fear that
+they had so set in gloom that they would never change. He raised his hand
+to the wick screw of the lamp, waiting for her to pass through the room
+before turning off the flame which bathed him in its rays, giving him the
+effect of a Rodinesque incarnation of memory.
+
+Any melancholy that beset him was her own enemy, to be fought and
+cajoled. Mary slipped to his side, dropping her head on his shoulder and
+patting his cheek. But this magic which had so frequently rallied him
+brought only a transient, hazy smile and in its company what seemed a
+random thought.
+
+"And you and he came down the pass together? Yes, yes!" he said. His tone
+had the vagueness of one drawing in from the sea a net that seemed to
+have no end.
+
+Had Jack Wingfield been more than a symbol? Had he brought something
+more than an expression of culture, manner, and ease of a past which
+nothing could dim? Had he suggested some personal relation to that past
+which her father preferred to keep unexplained? These questions crowded
+into her mind speculatively. They were seeking a form of conveyance when
+she realized that she had been adrift with imaginings. He was getting
+older. She must expect his preoccupation and his absent-mindedness to
+become more exacting.
+
+"Yes, yes!" His voice had risen to its customary sonority; his eyes were
+twinkling; all the hard lines had become benignant wrinkles of Olympian
+charm. "Yes, yes! You and this funny tourist! What a desert it is! I
+wonder--now, I wonder if he will go aboard the Pullman in that stage
+costume. But come, come, Mary! It's bedtime for all pastoral workers and
+subjects of the Eternal Painter. Off you go, or we shall be playing
+blind-man's-buff in the dark!" He was chuckling as he turned down the
+wick. "His enormous spurs, and Jag Ear and Wrath of God!" he said.
+
+Her fancy ran dancing rejoicingly with his mood.
+
+"Don't forget the name of his pony!" she called merrily from the stairs.
+"It's P.D."
+
+"P.D.!" said her father, with the disappointment of one tempted by a good
+morsel which he finds tasteless. "There he seems to have descended to
+alphabetic commonplace. No imagery in that!"
+
+"He is a slow, reliable pony," put in Mary, "without the Q."
+
+"Pretty Damn, without the Quick! Oh, I know slang!"
+
+Jasper Ewold burst into laughter. It was still echoing through the house
+when she entered her room. As it died away it seemed to sound hollow and
+veiled, when the texture of sunny, transparent solidity in his laugh was
+its most pronounced characteristic.
+
+Probably this, too, was imagination, Mary thought. It had been an
+overwrought day, whose events had made inconsiderable things supreme over
+logic. She always slept well; she would sleep easily to-night, because it
+was so late. But she found herself staring blankly into the darkness and
+her thoughts ranging in a shuttle play of incoherency from the moment
+that Leddy had approached her on the pass till a stranger, whom she never
+expected to see again, walked away into the night. What folly! What folly
+to keep awake over an incident of desert life! But was it folly? What
+sublime egoism of isolated provincialism to imagine that it had been
+anything but a great event! Naturally, quiet, desert nerves must still be
+quivering after the strain. Inevitably, they would not calm instantly,
+particularly as she had taken coffee for supper. She was wroth about the
+coffee, though she had taken less than usual that evening.
+
+She heard the clock strike one; she heard it strike two, and three. And
+he, on his part--this Sir Chaps who had come so abruptly into her life
+and evidently set old passions afire in her father's mind--of course he
+was sleeping! That was the exasperating phlegm of him. He would sleep on
+horseback, riding toward the edge of a precipice!
+
+"A smile and a square chin--and dreamy vagueness," she kept repeating.
+
+The details of the scene in the store recurred with a vividness which
+counting a flock of sheep as they went over a stile or any other trick
+for outwitting insomnia could not drive from her mind. Then Pete Leddy's
+final look of defiance and Jack Wingfield's attitude in answer rose out
+of the pantomime in merciless clearness.
+
+All the indecisiveness of the interchange of guesses and rehearsed
+impressions was gone. She got a message, abruptly and convincingly. This
+incident of the pass was not closed. An ultimatum had been exchanged.
+Death lay between these two men. Jack had accepted the issue.
+
+The clock struck four and five. Before it struck again daylight would
+have come; and before night came again, what? To lie still in the torment
+of this new experience of wakefulness with its peculiar, half-recognized
+forebodings, had become unbearable. She rose and dressed and went down
+stairs softly, candle in hand, aware only that every agitated fibre of
+her being was whipping her to action which should give some muscular
+relief from the strain of her overwrought faculties. She would go into
+the garden and walk there, waiting for sunrise. But at the edge of the
+path she was arrested by a shadow coming from the servants'
+sleeping-quarters. It was Ignacio, the little Indian who cared for her
+horse, ran errands, and fought garden bugs for her--Ignacio, the
+note-bearer.
+
+"Señorita! señorita!" he exclaimed, and his voice, vibrant with something
+stronger than surprise, had a certain knowing quality, as if he
+understood more than he dared to utter. "Señorita, you rise early!"
+
+"Sometimes one likes to look at the morning stars," she remarked.
+
+But there were no stars; only a pale moon, as Ignacio could see
+for himself.
+
+"Señorita, that young man who was here and Pete Leddy--do you know,
+señorita?"
+
+"The young man who came down from the pass with me, you mean?" she asked,
+inwardly shamed at her simulation of casual curiosity.
+
+"Yes, he and Leddy--bad blood between them'" said Ignacio. "You no know,
+señorita? They fight at daybreak."
+
+The pantomime in the store, Jack's form disappearing with its easy step
+into the night, analyzed in the light of this news became the natural
+climax of a series of events all under the spell of fatality.
+
+"Come, Ignacio!" she said. "We must hurry!" And she started around the
+house toward the street.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+WHAT HAPPENED AT LANG'S
+
+
+While Jack had been playing the pioneer of rural free delivery in Little
+Rivers, Pete Leddy, in the rear of Bill Lang's store, was refusing all
+stimulants, but indulging in an unusually large cud of tobacco.
+
+"Liquor ain't no help in drawing a bead," he explained to the loungers
+who followed him through the door after Jack had gone.
+
+If Pete did not want to drink it was not discreet to press him,
+considering the mood he was in. The others took liberal doses, which
+seemed only to heighten the detail of the drama which they had witnessed.
+To Mary it had been all pantomime; to them it was dynamic with language.
+It was something beyond any previous contemplation of possibility in
+their cosmos.
+
+The store had been enjoying an average evening. All present were
+expressing their undaunted faith in the invincibility of James J.
+Jeffries, when a smiling stranger appeared in the doorway. He was dressed
+like a regular cowboy dude. His like might have appeared on the stage,
+but had never been known to get off a Pullman in Arizona. And the instant
+he appeared, up flashed Pete Leddy's revolver.
+
+The gang had often discussed when and how Pete would get his seventh
+victim, and here they were about to be witnesses of the deed. Instinct
+taught them the proper conduct on such occasions. The tenderfoot was as
+good as dead; but, being a tenderfoot and naturally a bad shot and prone
+to excitement, he might draw and fire wild. They ducked with the avidity
+of woodchucks into their holes--all except Jim Galway, who remained
+leaning against the counter.
+
+"I gin ye warning!" they heard Pete say, and closed their eyes
+involuntarily--all except Jim Galway--with their last impression the
+tenderfoot's ingenuous smile and the gleam on Pete's gun-barrel. They
+waited for the report, as Mary had, and then they heard steps and looked
+up to see that dude tenderfoot, still smiling, going straight toward the
+muzzle pointed at his head, his hands at his side in no attempt to draw.
+The thing was incredible and supernatural.
+
+"Pete is letting him come close first," they thought.
+
+But there, unbelievable as it was, Pete was lowering his revolver and
+the tenderfoot's hand was on his shoulder in a friendly, explanatory
+position. Pete seemed in a trance, without will-power over his trigger
+finger, and Pete was the last man in the world that you would expect
+to lose his nerve. Jim Galway being the one calm observer, whose
+vision had not been disturbed by precipitancy in taking cover, let us
+have his version.
+
+"He just walked over to Pete--that's all I can say--walked over to him,
+simple and calm, like he was going to ask for a match. All I could think
+of and see was his smile right into that muzzle and the glint in his
+eyes, which were looking into Pete's. Someway you couldn't shoot into
+that smile and that glint, which was sort of saying, 'Go ahead! I'm
+leaving it to you and I don't care!'--just as if a flash of powder was
+all the same to him as a flash of lightning."
+
+The desert had given Jack life; and it would seem as if what the desert
+had given, it might take away. He was not going to humble himself by
+throwing up his arms or standing still for execution. He was on his way
+into the store and he continued on his way. If something stopped him,
+then he would not have to take the train East in the morning.
+
+"Now if you want to kill me, Pete Leddy," the astonished group heard this
+stranger say, "why, I'm not going to deny you the chance. But I don't
+want you to do it just out of impulse, and I know that is not your own
+reasoned way. You certainly would want sporting rules to prevail and that
+I should have an equal chance of killing you. So we will go outside,
+stand off any number of paces you say, let our gun-barrels hang down even
+with the seams of our trousers, and wait for somebody to say 'one, two,
+three--fire!'"
+
+Not once had that peculiar smile faded from Jack's lips or the glint in
+his eyes diverted from its probe of Leddy's eyes. His voice went well
+with the smile and with an undercurrent of high voltage which seemed the
+audible corollary of the glint. Every man knew that, despite his gay
+adornment, he was not bluffing. He had made his proposition in deadly
+earnest and was ready to carry it out. Pete Leddy shuffled and bit the
+ends of his moustache, and his face was drawn and white and his shoulder
+burning under the easy grip of Jack's hand. From the bore of the
+unremitting glance that had confounded him he shifted his gaze
+sheepishly.
+
+"Oh, h--l!" he said, and the tone, in its disgust and its attempt to
+laugh off the incident, gave the simplicity of an exclamation from his
+limited vocabulary its character. "Oh, h--l! I was just trying you out as
+a tenderfoot--a little joke!"
+
+At this, all the crowd laughed in an explosive breath of relief. The
+inflection of the laugh made Pete go red and look challengingly from face
+to face, with the result that all became piously sober.
+
+"Then it is all right? I meant in no way to wound your feelings or even
+your susceptibilities," said Jack; and, accepting the incident as closed,
+he turned to the counter and asked for the Ewold mail.
+
+Free from that smile and the glint of the eyes, Pete came to in a torrent
+of reaction. He, with six notches on his gun-handle, had been trifled
+with by a grinning tenderfoot. Rage mounted red to his brow. No man who
+had humiliated him should live. He would have shot Jack in the back if it
+had not been for Jim Galway, lean as a lath, lantern-jawed, with deep-set
+blue eyes, his bearing different from that of the other loungers. Jim had
+not joined in the laugh over Pete's explanation; he had remained
+impassive through the whole scene; but the readiness with which he
+knocked Leddy's revolver down showed that this immovability had let
+nothing escape his quiet observation.
+
+When Jack looked around and understood what had passed, his face
+was without the smile. It was set and his body had stiffened free
+of the counter.
+
+"I'll take the gun away from him. It's high time somebody did,"
+said Galway.
+
+"I think you had better, if that is the only way that he knows how to
+fight," said Jack. "I have wondered how he got the six. Presumably he
+murdered them."
+
+"To their faces, as I'll get you!" Leddy answered. "I'll play your way
+now, one, two, three--fire!"
+
+Galway, convinced that this stranger did not know how to shoot,
+turned to Jack:
+
+"It's not worth your being a target for a dead shot," he said.
+
+"In the morning, yes," answered Jack; and he was smiling again in a way
+that swept the audience with uncanniness. "But to-night I am engaged.
+Make it early to-morrow, as I have to take the first train East."
+
+"Well, are you going to let me go?" Leddy asked Jim, while he looked in
+appeal to the loungers, who were his men.
+
+"Yes, by all means," Jack told Galway. "And as I shall want a man with
+me, may I rely on you? Four of us will be enough, with a fifth to give
+the word."
+
+"Ropey Smith can go with me," said Leddy.
+
+It scarcely occurred to them to give the name of duel to this meeting,
+which Jack held was the only fair way when one felt that he must have
+satisfaction from an adversary in the form of death. An _arroyo_ a mile
+from town was chosen and the time dawn, for a meeting which was to
+reverse the ethics of that boasted fair-play in which the man who first
+gets a bead is the hero.
+
+"It seems a mediaeval day for me," Jack said, when the details were
+concluded. "Good-night, gentlemen," he added, after Bill Lang, with
+fingers that bungled from agitation, had filled his arms with
+second-class matter.
+
+Jim Galway resumed his position, leaning against the counter watchfully
+as the gang filed out to the rear to wet up, and in his right hand, which
+was in his pocket, nestled an automatic pistol.
+
+"I'd shot Pete Leddy dead--'twas the first real fair chance within the
+law--so help me, God! I would," he thought, "if there had been time to
+spare, and save that queer tenderfoot's life. And me a second in a
+regular duel! Well, I'll be--but it ain't no regular duel. One of 'em is
+going to drop--that is, the tenderfoot is. I don't just know how to line
+him up. He beats me!"
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+ACCORDING TO CODE
+
+
+It was the supreme moment of night before dawn. A violet mist shrouded
+everything. The clamminess of the dew touched Mary's forehead and her
+hand brushed the moisture-laden hedge as she left the Ewold yard. She
+remembered that Jack had said that he would camp near the station, so
+there was no doubt in which direction she should go. Hastening along the
+silent street, it was easy for her to imagine that she and Ignacio were
+the only sentient beings, abroad in a world that had stopped breathing.
+
+Softly, impalpably, with both the graciousness of a host and the
+determinedness of an intruder who will not be gainsaid, the first rays of
+morning light filtered into the mist. The violet went pink. From pale
+pink it turned to rose-pink; to the light of life which was as yet as
+still as the light of the moon. The occasional giant cactus in the open
+beyond the village outskirts ceased to be spectral.
+
+For the first time Mary Ewold was in the presence of the wonder of
+daybreak on the desert without watching for the harbinger of gold in the
+V of the pass, with its revelation of a dome of blue where unfathomable
+space had been. For the first time daybreak interested her only in
+broadening and defining her vision of her immediate surroundings.
+
+When the permeating softness suddenly yielded to full transparency,
+spreading from the fanfare of the rising sun come bolt above the range,
+and the mist rose, she left the road at sight of two ponies and a burro
+in a group, their heads together in drooping fellowship. She knew them at
+once for P.D., Wrath of God, and Jag Ear. Nearby rose a thin spiral of
+smoke and back of it was a huddled figure, Firio, preparing the morning
+meal. Animals and servant were as motionless as the cactus. Evidently
+they did not hear her footsteps. They formed a picture of nightly
+oblivion, unconscious that day had come. Firio's face was hidden by his
+big Mexican hat; he did not look up even when she was near. She noted the
+two blanket-rolls where the two comrades of the trail had slept. She saw
+that both were empty and knew that Jack had already gone.
+
+"Where is Mr. Wingfield?" she demanded, breathlessly.
+
+Firio was not startled. To be startled was hardly in his Indian nature.
+The hat tipped upward and under the brim-edge his black eyes gleamed, as
+the sandy soil all around him gleamed in the dew. He shrugged his
+shoulders when he recognized the lady speaking as the one who had delayed
+him at the foot of the pass the previous afternoon. Thanks to her, he had
+been left alone without his master the whole evening.
+
+"He go to stretch his legs," answered Firio.
+
+Apparently, Sir Chaps had been disinclined to disturb the routine of camp
+by telling Firio anything about the duel.
+
+"Where did he go? In which direction?" Mary persisted.
+
+Firio moved the coffee-pot closer to the fire. This seemed to require
+the concentration of all his faculties, including that of speech. He was
+a fit servant for one who took duels so casually.
+
+"Where? Where?" she repeated.
+
+"Where? Have you no tongue?" snapped Ignacio.
+
+Firio gazed all around as if looking for Jack; then nodded in the
+direction of rising ground which broke at the edge of a depression about
+fifty yards away. Her impatience had made the delay of a minute seem
+hours, while the brilliance of the light had now become that of broad
+day. She forgot all constraint. She ran, and as she ran she listened for
+a shot as if it were something inevitable, past due.
+
+And then she uttered a muffled cry of relief, as the scene in a
+depression which had been the bed of an ancient river flashed before her
+with theatric completeness. In the bottom of it were five men, two
+moving and three stationary. Jim Galway and Ropey Smith were walking
+side by side, keeping a measured step as they paced off a certain
+distance, while Bill Lang and Pete Leddy and Jack stood by. Leddy and
+Lang were watching the process inflexibly. Jack was in the costume which
+had flushed her curiosity so vividly on the pass and he appeared the
+same amused, disinterested and wondering traveller who had then come
+upon strange doings.
+
+She stopped, her temples throbbing giddily, her breaths coming in gasps;
+stopped to gain mastery of herself before she decided what she would do
+next. On the opposite bank of the _arroyo_ was a line of heads, like
+those of infantry above a parapet, and she comprehended that, in the
+same way that news of a cock-fight travels, the gallery gods of Little
+Rivers had received a tip of a sporting event so phenomenal that it
+changed the sluggards among them into early risers. They were making
+themselves comfortable lying flat on their stomachs and exposing as
+little as possible of their precious bodies to the danger of that
+tenderfoot firing wild.
+
+It was a great show, of which they would miss no detail; and all had
+their interest whetted by some possible new complication of the plot when
+they saw the tall, familiar figure of Jasper Ewold's daughter standing
+against the skyline. She felt the greedy inquiry of their eyes; she
+guessed their thoughts.
+
+This new element of the situation swept her with a realization of the
+punishment she must suffer for that chance meeting on Galeria and then
+with resentful anger, which transformed Jack Wingfield's indifference to
+callous bravado.
+
+Must she face that battery of leers from the town ruffians while she
+implored a stranger, who had been nothing to her yesterday and would be
+nothing tomorrow, to run away from a combat which was a creation of his
+own stubbornness? She was in revolt against herself, against him, and
+against the whole miserable business. If she proceeded, public opinion
+would involve her in a sentimental interest in a stranger. She must live
+with the story forever, while to an idle traveller it was only an
+adventure at a way-station on his journey.
+
+She had but to withdraw in feigned surprise from the sight of a scene
+which she had come upon unawares and she would be free of any association
+with it. For all Little Rivers knew that she was given to random walks
+and rides. No one would be surprised that she was abroad at this early
+hour. It would be ascribed to the nonsense which afflicted the Ewolds,
+father and daughter, about sunrises.
+
+Yes, she had been in a nightmare. With the light of day she was seeing
+clearly. Had she not warned him about Leddy? Had not she done her part?
+Should she submit herself to fruitless humiliation? Go to him in as much
+distress as if his existence were her care? If he would not listen to her
+yesterday, why should she expect him to listen to her now?
+
+She would return to her garden. Its picture of content and isolation
+called her away from the stare of the faces on the other bank. She turned
+on her heel abruptly, took two or three spasmodic steps and stopped
+suddenly, confronted with another picture--one of imagination--that of
+Jack Wingfield lying dead. The recollection of a voice, the voice that
+had stopped the approach of Leddy's passion-inflamed face to her own on
+the pass, sounded in her ears.
+
+She faced around, drawn by something that will and reason could not
+overcome, to see that Jim Galway and Ropey Smith had finished their task
+of pacing off the distance. The two combatants were starting for their
+stations, their long shadows in the slant of the morning sunlight
+travelling over the sand like pursuing spectres. Leddy went with the
+quick, firm step which bespoke the keenness of his desire; Jack more
+slowly, at a natural gait. His station was so near her that she could
+reach him with a dozen steps. And he was whistling--the only sound in a
+silence which seemed to stretch as far as the desert--whistling gaily in
+apparent unconsciousness that the whole affair was anything but play.
+The effect of this was benumbing. It made her muscles go limp. She sank
+down for very want of strength to keep erect; and Ignacio, hardly
+observed, keeping close to her dropped at her side.
+
+"Ignacio, tell the young man, the one who was our guest last evening,
+that I wish to see him!" she gasped.
+
+With flickering, shrewd eyes Ignacio had watched her distress. He craved
+the word that should call him to service and was off with a bound. His
+rushing, agitated figure was precipitated into a scene hard set as men on
+a chess-board in deadly serenity. Leddy and Jack, were already facing
+each other.
+
+"Señor! Señor!" Ignacio shouted, as he ran. "Señor Don't Care of the Big
+Spurs--wait!"
+
+The message which he had to give was his mistress's and, therefore,
+nobody else's business. He rose on tiptoes to whisper it into Jack's
+ear. Jack listened, with head bent to catch the words. He looked over to
+Mary for an instant of intent silence and then raised his empty left
+hand in signal.
+
+"Sorry, but I must ask for a little delay!" he called to Leddy. His tone
+was wonderful in its politeness and he bowed considerately to his
+adversary.
+
+"I thought it was all bluff!" Leddy answered. "You'll get it,
+though--you'll get it in the old way if you haven't the nerve to take it
+in yours!"
+
+"Really, I am stubbornly fond of my way," Jack said. "I shall be only a
+minute. That will give you time to steady your nerves," he added, in the
+encouraging, reassuring strain of a coach to a man going to the bat.
+
+He was coming toward Mary with his easy, languid gait, radiant of casual
+inquiry. The time of his steps seemed to be reckoned in succeeding
+hammer-beats in her brain. He was coming and she had to find reasons to
+keep him from going back; because if it had not been for her he would be
+quite safe. Oh, if she could only be free of that idea of obligation to
+him! All the pain, the confusion, the embarrassment was on her side. His
+very manner of approach, in keeping with the whole story of his conduct
+toward her, showed him incapable of such feelings. She had another
+reaction. She devoutly wished that she had not sent for him.
+
+Had not his own perversity taken his fate out of her hands? If he
+preferred to die, why should it be her concern? Should she volunteer
+herself as a rescuer of fools? The gleaming sand of the _arroyo_ rose in
+a dazzling mist before her eyes, obscuring him, clothing him with the
+unreality of a dream; and then, in physical reality, he emerged. He was
+so near as she rose spasmodically that she could have laid her hand on
+his shoulder. His hat under his arm, he stood smiling in the bland,
+questioning interest of a spectator happening along the path, even as he
+had in her first glimpse of him on the pass.
+
+"I don't care! Go on! Go on!" she was going to say. "You have made sport
+of me! You make sport of everything! Life itself is a joke to you!"
+
+The tempest of the words was in her eyes, if it did not reach her
+tongue's end. It was halted by the look of hurt surprise, of real pain,
+which appeared on his face. Was it possible, after all, that he could
+feel? The thought brought forth the passionate cry of her mission after
+that sleepless night.
+
+"I beg of you--I implore you--don't!"
+
+Had anyone told her yesterday that she would have been begging any man
+in melodramatic supplication for anything, she would have thought of
+herself as mad. Wasn't she mad? Wasn't he mad? Yet she broke into
+passionate appeal.
+
+"It is horrible--unspeakable! I cannot bear it!"
+
+A flood of color swept his cheeks and with it came a peculiar, feminine,
+almost awkward, gentleness. His air was that of wordless humility. He
+seemed more than ever an uncomprehending, sure prey for Leddy.
+
+"Don't you realize what death is?" she asked.
+
+The question, so earnest and searching, had the contrary effect on him.
+It changed him back to his careless self. He laughed in the way of one
+who deprecates another's illusion or passing fancy. This added to her
+conviction that he did not realize, that he was incapable of realizing,
+his position.
+
+"Do you think I am about to die?" he asked softly.
+
+"With Pete Leddy firing at you twenty yards away--yes! And you pose--you
+pose! If you were human you would be serious!"
+
+"Pose?" He repeated the word. It startled him, mystified him. "The
+clothes I bought to please Firio, you mean?" he inquired, his face
+lighting.
+
+"No, about death. It is horrible--horrible! Death for which I am
+responsible!"
+
+"Why, have you forgotten that we settled all that?" he asked. "It was not
+you. It was the habit I had formed of whistling in the loneliness of the
+desert. I am sorry, now, that I did not stick to singing, even at the
+expense of a sore throat."
+
+Now he called to Leddy, and his voice, high-pitched and powerful, seemed
+to travel in the luminous air as on resilient, invisible wires.
+
+"Leddy, wasn't it the way I whistled to you the first time we met that
+made you want satisfaction? You remember"--and he broke into a whistle.
+His tone was different from that to Leddy on the pass; the whistle was
+different. It was shrill and mocking.
+
+"Yes, the whistle!" yelled Leddy. "No man can whistle to me like that
+and live!"
+
+Jack laughed as if he appreciated all the possibilities of humor inherent
+in the picture of the bloodthirsty Leddy, the waiting seconds and the
+gallery. He turned to Mary with a gesture of his outstretched hands:
+
+"There, you see! I brought it on myself."
+
+"You are brutal! You are without feeling--you are ridiculous--you--" she
+stormed, chokingly.
+
+And in face of this he became reasoning, philosophical.
+
+"Yes, I admit that it is all ridiculous, even to farce, this little
+_comédie humaine_. But we must remember that beside the age of the desert
+none of us last long. Ridiculous, yes; but if I will whistle, why, then,
+I must play out the game I've started."
+
+He was looking straight into her eyes, and there was that in his gaze
+which came as a surprise and with something of the effect of a blade out
+of a scabbard. It chilled her. It fastened her inactive to the earth with
+a helplessness that was uncanny. It mixed the element of fear for him
+with the element of fear of him.
+
+"Remember I am of age--and I don't mind," he added, with the faintest
+glint of satire in his reassurance.
+
+He was walking away, with a wave of his hand to Leddy; he was going
+over the precipice's edge after thanking the danger sign. He did not
+hasten, nor did he loiter. The precipice resolved itself into an
+incident of a journey of the same order as an ankle-deep stream
+trickling across a highway.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+THE DEVIL IS OUT
+
+
+She had done her best and she had failed. What reason was there for her
+to remain? Should she endure witnessing in reality the horror which she
+had pictured so vividly in imagination? A flash of fire! The fall of a
+careening figure to the earth! Leddy's grin of satisfaction! The
+rejoicing of his clan of spectators over the exploit, while youth which
+sang airs to the beat of a pony's hoofs and knew the worship of the
+Eternal Painter lay dead!
+
+What reason to remain except to punish herself! She would go. But
+something banished reason. She was held in the leash of suspense, staring
+with clearness of vision in one second; staring into a mist the next;
+while the coming and going of Ignacio's breaths between his teeth was the
+only sound in her ears.
+
+"Señor Don't Care of the Big Spurs will win!" he whispered.
+
+"He will?" she repeated, like one marvelling, in the tautness of every
+nerve and muscle, that she had the power of speech.
+
+She peered into Ignacio's face. Its Indian impassivity was gone. His lips
+were twitching; his eyes were burning points between half-closed lids.
+
+"Why?" she asked. "How?"
+
+"I know. I watch him. I have seen a mountain lion asleep in a tree. His
+paw is like velvet. He smiles. There seems no fight in him. I know. There
+is a devil, a big devil, in Señor Don't Care. It sleeps so much it very
+terrible when it awakes. And Pete Leddy--he is all the time awake; all
+the time too ready. Something in him will make his arm shake when the
+moment to shoot comes and something in Señor Don't Care--his devil--will
+make his arm steady."
+
+Could Ignacio be right? Did Jack really know how to shoot? Was he
+confident of the outcome? Were his smiles the mask of a conviction that
+he was to kill and not to be killed? After all, had his attitude toward
+her been merely acting? Had she undergone this humiliation as the fish on
+the line of the mischievous play of one who had stopped over a train in
+order to do murder? No! If he were capable of such guile he knew that
+Leddy could shoot well and that twenty yards was a deadly range for a
+good shot. He was taking a chance and the devil in him was laughing at
+the chance, while it laughed at her for thinking that he was an innocent
+going to slaughter in expression of a capricious sense of chivalry.
+
+"He will win--he will win if Leddy plays fair!" Ignacio repeated.
+
+Now she was telling herself that it was solely for the sake of her
+conscience that she wanted to see Señor Don't Care survive; solely for
+the sake of her conscience that she wanted to see him go aboard the train
+safe. After that, she could forget ever having owed this trifler the
+feeling of gratitude for a favor done. Literally, he must live in order
+to be a dead and unremembered incident of her existence.
+
+And Jack was back at his station, with the bright sunlight heightening
+the colors of his play cowboy attire, his weight on the ball of his right
+foot thrown well ahead of the other, his head up, but the whole effect
+languid, even deferential. He seemed about to take off his hat to the
+joyous sky of a fair day in May. His shadow expressed the same feeling as
+his pose, that of tranquil youth with its eyes on the horizon. Leddy had
+the peculiar slouch of the desperado, which is associated with the spread
+of pioneering civilization by the raucous criers of red-blooded
+individualism. If Jack's bearing was amateurish, then Pete's was
+professional in its threatening pose; and his shadow, like himself, had
+an unrelieved hardness of outline.
+
+Both drew their guns from their holsters and lowered them till the
+barrels lay even with the trousers seams. They awaited the word to fire
+which Bill Lang, who stood at an angle equidistant from the two men,
+was to give.
+
+"Wait!" Jack called, in a tone which indicated that something had
+recurred to him. Then a half laugh from him fell on the brilliant,
+shining, hard silence with something of the sound of a pebble slipping
+over glare ice.
+
+"Leddy, it has just occurred to me that we are both foolish--honestly, we
+are!" he said. "The idea when Arizona is so sparsely settled of our
+starting out to depopulate it in such a premeditated manner on such a
+beautiful morning, and all because I was such an inept whistler! Why, if
+I had realized what a perfectly bad whistler I was I would never have
+whistled again. If my whistle hurt your feelings I am sorry, and I--"
+
+"No, you don't!" yelled Leddy. "I've waited long enough! It's
+fight, you--"
+
+"Oh, all right! You are so emphatic," Jack answered. His voice was still
+pleasant, but shot with something metallic. The very shadow of him seemed
+to stiffen with the stiffening of his muscles.
+
+"Ready!" called Bill Lang.
+
+The ruling passion that had carved six notches on his gun-handle
+overwhelmed Pete Leddy. At least, let us give him the benefit of the
+doubt and say that this and not calculation was responsible for his
+action. Before the word for preparation was free of Lang's lips, and
+without waiting for the word to fire, his revolver came up in a swift
+quarter-circle. He was sure of his aim at that range with a ready draw.
+Again and again he had thus hit his target in practice and six times he
+had winged his man by such agile promptness.
+
+With the flash from the muzzle all the members of the gallery rose on
+hands and knees. They were as sure that there was to be a seventh notch
+as of their identity. There was no question in their minds but Pete had
+played a smart trick. They had known from the first that he would win.
+And the proof of it was in the sudden, uncontrollable movement of the
+adversary.
+
+Jack whirled half round. He was falling. But even as he fell he was still
+facing his adversary. He plunged forward unsteadily and came to rest on
+his left elbow. A trickle of blood showed on the chap of his left leg,
+which had tightened as his knee twisted under him. Leddy's rage had been
+so hot that for once his trigger finger had been too quick. He had aimed
+too low. But he was sure that he had done for his man and he looked
+triumphantly toward the gallery gods whose hero he was. They had now
+risen to their feet. In answer to their congratulations he waved his
+left hand, palm out, in salutation. His gun-hand had dropped back to his
+trousers seam.
+
+Even as it dropped, Jack's revolver had risen, his own gun-hand steadied
+in the palm of his left hand, which had an elbow in the sand for a rest.
+Victor and spectators, in their preoccupation with the relief and elation
+of a drama finished, had their first warning of what was to come in a
+voice that did not seem like the voice of the tenderfoot as they had
+heard it, but of another man. And Leddy was looking at a black hole in a
+rim of steel which, though twenty yards away, seemed hot against his
+forehead, while he turned cold.
+
+"Now, Pete Leddy, do not move a muscle!" Jack told him. "Pete Leddy,
+you did not play my way. I still have a shot due, and I am going to
+kill you!"
+
+Jack's face seemed never to have worn a smile. It was all chin, and thin,
+tightly-pressed lips, and solid, straight nose, bronze and unyielding.
+
+"And I am going to kill you!"
+
+This was surely the devil of Ignacio's imagery speaking in him--a cold,
+passionless, gray-eyed devil. Though they had never seen him shoot,
+everybody felt now that he could shoot with deadly accuracy and that
+there was no play cowboy in his present mood. He had the bead of death
+on Leddy and he would fire with the first flicker of resistance. His
+call seemed to have sunk the feet of everyone beneath the sand to
+bed-rock and riveted them there. Lang and the two seconds were as
+motionless as statues.
+
+Mary recalled Leddy's leer at her on the pass, with its intent of
+something more horrible than murder. Savagery rose in her heart. It was
+right that he should be killed. He deserved his fate. But no sooner was
+the savagery born--born, she felt, of the very hypnosis of that carved
+face--than she cast it out shudderingly in the realization that she had
+wished the death of a fellow human being! She looked away from Jack; and
+then it occurred to her that he must be bleeding. He was again a
+companion of the trail, his strength ebbing away. Her impulse was
+retarded by no fear of the gallery now. It brought her to her feet.
+
+"But first drop your revolver!" she heard Jack call, as she ran.
+
+She saw it fall from Leddy's trembling hand, as a dead leaf goes free of
+a breeze-shaken limb. All the fight was out of him. The courage of six
+notches was not the courage to accept in stoicism the penalty of foul
+play. And that black rim was burning his forehead.
+
+"Galway, you have a gun?" Jack asked.
+
+"Yes," Galway answered, mechanically. His presence of mind, which had
+been so sure in the store, was somewhat shaken. He had seen men killed,
+but never in such deliberate fashion.
+
+"Take it out'"
+
+There was a quality in the command like frosty madness, which one
+instinctively obeyed. The half-prostrate figure of the tenderfoot seemed
+to dominate everything--men, earth, and air.
+
+Mary had a glimpse of Galway drawing an automatic pistol from his pocket
+when she dropped at Jack's side. She knew that Jack had not heard or seen
+her approach. All his will was flowing out along a pistol's sight, even
+as his blood was flowing out on the sand in a broadening circle of red.
+
+It was well that she had come. Her fingers were splashed as she felt for
+the artery, which she closed by leaning her whole weight on the thumb.
+
+Ignacio had followed her and immediately after him came Firio, who had
+been startled in his breakfast preparations by the sound of a shot and
+had set out to investigate its cause. He was as changed as his master; a
+twitching, fierce being, glaring at her and at the wound and then
+prolongedly and watchfully at Pete Leddy.
+
+"Can you shoot to kill?" Jack asked Galway, in a piercing summons.
+
+"Yes," drawled Galway.
+
+"Then up with your gun--quick! There! A bead on Ropey Smith!"
+
+Galway had the bead before Ropey could protest.
+
+"Give Ropey ten seconds to drop his gun or we will care for him at the
+same time as Pete'" Jack concluded.
+
+Ropey did not wait the ten seconds. He was over-prompt for the
+same reasons of temperament that made Pete Leddy prefer his own
+way of fighting.
+
+"I take it that we can count on the neutrality of our spectators. They
+cannot be interested in the success of either side," Jack observed, with
+dry humor, but still methodically. "All they ask is a spectacle."
+
+"Yes, you bet!" came a voice from the gallery, undisguisedly eager
+to concur.
+
+"Now, Pete and Ropey," Jack began, and broke off.
+
+There was a poignant silence that waited on the processes of his mind.
+Not only was there no sound, but to Mary there seemed no movement
+anywhere in the world, except the pulse of the artery trying to drive its
+flood past the barrier of her thumb. Jack kept his bead unremittingly on
+Pete. It was Firio who broke the silence.
+
+"Kill him! He is bad! He hates you!" said Firio.
+
+"_Sí, sí_! If you do not kill him now, you must some time," said Ignacio.
+
+Mary felt that even if Jack heard them he would not let their advice
+influence him. On the bank before she had hastened to him a strange and
+awful visitor in her heart had wished for Leddy's death. Now she wished
+for him to go away unharmed. She wished it in the name of her own
+responsibility for all that had happened. Yet her tongue had no urging
+word to offer. She waited in a supernatural and dreadful curiosity on
+Jack's decision. It was as if he were to answer one more question in
+explanation of the mystery of his nature. Could he deliberately shoot
+down an unarmed man? Was he that hard?
+
+"I am thinking just how to deal with you, Pete and Ropey," Jack
+proceeded. "As I understand it, you have not been very useful citizens of
+Little Rivers. You can live under one condition--that you leave town and
+never return armed. Half a minute to decide!"
+
+"I'll go!" said Pete.
+
+"I'll go!" said Ropey.
+
+"And keep your words?"
+
+"Yes!" they assented.
+
+But neither moved. The fact that Jack had not yet lowered his
+revolver made them cautious. They were obviously over-anxious to play
+safe to the last.
+
+"Then go!" called Jack.
+
+Pete and Ropey slouched away, leaving behind Ropey's gun, which was
+unimportant as it had only one notch, and Pete's precious companion of
+many campaigns with its six notches, lying on the sand.
+
+"And, gentlemen," Jack called to the spectators, "our little
+entertainment is over now. I am afraid that you will be late for
+breakfast."
+
+Apparently it came as a real inspiration to all at once that they might
+be, for they began to withdraw with a celerity that was amazingly
+spontaneous. Their heads disappeared below the skyline and only the
+actors were left. Pete and Ropey--Bill Lang following--walked away along
+the bed of the _arroyo_, instead of going over the bank. Pete paused when
+he was out of range. The old threat was again in his pose.
+
+"I'm not through with you, yet!" he called.
+
+"Why, I hope you are!" Jack answered.
+
+He let his revolver fall with a convulsion of weakness. Mary wondered if
+he were going to faint. She wondered if she herself were not going to
+faint, in a giddy second, while the red spot on the sand shaped itself in
+revolving grotesquery. But the consciousness that she must not lift her
+weight from the artery was a centering idea to keep her faculties in some
+sort of equilibrium.
+
+He was looking around at her, she knew. Now she must see his face after
+this transformation in him which had made her fears of his competency
+silly imaginings; after she had linked her name with his in an
+overwhelming village sensation. She was stricken by unanalyzable emotions
+and by a horror of her nearness to him, her contact with his very blood,
+and his power. She was conscious of a glimpse of his turning profile,
+still transfixed with the cool purpose of action. Then they were gazing
+full at each other, eyes into eyes, directly, questioningly. He was
+smiling as he had on the pass; as he had when he stood with his arms
+full of mail waiting for the signal to deposit his load. His devil had
+slipped back into his inner being.
+
+He spoke first, and in the voice that went with his vaguest mood; the
+voice in which he had described his escape from the dinosaur whose scales
+had become wedged in the defile at the critical moment.
+
+"You have a strong thumb and it must be tired, as well as all
+bluggy," he said, falling into a childhood symbol for taking the
+whole affair in play.
+
+Could he be the same man who had said, "I am going to kill you!" so
+relentlessly? He had eased the situation with the ready gift he had for
+easing situations; but, at the same time, he had made those unanalyzable
+emotions more complex, though they were swept into the background for the
+moment. He glanced down at his leg with comprehending surprise.
+
+"Now, certainly, you are free of all responsibility," he added. "You kept
+the strength in me to escape the fate you feared. Jim Galway will make a
+tourniquet and relieve you."
+
+The first available thing for tightening the tourniquet was the barrel
+of Pete Leddy's gun and the first suggestion for material came from her.
+It was the sash of her gown, which Galway knotted with his strong,
+sunburned fingers.
+
+When she could lift her numbed thumb from its task and rose to her feet
+she had a feeling of relief, as if she were free of magnetic bonds and
+uncanny personal proximity. The incident was closed--surely closed. She
+was breathing a prayer of thanks when a remark from Galway to Jack
+brought back her apprehension.
+
+"I guess you will have to postpone catching to-day's train," he said.
+
+Certainly, Jack must remain until his wound had healed and his strength
+had returned. And where would he go? He could not camp out on the desert.
+As Jasper Ewold had the most commodious bungalow it seemed natural that
+any wounded stranger should be taken there. The idea chilled her as an
+insupportable intrusion. Jack hesitated a moment. He was evidently
+considering whether he could not still keep to his programme.
+
+"Yes, Jim, I'm afraid I shall have to ask you for a cot for a few days,"
+he said, finally.
+
+Again he had the right thought at the right moment. Had he surmised what
+was passing in her mind?
+
+"Seeing that you've got Pete Leddy out of town, I should say that you
+were fairly entitled to a whole bed," Jim drawled. "These two Indians
+here can make a hustle to get some kind of a litter."
+
+Now she could go. That was her one crying thought: She could go! And
+again he came to her rescue with his smiling considerateness.
+
+"You have missed your breakfast, I'll warrant," he said to her. "Please
+don't wait. You were so brave and cool about it all, and--I--" A faint
+tide of color rose to his cheeks, which had been pale from loss of blood.
+For once he seemed unable to find a word.
+
+Mary denied him any assistance in his embarrassment.
+
+"Yes," she answered, almost bluntly. Then she added an excuse: "And you
+should have a doctor at once. I will send him."
+
+She did not look at Jack again, but hastened away. When she was over the
+bank of the _arroyo_ out of sight she put her fingers to her temples in
+strong pressure. That pulse made her think of another, which had been
+under her thumb, and she withdrew her fingers quickly.
+
+"It is the sun! I have no hat," she said to herself, "and I didn't
+sleep well."
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+MARY EXPLAINS
+
+
+Dr. Patterson was still asleep when Mary rapped at his door. Having
+aroused him to action by calling out that a stranger had been wounded in
+the _arroyo_, she did not pause to offer any further details. With her
+eyes level and dull, she walked rapidly along the main street where
+nobody was yet abroad, her one thought to reach her room uninterrupted.
+As she approached the house she saw her father standing on the porch, his
+face beaming with the joy of a serenely-lived moment as he had his
+morning look at the Eternal Painter's first display for the day. She had
+crossed the bridge before he became conscious of her presence.
+
+"Mary! You are up first! Out so early when you went to bed so late!" he
+greeted her.
+
+"I did not sleep well," she explained.
+
+"What, Mary, you not sleep well!" All the preoccupation with the
+heavens went from his eyes, which swept her from head to foot. "Mary!
+Your hand is covered with blood! There is blood on your dress' What
+does this mean?"
+
+She looked down and for the first time saw dark red spots on her skirt.
+The sight sent a shiver through her, which she mastered before she spoke.
+
+"Oh, nothing--or a good deal, if you put it in another way. A real
+sensation for Little Rivers!" she said.
+
+"But you are not telling!"
+
+"It is such a remarkable story, father, it ought not to be spoiled by
+giving away its plot," she said, with assumed lightness. "I don't feel
+equal to doing full justice to it until after I've had my bath. I will
+tell you at breakfast. That's a reason for your waiting for me."
+
+And she hastened past him into the house.
+
+"Was it--was it something to do with this Wingfield?" he called excitedly
+after her.
+
+"Yes, about the fellow of the enormous spurs--Señor Don't Care, as
+Ignacio calls him," she answered from the stair.
+
+Some note underneath her nonchalance seemed to disturb, even to distress
+him. He entered the house and started through the living-room on his way
+to the library. But he paused as if in answer to a call from one of the
+four photographs on the wall, Michael Angelo's young David, in the
+supple ease of grace. The David which Michael made from an imperfect
+piece of marble! The David which sculptors say is ill-proportioned! The
+David into which, however, the master breathed the thing we call genius,
+in the bloom of his own youth finding its power, even as David found his
+against Goliath.
+
+This David has come out of the unknown, over the hills, with the dew of
+morning freshness on his brow. He is unconscious of self; of everything
+except that he is unafraid. If all other aspirants have failed in downing
+the old champion, why, he will try.
+
+Now, Jasper Ewold frowned at David as if he were getting no answer to a
+series of questions.
+
+"I must make a change. You have been up a long time, David," he
+thought; for he had many of these photographs which he kept in a
+special store-room subject to his pleasure in hanging. "Yes, I will
+have a Madonna--two Madonnas, perhaps, and a Velasquez and a Rembrandt
+next time."
+
+In the library he set to reading Professor Giuccamini; but he found
+himself disagreeing with the professor.
+
+"I want your facts which you have dug out of the archives," he said,
+speaking to the book as if it were alive. "I don't want your opinions.
+Confound it!" he threw Giuccamini on the table. "I'll make my own
+opinions! Nothing else to do out here on the desert. Time enough to
+change them as often as I want, too."
+
+He went into the garden--the garden which, next to Mary, was the most
+intimate thing in his affections. Usually, every new leaf that had burst
+forth over night set itself in the gelatine of his mind like so many
+letterpress changes on a printed page to a proof-reader. This time,
+however, a new palm leaf, a new spray of bougainvillea blossoms, a bud
+on the latest rose setting which he had from Los Angeles, said "Good
+morning," without any response from him.
+
+He paced back and forth, his hands clasped behind him, his head bowed
+moodily, and his shoulders drawn together in a way that made him seem
+older and more portly. With each turn he looked sharply, impatiently,
+toward the door of the house.
+
+Never had Mary so felt the charm of her room as on this morning; never
+had it seemed so set apart from the world and so personal. It was the
+breadth of the ell and the size of her father's library and bedroom
+combined. The windows could hardly be called windows in a Northern sense,
+for there was no glass. It was unnecessary to seal up the source of
+light and air in a dry climate, where a blanket at night supplied all the
+extra warmth one's body ever required. The blinds swung inward and the
+shades softened the light and added to the privacy which the screen of
+the growing young trees and creeping vines were fast supplying. Here she
+could be more utterly alone than on the summit of the pass itself. She
+paused in the doorway, surveying familiar objects in the enjoyed triumph
+of complete seclusion.
+
+While she waited for the water to run into the bowl, she looked fixedly
+at the stains of a fluid which had been so warm in its touch. It was only
+blood, she told herself. It would wash off, and she held her hands in the
+water and saw the spread of the dye through the bowl in a moment of
+preoccupation. Then she scrubbed as vigorously as if she were bent on
+removing the skin itself. After she had held up her dripping fingers in
+satisfied inspection, the spots on her gown caught her eye. For a moment
+they, too, held her staring attention; then she slipped out of the gown
+precipitately.
+
+With this, her determined haste was at an end. She was about to enjoy the
+feminine luxury of time. The combing of her hair became a delightful and
+leisurely function in the silky feel of the strands in her fingers and
+the refreshing pull at the roots. The flow of the bath water made the
+music of pleasurable anticipation, and immersion set the very spirit of
+physical life leaping and tingling in her veins. And all the while she
+was thinking of how to fashion a narrative.
+
+When she started down-stairs she was not only refreshed but remade. She
+was going to breakfast at the usual hour, after the usual processes of
+ushering herself from the night's rest into the day's activities. There
+had been no stealthy trip out to the _arroyo_; no duel; no wound; no
+Señor Don't Care. She had only a story which involved all these elements,
+a most preposterous story, to tell.
+
+"Now you shall hear all about it!" she called to her father as soon as
+she saw him; "the strangest, most absurd, most amusing affair"--she piled
+up the adjectives--"that has ever occurred in Little Rivers!"
+
+She began at once, even before she poured his coffee, her voice a trifle
+high-pitched with her simulation of humor. And she was exactly veracious,
+avoiding details, yet missing nothing that gave the facts a pleasant
+trail. She told of the meeting with Leddy on the pass and of the arrival
+of the gorgeous traveller; of Jack's whistle; of Pete's challenge.
+
+Jasper Ewold listened with stoical attentiveness. He did not laugh, even
+when Jack's vagaries were mentioned.
+
+"Why didn't you tell me last night?" was his first question.
+
+"To be honest, I was afraid that it would worry you. I was afraid that
+you would not permit me to go to the pass alone again. But you will?" She
+slipped her hand across the table and laid her fingers appealingly on the
+broad back of his heavily tanned hand, from which the veins rose in
+bronze welts. "And he was nice about it in his ridiculous, big-spurs
+fashion. He said that it was all due to the whistle."
+
+"Go on! Go on! There must be more!" her father insisted impatiently.
+
+She gave him the pantomime of the store, not as a bit of tragedy--she was
+careful about that--but as something witnessed by an impersonal
+spectator and narrator of stories.
+
+"He walked right toward a muzzle, this Wingfield?" Jasper asked, his
+brows contracting.
+
+"Why, yes. I told you at the start it was all most preposterous,"
+she answered.
+
+"And he was not afraid of death--this Wingfield!" Jasper repeated.
+
+He was looking away from her. The contraction of his brows had become a
+scowl of mystification.
+
+"Why do you always speak of him as 'this Wingfield,'" she demanded, "as
+if the town were full of Wingfields and he was a particular one?"
+
+He looked around quickly, his features working in a kind of confusion.
+Then he smiled.
+
+"I was thinking of the whistle," he explained. "Well, we'll call him this
+Sir Chaps, this Señor Don't Care, or whatever you please. As for his
+walking into the gun, there is nothing remarkable in that. You draw on a
+man. You expect him to throw up his hands or reach for his gun. He does
+nothing but smile right along the level of the sight into your eyes. It
+was disturbing to Pete's sense of etiquette on such occasions. It threw
+him off. There are similar instances in history. A soldier once put a
+musket at Bonaparte's head. Some of Caesar's legionaries once pressed
+their swords at his breast. Such old hands in human psychology had the
+presence of mind to smile. And the history of the West is full of
+examples which have not been recorded. Go on, Mary!"
+
+"Ignacio says he has a devil in him," she added.
+
+"That little Indian has a lot of primitive race wisdom. Probably he is
+right," her father said soberly.
+
+"It explains what followed," she proceeded.
+
+She was emphatic about the reason for her part. She went out to the
+_arroyo_ on behalf of her responsibility for a human life.
+
+"But why did you not rouse me? Why did you go alone?" he asked.
+
+"I didn't think--there wasn't time--I was upset and hurried."
+
+She proceeded in a forced monotone which seemed to allow her hardly a
+single full breath.
+
+"And I am going to kill you!" she repeated, shuddering, at the close of
+the narrative.
+
+"When he said that did his face change completely? Did it seem like the
+face of another man? Yes, did it seem as if there were one face that
+could charm and another that could kill?" Jasper's words came slowly and
+with a drawn exactness. They formed the inquiry of one who expected
+corroboration of an impression.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You felt it--you felt it very definitely, Mary?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+She was living over the moment of Jack's transformation from silk to
+steel. The scene in the _arroyo_ became burning clear. Under the strain
+of the suppression of her own excitement, concentrated in her purpose to
+make all the realism of the duel an absurdity, she did not watch keenly
+for the signs of expression by which she usually knew what was passing
+in her father's mind. But she was not too preoccupied to see that he was
+relieved over her assent that there was a devil in Jack Wingfield, which
+struck her as a puzzle in keeping with all that morning's experience.
+It added to the inward demoralization which had suddenly dammed her
+power of speech.
+
+"Ignacio saw it, too, so I was interested," Jasper added quickly,
+in a more natural tone, settling back into his chair. His agitation
+had passed.
+
+So that was it. Her father's dominant, fine old egoism was rejoicing in
+another proof of his excellence as a judge of character.
+
+"Finis! The story is told!" he continued softly.
+
+All told! And it had been a success. Mary caught her breath in a gay,
+high-pitched exclamation of realization that she had not to go on with
+explanations.
+
+"Our singular cavalier is safe!" she said. "My debt is paid. I need not
+worry any further lest someone who did me a favor should suffer for it!"
+
+"True! true!"
+
+Jasper's outburst of laughter when he had paused in turning down the wick
+of the lamp the previous evening had been as a forced blast from the
+brasses. Anyone with strong lungs may laugh majestically; but it takes
+depth of feeling and years rich with experience to express the
+gratification that now possessed him. He stretched his hands across the
+table to her and the laugh that came then came as a cataract of
+spontaneity.
+
+"Exactly, Mary! The duel provided the way to pay a debt," he said. "Why,
+it is you who have done our Big Spurs a favor! He has a wound to show to
+his friends in the East! I am proud that you could take it all so coolly
+and reasonably."
+
+She improved her opportunity while he held her hands.
+
+"I will go armed next time, and I do know how to shoot, so you won't
+worry"--she put it that way, rather than openly ask his consent--"if I
+ride out to the pass?"
+
+"Mary, I have every reason to believe that you know how to take care of
+yourself," he answered.
+
+And that very afternoon she rode out to Galeria, starting a little
+earlier than usual, returning a little later than usual, in
+jubilant mood.
+
+"Everything is the same!" she had repeated a dozen times on the road.
+"Everything is the same!" she told herself before she fell asleep;
+and her sleep was long and sweet, in nature's gratitude for rest
+after a storm.
+
+The sunlight breaking through the interstices of the foliage of a poplar,
+sensitive to a slight breeze, came between the lattices in trembling
+patchwork on the bed, flickering over her face and losing itself in the
+strands of her hair.
+
+"Everything is the same!" she said, when her faculties were cleared of
+drowsiness.
+
+For the second time she gave intimate, precious thanks for a simple thing
+that had never occurred to her as a blessing before: for the seclusion
+and silence of her room, free from all invasion except of her own
+thoughts. The quicker flow of blood that came with awaking, the expanding
+thrill of physical strength and buoyancy of life renewed, brought with it
+the moral courage which morning often brings to flout the compromises of
+the confusion of the evening's weariness. The inspiriting, cool air of
+night electrified by the sun cleared her vision. She saw all the pictures
+on the slate of yesterday and their message plainly, as something that
+could not be erased by any Buddhistic ritual of reiterated phrase.
+
+"No, everything is not the same, not even the ride--not yet!" she
+admitted. "But time will make it so--time and a sense of humor, which I
+hope I have."
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+SEÑOR DON'T CARE RECEIVES
+
+
+Jack lounged in an armchair in the Galway sitting-room with his bandaged
+leg bolstered on a stool after Dr. Patterson had fished a bit of lead
+out of the wound. Tribute overflowed from the table to the chairs and
+from the chairs to the floor; pineapples, their knobby jackets all
+yellow from ripening in the field, with the full succulency of root-fed
+and sun-drawn flavor; monstrous navel oranges, leaden with the weight of
+juice, richer than cloth of gold and velvet soft; and every fruit of the
+fertile soil and benignant climate; and jellies, pies, and custards. But
+these were only the edibles. There were flowers in equal abundance. They
+banked the windows.
+
+"It's Jasper Ewold's idea to bring gifts when you call," explained Jim
+Galway. "Jasper is always sowing ideas and lots of them have sprung up
+and flourished."
+
+Jack had not been in Little Rivers twenty-four hours, and he had played a
+part in its criminal annals and become subject to all the embarrassment
+of favors of a royal bride or a prima donna who is about to sail. In a
+bower, amazed, he was meeting the world of Little Rivers and its wife.
+Men of all ages; men with foreign accent; men born and bred as farmers;
+men to whom the effect of indoor occupation clung; men still weak, but
+with red corpuscles singing a song of returning health in their
+arteries--strapping, vigorous men, all with hands hardened by manual
+labor and in their eyes the far distances of the desert, in contrast to
+the sparkle of oasis intimacy.
+
+Women with the accent of college classrooms; women who made plural nouns
+the running mates of singular verbs; women who were novices in
+housework; women drilled in drudgery from childhood--all expanding, all
+dwelling in a democracy that had begun its life afresh in a new land,
+and all with the wonder of gardens where there had been only sagebrush
+in their beings.
+
+There was something at odds with Jack's experience of desert towns in the
+picture of a bronzed rancher, his arms loaded with roses, saying, in
+boyish diffidence:
+
+"Mister, you fit him fair and you sure fixed him good. Just a few
+roses--they're so thick over to our place that they're getting a pest.
+Thought mebbe they'd be nice for you to look at while you was tied up to
+a chair nursing Pete's soovenir!"
+
+One visitor whose bulk filled the doorway, the expansion of his smile
+spreading over a bounteous rotundity of cheek, impressed himself as a
+personality who had the distinction in avoirdupois that Jim Galway had in
+leanness. In his hand he had five or six peonies as large as saucers.
+
+"Every complete community has a fat man, seh!" he announced, with a
+certain ample bashfulness in keeping with his general amplitude and a
+musical Southern accent.
+
+"If it wants to feel perfectly comfortable it has!" said Jack, by way
+of welcome.
+
+"Well, I'm the fat man of Little Rivers, name being Bob Worther!"
+said he, grinning as he came across the room with an amazingly quick,
+easy step.
+
+"No rivals?" inquired Jack.
+
+"No, seh! I staked out the first claim and I've an eye out for any
+new-comers over the two hundred mark. I warn them off! Jasper Ewold is up
+to two hundred, but he doesn't count. Why, you ought to have seen me,
+seh, before I came to this valley!"
+
+"A living skeleton?"
+
+"No, seh! Back in Alabama I had reached a point where I broke so many
+chairs and was getting so nervous from sudden falls in the midst of
+conversation, when I made a lively gesture that I didn't dare sit down
+away from home except at church, where they had pews. I weighed three
+hundred and fifty!"
+
+"And now?"
+
+"I acknowledge two hundred and forty, including my legs, which are very
+powerful, having worked off that extra hundred. I've got the boss job
+for making a fat man spider-waisted--inspector of ditches and dams. Any
+other man would have to use a horse, but I hoof it, and that's economy
+all around. And being big I grow big things. Violets wouldn't be much
+more in my line than drawnwork. I've got this whole town beat on
+peonies and pumpkins. Being as it's a fat man's pleasure to cheer
+people up, I dropped in to bring you a few peonies and to say that,
+considering the few well-selected words you spoke to Pete Leddy on this
+town's behalf, I'm prepared to vote for you for anything from coroner
+to president, seh!"
+
+Later, after Bob had gone, a small girl brought a spray of gladiolus,
+their slender stems down to her toe-tips and the opening blossoms half
+hiding her face. Jack insisted on having them laid across his knee She
+was not a fairy out of a play, as he knew by her conversation.
+
+"Mister, did you yell when you was hit?" she asked.
+
+Jack considered thoughtfully. It would not do to be vagarious under such
+a shrewd examination; he must be exact.
+
+"No, I don't think I did. I was too busy."
+
+"I'll bet you wanted to, if you hadn't been so busy. Did it hurt much?"
+
+"Not so very much."
+
+"Maybe that was why you didn't yell. Mother says that all you can see is
+a little black spot--except you can't see it for the bandages. Is that
+the way yours is?"
+
+"I believe so. In fact, I'll tell you a secret: That's the fashion
+in wounds."
+
+"Mother will be glad to know she's right. She sets a lot by her opinion,
+does mother. Say, do you like plums?"
+
+Jack already had a peck of plums, but another peck would not add much to
+the redundancy as far as he was concerned.
+
+"I'll bring you some. We've got the biggest plums in Little Rivers--oh,
+so big! Bigger'n Mr. Ewold's! I'll bring some right away." She paused,
+however, in the doorway. "Don't you tell anybody I said they were
+bigger'n Mr. Ewold's," she went on. "It might hurt his feelings. He's
+what they call the o-rig-i-nal set-tler, and we always agree that he
+grows the biggest of everything, because--why, because he's got such a
+big laugh and such a big smile. Mother says sour-faced people oughtn't to
+have a face any bigger'n a crab apple; but Mr. Ewold's face couldn't be
+too big if it was as big as all outdoors! Good-by. I reckon you won't be
+s'prised to hear that I'm the dreadful talker of our family."
+
+"Wait!" Jack called. "You haven't told me your name."
+
+"Belvedere Smith. Father says it ain't a name for living things. But
+mother is dreadfully set in her ideas of names, and she doesn't like it
+because people call me Belvy; but they just naturally will."
+
+"Belvedere, did you ever hear of the three little blue mice"--Jack was
+leaning toward her with an air of fascinating mystery--"that thought they
+could hide in the white clover from the white cat that had two black
+stripes on her back?"
+
+There was a pellmell dash across the room and her face, with wide-open
+eyes dancing in curiosity, was pressed close to his:
+
+"Why did the cat have two black stripes? Why? why?"
+
+"Just what I was going to tell," said the pacifier of desperadoes.
+
+"They were off on a tremendous adventure, with anthills for mountains
+and clover-stems for the tree-trunks of forests in the path. Tragedy
+seemed due for the mice, when a bee dropped off a thistle blossom for a
+remarkable reason--none other than that a hummingbird cuffed him in the
+ear with his wing--and the bee, looking for revenge with his stinger on
+the first vulnerable spot, stung the cat right in the Achilles tendon of
+his paw, just as that paw was about to descend with murderous purpose.
+The cat ran away crying, with both black stripes ridges of fur sticking
+up straight, while the rest of the fur lay nice and smooth; and the
+mice giggled so that their ears nearly wiggled off their heads. So all
+ended happily."
+
+"He does beat all!" thought Mrs. Galway, who had overheard part of the
+nonsense from the doorway. "Wouldn't it make Pete Leddy mad if he could
+hear the man who took his gun away getting off fairy stuff like that!"
+
+Mrs. Galway had brought in a cake of her own baking. She was
+slightly jealous of the neighbors' pastry as entering into her own
+particular field of excellence. Jack saw that the supply of cake in
+the Galway pantry must be as limitless as the pigments on the
+Eternal Painter's palette.
+
+"The doctor said that I was to have a light diet," he expostulated; "and
+I am stuffed to the brim."
+
+"I'll make you some floating island," said Mrs. Galway, refusing to
+strike her colors.
+
+"That isn't filling and passes the time," Jack admitted.
+
+"Jim says if you had to Fletcherize on floating island you would starve
+to death and your teeth would get so used to missing a step on the stairs
+that they would never be able to deal with real victuals at all."
+
+"Mrs. Galway," Jack observed sagely, dropping his head on the back of the
+chair, "I see that it has occurred to you and Jim that it is an excellent
+world and full of excellent nonsense. I am ready to eat both fluffy isles
+and the yellow sea in which they float. I am ready to keep on getting
+hungry with my efforts, even though you make it continents and oceans!"
+
+From his window he had a view, over the dark, polished green of Jim's
+orange trees, of the range, brown and gray and bare, holding steady
+shadows of its own and host to the shadows of journeying clouds, with the
+pass set in the centre as a cleft in a forbidding barrier. In the yard
+Wrath of God, Jag Ear, and P.D. were tethered. Deep content illumined the
+faces of P.D. and Jag Ear; but Wrath of God was as sorrowful as ever. A
+cheerful Wrath of God would have excited fears for his health.
+
+"Yet, maybe he is enjoying his rest more than the others," Jack told
+Firio, who kept appearing at the window on some excuse or other. "Perhaps
+he takes his happiness internally. Perhaps the external signs are only
+the last stand of a lugubriousness driven out by overwhelming forces of
+internal joy."
+
+"_Sí, sí_!" said Firio.
+
+"Firio, you are eminently a conversationalist," said Jack. "You agree
+with any foolishness as if it were a new theory of ethics. You are an
+ideal companion. I never have to listen to you in order that I may in
+turn have my say."
+
+"_Sí_," said Firio. He leaned on the windowsill, his black eyes shining
+with ingenuous and flattering appeal: "I will broil you a quail on a
+spit," he whispered. "It's better than stove cooking."
+
+"Don't talk of that!" Jack exclaimed, almost sharply. The suggestion
+brought a swift change to sadness over his face and drew a veil of
+vagueness over his eyes. "No, Firio, and I'll tell you why: the odor of a
+quail broiled on a spit belongs at the end of a day's journey, when you
+camp in sight of no habitation. You should sit on a dusty blanket-roll;
+you should eat by the light of the embers or a guttering candle. No,
+Firio, we'll wait till some other day. And it's not exactly courtesy to
+our hostess to bring in provender from the outside."
+
+The trail had apparently taught Firio all the moods of his master. He
+knew when it was unwise to persist.
+
+"_Sí_!" he whispered, and withdrew.
+
+Jack looked at Galeria and then back quickly, as if resisting its call.
+He smiled half wryly and readjusted his position in the chair. Over the
+hedge he could see the heads and shoulders of passers-by. Jim Galway had
+come into the room, when Jasper Ewold's broad back and great head hove
+in sight with something of the steady majesty of progress of a
+full-rigged ship.
+
+"The Doge!" Jack exclaimed, brightening.
+
+Jim was taken unawares. Was it the name of a new kind of semi-tropical
+fruit not yet introduced into Arizona?
+
+"Not the Doge of Venice--hardly, when Mr. Ewold's love runs to Florence!
+The Doge of Little Rivers!"
+
+"Why, the Doge--of course!" Jim was "on" now and grinning. "I didn't
+think of my history at first. That's a good one for Jasper Ewold!"
+
+"O Doge of Little Rivers, I expected you in a gondola of state!" said
+Jack, with a playfully grandiloquent gesture, as Jasper's abundance
+filled the doorway. "But it is all the more compliment to me that you
+should walk."
+
+"Doge, eh?" Jasper tasted the word. "Pooh!" he said. "Persiflage!
+persiflage! I saw at once yesterday that you had a weakness for it."
+
+"And Miss Ewold? How is she?" Jack asked. Remembering the promise
+that Mary had exacted from him, he took care not to refer to her part
+in the duel.
+
+His question fell aptly for what Jasper had to say. Being a man used to
+keeping the gate ever open to the full flood of spontaneity, he became
+stilted in the repetition of anything he had thought out and rehearsed.
+He was overcheerful, without the mellowness of tone which gave his cheer
+its charm on the previous evening.
+
+"She's not a bit the worse. Why, she went for a ride out to the pass this
+afternoon as usual! I've had the whole story, from the pass till the
+minute that Jim put the tourniquet on your leg. She recognizes the great
+kindness you did her."
+
+"Not a kindness--an inevitable interruption by any passer-by,"
+Jack put in.
+
+"Naturally she felt that it was a kindness, a service, and when she knew
+you were in danger she acted promptly for herself, with a desert girl's
+self-reliance. When it was all over she saw the whole thing in its proper
+perspective, as an unpleasant, preposterous piece of barbarism which had
+turned out fortunately."
+
+"Oh, I am glad of that!" Jack exclaimed, in relief that spoke rejoicing
+in every fibre. "I had worried. I had feared lest I had insisted too much
+on going on. But I had to. And I know that it was a scene that only men
+ought to witness--so horrible I feared it might leave a disagreeable
+impression."
+
+"Ah, Mary has courage and humor. She sees the ridiculous. She laughs at
+it all, now!"
+
+"Laughs?" asked Jack. "Yes, it was laughable;" and he broke into
+laughter, in which Jasper joined thunderously.
+
+Jasper kept on laughing after Jack stopped, and in genuine relief to find
+that the affair was to be as uninfluencing a chapter in the easy
+traveller's life as in Mary's.
+
+"Our regret is that we may have delayed you, sir," Jasper proceeded. "You
+may have had to postpone an important engagement. I understand that you
+had planned to take the train this morning."
+
+"When one has been in the desert for a long time," Jack answered, "a few
+days more or less hardly matter in the time of his departure. In a week
+Dr. Patterson says that I may go. Meanwhile, I shall have the pleasure
+of getting acquainted with Little Rivers, which, otherwise, I should
+have missed."
+
+"I am glad!" Jasper Ewold exclaimed with dramatic quickness. "Glad that
+your wound is so slight--glad that you need not be shut up long when you
+are due elsewhere."
+
+What books should he bring to the invalid to while away the time? "The
+Three Musketeers" or "Cyrano"? Jack seemed to know his "Cyrano" so well
+that a copy could be only a prompt. He settled deeper in his chair and,
+more to the sky than to Jasper Ewold, repeated Cyrano's address to his
+cadets, set to a tune of his own. His body might be in the chair, with a
+bandaged leg, but clearly his mind was away on the trail.
+
+"Yes, let me see," he said, coming back to earth. "I should like the
+'Road to Rome,' something of Charles Lamb, Aldrich's 'Story of a Bad
+Boy,' Heine---but no! What am I saying? Bring me any solid book on
+economics. I ought to be reading economics. Economics and Charles Lamb,
+that will do. Do you think they could travel together?"
+
+"All printed things can, if you choose. I'll include Lamb."
+
+"And any Daudet lying loose," Jack added.
+
+"And Omar?"
+
+"I carry Omar in my head, thank you, O Doge!"
+
+"Sir Chaps of the enormous spurs, you have a broad taste for one who
+rides over the pass of Galeria after five years in Arizona," said the
+Doge as he rose. He was covertly surveying that soft, winning, dreamy
+profile which had turned so hard when the devil that was within came to
+the surface.
+
+"I was fed on books and galleries in my boyhood," Jack said; but
+with a reticence that indicated that this was all he cared to tell
+about his past.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+MARY BRINGS TRIBUTE
+
+
+Every resident except the cronies of Pete Leddy considered it a duty,
+once a day at least, to look over the Galway hedge and ask how Señor
+Don't Care was doing. That is, everyone with a single exception, which
+was Mary. Jack had never seen her even pass the house. It was as if his
+very existence had dropped out of her ken. The town remarked the anomaly.
+
+"You have not been in lately," Mrs. Galway reminded her.
+
+"My flowers have required a lot of attention; also, I have been riding
+out to the pass a good deal," she answered, and changed the subject to
+geraniums, for the very good reason that she had just been weeding her
+geranium bed.
+
+Mrs. Galway looked at her strangely and Mary caught the glance. She
+guessed what Mrs. Galway was thinking: that she had been a little
+inconsiderate of a man who had been wounded in her service.
+
+"Probably it is time I bore tribute, too," she said to herself.
+
+That afternoon she took down a glass of jelly from the pantry shelves and
+set forth in the line of duty, frowning and rehearsing a presentation
+speech as she went. With every step toward the Galway cottage she was
+increasingly confused and exasperated with herself for even thinking of a
+speech. As she drew near she heard a treble chorus of "ohs!" and "ahs!"
+and saw Jack on the porch surrounded by children.
+
+"It's dinosaur foolishness again!" she thought, pungently.
+
+He was in the full fettle of nonsense, his head a little to one side and
+lowered, while he looked through his eyebrows at his hearers, measuring
+the effect of his words. She thought of that face when he called to
+Leddy, "I am going to kill you!" and felt the pulse of inquiry beat over
+all that lay in this man's repertory between the two moods.
+
+"Then, counting each one in his big, deep, bass voice, like this," he was
+saying, "that funny little dwarf kept dropping oranges out of the tree on
+the big giant, who could not wiggle and was squeaking in protest in his
+little, old woman's voice. Every orange hit him right on the bridge of
+his nose, and he was saying: 'You know I never could bear yellow! It
+fusses me so.'"
+
+"He doesn't need any jelly! I am going on!" Mary thought.
+
+Then Jack saw a slim, pliant form hastening by and a brown profile under
+hair bare of a hat, with eyes straight ahead. Mary might have been a unit
+of marching infantry. The story stopped abruptly.
+
+"Yes--and--and--go on!" cried the children.
+
+Jack held up his hand for silence.
+
+"How do you do?" he called, and she caught in his tone and in her first
+glimpse of his face a certain mischievousness, as if he, who missed no
+points for idle enjoyment of any situation, had a satisfaction in taking
+her by surprise with his greeting. This put her on her mettle with the
+quickness of a summons to fence. She was as nonchalant as he.
+
+"And you are doing well, I learn," she answered.
+
+"Oh, come in and hear it, Miss Ewold! It's the best one yet!" cried
+Belvedere Smith. "And--and--"
+
+"And--and--" began the chorus.
+
+Mary went to the hedge. She dropped the glass of jelly on the thick
+carpet of the privet.
+
+"I have just brought my gift. I'll leave it here. Belvy will bring it
+when the story is over. I am glad you are recovering so rapidly."
+
+"And--and--" insisted the chorus.
+
+"You oughtn't to miss this story. It's a regular Jim dandy!"
+Belvedere shouted.
+
+"Yes, won't you come in?" Jack begged in serious urgency. "I pride
+myself that it is almost intellectual toward the close."
+
+"I have no doubt," she said, looking fairly at him from under her hand,
+which she held up to shade her face, so he saw only the snap of her eyes
+in the shadow. "But I am in a hurry."
+
+And he was looking at a shoulder and a quarter profile as she
+turned away.
+
+"Did you make the jelly yourself?" he called.
+
+"Yes, I am not afraid of the truth--I did!" she answered with a backward
+glance and not stopping.
+
+"Oh, bully!" he exclaimed with great enthusiasm, in which she detected a
+strain of what she classified as impudence.
+
+"But all the time the giant was fumbling in his pocket for his green
+handkerchief. You know the dwarf did not like green. It fussed him just
+as much as yellow fussed the giant. But it was a narrow pocket, so narrow
+that he could only get his big thumb in, and very deep. So, you see--"
+and she heard the tale proceeding as she walked on to the end of the
+street, where she turned around and came back across the desert and
+through the garden.
+
+On the way she found it amusing to consider Jack judicially as a human
+exhibit, stripped of all the chimera of romance with which Little Rivers
+had clothed his personality. If he had not happened to meet her on the
+pass, the townspeople would have regarded this stranger as an invasion of
+real life by a character out of a comic opera. She viewed the specimen
+under a magnifying glass in all angles, turning it around as if it were a
+bronze or an ivory statuette.
+
+1. In his favor: Firstly, children were fond of him; but his extravagance
+of phrase and love of applause accounted for that. Secondly, Firio was
+devoted to him. Such worshipful attachment on the part of a native Indian
+to any Saxon was remarkable. Yet this was explained by his love of color,
+his foible for the picturesque, his vagabond irresponsibility, and,
+mostly, by his latent savagery--which she would hardly have been willing
+to apply to Ignacio's worshipful attachment to herself.
+
+2. Against him: Everything of any importance, except in the eyes of
+children and savages; everything in logic. He would not stand analysis at
+all. He was without definite character. He was posing, affected, pleased
+with himself, superficial, and theatrical, and interested in people only
+so long as they amused him or gratified his personal vanity.
+
+"I had the best of the argument in leaving the jelly on the hedge, and
+that is the last I shall hear of it," she concluded.
+
+Not so. Mrs. Galway came that evening, a bearer of messages.
+
+"He says it is the most wonderful jelly that ever was," said Mrs. Galway.
+"He ate half the glass for dinner and is saving the rest for
+breakfast--I'm using his own words and you know what a killing way he has
+of putting things--saving it for breakfast so that he will have something
+to live through the night for and in the morning the joy of it will not
+be all a memory. He wants to know if you have any more of the same kind."
+
+"Yes, a dozen glasses," Mary returned. "Tell him we are glad of the
+opportunity of finishing last year's stock, and I send it provided he
+eats half a glass with every meal."
+
+"I don't know what his answer will be to that," said Mrs. Galway,
+contracting her brow studiously at Mary. "But he would have one quick. He
+always has. He's so poetic and all that, we're planning to go to the
+station to see him off and pelt him with flowers; and Dr. Patterson is
+going to fashion a white cat out of white carnations, with deep red ones
+for the black stripes, for the children to present."
+
+"Hurrah!" exclaimed Mary blithely, and went for the jelly.
+
+She was spared further bulletins on the state of health of the wounded
+until her father returned from his daily call the next morning. She was
+in the living-room and she knew by his step on the porch, vigorous yet
+light, that he was uplifted by good news or by the anticipation of the
+exploitation of some new idea--a pleasure second only to that of the
+idea's birth. Such was his elation that he broke one of his own rules by
+tossing some of the books loaned to Jack onto the broad top of the table
+of the living-room, which was sacred to the isolation of the ivory
+paper-knife.
+
+"He has named the date!" shouted the Doge. "He goes by to-morrow's train!
+It will be a gala affair, almost an historical moment in the early
+history of this community. I am to make a speech presenting him with the
+freedom of the whole world. Between us we have hit on a proper modern
+symbol of the gift. He slips me his Pullman ticket and I formally offer
+it to him as the key to the hospitality of the seven seas, the two
+hemispheres, and the teeming cities that lie beyond the range. It will be
+great fun, with plenty of persiflage. And, Mary, they suggest that you
+write some verses--ridiculous verses, in keeping with the whole
+nonsensical business."
+
+"You mean that I am to stand on the platform and read poetry dedicated to
+him?" she demanded.
+
+"Poetry, Mary? You grow ambitious. Not poetry--foolish doggerel. Or
+someone will read it for you."
+
+He had not failed to watch the play of her expression. She had received
+all his nonsense, announced in his best style of simulated forensic
+grandeur, with a certain unchanging serenity which was unamused: which
+was, indeed, barely interested.
+
+"And someone else shall write it, for I don't think of any verses,"
+she said, with a slight shrug of the shoulder. "Besides, I shall not
+be there."
+
+"Not be there! People will remark your absence!"
+
+"Will they?" she asked, thoughtfully, as if that had not occurred to her.
+"No, they will be too occupied with the persiflage. I am going to ride
+out to the pass in the morning very early--before daybreak."
+
+"But"--he was positively frolicsome as he caught her hands and waved
+them back and forth, while he rocked his shoulders--"when you are
+stubborn, Mary, have your way. I will make your excuses. And I to work
+now. It is the hour of the hoe," as he called all hours except those of
+darkness and the hot midday.
+
+For Jasper Ewold was no idler in the affairs of his ranch or of the town.
+Few city men were so busy. His everlasting talk was incidental, like the
+babbling of a brook which, however, keeps steadily flowing on; and the
+stored scholarship of his mind was supplemented by long evenings with no
+other relaxation but reading. Now as he went down the path he broke into
+song; and when the Doge sang it was something awful, excusable only by
+the sheer happiness that brought on the attack.
+
+Mary had important sewing, which this morning she chose to do in her room
+rather than in her favorite spot in the garden. She closed the shutters
+on the sunny side and sat down by the window nearest the garden,
+peculiarly sensible of the soft light and cool spaciousness of an inner
+world. The occasional buzz of a bee, the flutter of the leaves of the
+poplar, might have been the voice of the outer world in Southern Spain or
+Southern Italy, or anywhere else where the air is balmy.
+
+And to-morrow! Out to Galeria in the fervor of a pilgrim to some shrine,
+with the easy movement of her pony and the rigid lines of the pass
+gradually drawing nearer and the sky ever distant! She would be mistress
+of her thoughts in all the silent glamour of morning on the desert. She
+would hear the train stop at the station, its heavy effort as it pulled
+out, and watch it winding over the flashing steel threads in a clamor of
+stridency and harshness, which grew fainter and fainter. And she would
+smile as it disappeared around a bend in the range. She would smile at
+him, at the incident, just as carelessly as he had smiled when he told of
+the dinosaur.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+A JOURNEY ON CRUTCHES
+
+
+The sun became benign in its afternoon slant. Little Rivers was beginning
+to move after its siesta, with the stretching of muscles that would grow
+more vigorous as evening approached and freshened life came into the air
+with the sprinkle of sunset brilliance.
+
+To Jack the hour palpably brought a reminder of the misery of the moment
+when a thing long postponed must at last be performed. The softness of
+speculative fancy faded from his face. His lips tightened in a way that
+seemed to bring his chin into prominence in mastery of his being. As he
+called Firio, his voice unusually high-pitched, he did not look out at
+P.D. and Wrath of God and Jag Ear.
+
+Firio came with the eagerness of one who is restless for action. He
+leaned on the windowsill, his elbows spread, his chin cupped in his
+hands, his Indian blankness of countenance enlivened by the glow of his
+eyes, as jewels enliven dull brown velvet.
+
+"Firio, I have something to tell you."
+
+"_Sí_!"
+
+There was a laboring of Jack's throat muscles, and then he forced out the
+truth in a few words.
+
+"Firio," he said, "this is my trail end. I am going back to New York
+to-morrow."
+
+"_Sí_!" answered Firio, without a tremor of emotion; but his eyes glowed
+confidently, fixedly, into Jack's.
+
+"There will be money for you, and--"
+
+"_Sí_!" said Firio mechanically, as if repeating the lines of a lesson.
+
+Was this Indian boy prepared for the news? Or did he not care? Was he
+simply clay that served without feeling? The thought made Jack wince. He
+paused, and the dark eyes, as in a spell, kept staring into his.
+
+"And you get P.D. and Wrath of God and Jag Ear and, yes, the big spurs
+and the chaps, too, to keep to remember me by."
+
+Firio did not answer.
+
+"You are not pleased? You--"
+
+"_Sí_! I will keep them for you. You will want them; you will come back
+to all this;" and suddenly Firio was galvanized into the life of a single
+gesture. He swept his arm toward the sky, indicating infinite distance.
+
+"No, I shall never come back! I can't!" Jack said; and his face had set
+hard, as if it were a wall about to be driven at a wall. "I must go and I
+must stay."
+
+"_Sí_!" said Firio, resuming his impassiveness, and slipped around the
+corner of the house.
+
+"He does care!" Jack cried with a smile, which, however, was not the
+smile of gardens, of running brooks, and of song. "I am glad--glad!"
+
+He picked up his crutches and went out to the three steeds of
+trail memory:
+
+"And _you_ care--_you_ care!" he repeated to them.
+
+He drew a lugubrious grimace in mockery at Wrath of God. He tickled the
+sliver of the donkey's ear, whereat Jag Ear wiggled the sliver in
+blissful unconsciousness that he had lost any of the ornamental equipment
+of his tribe.
+
+"You are like most of us; we don't see our deformities, Jag Ear," Jack
+told him. "And if others were also blind to them, why, we should all be
+good-looking!"
+
+His arm slipped around P.D.'s neck and he ran a finger up and down P.D.'s
+nose with a tickling caress.
+
+"You old plodder!" he said. "You know a lot. It's good to have the love
+of any living thing that has been near me as long as you have."
+
+This preposterous being was preposterously sentimental over a pair of
+ponies and an earless donkey. When Mrs. Galway, who had watched him from
+the window, came out on the porch she saw that he was on his way through
+the gate in the hedge to the street.
+
+"Look here! Did the doctor say you might?" she called.
+
+"No, my leg says it!" Jack answered, gaily. "Just a little walk!
+Back soon."
+
+It was his first enterprise in locomotion outside the limits of Jim
+Galway's yard since he had been wounded. He turned blissful traveller
+again. Having come to know the faces of the citizens, now he was to look
+into the faces of their habitations. The broad main street, with its rows
+of trees, narrowed with perspective until it became a gray spot of desert
+sand. Under the trees leisurely flowed those arteries of ranch and
+garden-life, the irrigation ditches. Continuity of line in the
+hedge-fences was evidently a municipal requirement; but over the hedges
+individualism expressed itself freely, yet with a harmony which had been
+set by public fashion.
+
+The houses were of cement in simple design. They had no architectural
+message except that of a background for ornamentation by the genius of
+the soil's productivity. They waited on vines to cover their sides and
+trees to cast shade across their doorways. One need not remain long to
+know the old families in this community, where the criterion of local
+aristocracy was the size of your plums or the number of crops of alfalfa
+you could grow in a year.
+
+Already Jack felt at home. It was as if he were friends with a whole
+world, lacking the social distinctions which only begin when someone
+acquires sufficient worldly possessions to give exclusive, formal
+dinners. He knew every passer-by well enough to address him or her by the
+Christian name. Women called to him from porches with a dozen invitations
+to visit gardens.
+
+"Just a saunter, just a try-out before I take the train. Not going far,"
+he always answered; yet there was something in his bearing that suggested
+a definite mission.
+
+"We hate to lose you!" called Mrs. Smith.
+
+"I hate to be lost!" Jack called back; "but that is just my
+natural luck."
+
+"I suppose you've got your work cut out for you back East, same's
+everybody else, somewhere or other, 'less they're millionaires, who all
+stay in the city and try to run from microbes in their automobiles."
+
+"Yes, I have work--lots of it," said Jack, ruefully. He shifted his
+weight on the crutches, paused and looked at the sky. The Eternal Painter
+was dipping his brush lightly and sweeping soft, silvery films, as a kind
+of glorified finger-exercise, over an intangible blue.
+
+"Why care? Why care?" His Majesty was asking. "Why not leave all the
+problems of earthly existence to your lungs? Why not lie back and look on
+at things and breathe my air? That is enough to keep your whole being in
+tune with the Infinite."
+
+It was his afternoon mood. At sunset he would have another. Then he would
+be crying out against the folly of wasting one precious moment in the
+eons, because that moment could never return to be lived over.
+
+Jack kept on until he recognized the cement bridge where he had stopped
+when he came from the post-office with Mary. Left bare of its
+surroundings, the first habitation in Little Rivers, with the ell which
+had been added later, would have appeared a barracks. But Jasper Ewold
+had the oldest trees and the most luxuriant hedge and vines as the reward
+of his pioneerdom.
+
+When Jack crossed the bridge and stood in the opening of the hedge there
+was no one on the porch in the inviting shade of the prodigal
+bougainvillea vines. So he hitched his way up the steps. Feeling that it
+was a formal occasion, he searched for the door-bell. There was none. He
+rapped on the casing and waited, while he looked at the cool, quiet
+interior, with the portrait of David facing him from the wall.
+
+"David, you seem to be the only one at home," he remarked, for there had
+been no answer to his raps; "and you are too busy getting a bead on
+Goliath to answer the immaterial questions of a wayfarer."
+
+Accepting the freedom of the Little Rivers custom on such occasions, he
+followed the path to the rear. His head knocked off the dead petals of a
+rambler rose blossom, scattering them at his feet. Rounding the corner of
+the house, he saw the arbor where he had dined the night of his arrival,
+and beyond this an old-fashioned flower garden separated by a path from
+a garden of roses. There was a sound of activity from the kitchen behind
+a trellis screen, but he did not call out for guidance. He would trust to
+finding his own way.
+
+When he came to the broad path, its stretch lay under a crochet-work of
+shadows from the ragged leaves of two rows of palms which ran to the edge
+of an orange grove, and the centre of this path was in a straight line
+with the bottom of the V of Galeria.
+
+Jasper Ewold had laid out his little domain according to a set plan
+before the water was first let go in laughing triumph over the parched
+earth, and this plan, as one might see on every hand, was expressive of
+the training of older civilizations in landscape gardening, which ages of
+men striving for harmonious forms of beauty in green and growing things
+had tested, and which the Doge, in all his unconventionalism of
+personality, was as little inclined to amend as he was to amend the
+classic authors. An avenue of palms is the epic of the desert; a
+bougainvillea vine its sonnet.
+
+Between the palms to the right and left Jack had glimpses of a vegetable
+garden; of rows of berry bushes; of a grove of young fig-trees; of rows
+of the sword-bundles of pineapple tops. Everything except the
+old-fashioned flower-bed, with its border of mignonette, and the generous
+beds of roses and other flowers of the bountiful sisterhood of petals of
+artificial cultivation, spoke of utility which must make the ground pay
+as well as please.
+
+Jack took each step as if he were apprehensive of disturbing the quiet
+Midway of the avenue of palms ran a cross avenue, and at the
+meeting-point was a circle, which evidently waited till the oranges and
+the olives should pay for a statue and surrounding benches. Over the
+breadth of the cross avenue lay the glossy canopy of the outstretched
+branches of umbrella-trees. A table of roughly planed boards painted
+green and green rattan chairs were in keeping with the restful effect,
+while the world without was aglare with light.
+
+Here Mary had brought her sewing for the afternoon. She was working so
+intently that she had not heard his approach. He had paused just as his
+line of vision came flush with the trunks of the umbrella-trees. For the
+first time he saw his companion in adventure in repose, her head bent,
+leaving clear the line of her neck from the roots of her hair to the
+collar, and the soft light bringing out the delicate brown of her skin.
+
+There seemed no movement anywhere in the world at the moment, except the
+flash of her needle in and out.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+"HOW FAST YOU SEW!"
+
+
+And she had not seen him! He was touched with a sense of guilt for
+having looked so long; for not having at once called to her; and rather
+than give her the shock of calling now, he moved toward her, the scuff
+of his limp, pendent foot attracting her attention. Her start at the
+sound was followed, when she saw him, with amazement and a flush and a
+movement as if she would rise. But she controlled the movement, if not
+the flush, and fell back into her chair, picking up her sewing, which
+had dropped on the table.
+
+It was like him, she might well think, to come unexpectedly, without
+invitation or announcement. She was alert, ready to take the offensive as
+the best means of defence, and wishing, in devout futility, that he had
+stayed away. He was smiling happily at everything in cosmos and at her as
+a part of it.
+
+"Good afternoon!"
+
+"Good afternoon!"
+
+"That last lot of jelly was better than the first," he said softly.
+
+"Was it? You must favor vintage jelly!"
+
+"I came to call--my p.p.c. call--and to see your garden," he added.
+
+"Is there any particular feature that interests you?" she asked. "The
+date-trees? The aviary? The nursery?"
+
+"No," he answered, "not just yet. It is very cool here under the
+umbrella-trees, isn't it? I have walked all the way from the Galways and
+I'll rest a while, if I may."
+
+He was no longer the play cavalier in overornamented _chaparejos_ and
+cart-wheel spurs, but a lame fellow in overalls, who was hitching toward
+her on crutches, his cowpuncher hat held by the brim and flopping with
+every step. But he wore the silk shirt and the string tie, and somehow he
+made even the overalls seem "dressy."
+
+"Pray sit down," she said politely.
+
+Standing his crutches against the table, he accepted the invitation. She
+resumed her sewing, eyes on the needle, lips pressed into a straight line
+and head bending low. He might have been a stranger on a bench in a
+public park for all the attention she was paying to him. She realized
+that she was rude and took satisfaction in it as the only way of
+expressing her determination not to reopen a closed incident.
+
+"It's wonderful--wonderful!" he observed, in a voice of contemplative
+awe.
+
+"What is?" she asked.
+
+"Why, how fast you sew!"
+
+"Yes?" she said, as automatically as she stitched. "Your wound is quite
+all right? No danger of infection?"
+
+"I don't blame you!" he burst out. His tone had turned sad and urgent.
+
+She looked up quickly, with the flare of a frown. His remark had brought
+her out of her pose and she became vivid and real.
+
+"Blame me!" she demanded, sharply, as one who flies to arms.
+
+But she met a new phase--neither banter, nor fancy, nor unvarying
+coolness in the face of fire. He was all contrition and apology. Must she
+be the audience to some fresh exhibition of his versatility?
+
+"I do not blame you for feeling the way that you do," he said.
+
+"How do you know how I feel?" she asked; and as far as he could see into
+her eyes there was nothing but the flash of sword-points.
+
+"I don't. I only know how I think you feel--how you might well feel," he
+answered delicately. "After Pete let his gun drop in the store I should
+not have named terms for an encounter. I should have turned to the law
+for protection for the few hours that I had to remain in town."
+
+"But to you that would have been avoiding battle!" she exclaimed.
+
+"Which may take courage," he rejoined. "What I did was selfish. It was
+bravado, with no thought of your position."
+
+"It is late to worry about that now. What does it matter? I did not want
+anyone killed on my account, and no one was," she insisted. "Besides, you
+should not be blue," this with a ripple of satire; "it is not quite all
+bravado to face Pete Leddy's gun at twenty yards."
+
+"And it is not courage. Courage is a force of will driving you into
+danger for some high purpose. I want you to realize that I am not such a
+barbarian that I do not know that I could have kept you out of it all if
+I had had proper self-control. Though probably, on the impulse, I would
+do the fool thing over again! Yes, that's the worst of it!"
+
+"There is a devil in him!" Ignacio's words were sounding in her ears. To
+how many men had he said, "I am going to kill you?" What other quarrels
+had he known in his wanderings from Colorado to Chihuahua?
+
+"If you really want my opinion, I am glad, so far as I am concerned, that
+you did fight," she said lightly. "Aren't you a hero? Isn't the town free
+of Leddy? And you take the train in the morning!"
+
+"Yes."
+
+The monosyllable was drawn out rather faintly. For the first time since
+they had met on the pass she felt she was mistress of the situation.
+This time she had not to plead with him in fear for his life. She could
+regard him without any sense of obligation, this invader of her garden
+retreat who had to put in one more afternoon in a dull desert town
+before he was away to that outside world which she might know only
+through books and memory.
+
+She rose exultantly, disregarding any formality that she would owe to the
+average guest; for an average guest he was not. Her attitude meant that
+she was having the last word; that she was showing her mettle.
+
+He did not rise. He was staring into the sunlight, as if it were darkness
+alive with flitting spectres which baffled identification.
+
+"Yes, back--back to armies of Leddys!" he said slowly.
+
+But this she saw as still another pose. It did not make her pause in
+gathering up her sewing. She was convinced that there was nothing more
+for her to say, except to give their parting an appearance of ease and
+unconcern.
+
+"Is it work you mean? You are not used to that, I take it?" she inquired
+a little sarcastically.
+
+"Yes, call it work," he answered, looking away from the spectres and
+back to her.
+
+"And you have never done any work!" she added.
+
+"Not much," he admitted, with his old, airy carelessness. He was smiling
+at the spectres now, as he had at the dinosaur.
+
+"As there is nothing particular about the garden that I can show you--"
+she was moving away.
+
+"No, I will be walking back to the house," he said after she had taken a
+few steps. "Will you wait on my slow pace?"
+
+He reached for his crutches, lifted himself to his feet and swung to
+her side. She who wished that the interview were over saw that it must
+be prolonged. Then suddenly she realized the weakness as well as the
+brusqueness of her attitude. She had been about to fly from him as
+from something that she feared. It was not necessary. It was foolish,
+even cowardly.
+
+"I thought perhaps you preferred to be alone, you seemed so abstracted,"
+she said, lamely; and then, as they came out into the sunlight in the
+circle, she began talking of the garden as she would to any visitor; of
+its beginnings, its growth, and its future, when her father's plans
+should have been fulfilled.
+
+"And in all these years you have never been back East?" he asked.
+
+"No. We are always planning a trip, but the money which we save for it
+goes into more plantings."
+
+They had been moving slowly toward the house, but now he stopped and his
+glance swept the sky and rested on Galeria.
+
+"It is the best valley of all! I knew it as soon as I saw it from the
+pass!" and the rapture of the scene was sounding in every syllable like
+chimes out of the distance. She knew that he was far away from the
+garden, and delaying, still delaying. If she spoke she felt that he would
+not hear what she said. If she went on it seemed certain that she would
+leave him standing there like a statue.
+
+"And there is more land here to make gardens like this?" he asked
+slowly, absorbed.
+
+"Yes, with water and labor and time."
+
+Though his face was in the full light of the sun, it seemed at times in
+shadow; then it glowed, as if between two passions. For an instant it was
+grim, the chin coming forward, the brows contracting; then it was
+transformed with something that was as a complete surrender to the
+transport of irresistible temptation. He looked down at her quickly and
+she saw him in the mood of story-telling to the children, suffused with
+the radiance of a decision.
+
+"I prefer the Leddys of Little Rivers to the Leddys of New York," he
+said. "I am not going to-morrow! I am going to have land and a home under
+the aegis of the Eternal Painter and in sight of Galeria, and worship at
+the shrine of fecund peace. Will you and the Doge help me?" he asked with
+an enthusiasm that was infectious. "May I go to his school of
+agriculture, horticulture, and floriculture?"
+
+Dumfounded, she bent her head and stared at the ground to hide her
+astonishment.
+
+"You want citizens, industrious young citizens, don't you?" he persisted.
+
+"Yes, yes!" she said hastily and confusedly.
+
+"Do you know a good piece of land?" he continued.
+
+"Yes, several parcels," she answered, recovering her poise and smiling
+in mockery.
+
+"Come on!" he cried.
+
+He was taking long, jumping steps on his crutches as they went up the
+path.
+
+"You will take me to look at the land, won't you, please--now? I want to
+get acquainted with my future estate. I mean to beat the Smiths at plums,
+Jim Galway at alfalfa, even rival Bob Worther at pumpkins and peonies.
+And you will help me lay out the flower garden, won't you? You see, I
+shall have to call in the experts in every line to start with, before I
+begin to improve on them and make them all jealous. I may find a kind of
+plum that will grow on alfalfa stalks," he hazarded. "What a
+horticultural sensation!"
+
+"And a spineless cactus called the Leddy!"
+
+His eyes were laughing into hers and hers irresistibly laughed back. She
+guessed that he was only joking. He had acted so well in the latest rôle
+that she had actually believed in his sincerity for a moment. He meant to
+take the train, of course, but his resourceful capriciousness had
+supplied him with a less awkward exit from the garden than she had
+provided. He would yet have the last word if she did not watch out--a
+last mischievous word at her expense.
+
+"First, you will have to plow the ground, in the broiling hot sun," she
+said tauntingly, when they had passed around to the porch. She was
+starting into the house with nervous, precipitate triumph. The last word
+was hers, after all.
+
+"But you are going to show me the land now!"
+
+His tone was so serious and so hurt that she paused.
+
+"And"--with the seriousness electrified by a glance that sought for
+mutual understanding--"and we are to forget about that duel and the whole
+hero-desperado business. I am a prospective settler who just arrived this
+afternoon. I came direct to headquarters to inquire about property. The
+Doge not being at home, won't you show me around?"
+
+Again he had said the right thing at the right time, with a delightful
+impersonality precluding sentiment.
+
+"I couldn't be unaccommodating," she admitted. "It is against all Little
+Rivers ethics."
+
+"I feel like a butterfly about to come out of his miserable chrysalis!
+Haven't you a walking-stick? I am going to shed the crutches!"
+
+She became femininely solicitous at once.
+
+"Are you sure you ought? Did the doctor say you might? Is the
+wound healed?"
+
+"There isn't any wound!" he answered. "That is one of the things which we
+are to forget."
+
+She brought a stick and he laid the crutches on the porch.
+
+He favored the lame leg, yet he kept up a clipping pace, talking the
+while as fast as the Doge himself as they passed through one of the side
+streets out onto the cactus-spotted, baking, cracked levels.
+
+"This is it!" she said finally. "This is all that father and I had to
+begin with."
+
+"Enough!" he answered, and held out his hands, palms open. "With
+callouses I will win luxuriance!"
+
+She showed him the irrigation ditch from which he should draw his water;
+she told him of the first steps; She painted all the difficulties in the
+darkest colors, without once lessening the glow of his optimism. He was
+so overwhelmingly, boyishly happy that she had to be happy with him in
+making believe that he was about to be a real rancher. But he should not
+have the sport all on his side. He must not think that she accepted this
+latest departure of his imagination incarnated by his Thespian gift in
+anything but his own spirit.
+
+"You plowing! You spraying trees for the scale! You digging up weeds! You
+stacking alfalfa! You settling down in one place as a unit of co-ordinate
+industry! You earning bread by the sweat of your brow! You with
+callouses!" Thus she laughed at him.
+
+Very seriously he held out his hands and ran a finger around a palm and
+across the finger-joints:
+
+"That is where I shall get them," he said. "But not on the thumb. I
+believe you get them on the thumb only by playing golf."
+
+He asked about carpenters and laborers; he chose the site for his house;
+he plotted the walks and orchards. She could not refuse her advice. Who
+can about the planning of new houses and gardens? He had everything
+quite settled except the land grant from the Doge when they started
+back; while the sun, with the swift passage of time in such fascinating
+diversion, had swung low in its ellipse. When they reached the main
+street the Doge was on the porch passing his opinion on the Eternal
+Painter's evening work.
+
+"Some very remarkable purples to-night, I admit, Your Majesty, without
+any intention of giving you too good an opinion of yourself; but
+otherwise, you are not up to your mark. There must have been a downpour
+in the rainy world on the other side of the Sierras that moistened your
+pigments. Next thing we know you will be turning water-colorist!" he was
+saying, when he heard Jack's voice.
+
+"Here's a new settler!" Jack called. "I am going to stay in Little Rivers
+and win all the prizes."
+
+"You are joking!" gasped the Doge.
+
+"Not joking," said Jack. "I want to close the bargain to-night."
+
+"You bring color and adventure--yes! I did not expect the honor--the
+town will be delighted! I am overwhelmed! Will you plow with Pete
+Leddy's gun drawn by Wrath of God, sir, and harrow with your spurs drawn
+by Jag Ear? Shall you make a specialty of olives? Do you dare to aspire
+as high as dates?"
+
+The Doge's speech had begun incoherently, but steadied into rallying
+humor at the close.
+
+"I haven't seen the date-tree yet," said Jack. "Not until I have can I
+judge whether or not I shall dare to rival the lord of the manor in his
+own specialty. And there are business details which I must settle with
+you, O Doge of this city of slender canals!"
+
+"O youth, will you tarry with peace between wars?" answered the Doge, in
+quick response to the spirit of nonsense as a basis for their new
+relations. "Come, and I will show you our noblest product of peace, the
+Date-Tree Wonderful!" he said, leading the way to the garden, while Mary
+hurried rather precipitately into the house.
+
+Jasper Ewold was at his best, a glowing husbandman, when he pointed aloft
+to the clusters of fruit pendent from the crotches of the stiff
+branches, enclosed in cloth bags to keep them free of insects.
+
+"Do you see strange lettering on the cloth?" he asked.
+
+"Yes, it looks like Arabic."
+
+"So it is! Among other futile diversions in a past incarnation I studied
+Arabic a little, and I still have my lexicon. Perhaps my construction
+might not please the grammarians of classic Bagdad, but the sentiment is
+there safe enough in the language of the mother romance world of the
+date: 'All hail, first-born of our Western desert fecundity!' It is
+calling out to the pass and the range from the wastes where the
+sagebrush has had its own way since the great stir that there was in the
+world at genesis."
+
+"With the unlimited authority I have in bestowing titles," said Jack, "I
+have a mind to make you an Emir. But it's a pity that you haven't a camel
+squatting under your date-tree and placidly chewing his cud."
+
+"A tempting thought!" declared the Doge unctuously.
+
+"Bob Worther could ride him on the tours of inspection. I think the
+jounce would be almost as good a flesh-reducer as pedestrianism."
+
+"There you go! You would have the camel wearing bells, with reins of red
+leather and a purple saddle-cloth hung with spangles, and Bob--our
+excellent Bob--in a turban! Persiflage, sir! A very demoralization of
+the faculties with cataracts of verbiage, sir!" declared the Doge as he
+started back to the house. "Little Rivers is a practical town," he
+proceeded seriously. "We indulge in nonsense only after sunset and when a
+stranger appears riding a horse with a profane name. Yes, a practical
+town; and I am surprised at your disloyalty to your own burro by
+mentioning camels."
+
+"It rests with you, I believe, to let me have the land and also the
+water," said Jack.
+
+"We grow businesslike!" returned the Doge with a change of manner.
+
+"Very!" declared Jack.
+
+"The requirement is that you become a member of the water users'
+association and pay your quota of taxes per acre foot; and the price you
+pay for your land also goes to the association. But I decide on the
+eligibility of the applicant."
+
+They were in front of the house by this time, and again the Doge gave
+Jack that sharp, quick, knowing glance of scrutiny through his heavy,
+tufted eyebrows, before he proceeded:
+
+"The concession for the use of the river for irrigation is mine,
+administered by the water users' association as if it were theirs, under
+the condition that no one who has not my approval can have membership.
+That is, it is practically mine, owing to my arrangement with old Mr.
+Lefferts, who lives upstream. He is an eccentric, a hermit. He came here
+many years ago to get as far away from civilization as he could, I judge.
+That gives him an underlying right. Originally he had two partners, squaw
+men. Both are dead. He had made no improvements beyond drawing enough
+water for a garden and for his horse and cow. When I came to make a
+bargain with him he named an annual sum which should keep him for the
+rest of his life; and thus he waived his rights. First, Jim Galway, then
+other settlers drifted in. I formed the water users' association. All
+taxes and sums for the sale of land go into keeping the dam and ditches
+in condition."
+
+"You take nothing for yourself!"
+
+"A great deal. The working out of an idea--an idea in moulding a little
+community in my old age in a fashion that pleases me; while my own
+property, of course, increases in value. At my death the rights go to the
+community. But no Utopia; Sir Chaps! Just hard-working, cheerful men and
+women in a safe refuge!"
+
+"And I am young!" exclaimed Jack, with a hopeful smile. "I have good
+health. I mean to work. I try to be cheerful. Am I eligible?"
+
+"Sir Chaps, you--you have done us a great favor. Everybody likes you. Sir
+Chaps"--the Doge hesitated for an instant, with a baffling, unspoken
+inquiry in his eyes--"Sir Chaps, I like your companionship and your
+mastery of persiflage. Jim Galway, who is secretary of the association,
+will look after details of the permit and Bob Worther will turn the water
+on your land, and the whole town will assist you with advice! Luck, Sir
+Chaps, in your new vocation!"
+
+That evening, while the Doge took down the David and set a fragment from
+the frieze of the Parthenon in its place, Little Rivers talked of the
+delightful news that it was not to lose its strange story-teller and
+duelist. Little Rivers was puzzled. Not once had Jack intimated a thought
+of staying. By his own account, so far as he had given any, his wound had
+merely delayed his departure to New York, where he had pressing business.
+He had his reservation on the Pullman made for the morning express; he
+had paid a farewell call at the Ewolds, and apparently then had changed
+his mind and his career. These were the only clues to work on, except the
+one suggested by Mrs. Galway, who was the wise woman of the community,
+while Mrs. Smith was the propagandist.
+
+"I guess he likes the way Mary Ewold snubs him!" said Mrs. Galway.
+
+But there was one person in town who was not surprised at Jack's
+decision. When Jack sang out as he entered the Galway yard on returning
+from the Doge's, "We stay, Firio, we stay!" Firio said: "_Sí_, Señor
+Jack!" with no change of expression except a brighter gleam than usual in
+his velvety eyes.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+WHEN THE DESERT BLOOMS
+
+
+Perhaps we may best describe this as a chapter of Incidents; or, to use a
+simile, a broad, eddying bend in a river on a plateau, with cataracts and
+canyons awaiting it on its route to the sea. Or, discarding the simile
+and speaking in literal terms, in a search for a theme on which to hang
+the incidents, we revert to Mary's raillery at the announcement of an
+easy traveller that he was going to turn sober rancher.
+
+"You plowing! You blistering your hands! You earning your bread by the
+sweat of your brow!"
+
+But there he was in blue overalls, sinking his spade deep for settings,
+digging ditches and driving furrows through the virgin soil, while the
+masons and carpenters built his ranch house.
+
+"They are straight furrows, too!" Jack declared.
+
+"Passably so!" answered Mary.
+
+"And look at the blisters!" he continued, exhibiting his puffy palms.
+
+"You seem to think blisters a remarkable human phenomenon, a sensational
+novelty to a laboring population!"
+
+"Now, would you advise pricking?" he asked, with deference to her
+judgment.
+
+"It is so critical in your case that you ought to consult a doctor rather
+than take lay advice."
+
+"Jim Galway says that the thorough way, I mulched my soil before
+putting in my first crop of alfalfa is a model for all future settlers,"
+he ventured.
+
+She remarked that Jim was always encouraging to new-comers, and remarked
+this in a way that implied that some new-comers possibly needed hazing.
+
+"And I am up at dawn and hard at it for six hours before midday."
+
+"Yes, it is wonderful!" she admitted, with a mock show of being
+overwhelmingly impressed. "Nobody in the world ever worked ten hours a
+day before!"
+
+"I'm doing more than any man that I pay two-fifty. I do perspire, and if
+you don't call that earning your bread with the sweat of your brow, why
+this is an astoundingly illogical world!"
+
+"There is a great difference between sporadic display and that continuity
+which is the final proof of efficiency," she corrected him.
+
+"Long, involved sentences often indicate the loss of an argument!"
+declared Jack.
+
+"There isn't any argument!" said Mary with superior disinterestedness.
+
+By common inspiration they had established a truce of nonsense. She still
+called him Jack; he still called her Mary. It was the only point of tacit
+admission that they had ever met before he asked her to show a
+prospective settler a parcel of land.
+
+Their new relations were as the house of cards of fellowship: cards of
+glass, iridescent and brittle, mocking the idea that there could be
+oblivion of the scene in Lang's store, the crack of Leddy's pistol in the
+_arroyo_, or the pulse of Jack's artery under her thumb! She was sure
+that he could forget these experiences, even if she could not. That was
+his character, as she saw it, free of clinging roots of yesterday's
+events, living some new part every day.
+
+In the house of cards she set up a barrier, which he saw as a veil over
+her eyes. Not once had he a glimpse of their depths. There was only the
+surface gleam of sunbeams and sometimes of rapier-points, merry but
+significant. She frequently rode out to the pass and occasionally, when
+his day's work was done, he would ride to the foot of the range to meet
+her, and as they came back he often sang, but never whistled. Indeed, he
+had ceased to whistle altogether. Perhaps he regarded the omission as an
+insurance against duels.
+
+Aside from nonsense they had common interests in cultural and daily life,
+from the Eternal Painter's brushwork to how to dress a salad. She did
+extend her approval for the generous space which he was allowing for
+flower-beds, and advised him in the practical construction of his
+kitchen; while the Doge decorated the living-room with Delia Robbias,
+which, however, never arrived at the express office. He was a neighbor
+always at home in the Ewold house. The Doge revelled in their
+disputations, yet never was really intimate or affectionate as he was
+with Jim Galway, who knew not the Pitti, the Prado, nor the Louvre, and
+could not understand the intoning of Dante in the original as Jack could,
+thanks to his having been brought up in libraries and galleries.
+
+The town, which was not supposed to ask about pasts, could not help
+puzzling about his. What was the story of this teller of stories? The
+secluded little community was in a poor way to find out, even if the
+conscientious feeling about a custom had not been a restraint that kept
+wonder free from inquiring hints. They took him for what he was in all
+their personal relations; that was the delightful way of Little Rivers,
+which inner curiosity might not alloy. His broader experience of that
+world over the pass which stretched around the globe and back to the
+other range-wall of the valley, seemed only to make him fall more easily
+into the simple ways of the fellow-ranchers of the Doge's selection, who
+were genuine, hall-marked people, whatever the origin from which the
+individual sprang. He knew the fatigue of productive labor as something
+far sweeter than the fatigue that comes from mere exercise, and the
+neophyte's enthusiasm was his.
+
+"I'm sitting at the outer edge of the circle," he told Jim Galway.
+"But when my first crop is harvested I shall be on the inside--a
+real rancher!"
+
+"You've already got one foot over the circle," said Jim.
+
+"And with my first crop of dates I'll be in the holy of holies of
+pastoral bliss!"
+
+"Yes, I should say so!" Jim responded, but in a way that indicated
+surprise at the thought of Jack's remaining in Little Rivers long enough
+for such a consummation.
+
+When his alfalfa covered the earth with a green carpet Jack was under a
+spell of something more than the never-ending marvel of dry seeds
+springing into succulent abundance without the waving of any magic wand.
+
+"I made it out of the desert!" he cried. "It laughs in triumph at the
+bare stretches around it, waiting on water!"
+
+"That is it," said Jim; "waiting on water!"
+
+"The promise of what might come!"
+
+"It will come! Some day, Jack, you and I will ride up into the river
+canyon and I will show you a place where you can see the blue sky between
+precipitous walls two hundred feet high. The abyss is so narrow you can
+throw a stone across it."
+
+"What lies beyond?" asked Jack, his eyes lighting vividly.
+
+"A great basin which was the bed of an ancient lake before the water wore
+its way through."
+
+"A dam between those walls--and you have another lake!"
+
+"Yes, and the spring freshets from the northern water-shed all held in a
+reservoir--none going to waste! And, Jack, as population spreads the dam
+must come."
+
+"Why, the Doge has a kingdom!"
+
+"Yes, that's the best of it, the rights being in his hands. He shares
+up with everybody and we get it when he dies. That's why we are ready
+to accept the Doge's sentiments as kind of gospel. If ornamental hedges
+waste water and bring bugs and are contrary to practical ranching
+ideas, why--well, why not? It's our Little Rivers to enjoy as we
+please. We aren't growing so fast, but we're growing in a clean,
+beautiful way, as Jasper Ewold says. What if that river was owned by
+one man! What if we had to pay the price he set for what takes the
+place of rain, as they do in some places in California? We're going to
+say who shall build that dam!"
+
+"Think of it! Think of it!" Jack half whispered, his imagination in play.
+"Plot after plot being added to this little oasis until it extends from
+range to range, one sea of green! Many little towns, with Little Rivers
+the mother town, spreading its ideas! Yes, think of being in at the
+making of a new world, seeing visions develop into reality as, stone by
+stone, an edifice rises! I--I--" Jack paused, a cloud sweeping over his
+features, his eyes seeming to stare at a wall. His body alone seemed in
+Little Rivers, his mind on the other side of the pass. He was in one of
+those moods of abstraction that ever made his fellow-ranchers feel that
+he would not be with them permanently.
+
+Indeed, he had whole days when his smile had a sad turn; when, though he
+spoke pleasantly, the inspiration of talk was not in him and when Belvy
+Smith could not rouse any action in the cat with two black stripes down
+its back. But many Little Riversites, including the Doge, had their sad
+days, when they looked away at the pass oftener than usual, as if seeing
+a life-story framed in the V. His came usually, as Mrs. Smith observed,
+when he had a letter from the East. And it was then that he would pretend
+to cough to Firio. These mock coughing spells were one of the few
+manifestations that made the impassive Firio laugh.
+
+"Now you know I am not well, don't you, Firio?" he would ask, waggishly,
+the very thought seeming to take him out of the doldrums. "I could never
+live out of this climate. Why, even now I have a cough, kuh-er!"
+
+Firio had turned a stove cook. He accepted the humiliation in a spirit of
+loyalty. But often he would go out among the sagebrush and return with a
+feathery tribute, which he would broil on a spit in a fire made in the
+yard. Always when Jack rode out to meet Mary at the foot of the range,
+Firio would follow; and always he had his rifle. For it was part of
+Jack's seeming inconsistency, emphasizing his inscrutability, that he
+would never wear his revolver. It hung beside Pete's on the wall of the
+living-room as a second relic. Far from being a quarrel-maker, he was
+peaceful to the point of Quakerish predilection.
+
+"Nobody ever hears anything of Leddy," said Jim; "but he will never
+forget or forgive, and one day he will show up unexpectedly."
+
+"Not armed!" said Jack.
+
+"Do you think he will keep his word?"
+
+"I know he will. I asked him and he said he would."
+
+"You're very simple, Jack. But mind, he can keep his word and still use
+a gun outside the town!"
+
+"So he might!" admitted Jack, laughing in a way that indicated that the
+subject was distasteful to him; for he would never talk of the duel.
+
+Now we come to that little affair of Pedro Nogales. Pedro was a
+half-breed, whose God among men was Pete Leddy no less than Jack was
+Firio's and the Doge was Ignacio's. In his shanty back of Bill Lang's the
+Mexicans and Indians lost their remaining wages in gambling after he had
+filled them with _mescal_. It happened that Gonzalez, head man of the
+laborers under Bob Worther, who had saved quite a sum, came away
+penniless after taking but one drink. Every ounce of Bob's avoirdupois
+was in a rage.
+
+"It's time we cleaned out Pedro's place, seh!" he told Jack; "and you and
+Jim Galway have got to help me do it!"
+
+"I don't like to get into a row," said Jack very soberly.
+
+"Then I'll undertake the job alone," Bob retorted. "That will be a good
+deal worse, for when I get going I lose my temper and I tell you, seh,
+I've got a lot to lose! And, Jack, are you going to stand by and see
+robbery done by the meanest, most worthless greaser in the valley--and a
+good Indian the victim?"
+
+"Yes, Jack," said Jim, "you've got such a formidable reputation since
+your set-to with Leddy that the Indians think you are a regular master of
+magic. You're just the one to make Pedro come to terms."
+
+"A formidable reputation without firing a shot!" admitted Jack
+quizzically, and consented.
+
+"You'll surely want your gun this time!" Bob warned him.
+
+"No," said Jack.
+
+"But--"
+
+"I have hung up my gun!" Jack said decisively. "We'll try to handle this
+peacefully. Come on!"
+
+"Well, we've got our guns, anyway!" Jim put in.
+
+It was mid-afternoon, a slack hour for Pedro's kind of trade, and the
+shanty was empty of customers when the impromptu vigilance committee
+entered. Pedro himself was half dozing in the faro dealer's chair. His
+small, ferret eyes flashed a spark at the visitors as he rose, but he was
+politeness itself.
+
+"Señores! It is great honor! Be seated, señores!" he said with eloquent
+deference.
+
+The very sight of him set all the ounces in Bob quivering in an outburst:
+
+"No chairs for us! You fork over Gonzalez's money that you tricked
+out of him!"
+
+"I take Gonzalez's money! I? Señores?"
+
+"It's a hundred and twenty dollars that he earned honestly, and the
+quicker you lay your hands on it the better for you!" Bob roared back.
+
+Pedro was quite impassive.
+
+"Señores, if Gonzalez need money--señores, I honest man! Señores, sit
+down! We talk!" Pedro dropped back into his chair and his hand, with
+cat-like quickness, shot under the faro table.
+
+Jack had come through the door after Jim and Bob. He was standing a
+little behind them, and while they had been watching Pedro's face he had
+watched Pedro's movements.
+
+"Pedro, take your hand out from under the table and without your gun!"
+said Jack; and Jim Galway caught a thrill in Jack's voice that he had
+heard in the _arroyo_.
+
+Pedro looked into Señor Don't Care's eyes and saw a bead, though they
+were not looking along the glint of a revolver barrel.
+
+"_Sí_, señor!" said Pedro, settling back in the chair with palms out in
+intimation of his pacific intentions.
+
+"Now, Pedro, you have Gonzalez's money, haven't you?" Jack went on, in
+the reasoning fashion that he had adopted to Leddy in the store. "And
+you aren't going to make yourself or Bob trouble. You are going to
+give it back!"
+
+"_Sí_, señor!" said Pedro wincing.
+
+While he was producing the money and counting it, his furtive glance kept
+watch of Jack. Then, as the committee turned to go, he suddenly exclaimed
+with angry surprise and disillusion:
+
+"You got no gun!"
+
+While Jim and Bob waited for Jack to precede them out of the door Jim had
+time to note Pedro's baleful, piercing look at Jack's back.
+
+"Just as I told you, Jack--and I reckon you saved a big row. You just
+put a scare into that hellion with a word, like you had a thousand devils
+in you!" said Jim.
+
+"It's all over!" Jack answered, looking more hurt than pleased over the
+congratulations. "Very fortunately over."
+
+"But," Jim observed, tensely, "Pedro is not only Leddy's bitter
+partisan and ready to do his bidding, Pedro's a bit loco, besides--the
+kind that hesitates at nothing when he gets a grudge. You've got to
+look out for him."
+
+"Oh, no!" said Jack, in the full swing of a Señor Don't Care mood.
+
+Jim and Bob began to entertain the feelings of Mary on the pass, when she
+thought of Jack as walking over precipices regardless of danger signs.
+After all, did he really know how to shoot? If he would not look after
+himself, it was their duty to look after him. Jim suggested that the rule
+which Jack had made for Leddy should have universal application. No one
+whosoever should wear arms in Little Rivers without a permit. The new
+ordinance had the Doge's approval; and Jim and Bob, both of whom had
+permits, kept watch that it was enforced, particularly in the case of
+Pedro Nogales.
+
+Meanwhile, Jack kept the ten-hour-a-day law. His alfalfa was growing
+with prolific rapidity, but Firio had the air of one who waits
+between journeys.
+
+"Never the trail again?" he asked temptingly, one day.
+
+"Never the trail again!" Jack declared firmly.
+
+"_Sí, sí, sí_--the trail again!"
+
+"You think so? Then why do you ask?"
+
+"To make a question," answered Firio. "The big sadness will be too
+strong. It will make you move--_sí_!"
+
+"The big sadness!" Jack exclaimed. He seized Firio by the shoulders and
+looked narrowly at him, and Firio met the gaze with soft, puzzling lights
+in his eyes. "Ho! ho! A big sadness! How do you know?" he laughed.
+
+"I learn on the trail when I watch you look at the stars. And Señorita
+Ewold, she know; but she think the big sadness a devil. She--" and he
+paused.
+
+"She--yes?" Jack asked.
+
+"She--" Firio started again.
+
+Jack suddenly raised his hands from Firio's shoulders in a gesture of
+interruption. It was not exactly Firio's place to hazard opinions about
+Mary Ewold.
+
+"Never mind!" he said, rather sharply.
+
+But Firio proceeded fixedly to finish what he had to say.
+
+"She has a big sadness, which makes her ride to the pass. She rides out
+so she can ride back smiling."
+
+"Firio, don't mistake your imagination for divination!" Jack warned him.
+
+As Firio did not understand the meaning of this he said nothing. Probably
+he would have said nothing even if he had understood.
+
+"I'll show you the nature of the big sadness and that the devil is a joy
+devil when we harvest our first crop of alfalfa," Jack concluded. "Then I
+shall make a holiday! Then I shall be a real rancher and something is
+going to happen!"
+
+"The trail!" exclaimed Firio, and the soft light in his eyes flashed.
+"_Sí_! The trail and the big spurs and the revolver in the holster!"
+
+"No!"
+
+But Firio said "_Sí_"! with the supreme confidence of one who holds that
+belief in fulfilment will make any wish come true.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+A CHANGE OF MIND
+
+
+It was Sunday afternoon; or, to date it by an epochal event, the day
+after Jack's alfalfa crop had fallen before the mower. Mary was seated on
+the bench under the avenue of umbrella-trees reading a thin edition of
+Marcus Aurelius bound in flexible leather. Of late she had developed a
+fondness for the more austere philosophers. Jack, whose mood was entirely
+to the sonneteers, came softly singing down the avenue of palms and
+presented himself before her in a romping spirit of interruption.
+
+"O expert in floriculture!" he said, "the humble pupil acting as a
+Committee of One has failed utterly to agree with himself as to the form
+of his new flowerbed. There must be a Committee of Two. Will you come?"
+
+"Good! I am weary of Marcus. I can't help thinking that he too far
+antedates the Bordeaux mixture!" she answered, springing to her feet with
+positive enthusiasm.
+
+He rarely met positive enthusiasm in her and everything in him called for
+it at the moment. He found it so inspiring that the problem of the bed
+was settled easily by his consent to all her suggestions--a too-ready
+consent, she told herself.
+
+"After all, it is your flower garden," she reminded him.
+
+"No, every flower garden in Little Rivers is yours!" he declared.
+
+The way he said this made her frown. She saw him taking a step on the
+other side of that barrier over which she mounted guard.
+
+"Never make your hyperboles felonious!" she warned him. "Besides, if
+you are going to be a real Little Riversite you should have opinions of
+your own."
+
+"I haven't any to-day--none except victory!" and he held out his palms,
+exhibiting their yellowish plates. "Look! Even corns on the joints!"
+
+"Yes, they look quite real," she admitted, censoriously.
+
+"Haven't I made good? Do you remember how you stood here on the very site
+of my house and lectured me? I would not work! I would not--"
+
+"You have worked a little--a little!" she said grudgingly, and showed him
+as much of the wondrous sparkle in her eyes as he could see out of the
+corners between the lashes. She never allowed him to look into her eyes
+if she apprehended any attempt to cross the barrier. But she could see
+well enough out of the corners to know that his glances had a kind of
+hungry joy and a promise of some new demonstration in his attitude toward
+her. She must watch that barrier very shrewdly.
+
+"Look at my hedge!" he went on. "It is knee-high already, and my
+umbrella-trees cast enough shade for anybody, if he will wrap himself
+around the trunk. But such things are ornamental. I have a more practical
+appeal. Come on!"
+
+His elation was insistent, superior to any prickling gibes of banter, as
+they walked on the mealy earth between rows of young orange settings,
+and the sweet odor of drying alfalfa came to their nostrils, borne by a
+vagrant breeze. He swept his hand toward the field in a gesture of pride,
+his shoulders thrown back in a deep breath of exultation.
+
+"The callouses win!" And he exhibited them again.
+
+But she refused even to glance at them this time.
+
+"You seem to think callouses phenomenal. Most people in Little Rivers
+accept them as they do the noses on their faces."
+
+"They certainly are phenomenal on me. So is my first crop! My first crop!
+I'll be up at dawn to stack it--and then I'm no longer a neophyte. I am
+an initiate! I'm a real rancher! A holiday is due! I celebrate!"
+
+He was rhapsodic and he was serious, too. She was provokingly flippant as
+an antidote for Marcus Aurelius, whom she was still carrying in the
+little flexible leather volume.
+
+"How celebrate?" she inquired. "By walking through the town with a wisp
+of alfalfa in one hand and exhibiting the callouses on the other? or will
+you be drawn on a float by Jag Ear--a float labeled, 'The Idler Enjoying
+His Own Reform?' We'll all turn out and cheer."
+
+"Amusing, but not dignified and not to my taste. No! I shall celebrate by
+a terrific spree--a ride to the pass!"
+
+He turned his face toward the range, earnest in its transfixion and
+suffused with the spirit of restlessness and the call of the mighty rock
+masses, gray in their great ribs and purple in their abysses. She felt
+that same call as something fluid and electric running through the air
+from sky to earth, and set her lips in readiness for whatever folly he
+was about to suggest.
+
+"A ride to the pass and a view of the sunset from the very top!" he
+cried. He looked down at her quickly, and all the force of the call he
+had transformed into a sunny, personal appeal, which made her avert her
+glance. "My day in the country--my holiday, if you will go with me! Will
+you, and gaze out over that spot of green in the glare of the desert,
+knowing that a little of it is mine?"
+
+"Your orange-trees are too young. It's so far away they will hardly
+show," she ventured, surveying the distance to the pass judicially.
+
+"Will you?"
+
+"Why, to me a ride to the pass is not a thing to be planned a day
+beforehand," she said deliberately, still studiously observing Galeria.
+"It is a matter of momentary inspiration. Make it a set engagement and it
+is but a plodding journey. I can best tell in the morning," she
+concluded. "And, by the way, I see you haven't yet tried grafting plums
+on the alfalfa stalks."
+
+"No. I have learned better. It is not consistent. You see, you mow
+alfalfa and you pick plums."
+
+This return to drollery, in keeping with the prescribed order of their
+relations, made her look up in candid amusement over the barrier which
+for a moment he had been endangering.
+
+"Honestly, Jack, you do improve," she said, with mock encouragement. "You
+seem to have mastered a number of the simple truths of age-old
+agricultural experience."
+
+"But will you? Will you ride to the pass?"
+
+He had the question launched fairly into her eyes. She could not escape
+it. He saw one bright flash, whether of real anger or simply vexation at
+his reversion to the theme he could not tell, and her lashes dropped;
+she ran the leaf edges of the austere Marcus back and forth in her
+fingers, thip-thip-thip. That was the only sound for some seconds, very
+long seconds.
+
+"As I've already tried to make clear to you, it's such a businesslike
+thing to ride to the pass unless you have the inspiration," she remarked
+thoughtfully to Marcus. "Perhaps I shall get the inspiration on the way
+back to the house;" which was a signal that she was going. "And, by the
+way, Jack, to return to the object of my coming, if you have ideas of
+your own about flowers incorporate them; that is the way to develop your
+floricultural talent."
+
+She turned away, but he followed. He was at her side and proceeding with
+her, his head bent toward her, boyishly, eagerly.
+
+"You see, I have never been out to the pass," he remarked urgently.
+
+"What! You--" she started in surprise and checked herself.
+
+"Didn't I come by train?" he asked reprovingly.
+
+"No!" she answered. Her eyes were level with the road, her voice was a
+little unnatural. "No! You came over the pass, Jack."
+
+It was the first time in the months of his citizenship of Little Rivers
+that she had ever hinted anything but belief in the fiction that they had
+first met when he asked her to show him a parcel of land. She seemed to
+be calling a truth out of the past and grappling with it, while her lips
+tightened and she drew in her chin.
+
+"Then I did come over the pass," he agreed; and after a pause added:
+"But there was no Pete Leddy."
+
+"Yes, oh, yes--there was a Pete Leddy!"
+
+"But he will not be there this time!"
+
+And now his voice, in a transport that seemed to touch the cloud heights,
+was neither like the voice of the easy traveller on the pass, nor the
+voice of his sharp call to Leddy to disarm, nor the voice of the
+storyteller. It had a new note, a note startling to her.
+
+"We shall be on the pass without Leddy and smiling over Leddy and
+thanking him for his unwitting service in making me stop in Little
+Rivers," he concluded.
+
+"Yes, he did that," she admitted stoically, as if it were some oppressive
+fact for which she could offer no thanks.
+
+"I want to see our ponies with their bridles hanging loose! I want the
+great silence! I want company, with imagination speaking from the sky
+and reality speaking from the patch of green out on the sea of gray!
+Will you?"
+
+Their steps ran rhythmically together. His look was eager in
+anticipation, while she kept on running the leaves of the austere Marcus
+through her fingers. Her lips were half open, as if about to speak, but
+were without words; the thin, delicate nostrils trembled.
+
+"Will you? Will you, because I kept the faith of callouses? Will you go
+forth and dream for a day? We'll tell fairy stories! We'll get a pole and
+prod the dinosaur through the narrow part of the pass and hear him roar
+his awfullest. Will you?"
+
+Her fingers paused in the pages as if they had found a helpful passage.
+The chin tilted upward resolutely and he had a full view of her eyes,
+dancing with challenging lights. She was augustly, gloriously
+mischievous.
+
+"Will you go in costume? Will you wear your spurs and the chaps and the
+silk shirt?"
+
+The question said that it was not a time to be serious. It sprinkled the
+crest of the barrier with gleaming slivers of glass, which might give
+zest to words spoken across it, but would be most sharp to the touch.
+
+"I will wear my spurs around my wrists, if you say, tie roses in the
+fringe of my chaps, bind my hat with a big red silk bandanna, and put
+streamers on P.D.'s bits!"
+
+"That is too enticing for refusal," she answered, playfully. "I
+particularly want to hear the dinosaur roar."
+
+They had come to the opening of the Ewold hedge, and they paused to
+consider arrangements. There was no one in sight on the street except Jim
+Galway, who was approaching at some distance.
+
+"Shall we start in the morning and have luncheon at the foot of the
+range?" suggested Jack.
+
+She favored an early afternoon start; he argued for his point of view,
+and in their preoccupation with the passage of arms they did not notice
+Pedro Nogales slipping along beside the hedge with soft steps, his hand
+under his jacket. A gleam out of the bosom of Pedro's jacket, a cry from
+Mary, and a knife flashed upward and drove toward Jack's neck.
+
+Jack had seemed oblivious of his surroundings, his gaze centered on Mary.
+Yet he was able to duck backward so that the blade only slit open his
+shirt as Pedro, with the misdirected force of his blow, lunged past its
+object. Mary saw that face which had been laughing into hers, which had
+been so close to hers in its persistent smile of persuasion, struck white
+and rigid and a glint like that of the blade itself in the eyes. In a
+breath Jack had become another being of incarnate, unthinking physical
+power and swiftness. One hand seized Pedro's wrist, the other his upper
+arm, and Mary heard the metallic click of the knife as it struck the
+earth and the sickening sound of the bone of Pedro's forearm cracking.
+She saw Pedro's eyes bursting from their sockets in pain and fear; she
+saw Jack's still profile of unyielding will and the set muscles of his
+neck and the knitting muscles of his forearm driving Pedro over against
+the hedge, as if bent on breaking the Mexican's back in two, and she
+waited in frozen apprehension to hear another bone crack, even expecting
+Pedro's death cry.
+
+"The devil is out of Señor Don't Care!" It was the voice of Ignacio, who
+had come around the house in time to witness the scene.
+
+"What fearful strength! You will kill him!" It was the voice of the Doge,
+from the porch.
+
+"Yes, please stop!" Mary pleaded.
+
+Suddenly, at the sound of her cry, Jack released his hold. The strong
+column of his neck became apparently too weak to hold the weight of his
+head. Inert, he fell against the hedge for support, his hands hanging
+limp at his side, while he stared dazedly into space. It seemed then that
+Pedro might have picked up the knife and carried out his plan of murder
+without defence by the victim.
+
+"Yes, yes, yes!" Jack repeated.
+
+Pedro had not moved from the hollow in the hedge which the impress of his
+body had made. He was trembling, his lips had fallen away from his
+teeth, and he watched Jack in stricken horror, a beaten creature waiting
+on some judgment from which there was no appeal.
+
+"We'll tell fairy stories"--Jack's soft tones of persuasion repeated
+themselves in Mary's ears in contrast to the effect of what she had just
+witnessed. Her hand slipped along the crest of the hedge, as if to
+steady herself.
+
+"I'll change my mind about going to the pass, Jack," she said.
+
+"Yes, Mary," he answered in a faint tone.
+
+He looked around to see her back as she turned away from him; then, with
+an effort, he stepped free of the hedge.
+
+"Come, we will go to the doctor!" he said to the Mexican.
+
+He touched Pedro's shoulder softly and softly ran his hand down the
+sleeve in which the arm hung limp. Pedro had not moved; he still leaned
+against the hedge inanimate as a mannikin.
+
+"Come! Your legs are not broken! You can walk!" said Jim Galway, who had
+come up in a hurry when he saw what was happening.
+
+"Pedro, you will learn not to play with the devil in Señor Don't Care!"
+whispered Ignacio, while Mary had disappeared in the house and the Doge
+stood watching.
+
+Jack had stroked Pedro's head while the bone was being set. He had
+arranged for Pedro's care. And now he was in his own yard with Jag Ear
+and the ponies, rubbing their muzzles alternately in silent
+impartiality, his head bowed reflectively as Firio came around the
+corner of the house. At first he half stared at Firio, then he surveyed
+the steeds of his long journeyings in questioning uncertainty, and then
+looked back at Firio, smiling wanly.
+
+"Firio," he said, "I feel that I am a pretty big coward. Firio, I am full
+up--full to overflowing. My mind is stuffed with cobwebs. I--I must think
+things out. I must have the solitudes."
+
+"The trail!" prescribed Doctor Firio.
+
+After Jack had given his ranch in charge to Galway, he rode away in
+the dusk, not by the main street, but straight across the levels
+toward the pass.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+THE DOGE SNAPS A RUBBER BAND
+
+
+Jasper Ewold was a disciple of an old-fashioned custom that has fallen
+into disuse since the multiplicity of typewriters made writing for one's
+own pleasure too arduous; or, if you will have another reason, since our
+existence and feelings have become so complex that we can no longer
+express them with the simple directness of our ancestors. He kept a
+diary with what he called a perfect regularity of intermittency. A week
+might pass without his writing a single word, and again he might indulge
+freely for a dozen nights running. He wrote as much or as little as he
+pleased. He wrote when he had something to tell and when he was in the
+mood to tell it.
+
+"It is facing yourself in your own ink," he said. "It is confessing that
+you are an egoist and providing an antidote for your egoism. Firstly, you
+will never be bored by your own past if you can appreciate your errors
+and inconsistencies. Secondly, you will never be tempted to bore others
+with your past as long as you wish to pose as a wise man."
+
+He must have found, as you would find if you had left youth behind and
+could see yourself in your own ink, that the first tracery of any
+controlling factor in your life was faint and inconsequential to you at
+the time, without presage of its importance until you saw other lines,
+also faint and inconsequential in their beginnings, drawing in toward it
+to form a powerful current.
+
+On the evening that Jack took to the trail again, Jasper Ewold had a
+number of thick notebooks out of the box in the library which he always
+kept locked, and placed them on the living-room table beside his easy
+chair, in which he settled himself. Mary was sewing while he pored over
+his life in review as written by his own hand. Her knowledge of the
+secrets of that chronicle from wandering student days to desert exile was
+limited to glimpses of the close lines of fine-written pages across the
+breadth of the circle of the lamp's reflection. He surrounded his diary
+with a line of mystery which she never attempted to cross. On occasions
+he would read to her certain portions which struck his recollection
+happily; but these were invariably limited to his impressions of some
+city or some work of art that he was seeing for the first time in the
+geniality of the unadulterated joy of living in what she guessed was the
+period of youth before she was born; and never did they throw any light
+on his story except that of his views as a traveller and a personality.
+But he did not break out into a single quotation to-night. It seemed as
+if he were following the thread of some reference from year to year; for
+he ran his fingers through the leaves of certain parts hastily and became
+studiously intense at other parts as he gloomily pondered over them.
+
+Neither she nor her father had mentioned Jack since the scene by the
+hedge. This was entirely in keeping with custom. It seemed a matter of
+instinct with both that they never talked to each other of him. Yet she
+was conscious that he had been in her father's mind all through the
+evening meal, and she was equally certain that her father realized that
+he was in her mind.
+
+It was late when the Doge finished his reading, and he finished it with
+the page of the last book, where the fine handwriting stopped at the edge
+of the blank white space of the future. An old desire, ever strong with
+Mary, which she had never quite had the temerity to express, had become
+impelling under the influence of her father's unusually long and silent
+preoccupation.
+
+"Am I never to have a glimpse of that treasure? Am I never, never to read
+your diary?" she asked.
+
+The Doge drew his tufted eyebrows together in utter astonishment.
+
+"What! What, Mary! Why, Mary, I might preach a lesson on the folly of
+feminine curiosity. Do you think I would ask to see your diary?"
+
+"But I don't keep one."
+
+"Hoo-hoo-hoo!" The Doge was blowing out his lips in an ado of deprecatory
+nonsense. "Don't keep one? Have you lost your memory?"
+
+"I had it a minute ago--yes," after an instant's playful consideration,
+"I am sure that I have it now."
+
+"Then, everybody with a memory certainly keeps a diary. Would you want
+me to read all the foolish things you had ever thought? Do you think I
+would want to?"
+
+"No," she answered.
+
+"There you are, then!" declared the Doge victoriously, as he rose,
+slipping a rubber band with a forbidding snap over the last book. "And
+this is all stupid personal stuff--but mine own!"
+
+There was an unconscious sigh of weariness as he took up the thumbed
+leather volumes. He was haggard. "Mine own" had given him no pleasure
+that evening. All the years of his life seemed to rest heavily upon him
+for a silent moment. Mary feared that she had hurt him by her request.
+
+"You have read so much you will scarcely do any writing to-night,"
+she ventured.
+
+"Yes, I will add a few more lines--the spirit is in me--a few more days
+to the long record," he said, absently, then, after a pause, suddenly,
+with a kind of suppressed force vibrating in his voice: "Well, our Sir
+Chaps has gone."
+
+"As unceremoniously as he came," she answered.
+
+"It was terrible the way he broke Nogales's wrist!" remarked the
+Doge narrowly.
+
+"Terrible!" she assented as she folded her work, her head bent.
+
+"Gone, and doubtless for good!" he continued, still watching her sharply.
+
+"Very likely!" she answered carelessly without looking up. "His vagarious
+playtime for this section is over."
+
+"Just it! Just it!" the Doge exclaimed happily.
+
+"And if Leddy overtakes him now, it's his own affair!"
+
+"Yes, yes! He and his Wrath of God and Jag Ear are away to other worlds!"
+
+"And other Leddys!"
+
+"No doubt! No doubt!" concluded the Doge, in high good humor, all the
+vexation of his diary seemingly forgotten as he left the room.
+
+But, as the Doge and Mary were to find, they were alone among Little
+Riversites in thinking that the breaking of Pedro Nogales's wrist was
+horrible. Jim Galway, who had witnessed the affair, took a radically
+contrary view, which everyone else not of the Leddy partisanship readily
+accepted. Despite the frequency of Jack's visits to the Ewold garden and
+all the happy exchange of pleasantries with his hosts, the community
+could not escape the thought of a certain latent hostility toward Jack on
+the part of the Doge, the more noticeable because it was so out of
+keeping with his nature.
+
+"Doge, sometimes I think you are almost prejudiced against Jack Wingfield
+because he didn't let Leddy have his way," said Jim, with an outright
+frankness that was unprecedented in speaking to Jasper Ewold. "You're
+such a regular old Quaker!"
+
+"But that little Mexican panting in abject fear against the hedge!"
+persisted the Doge.
+
+"A nice, peaceful little Mexican with a knife, sneaking up to plant it in
+Jack's neck!"
+
+"But Jack is so powerful! And his look! I was so near I could see it well
+as he towered over Nogales!"
+
+"Yes, no mistaking the look. I saw it in the _arroyo_. It made me think
+of what the look of one of those old sea-fighters might have been like
+when they lashed alongside and boarded the enemy."
+
+"And the crack of the bone!" continued the Doge.
+
+"Would you have a man turn cherub when he has escaped having his
+jugular slashed by a margin of two or three inches? Would you have him
+say, 'Please, naughty boy, give me your knife? You mustn't play with
+such things!'"
+
+"No! That's hyperbole!" the Doge returned with a lame attempt at a laugh.
+
+"Mebbe it is, whatever hyperbole is," said Jim; "but if so, hyperbole is
+a darned poor means of self-defence. Yes, the trouble is you are against
+Jack Wingfield!"
+
+"Yes, I am!" said the Doge suddenly, as if inward anger had got the
+better of him.
+
+"And the rest of us are for him!" Jim declared sturdily.
+
+"Naturally! naturally!" said the Doge, passing his hand over his brow.
+"Yes, youth and color and bravery!" He shook his head moodily, as if
+Jim's statement brought up some vital, unpleasant, but inevitable fact
+to his mind.
+
+"It's beyond me how anybody can help liking him!" concluded Galway
+stubbornly.
+
+"I like him--yes, I do like him! I cannot help it!" the Doge admitted
+rather grudgingly as he turned away.
+
+"So we weren't so far apart, after all!" Galway hastened to call after
+the Doge in apology for his testiness. "We like him for what he has been
+to us and will always be to us. That's the only criterion of character in
+Little Rivers according to your own code, isn't it, Jasper Ewold?"
+
+"Exactly!" answered the Doge over his shoulder.
+
+The community entered into a committee of the whole on Jack Wingfield.
+With every citizen contributing a quota of personal experience, his story
+was rehearsed from the day of his arrival to the day of his departure.
+Argument fluctuated on the question of whether or not he would ever
+return, with now the noes and now the ayes having it. On this point Jim
+had the only first-hand evidence.
+
+"He said to let things grow until he showed up or I heard from
+him," said Jim.
+
+"Not what I would call enlightening," said Bob Worther.
+
+"That was his way of expressing it; but to do him justice, he showed what
+a good rancher he was by his attention to the details that had to be
+cared for," Jim added.
+
+"He's like the spirit of the winds, I guess," put in Mrs. Galway.
+"Something comes a-calling him or a-driving him, I don't know which.
+Indeed, I'm not altogether certain that it isn't a case of Mary Ewold
+this time!"
+
+"Yes," agreed Jim. "The fighting look went out of his face when she
+spoke, and when he saw how horrified she was, why, I never saw such a
+change come over a man! It was just like a piece of steel wilting."
+
+However, the children, who had no part in the august discussions of the
+committee of the whole, were certain that their story-teller would come
+back. Their ideas about Jack were based on a simple, self-convincing
+faith of the same order as Firio's. Lonely as they were, they were hardly
+more lonely than their elders, who were supposed to have the philosophy
+of adults.
+
+No Jack singing out "Hello!" on the main street! No Jack looking up from
+work to ask boyishly: "Am I learning? Oh, I'll be the boss rancher yet!"
+No Jack springing all sorts of conceits, not of broad humor, but the kind
+that sort of set a "twinkling in your insides," as Bob Worther expressed
+it! No Jack inspiring a feeling deeper than twinkles on his sad days! He
+had been an improvement in town life that became indispensable once it
+was absent. Little Rivers was fairly homesick for him.
+
+"How did we ever get along without him before he came, anyway?" Bob
+Worther demanded.
+
+Then another new-comer, as distinctive from the average settler as Jack
+was, diverted talk into another channel, without, however, reconciling
+the people to their loss.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+ANOTHER STRANGER ARRIVES
+
+
+If the history of Little Rivers were to be written in chapter headings
+the first would be, "Jasper Ewold Founded the Town"; the second, "Jack
+Wingfield Arrived"; and the third, "John Prather Arrived."
+
+While Jack came in chaps and spurs, bearing an argosy of fancy, Prather
+came by rail, carrying a suitcase in a conventional and businesslike
+fashion. Bill Deering, as the representative of a spring wagon that did
+the local omnibus and express business, was on the platform of the
+station when the 11:15 rolled in, and sang out, in a burst of joy, as the
+stranger, a man in the early twenties, stepped off the Pullman:
+
+"What's this, Jack? Back by train--and in store clothes? Well, of
+all--" and saw his mistake when the stranger's full face was turned
+toward him.
+
+"Yes, I am sometimes called Jack," said the stranger pleasantly. "Now,
+where have we met before? Perhaps in Goldfield? No matter. It is time we
+got acquainted. My name is Prather, and yours?"
+
+As he surveyed the man before him, Bill was as fussed as the giant of the
+fairy story had been by a display of yellow. He was uncertain whether he
+was giving his own baptismal name or somebody's else.
+
+"By Jing! No, I don't know you, but you sure are the dead spit of a
+fellow I do know!" said Bill.
+
+"Well, he has done me the favor of introducing me to you, anyway," said
+Prather, who had a remarkably ingratiating smile. "I would like a place
+to stop while I take a look around. Is there a hotel?"
+
+"Rooms over the store and grub at Mrs. Smith's--none better!"
+
+"That will do."
+
+As they rode into town more than one passer-by called out a ringing
+"Hello, Jack!" or, "Back, eh, Jack? Hurrah for you!" and then uttered an
+exclamation of disillusion when Prather turned his head.
+
+"The others see it, too," said Bill.
+
+"They seem to. Who is this double of mine?"
+
+"Jack Wingfield."
+
+"Jack Wingfield? It seems that our first names are the same, too. He
+lives here, I take it."
+
+"Yes. But he's away now."
+
+"Well, when he comes back"--with a pause of slight irritation--"there
+will be no difficulty in telling us apart."
+
+He put his finger to a triangular patch of mole on his cheek. His
+irritation passed and a sense of appreciative amusement at the
+distinction took its place.
+
+"Now, where shall I find Jasper Ewold?" he asked, as Bill drew up before
+the Smiths.
+
+A few minutes later the Doge, busy among his orange-trees, hearing a
+step, looked up with a signal of recognition which changed to blank
+inquiry when the cheek with the mole was turned toward him.
+
+"Upon my word, sir, I--I thought that you were--" he began.
+
+"Mr. Wingfield! Yes, everybody in town seems to think so at first glance,
+so I am quite used to the comparison by this time," Prather put in,
+easily. "It is very interesting to meet the founder of a town, and I
+have come to you to find out about conditions here."
+
+Prather did not appear as if he had ever done manual labor. He was too
+young to have turned from ill health or failure in the city to the refuge
+of the land. Indeed, his quiet gray suit of good material indicated
+unostentatious prosperity. Evidently he was well-bred and evidently he
+was not an agent for a new style of seeding harrow or weed killer.
+
+"You think of settling?" asked the Doge.
+
+"Yes. From all I have heard of Little Rivers, it's a community where I
+should feel at home."
+
+"Then, sir, we will talk of it at luncheon; it is knocking-off time for
+the morning. Yes, I'll talk as much as you please. Come on, Mr. Prather!"
+They started along the avenue of palms, the Doge still studying the face
+at his side. "Pardon me for staring at you, but the resemblance to Jack
+Wingfield at first sight is most striking," he added.
+
+"Has he travelled much in the West?" asked Prather.
+
+"Yes, much--leading an aimless life."
+
+"Then he must be the one that I was taken for in Salt Lake City one day.
+The man who called out to me saw his mistake, just as you did, when he
+saw my full face;" and again Prather made a gesture of understanding
+amusement to the mole.
+
+"When you consider what confusion there must be in the workrooms, with
+the storks flapping and screeching like newsboys outside the delivery
+room," mused the Doge, "and when you consider the multitudinous
+population of the earth, it's surprising that the good Lord is able to
+furnish such a variety of faces as he does. But they do say that every
+one of us has a few doubles. In the case of famous public men they get
+their pictures in the papers."
+
+"Yes, very few of us but have been mistaken for a friend by a stranger
+passing in the street!" Prather suggested.
+
+"Only to have the stranger see his mistake at a second glance; and on
+second glance you do not look very much like Jack Wingfield," the Doge
+concluded. "Just a coincidence in physiognomy!"
+
+And Prather was very frank about his past.
+
+"I have led rather a hard life," he said. "Though I was well brought up
+my father left mother and me quite penniless. I had to fend for myself at
+the age of sixteen. A friend gave me an opportunity to go to Goldfield at
+the outbreak of the excitement there. The rough experience of a
+mining-camp was not exactly to my taste, but it meant a livelihood. My
+real interest has always been in irrigation farming. I would rather grow
+a good crop than mine for gold. Well, I saved a little money at
+Goldfield--saved it to buy land. But land is not the only consideration.
+The surroundings, the people with whom you have to live count for a great
+deal when you mean to settle permanently."
+
+"Excellent!" declared the Doge. "A good citizen in full fellowship with
+your neighbors! Exactly what we want in Little Rivers."
+
+Prather had a complexion of that velvety whiteness that never tans.
+His eyes were calm, yet attractive, with a peculiar insinuating charm
+when he talked that made it seem easy and natural to respond to his
+wishes. In listening he had an ingratiating manner that was
+flattering to the speaker.
+
+"A practical man!" the Doge said to Mary that evening. "The kind we need
+here. He and I had a grand afternoon of it together. Every one of his
+questions about soils and cultivation was to the point."
+
+"Not one argument?" she asked.
+
+"No, Mary; no time for argument."
+
+"You do like people to agree with you, after all!" she hazarded. For she
+did not like Prather.
+
+"Pooh! Not a matter of agreement! No persiflage! No altitudinous
+conversation of the kind that grows no crops. Prather wants to learn, and
+he's got good, clean ideas, with a trained and accurate mind--the best
+possible combination. I hope he will stay for the very reason that he is
+not the kind that takes up a plot of land for life on an impulse, which
+usually results in turning on the water and getting discouraged because
+nature will not do the rest. But he is very favorably impressed. He said
+that after Goldfield Little Rivers was like Paradise--practical Paradise.
+Good phrase, practical Paradise!"
+
+In two or three days the new-comer knew everyone in town; but though he
+addressed the men by their first names they always addressed him as "Mr.
+Prather." In another respect besides his features he was like Jack: he
+was much given to smiling.
+
+"The difference between his smile and Jack's," said Mrs. Galway, who was
+at one with Mary in not liking him, "is that his is sort of a drawing-in
+kind of smile and Jack's sort of radiates."
+
+The children developed no interest in him. It was evident that he could
+not tell stories, except with an effort. In his goings and comings, ever
+asking pleasant questions and passing compliments, he was usually
+accompanied by the Doge, and his attitude toward the old man was the
+admiring deference of disciple for master.
+
+"I am sorry I don't understand that," he would say when the Doge fell
+into a scholastic allusion to explain a point. "I was hard at work when
+lots of my friends were in college."
+
+"Learning may be ruination," responded the Doge, "though it wouldn't have
+been in your case. It's the man that counts. See what you have made of
+yourself!"
+
+"Ah, yes, but I feel that I have missed something. When I am settled here
+I shall be able to make up for lost time, with your help, sir."
+
+"Every pigeonhole in my mind will be open at your call!" said the Doge,
+glowing at the prospect.
+
+The favor that Prather found in the eyes of Jasper Ewold partly accounted
+for what favor he found in Little Rivers' eyes.
+
+"Prather has certainly made a hit with the Doge!" quoth Bob Worther.
+"As the Doge gets older I reckon he will like compliments better than
+persiflage. But Jack could pay a compliment, too--only he never used
+the ladle."
+
+It was Bob, as inspector of ditches and dams, who provided a horse for
+Prather to inspect the source of the water supply. In keeping with a
+characteristic thoroughness, Prather wanted to go up the river into the
+canyon. He made himself a very enjoyable companion on the way, drawing
+out all of Bob's best stories. When they stopped in sight of the streak
+of blue sky through the breach in the mighty wall that had once
+imprisoned the ancient lake, he was silent for some time, while he
+surveyed this grandeur of the heights with smiling contemplation, at
+intervals rubbing the palms of his hands together in a manner habitual
+with him when he was particularly pleased.
+
+"I guess the same idea has struck you that strikes everybody at sight of
+that, seh!" said Bob.
+
+"Yes, a dam might be practical," Prather answered. "But it would take a
+lot of capital--a lot of capital!"
+
+On the way back they stopped before a dilapidated shanty near the
+foothills. In the midst of a littered yard old man Lefferts, half dozing,
+occupied a broken chair.
+
+"Since the Doge came old man Lefferts has had to do no work at all. A
+Mexican looks after him. But it hasn't made him any happier," Bob
+explained as they approached.
+
+"Howdy yourself?" growled Lefferts in answer to Bob's greeting.
+
+"He seems to be a character!" whispered Prather to Bob, as he smiled at
+the prospect. "To confess the truth, I am a little saddle sore and tired.
+I didn't get much riding in Goldfield. I think I'll stop and rest and get
+acquainted."
+
+"You won't get much satisfaction but growls."
+
+"That will be all the more fun for me," rejoined Prather. "But don't let
+me keep you."
+
+"No. I must be going on. I've got some things to look after before
+nightfall," said Bob, while Prather, in a humor proof against any hermit
+cantankerousness, rode into the yard.
+
+When he returned after dark he said, laughingly, that he had enjoyed
+himself, though the conversation was all on one side. The next morning he
+decided to take up the plot of land adjoining Jack's.
+
+"But I shall not be able to begin work for a few weeks," he said. "I must
+go to Goldfield to settle up my affairs before I begin my new career."
+
+"If Jack ever comes back I wonder what he will say to his new neighbor!"
+Little Rivers wondered.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+LOOKING OVER PRECIPICES
+
+
+To Mary Ewold the pass was a dividing line between two appeals. The
+Little Rivers side, with the green patch of oasis in the distance, had a
+message of peaceful enjoyment of what fortune had provided for her. Under
+its spell she saw herself content to live within garden walls forever in
+the land that had given her life, grateful for the trickles of
+intelligence that came by mail from the outside world.
+
+The other side aroused a mighty restlessness. Therefore, she rarely made
+that short journey which spread another panorama of space before her. But
+this was one of the afternoons when she welcomed a tumult of any kind as
+a relief from her depression; and she went on through the V as soon as
+she reached the summit.
+
+Seated on a flat-topped rock, oblivious of the passage of time, of the
+dream cities of the Eternal Painter, she was staring far away where the
+narrowing gray line between the mountain rims met the sky. She was seeing
+beyond the horizon. She was seeing cities of memory and reality. A great
+yearning was in her heart. All the monotonous level lap of the heights
+which seemed without end was a symbol that separated her from her desire.
+
+She imagined herself in a Pullman, flashing by farms and villages; in a
+shop selecting gowns; viewing from a high window the human stream of
+Fifth Avenue; taking passage on a steamer; hearing again foreign tongues
+long ago familiar to her ears; sensing the rustle of great audiences
+before a curtain rose; glimpsing the Mediterranean from a car window;
+feeling herself a unit in the throbbing promenade of the life of many
+streets while her hunger took its fill of a busy world.
+
+"It is hard to do it all in imagination!" she said to herself. "Even
+imagination needs an occasional nest-egg of reality by way of
+encouragement."
+
+An hour on the far side of the pass played the emotional part for her of
+a storm of tears for many another woman. She rejoiced in being utterly
+alone; rejoiced in the grandeur of the very wastes around her as mounting
+guard over the freedom of her thoughts. There was no living speck on the
+trail, which she knew lay across the expanse of parched earth to the edge
+of the blue dome; there was not even a bird in the air. Undisturbed, she
+might think anything, pray for anything; she might feed the flame of
+revolt till the fuel of many weeks' accumulation had burned itself out
+and left her calm in the wisdom and understanding that reconciled her to
+her portion and freshened to return through Galeria to the quiet routine
+of her daily existence.
+
+Her mind paused in its travels from capital to capital and she was
+conscious solely of the stark majesty of her surroundings. She listened.
+There was no sound. The spacious stillness was soothing to her nerves; a
+specific when all the Eternal Painter's art failed. She closed her eyes,
+trying to realize that great silence as one would try to realize the
+Infinite. Then faintly she heard a man's voice singing. It seemed at
+first a trick of the imagination. But nearer and nearer it came, in the
+fellowship of life joyfully invading the solitude; and with a
+readjustment of her faculties to the expected event, she watched the
+point where the trail dipped on a sharp turn of grade.
+
+Above it rose a cowpuncher hat, then a silk shirt with a string tie, and
+after that a sage baggage burro with clipped ears, a solemn-faced pony,
+and an Indian. Jack was watching his steps in the uneven path, and not
+until the full length of him had appeared and he was flush on the level
+with her did he look up.
+
+She was leaning back, her weight partly poised on the flat of her hand
+on the rock, revealing the full curve of throat and the soft sweep of
+the lines of her slim figure, erect, her head thrown back, her face in
+shadow with the sun behind playing in her hair, in half-defiant
+readiness. She saw him as the spirit of travel--its ease, mystery,
+unattachedness--which had spanned the distances between her and the
+horizon, in the freedom of his wandering choice. His low-pitched
+exclamation of surprise was vibrant with appreciation of the picture she
+made, and he stood quite still in a second's wistful silence, waiting on
+her first word after the lapse of the many days since he had brought a
+look of horror into her eyes.
+
+"Hello, Jack!" she said in the old tone of comradeship. It struck a spark
+electrifying him with all his old, happy manner.
+
+He swept off his hat with a grand bow, blinking in the blaze of the sun
+which turned his tan to a bronze and touched the smile, which was born as
+an inspiration from her greeting, with radiance.
+
+"Hello to you, Mary, guarding the pass to Little Rivers!" he said
+exultantly. "You are just the person I wanted to see. I have been in
+a hurry to tell you about a certain thing ever since it came to me
+this morning."
+
+She guessed that he was about to make up a new story. He must have had
+time for many inventions in the ten days of his absence. But she welcomed
+any tangent of nonsense that set the right key for the coincidence of
+their meeting. She had refused to ride to the pass with him and here they
+were alone together on the pass. Three or four steps, so light that they
+seemed to be irresistibly winning permission from her, and he had sat
+down on another flat-topped rock close by. Firio and the baggage train
+moved on up the trail methodically and stopped well in the background.
+
+"You know how when you meet a person you are sometimes haunted by a
+conviction that you have met him before!" he began. "How exasperated you
+are not to be able to recall the time and place!"
+
+"Had you forgotten where you met the dinosaur?" she asked. "He must have
+thought you very impolite after all the trouble he had taken to make you
+remember him the last time you went through the pass."
+
+"Oh, the dinosaur and I have patched up a truce, because it seems, after
+all, that I had mistaken his identity and he was a pleosaur. But"--he did
+not take the pains to parry her interruption with more foolery, and
+proceeded as if she had not spoken--"it has never been out of my mind
+that your father gave me a glance at our first meeting which asked the
+question that has kept recurring to me: Where had he and I seen each
+other before?"
+
+"Well?" she said curiously, recalling her father's repeated allusions to
+"this Wingfield," his strange depression after Jack had left the night
+before the duel, his reticence and animadversions.
+
+"I said nothing about it, nor did he. I wonder if it has not been a kind
+of contest between us as to which should be the first to say 'Tag!'"
+
+She smiled at this and leaned farther back, but with the curtain of her
+eyelashes widening in tremulous intensity.
+
+"I knew it would come!" he went on, with dramatic fervor. "Such things do
+come unexpectedly in a flash when there is a sudden electric connection
+with some dusty pigeonhole in the mind. It was in Florence that he and I
+met! In Florence, on the road to Fiesole!"
+
+"Florence! The road to Fiesole!" Mary repeated; and the names seemed to
+rouse in her a rapturous recollection. She leaned forward now, her lips
+apart, her eyes glowing. In place of wastes she was seeing brown roofs
+and the sweep of the Tuscan Valley.
+
+"And _we_ met--_you_ and _I_!"
+
+"We?" Her glance came sharply back from the distances in the astonishment
+of dilating pupils that drew together in inquiry as she saw that he was
+in earnest.
+
+"Yes. I was at the extremely mature age of six and you must have been
+about a year younger. Do you remember it at all?"
+
+"No!" She was silent, concentrated, groping. "No, no!" she repeated.
+"Five is very immature compared to six!"
+
+"Your father had a beard then, a great blond beard that excited my
+emulation. When I grew up I was going to have one like it and just such
+bushy eyebrows. You came up the Fiesole road at his side, holding fast
+to his thumb. I was playing at our villa gate. You went up the path with
+him to see my mother--I can see just how you looked holding so fast to
+that thumb! After a while you came straying out alone. Now don't you
+remember? Don't you? Something quite sensational happened."
+
+"No!"
+
+"Well, I showed off what a great boy I was. I walked on the parapet of
+the villa wall. I bowed to my audience aged five with the grandeur of a
+tight-rope performer who has just done his best thriller as a climax to
+his turn."
+
+"Yes--yes!" she breathed, with quick-running emphasis. Out of the mists
+of fifteen years had come a signal. She bent nearer to him in the wonder
+of a thing found in the darkness of memory, which always has the
+fascination of a communication from another world. "You wanted me to come
+up on the wall," she said, taking up the thread of the story. "You said
+it was so easy, and you helped me up, and when I looked down at the road
+I was overcome and fell down all in a heap on the parapet."
+
+"And heavens!" he gasped, living the scene over again, "wasn't I
+frightened for fear you would tumble off!"
+
+"But I remember that you helped me down very nicely--and--and that is all
+I do remember. What then?"
+
+She had come to a blind alley and perplexity was in her face, though she
+tried to put the question nonchalantly. What then? How deep ran the
+current of this past association?
+
+"Why, there wasn't much else. Your father came down the path and his big
+thumb took you in tow. I did not see you again. A week later mother and I
+had gone to Switzerland--we were always on the move."
+
+The candor of his glance told her that this was all. As boy and girl they
+had met under an Italian sky. As man and woman they had met under an
+Arizona sky.
+
+Now the charm of the Florence of their affections held them with a magic
+touch. They were not in a savage setting, looking out over savage
+distances, but on the Piazzale Michelangelo, looking out over the city of
+Renaissance genius which slumbers on the refulgent bosom of its past;
+they were oblivious of the Eternal Painter's canvasses and enjoying
+Raphael's, Botticelli's, and Andrea del Sarto's. Possibly the Eternal
+Painter, in the leniency of philosophic appreciation of their oblivion to
+his art, hazarded a guess about the destiny of this pair. He could not
+really have known their destiny. No, it is impossible to grant him the
+power of divination; for if he had it he might not be so young of heart.
+
+Their talk flitted here and there in exclamations, each bringing an
+entail of recollection of some familiar, enjoyed thing; and when at last
+it returned to their immediate surroundings the shadow of the range was
+creeping out onto the plain, cut by the brilliance of the sun through the
+V. Mary rose with a quick, self-accusing cry about the lateness of the
+hour. To him it was a call on his resources to delay their departure.
+
+"Do you see where that shelf breaks abruptly?" he asked. "It must be the
+side of a canyon. Have you ever looked down?"
+
+"I started to once."
+
+"I should not like to go over the pass again without seeing if this
+is really a canyon of any account. I feel myself quite an authority
+on canyons."
+
+"It will be dark before we reach Little Rivers!" she protested.
+
+"Ten minutes--only a step!" and he was appealing in his boyish fashion to
+have his way.
+
+"Nonsense! Besides, I do not care for canyons."
+
+"You still fear, then, to look down from walls? You--"
+
+And this decided her. On another occasion she had gone to the precipice
+edge and faltered. She would master her dizziness for once and all; he
+should not know from her any confession of a weakness which was purely of
+the imagination.
+
+The point to which he had alluded was an immense overhanging slab of
+granite stratum deep set in the mountain side. As they approached, a
+thrill of lightness and uncertainty was setting her limbs a-quiver. Her
+elbow was touching his, her will driving her feet forward desperately.
+Suddenly she was gazing down, down, down, into black depths which
+seemed calling irresistibly and melting her power of muscular volition,
+while he with another step was on the very edge, leaning over and
+smiling. She dropped back convulsively. He was all happy absorption in
+the face of that abyss. How easy for him to topple over and go hurtling
+into the chasm!
+
+"Don't!" she gasped, and blindly tugged at his arm to draw him back.
+
+As he looked around in surprise and inquiry, she withdrew her hand in a
+reaction against her familiarity, yet did not lower it, holding it out
+with fingers spread in expression of her horror. Serenely he regarded
+her for a moment in her confusion and distress, and then, smiling, while
+the still light of confidence was in his eyes, he locked his arm in hers.
+Before she could protest or resist he had drawn her to his side.
+
+"It is just as safe as looking off the roof of a porch on to a flower
+garden," he said.
+
+And why she knew not, but the fact had come as something definite and
+settled: she was no longer dizzy or uncertain. Calmly, in the triumph of
+mind over fear, in the glory of a new sensation of power, she looked down
+into that gulf of shadows--looked down for a thousand feet, where the
+narrowing, sheer walls merged into darkness.
+
+From this pit to the blue above there was only infinite silence, with no
+movement but his pulse-beat which she could feel in his wrist
+distinctly. He had her fast, a pawn of one of his impulses. A shiver of
+revolt ran through her. He had taken this liberty because she had shown
+weakness. And she was not weak. She had come to the precipice to prove
+that she was not.
+
+"Thank you. My little tremor of horror has passed," she told him. "I can
+stand without help, now."
+
+He released his hold and she stood quite free of him, a glance flashing
+her independence. Smilingly she looked down and smilingly and
+triumphantly back at him.
+
+"You need not keep your arm up in that fashion ready to assist me. It
+is tiring," she said, with a touch of her old fire of banter over the
+barrier. "I am all right, now. I don't know what gave me that giddy
+turn--probably sitting still so long and looking out at the blaze of
+the desert."
+
+He swept her with a look of admiration; and their eyes meeting, she
+looked back into the abyss.
+
+"I wish I had such courage," he said with sudden, tense earnestness;
+"courage to master my revulsion against shadows."
+
+"Perhaps it will come like an inspiration," she answered
+uncomprehendingly.
+
+Then both were silent until she spoke of a stunted little pine three or
+four hundred feet down, in the crotch of an outcropping. Its sinking
+roots had split a rock, over which the other roots sprawled in gnarly
+persistence. Some passing bird had dropped the seed which had found a bed
+in a pocket of dust from the erosions of time. So it had grown and set up
+housekeeping in its isolation, even as the community of Little Rivers had
+in a desert basin beside a water-course.
+
+"The little pine has courage--the courage of the dwarf," she said. "It is
+worth more than a whole forest of its majestic cousins in Maine. How
+green it is--greener than they!"
+
+"But they rise straight to heaven in their majesty!" he returned, to make
+controversy.
+
+"Yes, out of the ease of their rich beds!"
+
+"In a crowd and waiting for the axe!"
+
+"And this one, in its isolation, creating something where there was
+nothing! Every one of its needles is counted in its cost of birth out of
+the stubborn soil! And waiting all its life down there for the reward of
+a look and a word of praise!"
+
+"But," he went on, in the delight of hearing her voice in rebuttal, "the
+big pines give us the masts of ships and they build houses and furnish
+the kindling for the hardwood logs of the hearth!"
+
+"The little pine makes no pretensions. It has done more. It has given us
+something without which houses are empty: It has given us a thought!"
+
+"True!" he exclaimed soberly, yielding. And now all the lively signals of
+the impulse of action played on his face. "For your glance and your word
+of praise it shall pay you tribute!" he cried. "I am going down to bring
+you one of its clusters of spines."
+
+"But, Jack, it is a dangerous climb--it is late! No! no!"
+
+"No climb at all. It is easy if I work my way around by that ledge
+yonder. I see stepping-places all the way."
+
+How like him! While she thought only of the pine, he had been thinking
+how to make a descent; how to conquer some physical difficulty. Already
+he had started despite her protest.
+
+"I don't want to rob the little pine!" she called, testily.
+
+"I'll bring a needle, then!"
+
+"Even every needle is precious!"
+
+"I'll bring a dead one, then!"
+
+There was no combatting him, she knew, when he was headstrong; and when
+he was particularly headstrong he would laugh in his soft way. He was
+laughing now as he took off his spurs and tossed them aside.
+
+"No climbing in these cart-wheels, and I shall have to roll up my chaps!"
+
+She went back to the precipice edge to prove to him, to prove to herself,
+that she could stand there alone, without the moral support of anyone at
+her side, and found that she could. She had mastered her weakness. It was
+as if a new force had been born in her. She felt its stiffening in every
+fibre as she saw him pass around the ledge and start down toward the
+little pine; felt it as something which could build barriers and mount
+them with an invulnerable guard.
+
+How would he get past that steep shoulder? The worst obstacle confronted
+him at the very beginning of the descent. He was hugging a rock face,
+feeling his way, with nothing but a few inches of a projecting seam
+between him and the darkness far below. His foot slipped, his body turned
+half around, and she had a second of the horror that she had felt when
+waiting for the sound of Leddy's shot in Bill Lang's store. She saw his
+outspread hands clutching the seam above; watched for them to let go. But
+they held; the foot groped and got its footing again, and he worked his
+way out on a shelf.
+
+He was safe and she dropped on her knees weakly, still looking down at
+him. It was the old story of their relations. Was this man ever to be
+subjecting her to spasms of fear on his account? And there he was beaming
+up at her reassuringly, while she felt the blood which had gone from her
+face return in a hot flood. It brought with it anger in place of fear.
+
+"I don't want it! I don't want it!" she cried down.
+
+"And I want to get it for you! I want to get it for you--for you!" His
+voice was a tumult of emotion in the abandon of passionate declaration.
+So long had she held him back that now when the flood came it had the
+power of conserved strength bursting a dam in wild havoc. "There is
+nothing I would not like to do for you, Mary!" he cried. "I'd like to
+pull that pine up for you, even if it bled and suffered! I'd like to go
+on doing things for you forever!"
+
+There was not even a movement of her lips in answer. It seemed to her
+now that there on the precipice edge, while he held her arm in his,
+the iridescent house of glass had fallen about them in a confused,
+dazzling shower of wreckage. He had found an opening. He had broken
+through the barrier.
+
+Half unconscious of his progress, of the chasm itself, she waited in a
+daze and came out of it to see him sweeping his hat upward from beside
+the pine before he reached as far as he could among the branches and,
+with what seemed to her the refinement of effrontery and disregard of her
+wishes, broke off a tawny young branch. He waved it to her--this garland
+of conquest won out of the jaws of danger, which he was ready to throw at
+her feet from the lists.
+
+"No, no, no!" she said, half aloud.
+
+She saw him start back with his sure steps, his shoulders swinging with
+the lithe, adaptable movement of his body; and every step was drawing him
+nearer to a meeting which would be like no other between them. Soon he
+would be crunching the glass of the house under that confident tread; in
+the ecstasy of a new part he would be before the opening he had broken in
+the barrier with the jauntiness of one who expected admission. His
+pulse-beat under the touch of her fingers at the precipice edge, his
+artery-beat in the _arroyo_, was hammering in her temples, hammering out
+a decision which, when it came, brought her to her feet.
+
+Now the shadows were deep; all the glory of the sunset in the Eternal
+Painter's chaotic last moments of his day's work overspread the western
+sky, and from the furnace in which he dipped his brush came a blade of
+rich, blazing gold through the pass and lay across the trail. It
+enveloped her as, half running, mindless of her footing, slipping as she
+went, she hurried toward the other side of Galeria.
+
+When Jack Wingfield came up over the ledge, a pine tassel in his hand,
+his languor of other days transformed into high-strung, triumphant
+intensity, the sparkle of a splendid hope in his eyes, only Firio was
+there to welcome him.
+
+"Señorita Ewold said she no could wait," Firio explained. "It was very
+late, she said."
+
+Jack stopped as if struck and his features became a lifeless mask, as
+lifeless as the walls of the canyon. He looked down at the trophy of his
+climb and ran his fingers over the needles slowly, again and again, in
+abstraction.
+
+"I understand!" he said, half to himself; and then aloud: "Firio, we will
+not go into town to-night. We will camp on the other side by the river."
+
+"_Sí_! I shot enough quail this afternoon for dinner."
+
+But Jack did not have much appetite, and after dinner he did not amuse
+Firio with inventions of his fancy. He lay long awake, his head on his
+clasped hands, looking at the stars.
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+A PUZZLED AMBASSADOR
+
+
+A faint aureole of light crept up back of the pass.
+
+"Dawn at last!" Jack breathed, in relief. "Firio! Firio! Up with you!"
+
+"Oh-yuh!" yawned Firio. "_Sí, sí_!" he said, rising numbly to his feet
+and rubbing his eyes with his fists, while he tried to comprehend an
+astonishing reversal of custom. Usually he awakened his camp-mate; but
+this morning his camp-mate had awakened him. A half shadow in the
+semi-darkness, Jack was already throwing the saddle over P.D.'s back.
+
+"We will get away at once," he said.
+
+Firio knew that something strange had come over Señor Jack after he had
+met Señorita Ewold on the pass, and now he was convinced that this thing
+had been working in Señor Jack's mind all night.
+
+"Coffee before we start?" he inquired ingratiatingly.
+
+"Coffee at the ranch," Jack answered.
+
+In their expeditious preparations for departure he hummed no snatches of
+song as a paean of stretching muscles and the expansion of his being with
+the full tide of the conscious life of day; and this, too, was contrary
+to custom.
+
+Before it was fairly light they were on the road, with Jack urging P.D.
+forward at a trot. The silence was soft with the shimmer of dawn; all
+glistening and still the roofs and trees of Little Rivers took form. The
+moist sweetness of its gardens perfumed the fresh morning air in greeting
+to the easy traveller, while the makers of gardens were yet asleep.
+
+It was the same hour that Mary had hurried forth after her wakeful night
+to stop the duel in the _arroyo_. As Jack approached the Ewold home he
+had a glimpse of something white, a woman's gown he thought, that
+disappeared behind the vines. He concluded that Mary must have risen
+early to watch the sunrise, and drew rein opposite the porch; but through
+the lace-work of the vines he saw that it was empty. Yet he was positive
+that he had seen her and that she must have seen him coming. She was
+missing the very glorious moment which she had risen to see. A rim of
+molten gold was showing in the defile and all the summits of the range
+were topped with flowing fire.
+
+"Mary!" he called.
+
+There was no answer. Had he been mistaken? Had mental suggestion played
+him a trick? Had his eyes personified a wish when they saw a figure on
+the steps?
+
+"Mary!" he called again, and his voice was loud enough for her to have
+heard if she were awake and near. Still there was no answer.
+
+The pass had now become a flaming vortex which bathed him in its
+far-spreading radiance. But he had lost interest in sunrises. A last
+backward, hungry glance over his shoulder as he started gave him a
+glimpse through the open door of the living-room, and he saw Mary leaning
+against the table looking down at her hands, which were half clasped in
+her lap, as if she were waiting for him to get out of the way.
+
+Thus he understood that he had ended their comradeship when he had broken
+through the barrier on the previous afternoon, and the only thing that
+could bring it back was the birth of a feeling in her greater than
+comradeship. His shoulders fell together, the reins loosened, while P.D.,
+masterless if not riderless, proceeded homeward.
+
+"Hello, Jack!"
+
+It was the greeting of Bob Worther, the inspector of ditches, who was the
+only man abroad at that hour. Jack looked up with an effort to be genial
+and found Bob closely studying his features in a stare.
+
+"What's the matter, Bob?" he asked. "Has my complexion turned green over
+night or my nose slipped around to my ear?"
+
+"I was trying to make out if you do look like him!" Bob declared.
+
+"Like whom? What the deuce is the mystery?"
+
+"What--why, of course you're the most interested party and the only
+Little Riversite that don't know about it, seh!"
+
+After all, there was some compensation for early rising. Bob expanded
+with the privilege of being the first to break the news.
+
+"If you'd come yesterday you'd have seen him. He went by the noon train,"
+he said, and proceeded with the story of Prather.
+
+Jack had never heard of the man before and was obviously uninterested. He
+did not seem to care if a dozen doubles came to town.
+
+"Oh, yes, there's another thing concerning you," Bob continued. "I was so
+interested in telling you about Prather that I near forgot it. A
+swell-looking fellow--says he's a doctor and he's got New York written
+all over him--came in yesterday particularly to see you."
+
+Though it was a saying in Little Rivers that nobody ever found Jack at a
+loss, he started perceptibly now. His fingers worked nervously on the
+reins and he bit his lips in irritation.
+
+"He was asking a lot of questions about you," Bob added.
+
+By this time Jack had summoned back his smile. He did not seem to mind if
+a dozen doctors came to town at the same time as a dozen doubles.
+
+"Did you tell him that I had a cough--kuh-er?" he asked, casually.
+
+"Why, no! I said you could thrash your weight in wildcats and he says,
+'Well, he'll have to, yet!' and then shut up as if he'd overspoke
+himself--and I judge that he ain't the kind that does that often. But
+say, Jack," Bob demanded, in the alarm of local partisanship which
+apprehends that it may unwittingly have served an outside interest, "did
+you want us to dope it out that you were an invalid? We ain't been
+getting you in wrong, I hope?"
+
+"Not a bit!" answered Jack with a reassuring slap on Bob's shoulder. "Was
+his name Bennington?"
+
+"Yes, that's it."
+
+"Well," said Jack thoughtfully and with a return of his annoyance, "he
+will find me at home when he calls." And P.D. knew that the reins were
+still held in listless hands as he turned down the side street toward the
+new ranch.
+
+Firio was feeling like an astrologer who had lost faith in his crystal
+ball. An interrogation had taken the place of his confident "_Sí, sí_"
+of desert understanding of the mind of his patron. Jack had broken camp
+with the precipitancy of one who was eager to be quit of the trail and
+back at the ranch; yet he gave his young trees only a passing glance
+before entering the house. He had not wanted coffee on the road, yet
+coffee served with the crisp odor of bacon accompanying its aroma, after
+his bath and return to ranch clothes, found no appetite. He was as a man
+whose mind cannot hold fast to anything that he is doing. Firio,
+restless, worried, his eyes flicking covert glances, was frequently in
+and out of the living-room on one excuse or another.
+
+"What work to-day?" he asked, as he cleared away the breakfast dishes.
+"What has Señor Jack planned for us to do?"
+
+"The work to-day? The work to-day?" Jack repeated absently. "First the
+mail." He nodded toward a pile on the table.
+
+"And I shall make ready to stay a long time?" Firio insinuated softly.
+
+"No!" Jack answered to space.
+
+The pyramid of mail might have been a week's batch for the Doge himself.
+At the bottom were a number of books and above them magazines which Jack
+had subscribed for when he found that they were not on the Doge's list.
+There was only one letter as a first-class postage symbol of the exile's
+intimacy with the outside world, and out of this tumbled a check and a
+blank receipt to be filled in. He tore off the wrappers of the magazines
+as a means of some sort of physical occupation and rolled them into
+balls, which he cast at the waste-basket; but neither the contents of the
+magazines nor those of the newspapers seemed to interest him. His
+aspect was that of one waiting in a lobby to keep an appointment.
+
+When he heard steps on the porch he sang out cheerily, "Come in!" but,
+contrary to the habit of Little Rivers hospitality, he did not hasten to
+meet his caller, and any keenness of anticipation which he may have felt
+was well masked.
+
+There entered a man of middle age, with close-cropped gray beard, clad in
+soft flannels, the trousers bottoms turned up in New York fashion for
+negligee business suits for that spring. To the simple interior of a
+western ranch house he brought the atmosphere of complex civilization as
+a thing ineradicably bred into his being. It was evident, too, that he
+had been used to having his arrival in any room a moment of importance
+which summoned the rapt attention of everybody, whether nurses, fellow
+physicians, or the members of the patient's family. But this time that
+was lacking. The young man leaning against the table was not visibly
+impressed.
+
+"Hello, doctor!" said Jack, as unconcernedly as he would have passed the
+time of day with Jim Galway in the street.
+
+"Hello, Jack!" said the doctor.
+
+Jack went just half-way across the room to shake hands. Then he dropped
+back to his easy position, with the table as a rest, after he had set a
+chair for the visitor.
+
+"How do you like Little Rivers?" Jack asked.
+
+"I have been here only thirty-six hours," answered the doctor, avoiding a
+direct answer. He was pulling off his silk summer gloves, making the
+operation a trifle elaborate, one which seemed to require much
+attention. "I came pretty near mistaking another man for you, but his
+mole patch saved me. I didn't think you could have grown one out here.
+Wonderfully like you! Have you met him?"
+
+He glanced up as he asked this question, which seemed the first to occur
+to him as a warming-up topic of conversation before he came to the
+business in hand.
+
+"No. I have just heard of him," Jack answered.
+
+The doctor smiled at his gloves, which he now folded and put in his
+pocket. Don't the lecturers to young medical students say, "Divert your
+patient's mind to some topic other than himself as you get your first
+impression"? Now Dr. Bennington drew forward in his chair, rested the
+tips of the long fingers of a soft, capable hand on the edge of the
+table, and looked up to Jack in professional candor, sweeping him with
+the knowing eye of the modern confessor of the secrets of all manner of
+mankind. With the other hand he drew a stethoscope from his side
+coat-pocket.
+
+"Well, Jack, you can guess what brought me all the way from New
+York--just five minutes' work!" and he gave the symbol of examination a
+flourish in emphasis.
+
+"I don't think I have forgotten the etiquette of the patient on
+such occasions," Jack returned. "It is an easy function in this
+Arizona climate."
+
+He drew his shirt up from a compact loin and lean middle, revealing the
+arch of his deep chest, the flesh of which was healthy pink under neck
+and face plated with Indian tan. The doctor's eyes lighted with the bliss
+of a critic used to searching for flaws at sight of a masterpiece. While
+he conducted the initial plottings with the rubber cup which carried
+sounds to one of the most expensive senses of hearing in America, Jack
+was gazing out of the window, as if his mind were far away across the
+cactus-spotted levels.
+
+"Breathe deep!" commanded the doctor.
+
+Jack's nostrils quivered with the indrawing of a great gust of air and
+his diaphragm swelled until his ribs were like taut bowstrings.
+
+"And you were the pasty-faced weakling that left my office five years
+ago--and you, you husky giant, have brought me two thousand miles to see
+if you were really convalescent!"
+
+"I hope the trip will do you good!" said Jack, sweetly.
+
+"But it is great news that I take back, great news!" said the doctor, as
+he put the stethoscope in his pocket.
+
+"Yes?" returned Jack, slipping his head through his shirt. "You don't
+find even a speck?"
+
+"Not a speck! No sign of the lesion! There is no reason why you should
+not have gone home long ago."
+
+"No?" Jack was fastening his string tie and doing this with something of
+the urban nicety with which the doctor had folded his gloves. That tie
+was one of the few inheritances from complex civilization which still had
+Jack's favor.
+
+"What have you found to do all these years?"
+
+Jack was surprised at the question.
+
+"I have just wandered about and read and thought," he explained.
+
+"Without developing any sense of responsibility?" demanded the doctor in
+exasperation.
+
+"I have tried to be good to my horses, and of late I have taken to
+ranching. There is a lot of responsibility in that and care, too. Take
+the scale, for instance!"
+
+"A confounded little ranch out in this God-forsaken place, that a Swede
+immigrant might run!"
+
+"No, the Swedes aren't particularly good at irrigation, though better
+than the Dutch. You see, the Hollanders are used to having so much
+water that--"
+
+Jack was leaning idly against the table again. The fashionable
+practitioner, accustomed to having his words accepted at their cost price
+in gold, broke in hotly:
+
+"It is past all understanding! You, the heir to twenty millions!"
+
+"Is it twenty now?" Jack asked softly and sadly.
+
+"Nearer thirty, probably! And shirking your duty! Shirking and for
+what--for what?"
+
+Jack faced around. The doctor, meeting a calm eye that was quizzically
+challenging, paused abruptly, feeling that in some way he had been caught
+at a professional disadvantage in his outburst of emotion.
+
+"Don't you like Little Rivers?" asked Jack.
+
+"I should be bored to death!" the doctor admitted, honestly.
+
+"Well, you see this air never healed a lesion for you! You never
+uttered a prayer to it for strength with every breath! And, doctor,"
+Jack hesitated, while his lips were half open, showing his even teeth
+slightly apart in the manner of a break in a story to the children
+where he expected them to be very attentive to what was coming, "you
+can take a piece of tissue and analyze it, yes, a piece of brain tissue
+and find all the blood-vessels, but not what a man was thinking, can
+you? Until you can take a precipitate of his thoughts--the very
+thoughts he is unconscious of himself--and put them under a microscope,
+why, there must be a lot of guesswork about the source of all
+unconventional human actions."
+
+Jack laughed over his invasion of psychology; and when he laughed in a
+certain way the impulse to join him was strong, as Mary first found on
+the pass. So the doctor laughed, partly in relief, perhaps, that this
+uncertain element which he was finding in Jack had not yet proved
+explosive.
+
+"That would make a capital excuse for a student flunking in
+examinations!" he said.
+
+"It might be a worthy one--not that I say it ought to pass him."
+
+"Now, Jack," the doctor began afresh, the reassuring force of his
+personality again in play.
+
+He took a step and raised his hands as if he would put them on Jack's
+shoulders. One could imagine him driving hypochondria out of many a
+patient's mind by thus making his own vigorous optimism flow down from
+his fingertips, while he looked into the patient's eye. But his hands
+remained in the air, though Jack had been only smiling at him. This was
+not the way to handle this patient, something told his trained, sensitive
+instinct in time, and he let his hands fall in semblance of a gesture of
+protest, gave a shrug and came directly to the point very genuinely.
+
+"Well, Jack--your father!"
+
+"Yes." And Jack's face was still and blank, while shadows played over
+it in a war among themselves. "He did not even tell me you were
+coming," he added.
+
+"Perhaps he feared that it would give you time to develop a cough or you
+would start overland to Chihuahua so I should miss you. Jack, he needs
+you! All that fortune waits for you!"
+
+"Now that I am strong, yes! He did not come out to see me even during
+the first year when I had not the health to go to him, nor did he think
+to come with you."
+
+"He--he is a very busy man!" explained the doctor, in ready championship.
+And yet he looked away from Jack, and when he looked back it was with an
+appeal to conscience rather than to filial affection. "Is it right to
+remain, however much you like this desert life? Have you any excuse?"
+
+"Yes, an overwhelming one!" exclaimed Jack in a voice that was
+high-pitched and determined, while his eyes burned and no trace of humor
+remained on lips that were as firm as the outline of his chin. "Yes, one
+that thrills me from head to foot with the steady ardor of the soldier
+who makes a siege!"
+
+"I--I--you are beyond me! Then you will stay? You are not coming home?"
+
+"Yes," Jack answered, in another mood, but one equally rigid. "I am
+coming at once. That was all settled last night under the stars. I have
+found the courage!"
+
+"The courage to go to twenty millions!" gasped the doctor. "But--good!
+You will go! That is enough! Why shouldn't we take the same train back?"
+he went on enthusiastically. "I shall be coming through here in less than
+a week. You see, I am so near California that I simply had to steal a few
+days with my sister, who can't come East on account of her health. I have
+been so tied down to practice that I have not seen her for fifteen years.
+That will give you time to arrange your affairs. How about it?"
+
+"It would be delightful, but--" Jack was hesitating. "No, I will refuse.
+You see, I rode horseback when I entered this valley for the first time
+and I should like to ride out in the way I came. Just sentiment!"
+
+"Jack!" exclaimed the doctor.
+
+He was casting about how to express his suspicion when something electric
+checked him--a current that began in Jack's measured glance. Jack was not
+mentioning that his word was being questioned, but something still and
+effective that came from far away out on the untrod desert was in the
+room. It fell on the nerves of the ambassador from the court of complex
+civilization like a sudden hush on a city's traffic. Jack broke the
+silence by asking, in a tone of lively hospitality:
+
+"You will join me at luncheon?"
+
+"I should like to," answered the doctor, "but I can catch a train on the
+other trunk line that will give me a few more hours with my sister. And
+what shall I wire your father? Have you any suggestion?"
+
+"Why, that he will be able to judge for himself in a few days how near
+cured I am."
+
+"You will wire him the date of your arrival?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Jack," said the doctor at the door, "that remark of yours about the
+analysis of brain tissue and of thought put a truth very happily. Come
+and see me and let me know how you get on. Good-by!"
+
+He took his departure thoughtfully, rather than with a sense of
+triumph over the success of a two-thousand-mile mission in the name of
+twenty millions.
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+"GOOD-BY, LITTLE RIVERS!"
+
+
+It was the thing thrilling him with the ardor of a soldier preparing for
+a siege that sent Jack to the Ewolds' later in the morning. He had come
+determined to finish the speech that he had called up to Mary from the
+canyon. As he crossed the cement bridge, Ignacio appeared on the path and
+took his position there obdurately, instead of standing to one side with
+a nod, as usual, to let the caller pass.
+
+"Señorita Ewold is not at home!" he announced, before Jack had spoken.
+
+"Not even in the garden?"
+
+"No, señor."
+
+"But she will be back soon?"
+
+"I do not think so."
+
+Ignacio's face was as blank as a wall, but knowingly, authoritatively
+blank. His brown eyes glistened with cold assurance. He seemed to have
+become the interpreter of a message in keeping with Mary's flight from
+the pass and her withdrawal from the porch when she had seen Jack
+approaching. Here was a new barrier which did not permit even banter
+across the crest. She must know that he was going, for the news of his
+approaching departure had already spread through the town. She had chosen
+not to see him again, even for a farewell.
+
+For a little time he stood in thought, while Ignacio remained steadfast
+on the path, watchful, perhaps, for the devil in Señor Don't Care to
+appear. Suddenly Jack's features glowed with action; he took a step as if
+he would sweep by Ignacio on into the garden. But the impulse instantly
+passed. He stopped, his face drawn as it had been when he fell limp
+against the hedge stricken by the horror of his seeming brutality to
+Pedro Nogales, and turned away into the street with a mask of smiles for
+the greetings and regrets of the friends whom he met.
+
+Worth twenty millions or twenty cents, he was still Jack to Little
+Rivers; still the knight who had come over the range to vanquish Pete
+Leddy; still a fellow-rancher in the full freemasonry of calloused
+hands; still the joyous teller of stories. The thought of losing him set
+tendrils in the ranchers' hearts twitching in sympathy with tendrils in
+his own, which he found rooted very deep now that he must tear them out.
+
+That afternoon at the appointed hour for his departure every man, woman,
+and child had assembled at the end of the main street, where it broke
+into the desert trail. The principal found an excuse for dismissing
+school an hour earlier than usual. That is, everyone was present except
+Mary. The Doge came, if a little late, to fulfil his function as chosen
+spokesman for all in bidding Jack Godspeed on his journey.
+
+"Señor Don't Care, you are a part of the history of Little Rivers!" he
+said, airily. "You have brought us something which we lacked in our
+singularly peaceful beginning. Without romance, sir, no community is
+complete. I have found you a felicitous disputant whom I shall miss; for
+you leave me to provide the arguments on both sides of a subject on the
+same evening. Our people have found you a neighbor of infinite resources
+of humor and cheer. We wish you a pleasant trail. We wish you warm
+sunshine when the weather is chill and shade when the weather is hot, and
+that you shall ever travel with a singing heart, while old age never
+overtakes the fancy of youth."
+
+Every one of the familiar faces grouped around the fine, cultured old
+face of the Doge expressed the thoughts to which he had given form.
+
+"May your arguments be as thick as fireflies, O Doge!" Jack answered,
+"everyone bearing a torch to illumine the outer darkness of ignorance!
+May every happy thought I have for Little Rivers spring up in a
+date-tree wonderful! Then, before the year is out, you will have a
+forest of date-trees stretching from foothills to foothills, across the
+whole valley."
+
+"And one more about the giant with the little voice and the dwarf with
+the big voice and the cat with the stripes down her back!" cried Belvy
+Smith, spokeswoman for the children. "Are they just going on forever
+having adventures and us never knowing about them?"
+
+"No. I have been holding back the last story," Jack said. "Both the giant
+and the dwarf were getting old, as you all know, and they were pretty
+badly battered up from their continual warfare. Why, the scar which the
+giant got on his forehead in their last battle was so big that if the
+dwarf had had it there would have been no top left to his head. After the
+cat had lost that precious black tip to her tail she became more and more
+thoughtful. She made up her mind to retire and reform and have a
+permanent home. And you know what a gift she had for planning out things
+and how clever she was about getting her own way. Now she sat in a hedge
+corner thinking and thinking and looking at the stubby end of her tail,
+and suddenly she cried, 'Eureka!' And what do you think she did? She went
+to a paint shop and had her left ear painted yellow and her right ear
+painted green. So, now you can see her any day sunning herself on the
+steps of the cottage where the giant and the dwarf live in peace.
+Whenever they have an inclination to quarrel she jumps between them and
+wiggles the yellow ear at the giant and the green ear at the dwarf, which
+fusses them both so that they promise to be good and rush off to get her
+a saucer of milk."
+
+"A green ear and a yellow ear! What a funny looking cat she must be!"
+exclaimed Belvy.
+
+"So she says to herself between purrs," concluded Jack. "But she is a
+philosopher and knows that she would look still funnier if she had lost
+her ears as Jag Ear has. Good-by, children! Good-by, everybody! Good-by,
+Little Rivers!"
+
+Jack gave P.D. a signal and the crowd broke into a cheer, which was
+punctuated by the music of Jag Ear's bells as his burrohood got in
+motion. The Doge, who had brought his horse, mounted.
+
+"I will ride a little distance with you," he said.
+
+He appeared like a man who had a great deal on his mind and yet was at a
+loss for words. There was the unprecedented situation of silence between
+the two exponents of persiflage in Little Rivers.
+
+"I--" he began, and paused as if the subject were too big for him and it
+were better not to begin at all. Then he drew rein.
+
+"Luck, Jack!" he said, simply, and there was something like pity
+in his tone.
+
+"And Mary--you will say good-by to her and thank her!" said Jack.
+
+"I think you may meet her," answered the Doge. "She went away early
+taking her luncheon, before she knew that you were going."
+
+So Ignacio had been acting on his own authority! The thrill of the news
+singing in Jack's veins was too overwhelming for him to notice the
+challenge and apprehension in the Doge's glance. The Doge saw the glow of
+a thousand happy, eager thoughts in Jack's face. He hesitated again on
+the brink of speech, before, with a toss of his leonine head as if he
+were veritably leaving fate's affairs to fate, he turned to go; and Jack
+mechanically touched P.D.'s rein, while he gazed toward the pass. P.D.
+had not gone many steps when Jack heard the same sonorous call that had
+greeted him that first night when he stopped before the door of the
+Ewolds; the call of a great, infectious fellowship between men:
+
+"Luck, Sir Chaps! I defy you to wear your spurs up the Avenue! Give my
+love to that new Campanile in Babylon, the Metropolitan tower! Get it in
+the mist! Get it under the sun! Kiss your hand to golden Diana, huntress
+of Manhattan's winds! Say ahoy to old Farragut! And on gray days have a
+look for me at the new Sorollas in the Museum! Luck, Sir Chaps!"
+
+"Good crops and a generous mail, O Doge!"
+
+Jack rode fast, in the gladness of a hope this side of the pass and in
+the face of shadows on the other side which he did not attempt to define.
+To Firio he seemed to have grown taller and older.
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+"LUCK, JACK, LUCK!"
+
+
+Apprehensively he watched the end of the ribbon running under P.D.'s
+hoofs for the sight of a horsewoman breaking free of the foothills. The
+momentary fear which rode with him was that Mary might be returning
+earlier than usual. If they met on the road--why, the road was without
+imagination and, in keeping with her new attitude toward him, she might
+pass him by with a nod. But at the top of the pass imagination would be
+supreme. There they had first met; there they had found their first
+thought in common in the ozone which had meant life to them both.
+
+He did not look up at the sky changes. As he climbed the winding path
+worn by moccasined feet before the Persians marched to Thermopylae, his
+mind was too occupied making pictures of its own in glowing anticipation
+to have any interest in outside pictures. This path was narrow. Here, at
+least, she must pause; and she must listen. Every turn which showed
+another empty stretch ahead sent his spirits soaring. Then he saw a pony
+with an empty side-saddle on the shelf. A few steps more and he saw Mary.
+
+She was seated with the defile at her back, her hands clasped over her
+knee. In this position, as in every position which she naturally took,
+she had a pliant and personal grace. The welter of light of the low sun
+was ablaze in her face. Her profile had a luminous wistfulness. Her
+lashes were half closed, at once retaining the vision of the panorama at
+her feet as a thing of atmospheric enjoyment and shutting it out from the
+intimacy of her thoughts. And more enveloping than the light was the
+silence which held her in a spell as still as the rocks themselves,
+waiting on time's dispensation where time was nothing. Yet the soft
+movement of her bosom with her even breaths triumphed in a life supreme
+and palpitant over all that dead world.
+
+Thus he drank her in before the crunch of a stone under his heel warned
+her of his presence and set her breaths going and coming in quick gusts
+as she wheeled around, half rising and then dropping back to a position
+as still as before, with a trace of new dignity in her grace, while her
+starkness of inquiry gradually changed to stoicism.
+
+"Mary, I came upon you very suddenly," he said.
+
+"Yes"--a bare, echoing monosyllable.
+
+He stepped to one side to let Firio and his little cavalcade pass. All
+the while she continued to look at him through the screen of her
+half-closed lashes in a way that set her repose and charm apart as
+something precious and cold and baffling. Now he realized that he had
+made a breach in the barrier of their old relations only to find himself
+in a garden whose flowers fell to ashes at his touch. He saw the light
+that enveloped her as an armor far less vulnerable than any wall, and the
+splendor of her was growing in his eyes.
+
+Jag Ear's bells with their warm and merry notes became a faint tinkle
+that was lost in the depths of the defile. The two were alone on the spot
+where the Eternal Painter had introduced them so simply as Jack and
+Mary, and where he, as the easy traveller, had listened to her plead for
+his own life. It was his turn to plead. She was not to be won by fighting
+Leddys or tearing up pine-trees by their roots. That armor was without a
+joint; a lance would bend like so much tin against its plates, and yet
+there must be some alchemy that would make it melt as a mist before the
+sun. It was tenanted by a being all sentiency, which saw him through her
+visor as a passer-by in a gallery. But one in armor does not fly from
+passers-by as she had flown while he was climbing up the canyon wall with
+his pine-tree branch.
+
+"I have learned now to look over any kind of a precipice without getting
+dizzy," she announced, quietly.
+
+He was not the Jack who had come over the ledge in the energy of his
+passion yesterday to find her gone. He had turned gentle and was smiling
+with craved permission for a respite from her evident severity as he
+dropped to a half-lying posture near her. Overhead, the Eternal Painter
+was throwing in the smoky purple of a false thunderhead, sweeping it away
+with the promise of a downpour, rolling in piles of silver clouds and
+drawing them out into filmy fingers melting into a luminous blue.
+
+"One can never tire of this," he said, tentatively.
+
+"To me it is all!" she answered, in an absorption with the scene that
+made him as inconsequential as the rocks around her.
+
+"And you never long for cities, with their swift currents and busy
+eddies?" he asked.
+
+"Cities are life, the life of humanity, and I am human. I--" The
+unfinished sentence sank into the silence of things inexpressible or
+which it was purposeless to express.
+
+Her voice suggested the tinkle of Jag Ear's bells floating away into
+space. If a precipitate were taken from her forehead, in keeping with
+Jack's suggestion to Dr. Bennington, it would have been mercury, which is
+so tangible to the eye and intangible to the touch. Press it and it
+breaks into little globules, only to be shaken together in a coherent
+whole. If there is joy or pain in the breaking, either one must be
+glittering and immeasurable.
+
+"But Little Rivers is best," she added after a time, speaking not to him,
+but devoutly to the oasis of green.
+
+In the crystal air Little Rivers seemed so near that one could touch the
+roofs of the houses with the fingertips of an extended arm, and yet so
+diminutive in the spacious bosom of the plateau that it might be set in
+the palm of the hand.
+
+Jack was as one afraid of his own power of speech. A misplaced word might
+send her away as oblivious of him as a globule of mercury rolling free
+from the grasp. Here was a Mary unfathomed of all his hazards of study,
+undreamed of in all his flights of fancy.
+
+"It is my last view," he began. "I have said all my good-bys in town. I
+am going."
+
+Covertly, fearfully, he watched the effect of the news. At least now
+she would look around at him. He would no longer have to talk to a
+profile and to the golden mist of the horizon about the greatest thing
+of his life. But there was no sign of surprise; not even an inclination
+of her head.
+
+"Yes," she told the horizon; and after a little silence added: "The time
+has come to play another part?"
+
+She asked the question of the horizon, without any trace of the old
+banter over the wall. She asked it in confirmation of a commonplace.
+
+"I know that you have always thought of me as playing a part. But I am
+not my own master. I must go. I--"
+
+"Back to your millions!" She finished the sentence for him.
+
+"Then you--you knew! You knew!" But his exclamation of astonishment did
+not move her to a glance in his direction or even a tremor.
+
+"Yes," she went on. "Father told me about your millions last night. He
+has known from the first who you were."
+
+"And he told no one else in Little Rivers? He never mentioned it to me or
+even to you before!"
+
+"Why should he when you did not mention it yourself? His omission was
+natural delicacy, in keeping with your own attitude. Isn't it part of the
+custom of Little Rivers that pasts melt into the desert? There is no
+standard except the conduct of the present!"
+
+And all this speech was in a monotone of quiet explanation.
+
+"He did not even tell you until last night! Until after our meeting on
+the other side of the pass! It is strange! strange!" he repeated in the
+insistence of wonder.
+
+He saw the lashes part a little, then quiver and close as she lifted
+her gaze from the horizon rim to the vortex of the sun. Then she
+smiled wearily.
+
+"He likes a joke," she said. "Probably he enjoyed his knowledge of your
+secret and wanted to see if I would guess the truth before you were
+through playing your part."
+
+"But the part was not a part!" he said, with the emphasis of fire
+creeping along a fuse. "It was real. I do not want to leave Little
+Rivers!"
+
+"Not in your present enthusiasm," she returned with a warning inflection
+of literalness, when he would have welcomed satire, anger, or any
+reprisal of words as something live and warm; something on which his mind
+could lay definite hold.
+
+In her impersonal calm she was subjecting him to an exquisite torture. He
+was a man flayed past all endurance, flayed by a love that fed on the
+revelation of a mystery in her being superbly in control. The riot of all
+the colors of the sky spoke from his eyes as he sprang to his feet. He
+became as intense as in the supreme moment in the _arroyo_; as reckless
+as when he walked across the store toward a gun-muzzle. Only hers were
+this time the set, still features. His were lighted with all the strength
+of him and all the faith of him.
+
+"A part!" he cried. "Yes, a part--a sovereign and true part which I shall
+ever play! I was going that day we first met, going before the legate of
+the millions came to me. Why did I stay? Because I could not go when I
+saw that you wanted to turn me out of the garden!"
+
+His quivering words were spoken to a profile of bronze, over which
+flickered a smile as she answered with a prompting and disinterested
+analysis.
+
+"You said it was to make callouses on your hands. But that must have been
+persiflage. The truth is that you imagined a challenger. You wanted to
+win a victory!" she answered.
+
+"It was for you that I calloused my hands!"
+
+"Time will make them soft!"
+
+She was half teasing now, but teasing through the visor, not over the
+wall.
+
+"And if I sought victory I saw that I was being beaten while I made a
+profession of you, not of gardening! Yes, of you! I could confess it to
+all the world and its ridicule!"
+
+"Jack, you are dramatic!"
+
+If she would only once look at him! If he could only speak into her eyes!
+If her breaths did not come and go so regularly!
+
+"Why did I take to the trail after Pedro Nogales struck at me with his
+knife? Because I saw the look on your face when you saw that I had broken
+his arm. I had not meant to break his arm--yet I know that I might have
+done worse but for you! I did not mean to kill Leddy--yet there was
+something in me which might have killed him but for you!"
+
+"I am glad to have prevented murder!" she answered almost harshly.
+
+A shadow of horror, as if in recollection of the scene in the _arroyo_
+and beside the hedge, passed over her face.
+
+"Yes, I understand! I understand!" he said. "And you must hear why this
+terrible impulse rose in me."
+
+"I know."
+
+"You know? You know?" he repeated.
+
+"About the millions," she corrected herself, hastily. "Go on, Jack, if
+you wish!" Urgency crept into her tone, the urgency of wishing to have
+done with a scene which she was bearing with the fortitude of
+tightened nerves.
+
+"It was the millions that sent me out here with a message, when I did
+not much care about anything, and their message was: 'We do not want to
+see you again if you are to be forever a weakling. Get strong, for our
+power is to the strong! Get strong, or do not come back!'"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+For the first time since he had begun his story she looked fairly at him.
+It was as if the armor had melted with sympathy and pity and she, in the
+pride of the poverty of Little Rivers, was armed with a Samaritan
+kindliness. For a second only he saw her thus, before she looked away to
+the horizon and he saw that she was again in armor.
+
+"And I craved strength! It was my one way to make good. I rode the
+solitudes, following the seasons, getting strength. I rejoiced in the tan
+of my arm and the movement of my own muscles. I learned to love the feel
+of a rifle-stock against my shoulder, the touch of the trigger to my
+finger's end. I would shoot at the cactus in the moonlight--oh, that is
+difficult, shooting by moonlight!--and I gloried in my increasing
+accuracy--I, the weakling of libraries and galleries and sunny verandas
+of tourist resorts! Afraid at first of a precipice's edge, I came to
+enjoy looking over into abysses and in spending a whole day climbing down
+into their depths, while Firio waited in camp. And at times I would cry
+out: 'Millions, I am strong! I am not afraid of you! I am not afraid of
+anything!' In the days when I knew I could never be acceptable as their
+master I knew I was in no danger of ever having to face them. When I had
+grown strong, less than ever did I want to face them. I know not why, but
+I saw shadows; I looked into another kind of depths--mental
+depths--which held a message that I feared. So I procrastinated, staying
+on in the air which had given me red blood. But that was cowardly, and
+that day I came over the pass I was making my last ride in the kingdom of
+irresponsibility. I was going home!
+
+"When you asked me not to face Leddy I simply had to refuse. I had just
+as soon as not that Leddy would shoot at me, because I wanted to see if
+he would. Yes, I was strong. I had conquered. And if Leddy hit me, why, I
+did not have to go back to battle with the shadows--the obsession of
+shadows which had grown in my mind as my strength grew. When I was
+smiling in Leddy's muzzle, as they say I did, I was just smiling
+exultantly at the millions that had called me a weakling, and saying,
+like some boaster, 'Could you do this, millions?' I--I--well, Mary, I--I
+have told you what I never was quite able to tell myself before."
+
+"Thank you, Jack!" she answered, and all the particles of sunlight that
+bathed her seemed to reflect her quiet gladness as something detached,
+permeating, and transcendent.
+
+"When Leddy challenged me I wanted to fight," he went on. "I wanted to
+see how cool I, the weakling whom the millions scorned, could be in
+battle. After Leddy's shot in the _arroyo_ I found that strength had
+discovered something else in me--something that had lain dormant in
+boyhood and had not awakened to any consciousness of itself in the five
+years on the desert--something of which all my boyhood training made me
+no less afraid than of the shadows, born of the blood, born of the very
+strength I had won. It seemed to run counter to books and gardens and
+peace itself--a lawless, devil-like creature! Yes, I gloried in the fact
+that I could kill Leddy. It was an intoxication to hold a steady bead on
+him. And you saw and felt that in me--yes, I tell you everything as a man
+must when he comes to a woman offering himself, his all, with his angels,
+his devils, and his dreams!"
+
+He paused trembling, as before a judge. She turned quickly, with a
+sudden, winsome vivacity, the glow of a great satisfaction in her eyes
+and smiling a comradeship which made her old attitude over the wall a
+thing of dross and yet far more intimate. Her hand went out to meet his.
+
+"Jack, we have had good times together," she said. "We were never
+mawkish; we were just good citizens of Little Rivers, weren't we? And,
+Jack, every mortal of us is partly what he is born and the rest is what
+he can do to bend inheritance to his will. But we can never quite
+transform our inheritance and if we stifle it, some day it will break
+loose. The first thing is to face what seems born in us, and you have
+made a good beginning."
+
+She gave his hands a nervous, earnest clasp and withdrew hers as she
+rose. So they stood facing each other, she in the panoply of good will,
+he with his heart on his sleeve. The swiftly changing pictures of the
+Eternal Painter in his evening orgy seemed to fill the air with the music
+of a symphony in its last measures, and her very breaths and smiles to be
+keeping time with its irresistible movement toward the finale.
+
+"I must be starting back, Jack," she said.
+
+"And, Mary, I must learn how to master the millions. Oh, I have not the
+courage of the little dwarf pine in the canyon! Mary, Mary, I calloused
+my hands for you! I want to master the millions for you! I would give you
+the freedom of Little Rivers and all the cities of the world!"
+
+"No, Jack! This is my side of the pass. I shall be very happy here."
+
+"Then I will stay in Little Rivers! I will leave the millions to the
+shadows! I will stay on ranch-making, fortune-making. Mary, I love you! I
+love you!"
+
+There was no staying the flame of his feeling. He seized her hands; he
+drew her to him. But her hands were cold; they were shivering.
+
+"Jack! No, no! It is not in the blood!" she cried in the face of some
+mocking phantom, her calmness gone and her words rocking with the tumult
+of emotion.
+
+"In the blood, Mary? What do you mean? What do you know that I don't
+know? Do you know those shadows that I cannot understand better than
+I?" he pleaded; and he was thinking of the Doge's look of pity and
+challenge and of the meeting long ago in Florence as the hazy filaments
+of a mystery.
+
+"No, I should not have said that. What do I know? Little--nothing that
+will help! I know what is in me, as I know what is in you. I am afraid of
+myself--afraid of you!"
+
+"Mary, I will fight all the shadows!" He drew her close to him
+resistlessly in his might.
+
+"Jack, you will not use your strength against me! Jack!"
+
+He saw her eyes in a mist of pain and reproach as he released her. And
+now she threw back her head; she was smiling in the philosophy of garden
+nonsense as she cried:
+
+"Good-by, Jack! Luck against the dinosaur! Don't press him too hard
+when he is turning a sharp corner. Remember he has a long reach with
+his old paleozoic tail. Luck!" with a laugh through her tears; a laugh
+with tremulous cheer in it and yet with the ring of a key in the lock
+of a gate.
+
+Unsteadily he bent over and taking her hands in his pressed his
+lips to them.
+
+"Yes, luck!" he repeated, and half staggering turned toward the defile.
+
+"Luck!" she called after him when he was out of sight. "Luck!" she called
+to the silence of the pass.
+
+Three days with the trail and the Eternal Painter mocking him, when the
+singing of Spanish verses that go click with the beat of horse-hoofs in
+the sand sounded hollow as the refrain of vain memories, and from the
+steps of a Pullman he had a final glimpse of Firio's mournful face, with
+its dark eyes shining in the light of the station lamp. Firio had in his
+hand a paper, a sort of will and testament given him at the last minute,
+which made him master in fee simple of the ranch where he had been
+servant, with the provision that the Doge of Little Rivers might store
+his overflow of books there forever.
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+HE FINDS HIMSELF
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+LABELLED AND SHIPPED
+
+
+Behold Jack clad in the habiliments of conventional civilization taken
+from the stock of ready-made suitings in an El Paso store! They were of
+the Moscowitz and Guggenheim type, the very latest and nattiest, as
+advertised in popular prints. The dealer said that no gentleman could be
+well dressed without them. He wanted to complete the transformation with
+a cream-colored Fedora or a brown derby.
+
+"I'll wait on the thirty-third degree a little longer," said Jack,
+fondling the flat-brimmed cowpuncher model of affectionate predilection.
+Swinging on a hook on the sleeper with the sway of the train, its company
+was soothing to him all the way across the continent.
+
+The time was March, that season of the northern year when winter growing
+stale has a gritty, sticky taste and the relief of spring seems yet far
+away. After the desert air the steam heat was stifling and nauseating.
+Jack's head was a barrel about to burst its hoops; his skin drying like a
+mummy's; his muscles in a starchy misery from lack of exercise. He felt
+boxed up, an express package labelled and shipped. When he crawled into
+his berth at night it was with a sense of giving himself up to
+asphyxiation at the whim of strange gods.
+
+If you have ever come back to town after six months in the woods, six
+months far from the hysteria of tittering electric bells, the brassy
+honk-honk of automobiles, the clang of surface cars and the screech of
+their wheels on the rails, multiply your period of absence by ten, add a
+certain amount of desert temperament, and you will vaguely understand how
+the red corpuscles were raising rebellion in Jack's artery walls on the
+morning of his journey's end. From the ferryboat on the dull-green bosom
+of the river he first renewed his memory of the spectral and forbidding
+abysses and pinnacles of New York. Here time is everything; here man has
+done his mightiest in contriving masses to imitate the architectural
+chaos of genesis. A mantle of chill, smoky mist formed the dome of
+heaven, in which a pale, suffused, yellowish spot alone bespoke the
+existence of a sun in the universe.
+
+In keeping with his promise to Dr. Bennington he had wired to his father,
+naming his train; and in a few minutes Wingfield, Sr. and Wingfield, Jr.
+would meet for the first time in five years. Jack was conscious of a
+faster beating of his heart and a feeling of awesome expectancy as the
+crowd debouched from the ferryboat. At the exit to the street a big
+limousine was waiting. The gilt initials on the door left no doubt for
+whom it had been sent. But there was no one to meet him, no one after his
+long absence except a chauffeur and a footman, who glanced at Jack
+sharply. After the exchange of a corroborative nod between them the
+footman advanced.
+
+"If you please, Mr. Wingfield," he said, taking Jack's suit case.
+
+"What would Jim Galway think of me now!" thought Jack. He put his head
+inside the car cautiously. "Another box!" he thought, this time aloud.
+
+"You have the check for it, sir?" asked the footman, thinking that Jack
+was using the English of the mother island for trunk.
+
+"No. That's all my baggage."
+
+In the tapering, cut-glass vase between the two front window-panels of
+the "box" was a rose--a symbol of the luxury of the twenty millions,
+evidently put there regularly every morning by direction of their master.
+Its freshness and color appealed to Jack. He took it out and pressed it
+to his nostrils.
+
+"Just needs the morning sun and the dew to be perfect," he said to the
+amazed attendants; "and I will walk if you will take the suit case to
+the house."
+
+He kept the rose, which he twirled in his fingers as he sauntered across
+town, now pausing at curb corners to glance back in thoughtful survey,
+now looking aloft at the peaks of Broadway which lay beyond the foothills
+of the river-front avenues.
+
+"All to me what the desert is to other folks!" he mused; "desert, without
+any cacti or mesquite! All the trails cross one another in a maze. A
+boxed-up desert--boxes and boxes piled on top of one another! Everybody
+in harness and attached by an invisible, unbreakable, inelastic leash to
+a box, whither he bears his honey or goes to nurse his broken wings!--so
+it seems to me and very headachy!"
+
+At Madison Square he was at the base of the range itself; and halting on
+the corner of Twenty-third Street and the Avenue he was a statue as aloof
+as the statue of Farragut from his surroundings. Salt sea spray ever
+whispers in the atmosphere around the old sailor. How St. Gaudens
+created it and keeps it there in the heart of New York is his secret.
+Possibly the sculptor put some of his soul into it as young Michael
+Angelo did into his young David.
+
+It is a great thing to put some of your soul into a thing, whether it is
+driving a nail or moulding a piece of clay into life. There are men who
+pause before the old Admiral and see the cutwater of men-of-war's bows
+and hear the singing of the signal halyards as they rise with the command
+to close in. Perhaps the Eternal Painter had put a little of his soul
+into the heart of Jack; for some busy marchers of the Avenue trail as
+they glanced at him saw the free desert and heard hoof-beats in the sand.
+Others seeing a tanned Westerner kissing his hand to Diana of Madison
+Square Garden probably thought him mad. Next, performing another
+sentimental errand for the Doge of Little Rivers, his gaze rose along the
+column of the Metropolitan tower. Its heights were half shrouded in mist,
+through which glowed the gold of the lantern.
+
+"Oh, bully! bully!" he thought. "The only sun in sight a manufactured
+one, shining on top of a manufactured mountain! It is a big business
+building a mountain; only, when God Almighty scattered so many ready-made
+ones about, why take the trouble?" he concluded. "Or so it seems to me,"
+he added, sadly, in due appreciation of the utterly reactionary mood of a
+man who has been boxed up for a week.
+
+Now he turned toward a quarter which he had, thus far, kept out of the
+compass of observation. He looked up the jagged range of Broadway where,
+over a terra-cotta pile, floated a crimson flag with "John Wingfield" in
+big, white letters.
+
+"My mountain! My box! My millions!" he breathed half audibly.
+
+How the people whom he passed, their faces speaking city keenness of
+ambition, must envy his position! How little reason they had to envy him,
+he thought, as he walked around the great building and saw his name
+glaring at him in gilt letters over the plate-glass windows and on all
+the delivery wagons, open-mouthed for the packages being wheeled out
+under the long glass awning.
+
+"A whole block now! Yes, the doctor was right. It must be thirty instead
+of twenty millions!" he concluded, as his vision swept the straight-line,
+window-checkered mass of the twelve stories. "And I do wish we had a
+tower! If one could go up on top of a tower and look out over the range
+now and then and breathe deep, it would help."
+
+When he entered the main door he paused in a maze, gazing at the acreage
+of counters manned by clerks and the aisles swarming with shoppers under
+the glare of the big, electric globes, and listening to the babble of
+shrill talk, the calls of the elevator boys, the coughing of the
+pneumatic tubes and the clang of the elevator doors. It was all like some
+devilishly complicated dream from which he would never awake. He must
+have a little time in order to orient himself before he could think
+rationally. The roar of the train still obsessed him; the air in the
+store seemed more stifling than that of the sleeper.
+
+So he decided that, rather than be shot up into The Presence by the
+elevator, he would gradually scale the heights. Ascending stairway after
+stairway, he ranged back and forth over the floors, a stranger in his
+own wonderland. When he reached the eleventh floor, with only one more to
+the offices, the whole atmosphere seemed suddenly to turn rare with
+expectancy; a rustle to run through all the goods on the counters; the
+very Paris gowns among which he was standing to be called to martial
+attention.
+
+"The boss!" he heard one of the model girls say.
+
+Turning to follow her nod toward the stairway, Jack saw, two-thirds of
+the way up the broad flight, a man past middle age, in dark gray suit and
+neutral tie, rubbing his palms together as he surveyed a stratum of his
+principality. The sight of him to Jack was like the touch of a myriad
+electric needles that pricked sharply, without exhilaration.
+
+"The boss is likely to run up that way any time of the day," said the
+model girl to a customer; "and what he don't see don't count!"
+
+"Not much older; not much changed!" thought Jack; and his realization of
+the disinterestedness of his observation tipped the needles with acid.
+
+In the sharpness of the master's button-counting survey there was swift
+finality; and his impressions completed, analyzed, docketed for
+reference, he ran on up the flight with light step, still rubbing the
+palms of his hands in the unctuously well-contained and appreciative
+sense of his power. To Jack he was a fascinating, grand, distant figure,
+this of his own father, yet mortally near.
+
+If the model girl had had the same keenness of observation for what is
+borne in the face as for what is worn on the back, she could not have
+failed to note the strong family resemblance between the young man
+standing near her and the man who had paused on the stairway. This
+glimpse of his father's mastery of every detail of that organization
+which he had built, this glimpse of cool, self-centered authority, only
+reminded Jack of his own ignorance and flightiness in view of all that
+would be expected of him. He knew less than one of the cash girls about
+how to run the store. A duel with Leddy was a simple matter beside this
+battle he had to wage.
+
+He mounted the last flight of stairs into an area of glass-paneled doors,
+behind which the creative business of the great concern was conducted.
+Out of one marked "Private," closing it softly and stepping softly, came
+a round-shouldered, stooping man of middle age, with the apprehensive and
+palliating manner of a long-service private secretary who has many things
+to remember and many persons to appease with explanations. It was evident
+that Peter Mortimer had just come from The Presence. At sight of Jack he
+drew back in a surprise that broke into a beaming delight which played
+over his tired and wrinkled features in ecstasy.
+
+"Jack! Jack! You did it! You did it!" he cried.
+
+"Peter!" Jack seized the secretary's hands and swung them back and forth.
+
+"You've got a grip of iron! And tanned--my, how you're tanned! You did
+it, Jack, you did it! It hardly seems credible, when I think of the last
+time I saw you."
+
+It was then that the secretary had seen a Jack with his eyes moist; a
+Jack pasty-faced, hollow-cheeked; and, in what was a revolutionary
+outburst for a unit in the offices, Peter Mortimer had put his arm around
+the boy in a cry for the success of the Odyssey for health which the
+heir was about to begin. And Mortimer's words were sweet, while the words
+of the farewell from the other side of the glass-paneled door marked
+"Private" were acrid with the disappointed hopes of the speaker.
+
+"You have always been a weakling, Jack, and I have had little to say
+about your rearing. Go out to the desert and stay--stay till you are
+strong!" declared the voice of strength, as if glad to be freed of the
+sight of weakness in its own image.
+
+"Father did not come to meet me?" Jack observed questioningly now
+to Mortimer.
+
+"He was very busy--he did not feel certain about the nature of your
+telegram--he--" and Mortimer's impulses withdrew into the shell of the
+professional private secretary.
+
+"I wired that he should see for himself if I were well. So he shall!"
+said Jack, turning toward the door.
+
+"Yes--that will be all right--yes, there is no one with him!"
+
+Mortimer, in the very instinct of long practice, was about to go in to
+announce the visitor, but paused. As Jack entered, whatever else may have
+been in his eyes, there was no moisture.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+IN THE CITADEL OF THE MILLIONS
+
+
+John Wingfield, Sr. sat at a mahogany table without a single drawer, in
+the centre of a large room with bare, green-tinted walls. His oculist had
+said that green was the best color for the eyes. Beside the green
+blotting-pad in front of him was a pile of papers. These would either be
+disposed of in the course of the day or, if any waited on the morrow's
+decision, would be taken away by Peter Mortimer overnight. When he rose
+to go home it was always with a clear desk; a habit, a belief of his
+singularly well-ordered mind in the mastery of the teeming detail that
+throbbed under the thin soles of his soft kid shoes. On the other side of
+the pad was the telephone, and beyond it the supreme implements of his
+will, a row of pearl-topped push-buttons.
+
+The story of John Wingfield, Sr.'s rise and career, as the lieutenants of
+the offices and the battalions of the shopping floors knew it, was not
+the story, perhaps, as Dr. Bennington or Peter Mortimer knew it; but,
+then, doctors and private secretaries are supposed to hold their secrets.
+There was little out of the commonplace in the world's accepted version.
+You may hear its like from the moneyed host at his dinner table in New
+York or as he shows you over the acres of his country estate, enthusing
+with a personal narrative of conquest which is to him unique. John
+Wingfield, Sr. makes history for us in the type of woman whom he
+married and the type of son she bore him.
+
+He was the son of a New England country clergyman, to whom working his
+way through college in order to practise a profession made no appeal.
+Birth and boyhood in poverty had taught him, from want of money, the
+power of money. He sought the centre of the market-place. At sixteen he
+was a clerk, marked by his industry not less than by his engaging
+manners, on six dollars a week in the little store that was the site of
+his present triumph. Of course he became a partner and then owner. It was
+his frequent remark, when he turned reminiscent, that if he could only
+get as good clerks as he was in his day he would soon have a monopoly of
+supplying New York and its environs with all it ate and wore and needed
+to furnish its houses; which raises the point that possibly such an
+equality of high standards in efficiency might make all clerks employers.
+
+The steady flame of his egoism was fanned with his Successes. Without
+real intimates or friends, he had an effective magnetism in making others
+do his bidding. It had hardly occurred to him that his discovery of the
+principle of never doing anything yourself that you can win others to do
+for you and never failing, when you have a minute to spare, to do a thing
+yourself when you can do it better than any assistant, was already a
+practice with leaders in trade and industry before the Pharaohs.
+
+Life had been to him a ladder which he ascended without any glances to
+right or left or at the rung that he had left behind. The adaptable
+processes of his mind kept pace with his rise. He made himself at home
+in each higher stratum of atmosphere. His marriage, delayed until he was
+forty and already a man of power, was still another upward step. Alice
+Jamison brought him capital and position. The world was puzzled why she
+should have accepted him; but this stroke of success he now considered as
+the vital error of a career which, otherwise, had been flawlessly
+planned. Yet he could flatter his egoism with the thought that it was
+less a fault of judgment than of the uncertainty of feminine temperament,
+which could not be measured by logic.
+
+New York saw little of Mrs. Wingfield after Jack's birth. Her friends
+knew her as a creature all life and light before her marriage; they
+realized that the life and light had passed out of her soon after the boy
+came; and thenceforth they saw and heard little of her. She had given
+herself up to the insistent possessorship and company of her son. Those
+who met her when travelling reported how frail she was and how
+constrained.
+
+Jack was fourteen when his mother died. He was brought home and sent to
+school in America; and two-years later Dr. Bennington announced that the
+slender youngster, who had been so completely estranged from the affairs
+of the store, must matriculate in the ozone of high altitudes instead of
+in college, if his life were to be saved. Whether Jack were riding over
+the _mesas_ of Arizona or playing in a villa garden in Florence, John
+Wingfield, Sr.'s outlook on life was the same. It was the obsession of
+self in his affairs. After the eclipse of his egoism the deluge. The very
+thought that anyone should succeed him was a shock reminding him of
+growing age in the midst of the full possession of his faculties, while
+he felt no diminution of his ambition.
+
+"I am getting better," came the occasional message from that stranger
+son. And the father kept on playing the tune of accruing millions on the
+push-buttons. His decision to send Dr. Bennington to Arizona came
+suddenly, just after he had turned sixty-three. He had had an attack of
+grip at the same time that his attention had been acutely called to the
+demoralization of another great business institution whose head had died
+without issue, leaving his affairs in the hands of trustees.
+
+Two days of confinement in his room with a high pulse had brought
+reflection and the development of atavism. What if the institution built
+as a monument to himself should also pass! What if the name of Wingfield,
+his name, should no longer float twelve stories high over his building!
+He foresaw the promise of companionship of a restless and ghastly
+apparition in the future.
+
+But he recovered rapidly from his illness and his mental processes were
+as keen and prehensile as ever. Checking off one against the other, with
+customary shrewdness, he had a number of doctors go over him, and all
+agreed that he was good for twenty years yet. Twenty years! Why, Jack
+would be middle-aged by that time! Twenty years was the difference
+between forty-three and sixty-three. Since he was forty-three he had
+quintupled his fortune. He would at least double it again. He was not
+old; he was young; he was an exceptional man who had taken good care of
+himself. The threescore and ten heresy could not apply to him.
+
+Bennington's telegram irritated him with its lack of precision. Fifteen
+hundred dollars and expenses to send an expert to Arizona and in
+return this unbusinesslike report: "You will see Jack for yourself. He
+is coming."
+
+In the full enjoyment of health, observing every nice rule for
+longevity, his slumber sweet, his appetite good, John Wingfield, Sr.
+had less interest in John Wingfield, Jr. than he had when his bones
+were aching with the grip. Jack's telegram from Chicago announcing the
+train by which he would arrive aroused an old resentment, which dated
+far back to Jack's childhood and to a frail woman who had been proof
+against her husband's will.
+
+Did this home-coming mean a son who could learn the business; a strong,
+shrewd, cool-headed son? A son who could be such an adjutant as only one
+who is of your own flesh and blood can be in the full pursuit of the same
+family interest as yourself? If Jack were well, would not Bennington have
+said so? Would he not have emphasized it? This was human nature as John
+Wingfield, Sr. knew it; human nature which never missed a chance to
+ingratiate itself by announcing success in the service of a man of power.
+
+The spirit of his farewell message to Jack, which said that strength
+might return but bade weakness to remain away, and the injured pride of
+seeing a presentment of wounded egoism in the features of a sickly boy,
+which had kept him from going to Arizona, were again dominant. Yet that
+morning he had a pressing sense of distraction. Even Mortimer noticed it
+as something unusual and amazing. He kept reverting to Jack's history
+between flashes of apprehension and he was angry with himself over his
+inability to concentrate his mind. Concentration was his god. He could
+turn from lace-buyer to floor-walker with the quickness of the swing of
+an electric switch. Concentrate and he was oblivious to everything but
+the subject in hand. He was in one of the moments of apprehension, half
+staring at the buttons on the desk rather than at the papers, when he
+heard the door open without warning and looked up to see a lean, sturdy
+height filling the doorway and the light from the window full on a
+bronzed and serene face.
+
+More than ever was Jack like David come over the hills in his incarnation
+of sleeping energy. Instead of a sling he carried the rose. Into the
+abode of the nicely governed rules of longevity came the atmosphere of
+some invasive spirit that would make the stake of life the foam on the
+crest of a charge in a splendid moment; the spirit of Señor Don't Care
+pausing inquiringly, almost apologetically, as some soldier in dusty
+khaki might if he had marched into a study unawares.
+
+Jack was waiting, waiting and smiling, for his father to speak. In a
+swift survey, his features transfixed at first with astonishment, then
+glowing with pride, the father half rose from his chair, as if in an
+impulse to embrace the prodigal. But he paused. He felt that something
+under his control was getting out of his control. He felt that he had
+been tricked. The boy must have been well for a long time. Yes! But he
+was well! That was the vital point. He was well, and magnificent in
+his vigor.
+
+The father made another movement; and still Jack was waiting, inquiring
+yet not advancing. And John Wingfield, Sr. wished that he had gone to
+the station; he wished that he had paid a visit to Arizona. This thought
+working in his mind supplied Jack's attitude with an aspect which made
+the father hesitate and then drop back into his chair, confused and
+uncertain for the first time in his own office.
+
+"Well, Jack, you--you surely do look cured!" he said awkwardly. "You see,
+I--I was a little surprised to see you at the office. I sent the
+limousine for you, thinking you would want to go straight to the house
+and wash off the dust of travel. Didn't you connect?"
+
+"Yes, thank you, father--and when you didn't meet me--"
+
+"I--I was very busy. I meant to, but something interrupted--I--" The
+father stopped, confounded by his own hesitation.
+
+"Of course," said Jack. He spoke deferentially, understandingly. "I know
+how busy you always are."
+
+Yet the tone was such to John Wingfield, Sr.'s ears that he eyed Jack
+cautiously, sharply, in the expectancy that almost any kind of
+undisciplined force might break loose from this muscular giant whom he
+was trying to reconcile with the Jack whom he had last seen.
+
+"I thought I'd stretch my legs, so I came over to the store to see how it
+had grown," said Jack. "I don't interrupt--for a moment?"
+
+He sat down on the chair opposite his father's and laid his faded
+cowpuncher hat and the rose on the desk. They looked odd in the company
+of the pushbuttons and the pile of papers in that neutral-toned room
+which was chilling in its monotony of color. And though Jack was almost
+boyishly penitent, in the manner of one who comes before parental
+authority after he has been in mischief, still John Wingfield, Sr.
+could not escape the dead weight of an impression that he was speaking to
+a stranger and not to his own flesh and blood. He wished now that he had
+shown affection on Jack's entrance. He had a desire to grip the brown
+hand that was on the edge of the desk fingering the rose stem; but the
+lateness of the demonstration, its futility in making up for his previous
+neglect, and some subtle influence radiating from Jack's person,
+restrained him. It was apparent that Jack might sit on in silence
+indefinitely; in a desert silence.
+
+"Well, Jack, I hear you had a ranch," said the father, with a faint
+effort at jocularity.
+
+"Yes, and a great crop of alfalfa," answered Jack, happily.
+
+"And it seems that all the time you were away you have never used your
+allowance, so it has just been piling up for you."
+
+"I didn't need it. I had quite sufficient from the income of my
+mother's estate."
+
+"Yes--your mother--I had forgotten!"
+
+"Naturally, I preferred to use that, when I was of so little service to
+you unless I got strong, as you said," Jack said, very quietly.
+
+Now came another silence, the silence of luminous, unsounded depths
+concealing that in the mind which has never been spoken or even taken
+form. Jack's garden of words had dried up, as his ranch would dry up for
+want of water. He rose to go, groping for something that should express
+proper contrition for wasted years, but it refused to come. He picked up
+the rose and the hat, while the father regarded him with stony wonder
+which said: "Are you mine, or are you not? What is the nature of this
+new strength? On what will it turn?"
+
+For Jack's features had set with a strange firmness and his eyes, looking
+into his father's, had a steady light. It seemed as if he might stalk out
+of the office forever, and nothing could stop him. But suddenly he
+flashed his smile; he had looked about searching for a talisman and found
+it in the rose, which set his garden of words abloom again.
+
+"This room is so bare it must be lonely for you," he said. "Wouldn't it
+be a good idea to cheer it up a bit? To have this rose in a vase on your
+table where you could see it, instead of riding about in an empty
+automobile box?"
+
+"Why, there is a whole cold storage booth full of them down on the first
+floor!" said the father.
+
+"Yes, I saw them in their icy prison under the electric light bulbs. The
+beads of water on them were like tears of longing to get out for the joy
+of their swan song under a woman's smiles or beside a sick bed," said
+Jack, in the glow of real enthusiasm.
+
+"Good line for the ad writer!" his father exclaimed, instinctively. "You
+always did have fanciful ideas, Jack."
+
+"Yes, I suppose I have!" he said, with some surprise and very
+thoughtfully. "I suppose that I was born with them and never weeded
+them out."
+
+"No doubt!" and the father frowned.
+
+Surveying the broad shoulders before him, he was thinking how nothing but
+aimlessness and fantasies and everything out of harmony with the career
+to come had been encouraged in the son. But he saw soberness coming into
+Jack's eyes and with it the pressure of a certain resoluteness of
+purpose. And now Jack spoke again, a trifle sadly, as if guessing his
+father's thoughts.
+
+"It will be a case of weeding for me in the future, won't it?" he asked
+wanly, as he rose. "I am full of foolish ideas that are just bound to run
+away with me."
+
+"Jack! Jack!" John Wingfield, Sr. put his hands out to the shoulders
+of his son and gripped them strongly, and for a second let his own
+weight half rest on that sturdy column which he sensed under the grip.
+His pale face, the paleness of the type that never tans, flushed.
+"Jack, come!" he said.
+
+He permitted himself something like real dramatic feeling as he signalled
+his son to follow him out of the office and led the way to a corner of
+one of the balconies where, under the light from the glass roof of the
+great central court, he could see down the tiers of floors to the jewelry
+counter which sparkled at the bottom of the well.
+
+"Look! look!" he exclaimed, rubbing his palms together with a peculiar
+crisp sound. "All selling my goods! All built from the little store where
+I began as a clerk!"
+
+"It's--it's immense!" gasped Jack; and he felt a dizziness and confusion
+in gazing at this kind of an abyss.
+
+"And it's only beginning! It's to go on growing and growing! You see why
+I wanted you to be strong, Jack; why it would not do to be weak if you
+had all this responsibility."
+
+This was a form of apology for his farewell to Jack, but the message was
+the same: He had not wanted a son who should be of his life and heart and
+ever his in faults and illnesses. This was the recognizable one of the
+shadows between them now recalled. He had wanted a fresh physical machine
+into which he could blow the breath of his own masterful being and instil
+the cunning of his experience. He saw in this straight, clean-limbed
+youth at his side the hope of Jack's babyhood fulfilled, in the
+projection of his own ego as a living thing after he himself was gone.
+
+"And it is to go on growing and growing, in my name and your name--John
+Wingfield!"
+
+Jack was swallowing spasmodically; he moistened his lips; he grasped the
+balcony railing so tight that his knuckles were white knobs on the bronze
+back of his hand. The father in his enthusiasm hardly noticed this.
+
+"What couldn't I have done," he added, "if I had had all this to begin
+with! All that you will have to begin with!"
+
+Jack managed a smile, rather thin and wavering.
+
+"Yes, I am going to try my best."
+
+"All I ask! You have me for a teacher and I know one or two little
+things!" said the father, fairly grinning in the transmission of his
+joke. "Now, you must be short on clothes," he added; "so you can get
+something ready-made downstairs while you have some making at
+Thompson's."
+
+"Don't you buy your clothes, your best clothes, I mean, in your own
+store?" Jack asked. It was his first question in getting acquainted with
+his future property.
+
+"No. We cater to a little bigger class of trade--one of the many twists
+of the business," was the answer. "And now we'll meet at dinner, shall
+we, and have a good long talk," he concluded, closing the interview and
+turning to the door, his mind snapping back to the matter he was about to
+take up when he had been interrupted with more eagerness than ever, now
+that his egoism thrilled with a still greater purpose.
+
+"I--I left my hat on your desk," Jack explained, as he followed his
+father into the office.
+
+"Well, you don't want to be carrying packages about," said John
+Wingfield, Sr. "That is hardly the fashion in New York, though John
+Wingfield's son can make it so if he wants to. I'll have that
+flat-brimmed western one sent up to the house and you can fit out with
+another when you go downstairs for clothes. That is, I suppose you will
+want to keep this as a memento, eh?" and he held out the cowpuncher,
+sweeping it with a sardonic glance.
+
+"No," Jack answered decisively, out of the impulse that came with the
+sight of the veteran companion that had shielded him from the sun on
+the trail. It was good to have any kind of an impulse after his
+giddiness on the balcony at sight of all the phantasmagoria of detail
+that he must master.
+
+If he were to be equal to this future there must be an end of temptation.
+He must shake himself free of the last clinging bit of chrysalis of the
+old life. His amazed father saw the child of the desert, where convention
+is made by your fancy and the supply of water in your canteen, go to the
+window and raise the sash. Leaning out, he let the hat drop into
+Broadway, with his eyes just over the line of the ledge while he watched
+it fall, dipping and gliding, to the feet of a messenger boy, who picked
+it up, waved it gleefully aloft before putting it over his cap, and with
+mock strides of grandeur went his way.
+
+"That gave him a lot of pleasure--and a remarkably quick system for
+delivering goods, wasn't it?" said Jack, cheerfully.
+
+"Yes, I should say so!" assented his father, returning to his seat.
+"Dinner at seven!" he called before the door closed; and as his finger
+sought one of the push-buttons it rested for a moment on the metal edge
+of the socket, his head bowed, while an indefinable emotion, mixed of
+prophecy and recollection, must have fluttered through the routine
+channels of his vigorous mind.
+
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+"BUT WITH YOU, 'YES, SIR'"
+
+
+As Jack came out of the office, Mortimer appeared from an adjoining room
+in furtive, mouselike curiosity.
+
+"Not much damage done!" said Jack, in happy relief from the ordeal. "I am
+without a hat, but I have the rose." He held it up before Mortimer's
+worn, kindly face that had been so genuine in welcome. "Yes, I must have
+kept it to decorate you, Peter!"
+
+Ineffectually, in timorous confusion, the old secretary protested while
+Jack fastened it in his buttonhole.
+
+"And you are going to help me, aren't you, Peter?" Jack went on,
+seriously. "You are going to hold up a finger of warning when I get off
+the course. I am to be practical, matter-of-fact; there's to be an end to
+all fantastic ideas."
+
+An end to all fantastic ideas! But it was hardly according to the gospel
+of the matter-of-fact to take Burleigh, the fitter, out to luncheon. Jack
+might excuse himself on the ground that he had not yet begun his
+apprenticeship and had several hours of freedom before his first lesson
+at dinner. This ecstasy of a recess, perhaps, made him lay aside the
+derby, which the clerk said was very becoming, and choose a softer
+head-covering with a bit of feather in the band, which the clerk, with
+positive enthusiasm, said was still more becoming. At all events, it was
+easy on his temples, while the derby was stiff and binding and conducive
+to a certain depression of spirits.
+
+Burleigh, the fitter, was almost as old as Mortimer. He rose to the
+exceptional situation, his eyes lighting as he surveyed the form to be
+clothed with a professional gratification unsurpassed by that of Dr.
+Bennington in plotting Jack's chest with a stethoscope.
+
+"Yes, sir, we will have that dinner-jacket ready to-night, sir, depend
+upon it--and couldn't I show you something in cheviots?"
+
+Jack broke another precedent. A Wingfield, he decided to patronize
+the Wingfield store, because he saw how supremely happy every order
+made Burleigh.
+
+"You can do it as well as Thompson's?" he asked.
+
+"With you, yes, sir--though Thompson is a great expert on round
+shoulders. But with you, yes, sir!"
+
+When the business of measuring was over, while Burleigh peered triumphant
+over the pile of cloths from which the masterpieces were to be fashioned,
+Jack said that he had a ripping appetite and he did not see why he and
+Burleigh should not appease their hunger in company. Burleigh gasped;
+then he grinned in abandoned delight and slipped off his shiny coat and
+little tailor's apron that bristled with pins.
+
+They went to a restaurant of reputation, which Jack said was in keeping
+with the occasion when a man changed his habits from Arizona simplicity
+to urban multiplicity of courses. And what did Burleigh like? Burleigh
+admitted that if he were a plutocrat he would have caviar at least once a
+day; and caviar appeared in a little glass cup set in the midst of
+cracked ice, flanked by crisp toast. After caviar came other things to
+Burleigh's taste. He was having such an awesomely grand feast that he
+was tongue-tied; but Jack could never eat in silence until he had
+forgotten how to tell stories. So he told Burleigh stories of the trail
+and of life in Little Rivers in a way that reflected the desert sunshine
+in Burleigh's eyes. Burleigh thought that he would like to live in Little
+Rivers. Almost anyone might after hearing Jack's description, in the joy
+of its call to himself.
+
+"Now, if you would trust me," said Burleigh, when they left the
+restaurant, "I should like to send out for some cloths not in stock for a
+couple of suits. And couldn't I make you up three or four fancy
+waistcoats, with a little color in them--the right color to go with the
+cloth? You can carry a little color--decidedly, yes."
+
+"Yes, I rather like color," said Jack, succumbing to temptation, though
+he felt that the heir to great responsibilities ought to dress in the
+most neutral of tones.
+
+"And I should like to select the ties to go with the suits and a few
+shirts, just to carry out my scheme--a kind of professional triumph for
+me, you see. May I?"
+
+"Go ahead!" said Jack.
+
+"And you can depend on your evening suit to be up in time. But I am going
+to rush a little broader braid on those ready-made trousers--you can
+carry that, too," Burleigh concluded.
+
+When they parted Jack turned into Fifth Avenue. Before he had gone a
+block the bulky eminence of a Fifth Avenue stage awakened his
+imagination. How could anybody think of confinement in a taxicab when he
+might ride in the elephant's howdah of that top platform, enjoying mortal
+superiority over surrounding humanity? Jack hung the howdah with silken
+streamers and set a mahout's turban on the head of the man on the seat in
+front of him, while the glistening semi-oval tops of the limousines
+floating in the mist of the rising grade from Madison Square to
+Forty-second Street, swarmed and halted in a kind of blind, cramped _pas
+de quatre_ from cross street to cross street, amid the breaking surge of
+pedestrians.
+
+"Such a throbbing of machine motion," he thought, "that I don't see
+how anybody can have an emotion of his own without bumping into
+somebody else's."
+
+It was a scene of another age and world to him, puzzling, overpowering,
+dismal, mocking him with a sense of loneliness that he had never felt on
+the desert. Could he ever catch up with this procession which had all the
+time been moving on in the five years of his absence? Could he learn to
+talk and think in the regulated manner of the traffic rules of
+convention? The few chums of his brief home school-days were long away
+from the fellowship of academies; they had settled in their grooves, with
+established intimacies. If he found his own flock he could claim
+admission to the fold only with the golden key of his millions, rather
+than by the password of kindred understanding.
+
+The tripping, finely-clad women, human flower of all the maelstrom of
+urban toil, in their detachment seemed only to bring up a visualized
+picture of Mary. What would he not like to do for her! He wished that he
+could pick up the Waldorf and set it on the other side of the street as
+a proof of the overmastering desire that possessed him whenever she was
+in his mind.
+
+And the Doge! He was the wisest man in the world. With a nod of
+well-considered and easy generosity Jack presented him with the new
+Public Library. And then all the people on the sidewalks vanished and
+the buildings melted away into sunswept levels, and the Avenue was a
+trail down which Mary came on her pony in the resplendent sufficiency of
+his dreams.
+
+"Great heavens!" he warned himself. "And I am to take my first lesson in
+running the business this evening! What perfect lunacy comes from
+mistaking the top of a Fifth Avenue stage for a howdah!"
+
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY
+
+
+How thankful he was that the old brick corner mansion in Madison Avenue,
+with age alone to recommend its architecture of the seventies--let it
+stand for what it was--had not been replaced by one of stone freshly
+polished each year! The butler who opened the door was new and stiffer
+than the one of the old days; but he saw that the broad hall, with the
+stairs running across the rear in their second flight, was little more
+changed than the exterior.
+
+Five years since he had left that hall! He was in the thrall of
+anticipation incident to seeing old associations with the eyes of
+manhood. The butler made to take his hat, but Jack, oblivious of the
+attention, went on to the doorway of the drawing-room, his look centering
+on a portrait that faced the door. In this place of honor he saw a
+Gainsborough. He uttered a note of pained surprise.
+
+"There used to be another portrait here. Where is it?" he demanded.
+
+The butler, who had heard that the son of the house was an invalid, had
+not recovered from his astonishment at the appearance of health of the
+returned prodigal.
+
+"Upstairs, sir," he answered. "When Mr. Wingfield got this prize last
+year, sir--"
+
+Though the butler had spoken hardly a dozen words, he became conscious
+of something atmospheric that made him stop in the confusion of one
+who finds that he has been garrulous with an explanation that does
+not explain.
+
+"Please take this upstairs and bring back the other," said Jack.
+
+"Yes, sir. You will be going to your room, sir, and while--" The butler
+had a feeling of a troublesome future between two masters.
+
+"Now, please!" said Jack, settling into a chair to wait.
+
+The Gainsborough countess, with her sweeping plumes, her rich, fleshy,
+soft tones, her charming affectation, which gave you, after the art
+interest, no more human interest in her than in a draped model, was
+carried upstairs and back came the picture that it had displaced. The
+frame still bore at the bottom the title "Portrait of a Lady," under
+which it had been exhibited at the Salon many years ago. It was by a
+young artist, young then, named Sargent. He had the courage of his
+method, this youngster, no less than Hals, who also worked his wonders
+with little paint when this suited his genius best. The gauze of the gown
+where it blended with the background at the edge of the line of arm was
+so thin, seemingly made by a single brush-stroke, that it almost showed
+the canvas.
+
+A purpose in that gauze: The thinness of transparency of character! The
+eyes of the portrait alone seemed deep. They were lambent and dark,
+looking straight ahead inquiringly, yet in the knowledge that no answer
+to the Great Riddle could change the course of her steps in the blind
+alley of a life whose tenement walls were lighted with her radiance. You
+could see through the gown, through the flesh of that frail figure, so
+lacking in sensuousness yet so glowing with a quiet fire, to the soul
+itself. She seemed of such a delicate, chaste fragility that she could be
+shattered by a single harsh touch. There would be no outcry except the
+tinkle of the fragments. The feelings of anyone who witnessed the
+breaking and heard the tinkle would be a criterion of his place in the
+wide margin between nerveless barbarism and sensitive gentility.
+
+"I give! I give! I give!" was her message.
+
+For a long time, he had no measure of it, Jack sat studying the portrait,
+set clear in many scenes of memory in review. It had been a face as
+changeful as the travels, ever full of quick lights and quick shadows. He
+had had flashes of it as it was in the portrait in its very triumph of
+resignation. He had known it laughing with stories of fancy which she
+told him; sympathetic in tutorial illumination as she gave him lessons
+and brought out the meaning of a line of poetry or a painting; beset by
+the restlessness which meant another period of travel; intense as fire
+itself, gripping his hands in hers in a defiance of possession; in moods
+when both its sadness and its playfulness said, "I don't care!" and
+again, fleeing from his presence to hide her tears.
+
+It was with the new sight of man's maturity and soberness that he now saw
+his mother, feeling the intangible and indestructible feminine majesty of
+her; feeling her fragility which had brought forth her living soul in its
+beauty and impressionableness as a link with the cause of his Odyssey;
+believing that she was rejoicing in his strength and understanding
+gloriously that it had only brought him nearer to her.
+
+After he had been to his room to dress he returned to the same chair and
+settled into the same reverie that was sounding depths of his being that
+he had never suspected. He was mutely asking her help, asking the support
+of her frail, feminine courage for his masculine courage in the battle
+before him; and little tremors of nervous determination were running
+through him, when he heard his father's footstep and became conscious of
+his father's presence in the doorway.
+
+There was a moment, not of hesitation but of completing a thought, before
+he looked up and rose to his feet. In that moment, John Wingfield, Sr.
+had his own shock over the change in the room. The muscles of his face
+twitched in irritation, as if his wife's very frailty were baffling
+invulnerability. Straightening his features into a mask, his eyes still
+spoke his emotion in a kind of stare of resentment at the picture.
+
+Then he saw his son's shoulders rising above his own and looked into
+his son's eyes to see them smiling. Long isolated by his power from
+clashes of will under the roof of his store or his house, the father
+had a sense of the rippling flash of steel blades. A word might start a
+havoc of whirling, burning sentences, confusing and stifling as a
+desert sandstorm; or it might bring a single killing flash out of
+gathering clouds.
+
+Thus the two were facing each other in a silence oppressive to both,
+which neither knew how to break, when relief came in the butler's
+announcement of dinner. Indeed, by such small, objective interruptions do
+dynamic inner impulses hang that this little thing may have suppressed
+the lightnings.
+
+The father was the first to speak. He hoped that a first day in New York
+had brought Jack a good appetite; certainly, he could see that the store
+had given him a wonderful fit for a rush order.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+BY RIGHT OF ANCESTRY
+
+
+There were to be no stories of Little Rivers at dinner; no questions
+asked about desert life. This chapter of Jack's career was a past rung of
+the ladder to John Wingfield, Sr. who was ever looking up to the rungs
+above. The magnetism and charm with which he won men to his service now
+turned to the immediate problem of his son, whom he was to refashion
+according to his ideas.
+
+"Are you ready to settle down?" he asked, half fearful lest that scene in
+the drawing-room might have wrought a change of purpose.
+
+In answer he was seeing another Jack; a Jack relaxed, amiable,
+even amenable.
+
+"If you have the patience," said Jack. "You know, father, I haven't a
+cash-register mind. I'm starting out on a new trail and I am likely to go
+lame at times. But I mean to be game."
+
+He looked very frankly and earnestly into his father's eyes.
+
+"Wild oats sown! My boy, after all!" thought the father. "Respected his
+mother! Well, didn't I respect mine? Of course--and let him! It is good
+principles. It is right. He has health; that is better than schooling."
+
+In place of the shock of the son's will against his, he was feeling it as
+a force which might yet act in unison with his. He expanded with the
+pride of the fortune-builder. He told how a city within a city is created
+and run; of tentacles of investment and enterprise stretching beyond the
+store in illimitable ambition; how the ball of success, once it was set
+rolling, gathered bulk of its own momentum and ever needed closer
+watching to keep it clear of obstacles.
+
+"And I am to stand on top like a gymnast on a sphere or be rolled under,"
+thought Jack. "And I'll have cloth of gold breeches and a balancing pole
+tipped with jewels; but--but--"
+
+"A good listener, and that is a lot!" thought the father, happily.
+
+Jack had interrupted neither with questions nor vagaries. He was gravely
+attentive, marveling over this story of a man's labor and triumph.
+
+"And the way to learn the business is not from talks by me," said his
+father, finally. "You cannot begin at the top."
+
+"No! no!" said Jack, aghast. "The top would be quite too insecure, too
+dizzy to start with."
+
+"Right!" the father exclaimed, decidedly. "You must learn each department
+of itself, and then how it works in with the others. It will be drudgery,
+but it is best--right at the bottom!"
+
+"Yes, father, where there is no danger of a fall."
+
+"You will be put on an apprentice salary of ten dollars a week."
+
+"And I'll try to earn it."
+
+"Of course, you understand that the ten is a charge against the store.
+That's business. But as for a private allowance, you are John Wingfield's
+son and--"
+
+"I think I have enough of my own for the present," Jack put in.
+
+"As you wish. But if you need more, say the word. And you shall name the
+department where you are to begin. Did you get any idea of which you'd
+choose from looking the store over to-day?"
+
+"That's very considerate of you!" Jack answered. He was relieved and
+pleased and made his choice quickly, though he mentioned it half timidly
+as if he feared that it might be ridiculous, so uncertain was he about
+the rules of apprenticeship.
+
+"You see I have been used to the open air and I'd like a little time in
+which to acclimatize myself in New York. Now, all those big wagons that
+bring the goods in and the little wagons that take them out--there is an
+out-of-door aspect to the delivery service. Is that an important branch
+to learn?"
+
+"Very--getting the goods to the customer--very!"
+
+"Then I'll start with that and sort of a roving commission to look over
+the other departments."
+
+"Good! We will consider it settled. And, Jack, every man's labor that you
+can save and retain efficiency--that is the trick! Organization and
+ideas, that's what makes the employer and so makes success. Why, Jack, if
+you could cut down the working costs in the delivery department or
+improve the service at the present cost, why--" John Wingfield, Sr.
+rubbed the palms of his hands together delightedly.
+
+Everything was going finely--so far. He added that proviso of _so far_
+instinctively.
+
+"Besides, Jack," he went on, changing to another subject that was equally
+vital to his ego, "this name of Wingfield is something to work for. I was
+the son of a poor New England clergyman, but there is family back of it;
+good blood, good blood! I was not the first John Wingfield and you shall
+not be the last!"
+
+He rose from the table, bidding the servant to bring the coffee to the
+drawing-room. With the same light, quick step that he ascended the
+flights in the store, he led the way downstairs, his face alive with the
+dramatic anticipation that it had worn when he took Jack out of the
+office to look down from the balcony of the court.
+
+"Ah, we have something besides the store, Jack!" he was saying, in the
+very exultation of the pride of possession, as he went to the opposite
+side of the mantel from the mother's portrait and turned on the reflector
+over a picture.
+
+Jack saw a buccaneer under the brush of the gold and the shadows of
+Spain; a robust, ready figure on fighting edge, who seemed to say, "After
+you, sir; and, then, pardon me, but it's your finish, sir!"
+
+"It's a Velasquez!" Jack exclaimed.
+
+"And you knew that at a glance!" said his father.
+
+"Why, yes!"
+
+"Not many Velasquezes in America," said the father, thinking,
+incidentally, that his son would not have to pay the dealers a heavy toll
+for an art education, while he revelled in a surprise that he was
+evidently holding back.
+
+"Or many better Velasquezes than this, anywhere," added Jack. "What
+mastery! What a gift from heaven that was vouchsafed to a human being to
+paint like that!"
+
+He was in a spell, held no less by the painter's art than by the subject.
+
+"Absolutely a certified Velasquez, bought from the estate of Count
+Galting," continued his father. "I paid a cool two hundred and fifty
+thousand for it. And that isn't all, Jack, that isn't all that you are
+going to drudge for as an apprentice in the delivery department. I know
+what I am talking about. I wasn't fooled by any of the genealogists who
+manufacture ancestors. I had it all looked up by four experts, checking
+one off against another."
+
+"Yes," answered Jack, absently. He had hardly heard his father's words.
+In fervent scrutiny he was leaning forward, his weight on the ball of the
+foot, the attitude of the man in the picture.
+
+"And who do you think he is--who?" pursued John Wingfield, Sr.
+
+"A man who fought face to face with the enemy; a man whom men followed!
+Velasquez caught all that!" answered Jack.
+
+"That old fellow was a great man in his day--a great Englishman--and his
+name was John Wingfield! He was your ancestor and mine!"
+
+After a quick breath of awakening comprehension Jack took a step nearer
+the portrait, all his faculties in the throe of beaming inquiry of Señor
+Don't Care and desert freedom, in the self-same, alert readiness of pose
+as the figure he was facing.
+
+"They say I resemble him!" The father repeated that phrase which he had
+used in benignant satisfaction to many a guest, but now seeing with
+greedy eyes a likeness between his son and the ancestor deeper than mere
+resemblance of feature, he added: "But you--you, Jack, you're the dead
+spit of him!"
+
+"Yes," said Jack, as if he either were not surprised or were too
+engrossed to be interested. To the buccaneer's "After you, sir; and,
+then, your finish, sir!" he seemed to be saying, in the fully-lived
+spirit of imagination: "A good epitaph, sir! I'll see that it is written
+on your tombstone!"
+
+The father, singularly affected by the mutual and enjoyed challenge that
+he was witnessing, half expected to see a sword leap out of the scabbard
+of the canvas and another from Jack's side.
+
+"If he had lived in our day," said the father, "he would have built
+himself a great place; he would have been the head of a great
+institution, just as I am."
+
+"Two centuries is a long way to fetch a comparison," answered Jack,
+hazily, out of a corner of his brain still reserved for conversation,
+while all the rest of it was centered elsewhere. "He might have been a
+cow-puncher, a revolutionist, or an aviator. Certainly, he would never
+have been a camp-follower."
+
+"At all events, a man of power. It's in the blood!"
+
+"It's in the blood!" Jack repeated, with a sort of staring, lingering
+emphasis. He was hearing Mary's protest on the pass; her final,
+mysterious reason for sending him away; her "It's not in the blood!"
+There could be no connection between this and the ancestor; yet, in the
+stirred depths of his nature, probing the inheritance in his veins, her
+hurt cry had come echoing to his ears.
+
+"Why, I would have paid double the price rather than not have got that
+picture!" the father went on. "There is a good deal of talk about family
+trees in this town and a strong tendency in some quarters for second
+generations of wealth to feel a little superiority over the first
+generation. Here I come along with an ancestor eight generations back,
+painted by Velasquez. I tell you it was something of a sensation when I
+exhibited him in the store!"
+
+"You--you--" and Jack glanced at his father perplexedly; "you exhibited
+him in the store!" he said.
+
+"Why, yes, as a great Velasquez I had just bought. I didn't advertise him
+as my ancestor, of course. Still, the fact got around; yes, the fact got
+around, Jack."
+
+While Jack studied the picture, his father studied Jack, whose face and
+whose manner of blissful challenge to all comers in the unconcern of easy
+fatality and ready blade seemed to grow more and more like that of the
+first John Wingfield. At length, Jack passed over to the other side of
+the mantel and turned on the reflector over the portrait of his mother;
+and, in turn, standing silently before her all his militancy was gone and
+in its place came the dreamy softness with which he would watch the
+Eternal Painter cloud-rolling on the horizon. And he was like her not in
+features, not in the color of hair or eyes, but in a peculiar
+sensitiveness, distinguished no less by a fatalism of its own kind than
+was the cheery aggressiveness of the buccaneer.
+
+"Yes, father," he said, "that old ruffian forebear of ours could swear
+and could kill. But he had the virtue of truth. He could not act or live
+a lie. And I guess something else--how supremely gentle he could be
+before a woman like her. Velasquez brought out a joyous devil and Sargent
+brought out a soul!"
+
+John Wingfield, Sr., who stood by the grate, was drumming nervously on
+the mantel. The drumming ceased. The fingers rested rigid and white on
+the dark wood. Alive to another manifestation of the lurking force in
+his son, he hastened to change the subject.
+
+"I had almost forgotten that you always had a taste for art, Jack."
+
+"Yes, from her;" which was hardly changing the subject.
+
+"As for the first John Wingfield, you may be sure that I wanted to know
+everything there was to know about the old fellow," said the father. "So
+I set a lot of bookworms looking up the archives of the English and
+Spanish governments and digging around in the libraries after material.
+Then I had it all put together in proper shape by a literary sharp."
+
+"You have that!" cried Jack. "You have the framework from which you can
+build the whole story of him--the story of how he fought and how
+Velasquez came to paint him? Oh, I want to read it!" With an unexplored
+land between gilt-tooled covers under his arm he went upstairs early, in
+the transport of wanderlust that had sent him away over the sand from
+Little Rivers. _Sí, sí_, Firio, outward bound, camp under the stars! If
+Señor Don't Care's desert journeys were over--and he had no thought but
+that they were--there was no ban on travelling in fancy over sea trails
+in the ancestor's company.
+
+Jack was with the buccaneer when he boarded the enemy at the head of his
+men; with him before the Board of Admiralty when, a young captain of
+twenty-two, he refused to lie to save his skin; with him when, in answer
+to the scolding of Elizabeth, then an old woman, he said: "It is glorious
+for one who fought so hard for Your Majesty to have the recognition even
+of Your Majesty's chiding in answer to the protest of the Spanish
+ambassador," which won Elizabeth's reversal of the Admiralty's decision;
+with him when, in a later change of fortune, he went to the court of
+Spain for once on a mission which required a sheathed blade; with him
+when the dark eye of Velasquez, who painted men and women of his time
+while his colleagues were painting Madonnas, glowed with a discoverer's
+joy at sight of this fair-haired type of the enemy, whom he led away to
+his studio.
+
+More than once was there mention of the fact that this terrible fighter
+was gentle with women and fonder of the company of children than of
+statesmen or courtiers. He had married the daughter of a great merchant,
+a delicate type of beauty; the last to fascinate a buccaneer, according
+to the gossips of the time. Rumor had it that he had taken her for the
+wherewithal to pay the enormous debts contracted in his latest exploit.
+To disprove this he went to sea in a temper with a frigate and came back
+laden with the treasure of half a dozen galleons, to find that his wife
+had died at the birth of a son. He promised himself to settle down for
+good; but the fog of London choked lungs used to soft airs; he heard the
+call of the sun and was away again to seek adventure in the broiling
+reaches of the Caribbean. A man of restless, wild spirit, breathing
+inconsistencies incomprehensible to the conventions of Whitehall! And his
+son had turned a Cromwellian, who, in poverty, sought refuge in America
+when Charles II. came to the throne; and from him, in the vicissitudes of
+five generations, the poor clergyman was descended.
+
+Thus ran the tale in its completeness. The end of the ancestor's career
+had been in keeping with its character and course. He had been spared
+the slow decay of faculties in armchair reminiscence. He had gone down in
+his ship without striking his colors, fighting the Spaniards one to
+three. When Jack closed the cover on the last page tenderly and in
+enraptured understanding, it was past midnight.
+
+The spaciousness of the sea under clouds of battle smoke had melted into
+the spaciousness of the desert under the Eternal Painter's canopy. Then
+four walls of a bedroom in Madison Avenue materialized, shutting out the
+horizon; a carpet in place of sand formed the floor; and in place of a
+blanket roll was a canopied bed upon which a servant had laid out a suit
+of pajamas. In the impulse of a desire to look into the face of the first
+John Wingfield in the light of all he now knew, Jack went downstairs, and
+in the silence of the house drank in the portrait again.
+
+"You splendid old devil, you!" he breathed, understandingly. "How should
+you like to start out delivering goods with me in the morning?"
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII
+
+JACK GETS A RAISE
+
+
+The next morning Jack went down town with his father in the limousine.
+About an hour later, after he had been introduced to the head of the
+delivery division, he was on his way up town beside a driver of one of
+the wagons on the Harlem route. He was in the uniform of the Wingfield
+light cavalry, having obtained a cap with embroidered initials on the
+front. The driver was like to burst from inward mirth, and Jack was
+regarding the prospect with veritable juvenile zest.
+
+At dinner that evening John Wingfield, Jr. narrated his experiences of
+the day to John Wingfield, Sr. with the simplicity and verisimilitude
+that always make for both realism and true comedy.
+
+"But, Jack, you took me too literally! It is hardly in keeping with your
+position! You--"
+
+"Why, I thought that the only way to know the whole business was to
+play every part. Didn't you ever deliver packages in person in your
+early days?"
+
+"I can't say that I did!" the father admitted wryly.
+
+"Then it seems to me that you missed one of the most entertaining and
+instructive features," Jack continued. "You cannot imagine the majestic
+feminine disdain with which you may be informed that a five-cent bar of
+soap should be delivered at the back door instead of the front door. The
+most indignant example was a red-haired woman who was doing her own work
+in a flat. She fairly blazed. She wanted to know if I didn't know what
+dumb-waiters were for."
+
+"And what did you say?" the father asked wearily; for the ninth John
+Wingfield had a limited sense of humor.
+
+"Oh, I try, however irritating the circumstances, to be most courtly, for
+the honor of the store," said Jack. "I told her that I was very sorry and
+I would speak to you in person about the mistake."
+
+"You mean that you admitted who you were?"
+
+"Oh, no! The red-haired woman laughed and took the package in at the
+front door," Jack responded. Anybody in Little Rivers would have
+understood just how he looked and smiled and why it was that the
+red-haired woman laughed.
+
+"Jack--now, really, Jack, this is not quite dignified!" expostulated the
+father. "What do you think your ancestor would say to it?"
+
+"I suspect that he would have made an even more ingratiating bow to the
+lady than I could," said Jack, thoughtfully. "They had the grand manner
+better developed in his day than in ours."
+
+In the ensuing weeks John Wingfield, Sr. dwelt in a kind of infernal
+wonder about his son. He was cheered when some friend of his world who
+had met Jack in the garb of his caste, as fitted by Burleigh, would say:
+"Fine, strapping son you have there, Wingfield!" He was abashed and
+dumfounded when Jack announced that he had taken Mamie Devore, who sold
+culinary utensils in the basement, out to luncheon with her "steady
+company," Joe Mathewson, driver of one of the warehouse trucks.
+
+"They were a little awed at first," Jack explained, "but they soon
+became natural. I don't know anything pleasanter than making people feel
+perfectly natural, do you? You see, Joe and Mamie are very real, father,
+and most businesslike; an ambitious, upstanding pair. They're going to
+have two thousand dollars saved before they marry.
+
+"'I don't believe that a woman ought to work out after she's married,'
+was the way Joe put it. And Mamie, with her eyes fairly devouring him,
+snapped back: 'No, she'd have enough to do looking after you, you big
+old bluff!'
+
+"Mamie is a wiry little thing and Joe is a heavyweight, with a hand
+almost as big as a baseball mit. That's partly why their practical
+romance is so fascinating. Why, it's wonderful the stories that are
+playing themselves out in that big store, father! Well, you see Joe is on
+a stint--two thousand before he gets Mamie. He had been making money on
+the side nights in boxing bouts. But Mamie stopped the fighting. She said
+she was not going to have a husband with the tip of his nose driven up
+between his eyes like a bull-dog's. And what do you imagine they are
+going to do with the two thousand? Buy a farm! Isn't that corking!"
+
+John Wingfield, Sr. shrugged his shoulders, but did not express his
+feelings with any remark. It seemed to him that Jack must have been born
+without a sense of proportion.
+
+With the breaking of spring, when gardens were beginning to sprout, Jack
+broadened his study to the trails of Westchester, Long Island, and New
+Jersey, coursed by the big automobile vans of the suburban delivery. To
+the people of the store, whose streets he traversed at will in
+unremitting wonder over its varied activities, he had brought something
+of the same sensation that he had to an Arizona town. He came to know the
+employees by name, even as he had his neighbors in Little Rivers. He
+nodded to the clerks as he passed down an aisle. They watched for his
+coming and brightened with his approach and met his smile with their
+smiles. In their idle moments he would stop and talk of the desert.
+
+Although he was learning to like the store as a community of human beings
+its business was as the works of a watch, when all he knew was how to
+tell the time by the face. But he tried hard to learn; tried until his
+head was dizzy with a whirl of dissociated facts, which he knew ought to
+be associated, and under the call of his utter restlessness would
+disappear altogether for two or three days.
+
+"Relieving the pressure! It's a safety-valve so I shan't blow up," he
+explained to his father, sadly.
+
+"Take your time," said John Wingfield, Sr., having in mind a recent talk
+with Dr. Bennington.
+
+Jack listened faithfully to his father's clear-cut lessons. He asked
+questions which only made his father sigh; for they had little to do with
+the economy of working costs. All his suggestions were extravagant; they
+would contribute to the joy of the employees, but not to profit. And
+other questions made his father frown in devising answers which were in
+the nature of explanations. Born of his rambling and humanly observant
+relations with every department, they led into the very heart of things
+in that mighty organization. There were times when it was hard for him
+to control his indignation. There were trails leading to the room with
+the glass-paneled door marked "Private" which he half feared to pursue.
+
+Thus, between father and son remained that indefinable chasm of thought
+and habit which filial duty or politeness could not bridge. No stories of
+the desert were ever told at home, though it was so easy to tell them to
+Burleigh or Mathewson, those contrasts in a pale fitter of clothes and a
+herculean rustler of dry-goods boxes. But echoes of the tales came to the
+father through his assistants. He had the feeling of some stranger spirit
+in his own likeness moving there in the streets of his city under the
+talisman of a consanguinity that was nominal. One day he put an inquiry
+to the general manager concretely, though in a way to avoid the
+appearance of asking another's opinion about his own son.
+
+"He has your gift of winning men to him. There is no denying his
+popularity with the force," said the general manager, who was a diplomat.
+
+The same question was put to Peter Mortimer.
+
+"We all love him. I think a lot of people in the store would march out to
+the desert after him," said Mortimer, with real rejoicing in his candor
+and courage. Indeed, of late he had been developing cheer as well as
+courage, imbibing both, perhaps, from the roses in the vase on his
+employer's desk. Jack had ordered a fresh bunch put there every day; and
+when employees were sick packages of grapes and bunches of flowers came
+to them, in Little Rivers fashion, with J.W. on the card, as if they had
+come from the head of the firm himself.
+
+"Maybe Jack will soften the old man a little," ran a whisper from
+basement to roof. For the battalions called him "Jack," rather than "Mr.
+Wingfield," just as Little Rivers had.
+
+"The boy's good nature isn't making him too familiar with the employees?"
+was a second question which the father had asked both the general manager
+and Mortimer.
+
+"No. That is the surprising thing--the gift of being friendly without
+being familiar," answered the manager.
+
+"He's got a kind of self-respect that induces respect in others,"
+said Peter.
+
+John Wingfield, Sr. was the proprietor of the store, but the human world
+of the store began to feel a kind of proprietorship in Jack, while its
+guardian interest in helping him in his mistakes was common enough to be
+a conspiracy.
+
+And the callouses were gone from his hands. There was no longer a
+dividing line between tan and white on his forehead. No outward symbol of
+the desert clung to his person except the moments of the far vision of
+distances in his eyes. Superficially, on the Avenue he would have been
+taken for one of his caste.
+
+But tossing a cowpuncher hat out of a window into Broadway was easier
+than tossing a thing out of mind. He sat up nights to write to Mary.
+Letter after letter he poured out as a diary of his experiences in his
+new world, letters breathing a pupil's hope of learning and all that
+pupil's sorry vagaries. No answer ever came, not even to the most
+appealing ones about his most adventurous conflicts with the dinosaur.
+He felt the chagrin of the army of unpublished novelists who lay their
+hearts bare on the stone slab of the dissectors in a publisher's
+office. He might as well have thrown all he wrote into the
+waste-basket so far as any result was concerned; yet he kept on
+writing as if it were his glorious duty to report to her as his
+superior. But he found a more responsive correspondent in Jim Galway;
+and this was the letter he received:
+
+"DEAR JACK:
+
+"The whole valley is not yet sprouting with dates as you said it would
+from your thinking of us. Maybe we didn't use the right seed. Your ranch
+is still called Jack's ranch, and Firio is doing his best and about the
+best I ever knew in an Indian. But as you always said, Indians are mostly
+human, like the rest of us, barring a sort of born twist in their
+intellect for which they aren't responsible. You see, Jack, a lot of your
+sayings still live with us, though you are gone.
+
+"Well, Firio keeps your P.D. exercised and won't let anybody but himself
+ride him. He says you will need him. For you can't budge the stubborn
+little cuss. He declares you're coming back. When we tell him you're
+worth twenty millions and he's plumb full of primitive foolishness and
+general ignorance of the outside world, he says, '_Sí_, he will come
+back!' like some heathen oracle that's strong on repetition and weak on
+vocabulary.
+
+"Of course you know about the new addition to our citizenship, John
+Prather, that double of yours that you didn't happen to meet. And I
+might mention that by this time, after we've seen so much of him, we
+agree with the Doge that he doesn't look a bit like you. Well, he's
+making a fine ranch across the road from you, but hiring all his work
+done, which ain't exactly according to Little Rivers custom, as you
+will remember. The Doge sets a lot by him, though I can't see how
+there's much in common between them. This fellow's not full of all that
+kind of scholastic persiflage that you are, Jack. He's so all-fired
+practical his joints would crack if he wasn't so oily; and he's up to
+old man Lefferts' pretty often.
+
+"He goes to Phoenix a good deal. When I was there the other day I heard
+he was circulating around among the politicians in his quiet way, and I
+saw him and Pete Leddy hobnobbing together. I didn't like that. But when
+I told the Doge of it he said he guessed there wasn't much real
+hobnobbing. The Doge is certainly strong for Prather. Another thing I
+heard was that, after all, old man Lefferts' two partners aren't dead,
+and Prather's been hunting them up.
+
+"Come to think of it, I didn't tell you that Pete Leddy and some of the
+gang have been back in town. Of course we have every confidence in the
+Doge, he's been so fair to this community. Still, some of us can't help
+having our private suspicions, considering what a lot we have at stake.
+And four or five of us was talking the other night, when suddenly we all
+agreed how you'd shine in any trouble, and if there was going to be
+any--not that there is--we wished you were here.
+
+"Well, Jack, the pass hasn't changed and the sunsets are just as grand as
+ever and the air just as free. The pass won't have changed and the
+sunsets will be doing business at the old stand when the antiquaries are
+digging up the remote civilization of Little Rivers and putting it in a
+high scale because they ran across a pot of Mrs. Galway's jam in the
+ruins--the same hifalutin compliment being your own when you were
+nursing your wound, as you will remember.
+
+"Here's wishing you luck from the whole town, way out here in nowhere.
+
+"As ever yours,
+
+"James R. Galway.
+
+"P.S. Belvy Smith wants to know if you won't write just one story. I told
+her you were too busy for such nonsense now. But she refuses to believe
+it. She says being busy doesn't matter to you. She says the stories just
+pop out. So I transmit her request. J.R.G."
+
+"P.D. waiting!" breathed Jack. "No changing Firio! He is like the pass. I
+wonder how Wrath of God and Jag Ear are!"
+
+He wrote a story for Belvy. He wrote to Firio in resolute assertion that
+he would never require the services of P.D. again, when he knew that
+Firio, despite the protests, would still keep P.D. fit for the trail. He
+wrote to Jim Galway how immersed he was in his new career, but that he
+might come for a while--for a little while, with emphasis--if ever Jim
+wired that he was needed.
+
+"That was a good holiday--a regular week-end debauch away from the shop!"
+he thought, when the letters were finished.
+
+Soon after this came an event which, for the first time, gave John
+Wingfield, Sr. a revelation of the side of his son that had won Little
+Rivers and the interest of the rank and file of the store. Among Jack's
+many suggestions, in his aim to carry out his father's talk about the
+creative business sense the first night they were together, had been one
+for a suburban clubbing delivery system. It had been dismissed as
+fantastic, but Jack had asked that it be given a trial and his father had
+consented. Its basis was a certain confidence in human nature. Jack and
+his father had dined together the evening after the master of the
+push-buttons had gone through the final reports of the experiment.
+
+"Well, Jack, I am going to raise your salary to a hundred a week," the
+father announced.
+
+"On the ground that if you pay me more I might make myself worth more?"
+Jack asked respectfully.
+
+"No, as a matter of business. Whenever any man makes two dollars for the
+store, he gets one dollar and I keep the other. That is the basis of my
+success--others earning money for me. Your club scheme is a go. As the
+accountant works it out, it has brought a profit of two hundred a week."
+
+"Then I have done something worth while, really?" Jack asked, eagerly,
+but half sceptical of such good fortune.
+
+"Yes. You have created a value. You have used your powers of observation
+and your brain. That's the thing that makes a few men employers while the
+multitude remains employees."
+
+"Father! Then I am not quite hopeless?"
+
+"Hopeless! My son hopeless! No, no! I didn't expect you to learn the
+business in a week, or a month, or even a year. Time! time!"
+
+Nor did John Wingfield, Sr. wish his son to develop too rapidly. Now
+that he was so sure of beating threescore and ten, while retaining the
+full possession of his faculties, if he followed the rules of longevity,
+he would not have welcomed a son who could spring into the saddle at
+once. He wanted to ride alone. He who had never shared his power with
+anyone! He who had never admitted anyone into even a few shares of
+company partnership in his concern! Time! time! The boy would never fall
+heir to undivided responsibility before he was forty. John Wingfield,
+Sr. was pleased with himself; pleased over a good sign; and he could not
+deny that he was pleased at the sudden change in Jack. For he saw Jack's
+eyes sparkling into his own; sparkling with comradeship and spontaneous
+gratification. Was the boy to be his in thought and purpose, after all?
+Yes, of course; yes, inevitably, with the approach of maturity. Gradually
+the flightiness of his upbringing would wear off down to the steel, the
+hard-tempered, paternal steel.
+
+"You can scarcely realize what a fight it has been for me until you know
+the life I led out in Arizona, getting strong for you and the store,"
+Jack began.
+
+"Strong for me! For the store! Yes, Jack!" There was an emphasis on the
+subjective personal pronoun--for _him_; for the store!
+
+The father's face beamed a serene delight. This Jack accepted as the
+expression of sympathy and understanding which he had craved. It was to
+him an inspiration of fellowship that set the well of his inner being in
+overflow and the force of his personality, which the father had felt
+uncannily before the mother's picture, became something persuasive in its
+radiance rather than something held in leash as a threatening and
+volcanic element. Now he could talk as freely and happily of the desert
+to his father as to Burleigh and Mathewson. He told of the long rides;
+of Firio and Wrath of God. He made the tinkle of Jag Ear's bells heard in
+the silence of the dining-room as it was heard in the silences of the
+trail. He mentioned how he was afraid to come back after he was strong.
+
+"Afraid?" queried his father.
+
+"Yes. But I was coming--coming when, at the top of the pass, I saw Little
+Rivers for the first time."
+
+He sketched his meeting with Mary Ewold; the story of the town and the
+story of Jasper Ewold as he knew it, now glancing at his father, now
+seeming to see nothing except visualization of the pictures of his story.
+The father, looking at the table-cloth, at times playing with his
+coffee-spoon, made no comment.
+
+"And that first night I saw that Jasper Ewold had met me somewhere
+before. But--" he went on after going back to the incident of the villa
+in his childhood--"that hardly explained. How could he remember the face
+of a grown man from the face of a boy? Jasper Ewold! Do you recall ever
+having met him? He must have known my mother. Perhaps he knew you, though
+why he should not have told me I don't know."
+
+"Yes, yes--Jasper Ewold," said the father. "I knew him in his younger
+days. His was an old family up in Burbridge, the New England town where I
+came from. Too much college, too much travel, as I remember,
+characterized Jasper Ewold. No settled point of view; and I judge from
+what you say that he must have run through his patrimony. One of the ups
+and downs of the world, Jack. And he never mentioned that he had met me?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Probably a part of that desert notion of freemasonry in keeping pasts a
+secret. But why did you stay on after you had recovered from your wound?"
+he asked penetratingly, though he was looking again at the bottom of his
+coffee-cup.
+
+"For a reason that comes to a man but once in his life!" Jack answered.
+
+Had the father looked up--it was a habit of his in listening to any
+report to lower his eyes, his face a mask--he might have seen Jack's
+face in the supremacy of emotion, as it was when he had called up to
+Mary from the canyon and when he had pleaded with her on the pass. But
+John Wingfield, Sr. could not mistake the message of a voice vibrating
+with all the force of a being let free living over the scene. With the
+shadows settling over his eyes, Jack came to her answer and to the
+finality of her cry:
+
+"It's not in the blood!"
+
+The only sound was a slight tinkle of a spoon against the coffee-cup.
+Looking at his father he saw a nervous flutter in his cheeks, his lips
+hard set, his brow drawn down; and the rigidity of the profile was such
+that Jack was struck by the shiver of a thought that it must have been
+like his own as others said it was when he had gripped Pedro Nogales's
+arm. But this passed quickly, leaving, however, in its trail an
+expression of shock and displeasure.
+
+"So it was the girl, that kept you--you were in love!" John Wingfield,
+Sr. exclaimed, tensely.
+
+"Yes, I was--I am! You have it, father, the unchangeable all of it! I
+face a wall of mystery. 'It's not in the blood!' she said, as if it were
+some bar sinister. What could she have meant?"
+
+In the fever of baffled intensity crying for light and help, he was
+sharing the secret that had beset him relentlessly and giving his father
+the supreme confidence of his heart. Leaning across the table he grasped
+his father's hand, which lay still and unresponsive and singularly cold
+for a second. Then John Wingfield, Sr. raised his other hand and patted
+the back of Jack's hesitantly, as if uncertain how to deal with this
+latest situation that had developed out of his son's old life. Finally he
+looked up good-temperedly, deprecatingly.
+
+"Well, well, Jack, I almost forgot that you are young. It's quite a bad
+case!" he said.
+
+"But what did she mean? Can you guess? I have thought of it so much that
+it has meant a thousand wild things!" Jack persisted desperately.
+
+"Come! come!" the father rallied him. "Time, time!"
+
+He gripped the hand that was gripping his and swung it free of the table
+with a kindly shake. All the effective charm of his personality which he
+never wasted, the charm that could develop out of the mask to gain an end
+when the period of listening was over, was in play.
+
+"She excited the opposition of the strength in you," he said. "You ask
+what did she mean? It is hard to tell what a woman means, but I judge
+that she meant that it was not in her blood to marry a fellow who went
+about fighting duels and breaking arms. She would like a more peaceful
+sort; and, yes, anything that came into her mind leaped out and you were
+mystified by her strange exclamation!"
+
+"Perhaps. I suppose that may be it. It was just myself, just my devil!"
+Jack assented limply.
+
+"Time! time! All this will pass."
+
+Jack could not answer that commonplace with one of his own, that it would
+not pass; he could only return the pressure when his father, rising and
+coming around the table, slipped his arm about the son in a demonstration
+of affection which was like opening the gate to a new epoch in their
+relations.
+
+"And you would have killed Leddy! You could have broken that Mexican in
+two! I should like to have seen that! So would the ancestor!" said the
+father, giving Jack a hug.
+
+"Yes, but, father, that was the horror of it!"
+
+"Not the power to do it--no! I mean, Jack, that in this world it is well
+to be strong."
+
+"And you think that I am no longer a weakling?" Jack asked strangely;
+"that I carried out your instructions when you sent me away?"
+
+"Oh, Jack, you remember my farewell remark? It was made in irritation and
+suffering. That hurt me. It hurt my pride and all that my work stands
+for. It hurt me as much as it hurt you. But if it was a whip, why, then,
+it served a purpose, as I wanted it to."
+
+"Yes, it was a whip!" said Jack, mechanically.
+
+"Then all ends well--all quits! And, Jack," he swung Jack, who was
+unresisting but unresponsive, around facing him, "if you ever have any
+doubts or any questions to ask bring them to me, won't you?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And, Jack, a hundred a week to-morrow! You're all right, Jack!" And he
+gave Jack a slap on the back as they left the dining-room.
+
+
+
+
+XXIX
+
+A MEETING ON THE AVENUE TRAIL
+
+
+Light sang in the veins and thoughts of a city. Light cleansed the
+streets of vapors. Light, the light of the sunshine of late May, made a
+far different New York from the New York under a blanket of March mist of
+the day of Jack's arrival. The lantern of the Metropolitan tower was all
+blazing gold; Diana's scarf trailed behind her in the shimmering abandon
+of her _honi soit qui mal y pense_ chases on Olympus; Admiral Farragut
+grew urbane, sailing on a smooth sea with victory won; General Sherman in
+his over-brightness, guided by his guardian lady, still gallantly pursued
+the tone of time in the direction of the old City Hall and Trinity; and
+the marble façade of the new library seemed no less at home than under an
+Agean sky. An ecstasy, blinding eyes to blemishes, set critical faculties
+to rejoicing over perfections. They graciously overlooked the blotch of
+red brick hiding the body of St. Patrick's on the way up town in
+gratitude for twin spires against the sky.
+
+Enveloping radiance gilded the sharp lines of skyscrapers and swept away
+the shadows in the chasms between them. It pointed the bows of busy tugs
+with sprays of diamonds falling on the molten surface of rivers and bays.
+It called up paeans of childish trebles from tenement alleys; slipped
+into the sickrooms of private houses, delaying the advent of crape on
+the door; and played across the rows of beds in the public wards of
+hospitals in the primal democracy of the gift of ozone to the earth.
+
+The milky glass roof of the central court of the Wingfield store acted as
+a screen to the omnipotent visitor, but he set unfiltered patches of
+delight in the aisles and on the counters near the walls. Mamie Devore
+and Burleigh and Peter Mortimer and many other clerks and employees asked
+if this were like a desert day and Jack said that it was. He longed to be
+free of all roofs and feel the geniality of the hearth-fire of the
+planetary system penetrating through his coat, his skin, his flesh, into
+his very being. Why not close the store and make a holiday for everybody?
+he asked himself; only to be amazed, on second thought, at such a
+preposterous suggestion from a hundred-dollar-a-week author of created
+profits in the business. He was almost on the point of acting on another
+impulse, which was that he and his father break away into the country in
+a touring car, not knowing where they were going to stop until hunger
+overtook an inn. This, too, he dismissed as a milder form of the same
+demoralizing order of heresy, bound to be disturbing to the new filial
+relations springing from the night when he had told his desert story over
+the coffee, which, contrary to the conventional idea of an exchange of
+confidences clearing the mind of a burden, had only provoked more
+restlessness.
+
+At least, he would fare forth for a while on the broad asphalt trail that
+begins under the arch of the little park and runs to the entrance of the
+great park. Even as the desert has its spell of overawing stillness in an
+uninhabited land, so this trail had its spell of congested human
+movement in the heart of habitations. A broad, luminous blade lay across
+the west side of the street and left the other in shade; and all the
+world that loved sunshine and had no errands on the east side kept to the
+west side. There was a communism of inspiration abroad. It was a
+conqueror's triumph just to be alive and feel the pulse-beat of the
+throng. The very over-developed sensitiveness of city nerves became
+something to be thankful for in providing the capacity for keener
+enjoyment as compensation for the capacity for keener pain.
+
+Womankind was in spring plumage. The mere consciousness of the value of
+light to their costumes, no less than the elixir in their nostrils, gave
+vivacity to their features. As usual, Jack was seeing them only to see
+Mary. The creation of no _couturier_ could bear rivalry with the garb in
+which his imagination clothed her. He found himself suddenly engrossed in
+a particular exhibit of fashion's parade a little distance ahead and
+going in the same direction as himself, a young woman in a simplicity of
+gown to which her carriage gave the final touch of art. Her steps had a
+long-limbed freedom and lightness, with which his own steps ran in a
+rhythm to the music of some past association. The thrall of a likeness,
+which more and more possessed him, made him hasten to draw near for a
+more satisfying glimpse.
+
+The young woman turned her head to glance into a shop-window and then
+there could be no mistaking that cheek and chin and the peculiar relation
+of the long lashes to the brow. It was the profile whose imprint had
+become indelible on his mind when he had come round an elbow of rock on
+Galeria. The Jack of wild, tumultuous pleading who had parted from Mary
+Ewold on the pass became a Jack elate with the glad, swimming joy of May
+sunshine at seeing and speaking to her again.
+
+"Mary! Mary!" he cried. "My, but you've become a grand swell!" he
+breathed delectably, with a fuller vision of her.
+
+"Jack!"
+
+There was a nervous twitching of her lips. He saw her eyes at first in a
+blaze of surprise and wonder; then change to the baffling sparkle, hiding
+their depths, of the slivers of glass on the old barrier. His smile and
+hers in unspoken understanding said that two comrades of another trail
+had met on the Avenue trail. There had not been any Leddy; there had not
+been any scene on the pass. They were back to the conditions of the
+protocol he had established when they started out from the porch of the
+Ewold bungalow in the airiest possible mood to look at a parcel of land.
+
+"And you also have become a grand swell!" she said. "Did you expect that
+I should be in a gray riding-habit? Certainly I didn't expect to see you
+in chaps and spurs."
+
+It was brittle business; but with a common resource in play they managed
+it well. And there they were walking together, noted by passers-by for
+their youth and beaming oblivion to everything but themselves.
+
+"How long have you been here?" Jack asked.
+
+"Two weeks," she answered.
+
+Two weeks in the same town and this his first glimpse of her! What a maze
+New York was! What a desert waste of two weeks!
+
+"Yes. Our decision to come was rather abrupt," she explained. "A sudden
+call to travel came to father; came to him like an inspiration that he
+could not resist. And how happily he has entered into the spirit of the
+city again! It has made him young."
+
+"And it has been quite like martyrdom for you!" Jack put in, teasingly.
+
+"Terrible! Sackcloth and ashes!"
+
+"I see you are wearing the sackcloth."
+
+She laughed outright, with a downward glance at her gown, at once in
+guilt and appreciation.
+
+"Another whim of father's."
+
+"The Doge a scapegoat for fashion!"
+
+"Not a scapegoat--a partisan! He insisted on going to one of the best
+places. Could I resist? I wanted to see how I felt, how I appeared."
+
+"The veritable curiosity of a Japanese woman getting her first
+foreign gown!"
+
+"Thank you! That is another excuse."
+
+"And it certainly looks very well," Jack declared.
+
+"Do you think so?" Mary flushed slightly. She could not help being
+pleased. "After six years, could I drop back into the old chrysalis
+naturally, without awkwardness? Did I still know how to wear a fine
+gown?"--and the gift for it, as anyone could see, was born in her as
+surely as certain gifts were born in Jack. "But," she added, severely, "I
+have only two--just two! And the cost of them! It will take the whole
+orange crop!"
+
+Just two, when she ought to have twenty! When he would have liked to put
+all the Paris models in the store in a wagon and, himself driving,
+deliver them at her door!
+
+"Having succumbed to temptation, I enjoy it out of sheer respect to
+the orange crop," Mary said; "and yes, because I like beautiful
+gowns; wickedly, truly like them! And I like the Avenue, just as I
+like the desert."
+
+And all that she liked he could give her! And all that he could give she
+had stubbornly refused!
+
+The liveliness of her expression, the many shades of meaning that she
+could set capering with a glance, were now as the personal reflection of
+the day and the scene. Their gait was a sauntering one. They went as far
+as the Park and started back, as if all the time of the desert were
+theirs. They stopped to look into the windows of shops of every kind,
+from antiques to millinery. When he saw a hat which he declared, after
+deliberate, critical appraisement, would surely become her, she asked
+boldly if it were better than the one she wore.
+
+"I mean an extra hat; that one more hat would have the good fortune of
+becoming you!"
+
+"Almost a real contribution to the literature of compliments!" she
+answered, unruffled.
+
+He thought, too, that she ought to have a certain necklace in a
+jeweler's window.
+
+"To wear over my riding-habit or when I am digging in the flower beds?"
+she inquired.
+
+When they passed a display of luxuries for masculine adornment, she found
+a further retort in suggesting that he ought to have a certain giddy
+fancy waistcoat. He complimented her on her taste, bought the waistcoat
+and, going to the rear of the shop, returned wearing it with a
+momentarily appreciated show of jaunty swagger.
+
+"Why be on the Avenue and not buy?" he queried, enthusing with a new
+idea.
+
+Jim Galway should have a cowpuncher hat as a present. The style of band
+was a subject of discussion calling on their discriminative views of
+Jim's personal tastes. This led to thoughts of others in Little Rivers
+who would appreciate gifts, and to the purchase of toys for the children,
+a positive revel. When they were through it was well past noon and they
+were in the region of the restaurants. The sun in majestic altitude swept
+the breadth of the Avenue.
+
+"Shall we lunch--yes, and in the Best Swell Place?" he asked, as if it
+were a matter-of-course part of the programme, while inwardly he was
+stirred with the fear of her refusal. He felt that any minute she might
+leave him, with no alternative but another farewell. She hesitated a
+moment seriously, then accepted blithely and naturally.
+
+"Yes, the Best Swell Place--let's! Who isn't entitled to the Best Swell
+Place occasionally?"
+
+After an argument in comparison of famous names, they were convinced that
+they had really chosen the Best Swell Place by the fact of a vacant table
+at a window looking out over a box hedge. Jack told the waiter that the
+assemblage was not an autocracy, but a parliament which, with a full
+quorum present, would enjoy in discursive appreciation selections from
+the broad range of a bill of fare.
+
+A luncheon for two narrows a walk on the Avenue, where you are part of a
+crowd, into restricted intimacy. He was feeling the intoxication of her
+inscrutability, catching gleams of the wealth that lay beyond it, across
+the limited breadth of a table-cloth. He forgot about the unspoken
+conditions in a sally which was like putting his hand on top of the
+barrier for an impetuous leap across.
+
+"I wrote you stacks of letters," he said, "and you never sent me one
+little line; not even 'Yours received and contents noted!'"
+
+In a flash all intimacy vanished. She might have been at the other end of
+the dining-room in somebody else's party nodding to him as to an
+acquaintance. Her answer was delayed about as long as it takes to lift an
+arrow from a quiver and notch it in a bowstring.
+
+"A novel may be very interesting, but that does not mean that I write to
+the author!"
+
+He imagined her going through the meal in polite silence or in measured
+commonplaces, turning the happy parliament into a frigid Gothic ceremony.
+Why had he not kept in mind that sufficient to the hour is the pleasure
+of it? Famished for her companionship, a foolhardy impulse of temptation
+had risked its loss. The waiter set something before them and softly
+withdrew. Jack signaled the unspoken humility of being a disciplined
+soldier at attention on his side of the barrier and Mary signaled a
+trifle superior but good-natured acceptance of his apology and promise of
+better conduct.
+
+They were back to the truce of nonsense, apostrophizing the cooking of
+the Best Swell Place, setting exclamations to their glimpses of people
+passing in the street. For they had never wanted for words when talking
+across the barrier; there was paucity of conversation only when he
+threatened an invasion.
+
+While a New Yorker meeting a former New Yorker on the desert might have
+little to tell not already chronicled in the press, a Little Riversite
+meeting a former Little Riversite in New York had a family budget of
+news. How high were Jack's hedges? How were the Doge's date-trees? How
+was this and that person coming on? Listening to all the details, Jack
+felt homesickness creeping over him, and he clung fondly to every one of
+the swiftly-passing moments. By no reference and by no inference had she
+suggested that there was ever any likelihood of his meeting or hearing
+from her again. A thread of old relations had been spun only to be
+snapped. She was, indeed, as a visitation developed out of the sunshine
+of the Avenue, into which she would dissolve.
+
+"I was to meet father at a bookstore at three," she said, finally,
+as she rose.
+
+"Inevitably he would be there or in a gallery," said Jack.
+
+"He has done the galleries. This is the day for buying books--still
+more books! I suppose he is spending the orange crop again. If you keep
+on spending the same orange crop, just where do you arrive in the maze
+of finance?"
+
+"I should not like to say without consulting the head book-keeper or, at
+least, Peter Mortimer!"
+
+They were coming out of the door of the Best Swell Place, now. A word and
+she would be going in one direction and he in another. How easily she
+might speak that word, with an electric and final glance of good-will!
+
+"But I must say howdy do to the Doge!" he urged. "I should like to
+see him buying books. What a prodigal debauch of learning! I cannot
+miss that!"
+
+"It is not far," she said, prolonging Paradise for him.
+
+A few blocks below Forty-second Street they turned into a cross street
+which was the same that led to the Wingfield house; and halfway to
+Madison Avenue they entered a bookstore. The light from low windows
+spreading across the counters blended with the light from high windows at
+the back, and here, on a platform at the head of the stairs, before a big
+table sat the Doge, in the majesty of a great patron of literature, with
+a clerk standing by in deftly-urging attentiveness. Mary and Jack paused
+at the foot of the stairs watching him. Gently he was fingering an old
+octavo; fingering it as one would who was between the hyperionic desire
+of possession and a fear that a bank account owed its solvency to keeping
+the amounts of deposits somewhere in proportion to the amount of
+withdrawals.
+
+"No, sir! No more, you tempter!" he declared. "No more, you unctuous
+ambassador from the court of Gutenberg! Why, this one would take enough
+alfalfa at the present price a ton to bury your store under a haycock as
+high as the Roman Pantheon!"
+
+The Doge rose and picked up his broad-brimmed hat, prepared to fly from
+danger. He would not expose himself a moment longer to the wiles of
+that clerk.
+
+"I'll wait for my daughter down there in the safe and economical environs
+of the popular novels fresh from the press!" he said.
+
+Turning to descend the stairs he saw the waiting pair. He stopped stock
+still and threw up his hand in a gesture of astonishment. His glance
+hovered back and forth between Jack's face and Mary's, and then met
+Jack's look with something of the same challenge and confidence of his
+farewell on the road out of Little Rivers, and in an outburst of genial
+raillery he began the conversation where he had left off with the final
+call of his personal good wishes and his salutations to certain landmarks
+of New York.
+
+"Well, well, Sir Chaps! I saw Sorolla in his new style; very different
+from the academics of the young Sorolla. He has found his mission and let
+himself go. No wonder people flocked to his exhibitions on misty days!
+The trouble with our artists is that they are afraid to let themselves
+go, afraid to be popular. They think technique is the thing, when it is
+only the tool. Why, confound it all! all the great masters were popular
+in their day--Venetian, Florentine, Flemish! Confound it, yes! And not
+one Velasquez"--evidently he was talking partly to get his bearings after
+his shock at seeing Jack--"no, not one Velasquez in the Metropolitan! I
+go home without seeing a Velasquez. They have the Catherine Lorillard
+Wolfe collection, thousands of square yards of it, and yes, cheer up!
+Thank heaven, they have some great Americans, Inness and Martin and Homer
+and our exile Whistler, who annexed Japan, and our Sargent, born in
+Florence. And I did see the Metropolitan tower. I take off my hat, my
+broad-brimmed hat, wishing that it were as big as a carter's umbrella, to
+that tower. I hate to think it an accident of chaos like the Grand
+Canyon. I rather like to think of it as majestic promise."
+
+The Doge had talked so fast that he was almost out of breath. He was
+ready to yield the floor to Jack.
+
+"I kissed my hand to Diana for you!" said Jack. "And what do you think?
+The lady in answer shook out her scarf and something white and small
+fluttered down. I picked it up. It was a note."
+
+"Did you open that note?" asked the Doge in haughty suspicion.
+
+"Naturally."
+
+"Wasn't it marked personal for me?"--this in fine simulation of
+indignation.
+
+"Without address!"
+
+"I am chagrined and surprised at Diana," said the Doge ruefully. "It's
+the effect of city association. As a matter of course, she ought to have
+given it to Mercury, or at least to one of the Centaurs, considering all
+the horseshows that have been held under her skipping toes! Well, what
+did she say? Being a woman of action she was brief. What did she say?"
+
+"It was in the nature of a general personal complaint. Her costume is in
+need of repair; it is flaking disgracefully. She said that if you had not
+forsaken your love of the plastic for love of the graphic arts you would
+long ago have stolen a little gold off the Eternal Painter's palette,
+just to clothe her decently for the sake of her own self-respect--the
+town having set her so high that its sense of propriety was quite safe."
+
+"I stand convicted of neglect," said the Doge, coming down to the floor
+of the store. "I will shoot her a bundle of gold leaf from the top of the
+pass on a ray of evening sunshine."
+
+There, he gave Jack a pat on the shoulder; a hasty, playful, almost
+affectionate demonstration, and broke off with a shout of:
+
+"Persiflage, sir, persiflage!"
+
+"It is manna to me!" declared Jack, in the fulness and sweetness of the
+sensation of the atmosphere of Little Rivers reproduced in New York.
+
+"And not a Velasquez in the Metropolitan!" mused the Doge, bustling along
+the aisle hurriedly. "Well, Mary, we have errands to do. There is no time
+to spare."
+
+They were at the door, Jack in wistful insistence, hungry for their
+companionship, and the Doge and Mary in common hesitancy for a phrase
+before parting from him. He was ahead of the phrase.
+
+"But there is a Velasquez, one of the greatest of Velasquezes, just a few
+steps from here! It would take only a minute to see it."
+
+"A Velasquez a few steps from here!" cried the Doge. "Where? Be exact,
+before I let my hopes rise too high."
+
+"The subject is an ancestor of mine. My father has it."
+
+Jack had looked in the direction of the Wingfield house on the Madison
+Avenue corner as he spoke, and the Doge had followed his glance. The
+eagerness passed from the Doge's face, but not its intensity. That was
+transmuted into something staring and hard.
+
+"A very great Velasquez!" Jack repeated.
+
+"My _amour propre_!" the Doge said, in whispered abstraction, using the
+French which so exactly expresses the rightness of an inner feeling that
+will not let one do a thing however much he may wish to. Then a wave of
+confusion passed over his face, evidently at the echo of his thoughts in
+the form of words come unwittingly from his lips. He tried to retrieve
+his exclamation in an effort at the forensic: "The _amour propre_ of any
+American is hurt by the thought that he must go to a private gallery to
+see a Velasquez in the greatest city of the land!"
+
+But it was a lame explanation. Clearly, some old antipathy had been
+aroused in Jasper Ewold; and it made him hesitate to enter the big red
+brick house on the corner.
+
+"And we have a wonderful Sargent, too, a Sargent of my mother!" Jack
+proceeded.
+
+"Yes, yes!" said the Doge, and eagerness returned; a strange, moving
+eagerness that seemed to come from the same depths as the exclamation
+that had arrested his acceptance of the invitation at the outset. It held
+the monosyllables like drops of water trembling before they fell.
+
+"I should like you to see them both," said Jack.
+
+"Yes," said the Doge, the word an echo rather than consent.
+
+"There is no one at home at this hour; you will have all the time you can
+spare for the pictures."
+
+In the ascendency of his ardor to retain the joy of their company and in
+the perplexity of mystery injected afresh into his relations with Mary,
+Jack was hardly conscious that his urging was only another way of saying
+that his father was absent. And Mary had not thrown her influence either
+for or against going. She was watching her father, curiously and
+penetratingly, as if trying to understand the source of the emotion that
+he was seeking to control.
+
+"Why, in that case," exclaimed the Doge, "why, you see," he went on to
+explain, "we desert folk, though we are used to galleries, are a little
+diffident about meeting people who live in big mansions. I mean, people
+who have not had the desert training that you have had, Sir Chaps. If it
+is only a matter of looking at a picture without any social
+responsibilities, and that picture a Velasquez, why, we must take the
+time, mustn't we, Mary?"
+
+"Yes," Mary assented.
+
+With Mary on one side of him and Jack on the other, the Doge was walking
+heavily and slowly.
+
+"At what period of Velasquez's career?" he asked, vacantly.
+
+"When he was young and the subject was middle-aged, a Northerner, with
+fair hair and lean muscles under a skin bronzed by the tropics, and the
+unquenchable fire of youth in his eyes."
+
+"That ought to be a good Velasquez," said the Doge.
+
+At the bottom step of the flight up to the entrance to the house he
+hesitated. He appeared to be very old and very tired. His face had gone
+quite pale. The lids hung heavily over his eyes. Jack dropped back in
+alarm to assist him; but his color quickly returned and the old challenge
+was in his glance as it met Jack's.
+
+"Now for your Velasquez!" he exclaimed, with calm vigor.
+
+Once in the hall, Jack stood to one side of the door of the drawing-room
+to let the Doge enter first. As the old man crossed the threshold his
+hands were clasped behind him; his shoulders had fallen together, not in
+weariness now, but in a kind of dazed, studious expectancy; and he faced
+the "Portrait of a Lady."
+
+"This is the Sargent," he said slowly, his lips barely opening in
+mechanical and absent comment. "A good Sargent!"
+
+He was as still as the picture in his bowed and earnest gaze into her
+eyes, except for an occasional nervous movement of the fingers. All the
+surroundings seemed to melt into a neutral background for the two; there
+was nothing else in the room but the scholar in his age and the "Portrait
+of a Lady" in her youth. Jack saw the Doge's face, its many lines
+expressive as through a mist of time, its hills and valleys in the sun
+and the shadow of emotions as variable as the mother's in life, speaking
+personal resentment and wrong, admiration and tenderness, grievous
+inquiry and philosophy, while the only answer was the radiant, "I give! I
+give!" Finally, the Doge tightened the clasp of his hands, with a quiver
+of his frame, as he turned toward Jack.
+
+"Yes, a really great Sargent--a Sargent of supreme inspiration!" he said.
+"Now for your Velasquez!"
+
+Before the portrait of the first John Wingfield, Jasper Ewold's head and
+shoulders recovered their sturdiness of outline and his features lighted
+with the veritable touch of the brush of genius itself. He was the
+connoisseur who understands, whose joy of possession is in the very
+tingling depths of born instinct, rich with training and ripened by time.
+It was superior to any bought title of ownership. In the presence of a
+supreme standard, every shade of discriminative criticism and appraisal
+became threads woven into a fabric of rapture.
+
+"Mary," he said, his voice having the mellowness of age in its deep
+appreciation, "Mary, wherever you saw this--skied or put in a corner
+among a thousand other pictures, in a warehouse, a Quaker meetinghouse,
+anywhere, whatever its surroundings--should you feel its compelling
+power? Should you pause, incapable of analysis, in a spell of tribute?"
+
+"Yes, I don't think I am quite so insensible as not to realize the
+greatness of this portrait, or that of the Sargent, either," she
+answered.
+
+"Good! I am glad, Mary, very glad. You do me credit!"
+
+Now he turned from the artist to the subject. He divined the kind of man
+the first John Wingfield was; divined it almost as written in the
+chronicle which Jack kept in his room in hallowed fraternity. Only he
+bore hard on the unremitting, callous, impulsive aggressiveness of a
+fierce past age, with its survival of the fittest swordsmen and
+buccaneers, which had no heroes for him except the painters, poets, and
+thinkers it gave to posterity.
+
+"Fire-eating old devil! And the best thing he ever did, the best luck he
+ever had, was attracting the attention of a young artist. It's
+immortality just to be painted by Velasquez; the only immortality many a
+famous man of the time will ever know!"
+
+He looked away from the picture to Jack's face keenly and back at the
+picture and back at Jack and back at the picture once more.
+
+"Yes, yes!" he mused, corroboratively; and Jack realized that at the same
+time Mary had been making the same comparison.
+
+"Very like!" she said, with that impersonal exactness which to him was
+always the most exasperating of her phases.
+
+Then the Doge returned to the Sargent. He was standing nearer the
+picture, but in the same position as before, while Jack and Mary waited
+silently on his pleasure; and all three were as motionless as the
+furniture, had it not been for the nervous twitching of the Doge's
+fingers. He seemed unconscious of the passing of time; a man in a maze of
+absorption with his thoughts. Jack was strangely affected. His brain was
+marking time at the double-quick of fruitless energy. He felt the
+atmosphere of the room surcharged with the hostility of the unknown. He
+was gathering a multitude of impressions which only contributed more
+chaos to chaos. His sensibilities abnormally alive to every sound, he
+heard the outside door opened with a latch-key; he heard steps in the
+hall, and saw his father's figure in the doorway of the drawing-room.
+
+John Wingfield, Sr. appeared with a smile that was gone in a flash.
+His face went stark and gray as stone under a frown from the Doge to
+Jack; and with an exclamation of the half-articulate "Oh!" of
+confusion, he withdrew.
+
+Jack looked around to see the Doge half turned in the direction of the
+door, gripping the back of a chair to steady himself, while Mary was
+regarding this sudden change in him in answer to the stricken change in
+the intruder with some of Jack's own paralysis of wonder. The Doge was
+the first to speak. He fairly rocked the chair as he jerked his hand free
+of its support, while he shook with a palsy which was not that of fear,
+for there was raging color in his cheeks. The physical power of his great
+figure was revealed. For the first time Jack was able to think of him as
+capable of towering militancy. His anger gradually yielded to the
+pressure of will and the situation. At length he said faintly, with a
+kind of abyssmal courtesy:
+
+"Thank you, Sir Chaps! Now I shall not go back to the desert without
+having seen a Velasquez. Thank you! And we must be going."
+
+Jack had an impulse, worthy of the tempestuous buccaneer of the picture,
+to call to his father to come down; and then to bar the front door until
+his burning questions were heard. The still light in Mary's eyes would
+have checked him, if not his own proper second thought and the fear of
+precipitating an ungovernable crisis. There had been shadows, real
+shadows, he was thinking wildly; they were not born of desert imaginings;
+and out of the quandary of his anguish came only the desire not to part
+from the Doge and Mary in this fashion! No, not until in some way
+equilibrium of mind was restored.
+
+Though he knew that they did not expect or want his company, he went
+out into the street with them. He would go as far as their hotel, he
+remarked, in the bravery of simulated ease. The three were walking in
+the same relative positions that they had before, with the Doge's bulk
+hiding Mary from Jack's sight. The Doge set a rapid pace, as if under
+the impetus of a desire to escape from the neighborhood of the
+Wingfield house.
+
+"Well, Sir Chaps," he said, after a while, "it will be a long time before
+the provincials come to New York again. Why, in this New York you can
+spend a patrimony in two weeks"--this with an affected amusement at his
+own extravagance--"and I've pretty nearly done it. So we fly from
+temptation. Yes, Mary, we will take the morning train."
+
+"The morning train!" Mary exclaimed; and her surprise left no doubt that
+her father's decision was new to her. Was it due to an exchange of
+glances between a stark face and a face crimson with indignation which
+Jack had already connected with the working out of his own destiny?
+
+"Yes, that is better than spending our orange crop again!" she hastened
+to add, with reassuring humor. "I'm fairly homesick for our oasis."
+
+"We've had our fill of the big city," said the Doge, feelingly, "and we
+are away to our little city of peace where we turned our pasts under with
+the first furrows in the virgin soil."
+
+Then silence. The truce of nonsense was dead. Persiflage was dead. Jack
+was as a mute stranger keeping at their side unasked, while the only
+glimpse he had of Mary was the edge of her hat and her fingertips on her
+father's sleeve. Silence, which he felt was as hard for them as for him,
+lasted until they were at the entrance to the quiet little hotel on a
+cross-town street where the Ewolds were staying; and having the first
+glimpse of Mary's eyes since they had started, he found nothing
+fathomable in them except unmistakable relief that the walk was over.
+
+"Thank you for showing me the Velasquez," said the Doge.
+
+"Thank you, Jack," Mary added.
+
+Both spoke in a manner that signaled to him the end of all things, but an
+end which he could not accept.
+
+"I--I--oh, there are a thousand questions I--" he broke out, desperately.
+
+The muscles of his face tightened. Unconsciously he had leaned forward
+toward the Doge in his intensity, and his attitude had become that of the
+Wingfield of the portrait. A lower note of command ran through the
+misery of his tone.
+
+Jasper Ewold stared at him in a second of scrutiny, at once burningly
+analytic and reflective. Then he flushed as he had at sight of the figure
+in the drawing-room doorway. His look plainly said: "How much longer do
+you mean to harass me?" as if Jack's features were now no less the image
+of a hard and bitter memory than those of John Wingfield, Sr. Jack drew
+back hurt and dumb, in face of this anger turned on himself. At length,
+the Doge mustered his rallying smile, which was that of a man who carries
+into his declining years a burden of disappointments which he fears may,
+in his bad moments, get the better of his personal system of philosophy.
+
+"Come, Mary!" he said, drawing his arm through hers. He became, in an
+evident effort, a grand, old-fashioned gentleman, making a bow of
+farewell. "Come, Mary, it's an early train and we have our packing
+yet to do."
+
+This time it was, indeed, dismissal; such a dismissal with polite urgency
+as a venerable cabinet minister might give an importunate caller who is
+slow to go. He and Mary started into the hotel. But he halted in the
+doorway to say over his shoulder, with something of his old-time cheer,
+which had the same element of pity as his leave-taking on the trail
+outside of Little Rivers:
+
+"Luck, Sir Chaps!"
+
+"Luck!" Mary called in the same strained tone that she had called to Jack
+when he went over the pass on his way to New York, the tone that was like
+the click of a key in the lock of a gate.
+
+
+
+
+XXX
+
+WITH THE PHANTOMS
+
+
+As Jack left the hotel entrance he was walking in the treadmill mechanics
+of a prisoner pacing a cell, without note of his surroundings, except of
+dim, moving figures with which he must avoid collision. The phantoms of
+his boyhood, bulky and stiflingly near, had a monstrous reality, yet the
+ghostly intangibility that mocked his sword-thrusts of tortured inquiry.
+At length his distraction centered on the fact that he and his father
+were to dine alone that evening.
+
+They dined alone regularly every Wednesday, when Jack made a report of
+his progress and received a lesson in business. It was at the last
+council of this kind that John Wingfield, Sr. had bidden his son to
+bring all questions and doubts to him. Now Jack hailed the weekly
+function as having all the promise of relief of a surgeon's knife. Fully
+and candidly he would unburden himself of every question beating in his
+brain and every doubt assailing his spirit.
+
+By the time that he was mounting the steps of the house his growing
+impatience could no longer bear even the delay of waiting on dinner. When
+he entered the hall he was the driven creature of an impelling desire
+that must be satisfied immediately.
+
+"Will you ask my father if he will see me at once?" he said to the
+butler.
+
+"Mr. Wingfield left word that he had to go into the country for the
+night," answered the butler. "I am sorry, sir," he added confusedly, in
+view of the blank disappointment with which the information was received.
+
+In dreary state Jack dined by himself in the big dining-room, leaving the
+food almost untouched. At intervals he was roused to a sense of his
+presence at table by the servant's question if he should bring another
+course. Without waiting for the last one, he went downstairs to the
+drawing-room, and standing near the "Portrait of a Lady," again poured
+out his questions, receiving the old answer of "I give! I give!" which
+meant, he knew, that she had given all of herself to him. Saying after
+saying of hers raced through his mind without throwing light on the
+mystery, which had the uncanniness of a conspiracy against him.
+
+And after his mother, Mary had influenced him more than any other person.
+She had brought life to the seeds which his mother had planted in his
+nature. That new life could not die, but without her it could not
+flourish. Her cry of "It's not in the blood!" again came echoing to his
+ears. What had she meant? The question sent him to the Ewolds' hotel; it
+sent this note up to her room:
+
+"MARY:
+
+"In behalf of old desert comradeship, if I were in trouble wouldn't you
+help me all you could? If I were in darkness and you could give me light,
+would you refuse? Won't you see me for a few moments, if I promise to
+keep to my side of the barrier which you have raised between us? I will
+wait here in the lobby a long time, hoping that you will.
+
+"JACK."
+
+"All the light I have to give. I also am in darkness," came the answer in
+a nervous, impulsive hand across a sheet of paper; and soon Mary herself
+appeared from the elevator, not in the fashion of the Avenue, but in
+simple gray coat and skirt, such as she wore at home. She greeted him in
+a startled, half-fearful manner, as if her presence were due to the
+impulsion of duty rather than choice.
+
+"Shall we walk?" she asked, turning toward the door in the welcome of
+movement as a steadying influence in her evident emotion.
+
+There they were in the old rhythm of step of Little Rivers companionship
+on a cross-town street. He saw that the costly hat that he had selected
+for her in the display of a shop-window after all was not the equal of
+the plain model with a fetching turn to the brim and a single militant
+feather, which she wore that evening. The light feather boa around her
+neck on account of the cool night air seemed particularly becoming. He
+was near, very near, her, so near that their elbows touched; but the
+nearness was like that of a picture out of a frame which has come to life
+and may step back into cold canvas at any moment. Oh, it was hard, in the
+might of his love for her, not to forget everything else and cry out
+another declaration, as he had from the canyon! But her face was very
+still. She was waiting for him to begin, while her fingers were playing
+nervously with the tip of her boa.
+
+"I must be frank, very frank," he said.
+
+"Yes, Jack, or why speak at all?"
+
+"From the night of my arrival in Little Rivers, when the Doge at once
+recognized who I was without telling me, I saw that, under his politeness
+and his kindness, he was hostile to my presence in Little Rivers."
+
+"Yes, I think that in a way he was," she answered.
+
+"I was conscious that something out of the past was between him and me,
+and that it included you in a subtle influence that nothing could change.
+And this afternoon, while you were at the house and my father came to the
+drawing-room door, I could not help noticing how the Doge was overcome.
+You noticed it, too?"
+
+"Yes, I never saw my father in such anger before. It seemed to me that
+he could have struck down that man in the doorway!" There was a
+perceptible shudder, but she did not look up, her glance remaining level
+with the flags.
+
+"And on the pass you said, 'It's not in the blood!'" he continued. "Yes,
+almost in terror you said it, as if it spelled an impassable gulf between
+us. Why? why? Mary, haven't I a right to know?"
+
+As he broke off passionately with this appeal, which was as the focus of
+all the fears that had tormented him, they were immediately under the
+light of a street lamp. She turned her head toward him resolutely, in the
+mustering of her forces for an ordeal. Her face was pale, but there was
+an effort at the old smile of comradeship.
+
+"Yes, as I said, the little light that I have is yours, Jack," she began.
+"But there is not much. It is, perhaps, more what I feel than what I
+know that has influenced me. All that my father has ever said about you
+and your father and your relations to us was the night after I returned
+from the pass ahead of you, when you had descended into the canyon to
+frighten me with the risk you were taking."
+
+"I did not mean to frighten you!" he interjected. "I only followed
+an impulse."
+
+"Yes, one of your impulses, Jack," she remarked, comprehendingly. "Father
+and I have been so much together--indeed, we have never been apart--that
+there is more than filial sympathy of feeling between us. There is
+something akin to telepathy. We often divine each other's thoughts. I
+think that he understood what had taken place between us on the pass;
+that you had brought on some sort of a crisis in our relations. It was
+then that he told me who you were, as you know. Then he talked of you and
+your father--you still wish to hear?"
+
+"Yes!"
+
+"And you will listen in silence?"
+
+"Yes!"
+
+"I will grant your defence of your father, but you will not argue? I am
+giving what you ask, in justice to myself; I am giving my reasons, my
+feelings."
+
+"No, I will not argue."
+
+Their tones were so low that a passer-by would have hardly been conscious
+that they were talking; but had the passer-by caught the pitch he might
+have hazarded many guesses, every one serious.
+
+"Then, I will try to make clear all that father said. You were the image
+of your father--a smile and a square chin. The smile could charm and the
+chin could kill. He liked you for some things that seemed to spring from
+another source, as he called it; but these would vanish and in the end
+you would be like your father, as he knew when he saw you break Pedro
+Nogales's arm. And you gloried in your strength; as you told me on the
+pass and as I saw for myself in the duel. And to you, father said,
+victory was the supreme guerdon of life. It ran triumphant and
+inextinguishable in your veins."
+
+"I--" he said, chokingly; but remembered his promise not to argue.
+
+"Any opposition, any refusal excited your will to overcome it in the
+sheer joy of the exercise of your strength. This had been your father's
+story in everything, even in his marriage."
+
+She paused.
+
+"There is nothing more? No further light on his old relations with my
+father and mother?" he asked.
+
+"Only a single exclamation, 'It's not in the blood for you to believe in
+Jack Wingfield, Mary!' And after that he turned silent and moody. I
+pressed him for reasons. He answered that he had told me enough. I had to
+live my own life; the rest I must decide for myself. I knew that I was
+hurting him sorely. I was striking home into that past about which he
+would never speak, though I know it still causes him many days of
+suffering."
+
+"But on the desert there is no past!" Jack exclaimed.
+
+"Yes, there is, Jack. There is your own heart. On the desert your past is
+not shared with others. But to-night, after I received your note, I did
+try, for the second time in my life, to share father's. I told him your
+request; I spoke of the scene in your drawing-room; I asked him what it
+meant. He answered that you must learn from one nearer you than he was,
+and that he never wanted to think of that scene again."
+
+It was she who had chosen the direction at the street corners. They were
+returning now toward the hotel. The fingers which had been playing with
+the boa had crumpled the end of it into a ball, which they were gripping
+so tightly that the knuckles were little white spots set in a blood-red
+background. She was suffering, but determined to leave nothing unsaid.
+
+"Jack, when I said 'It's not in the blood' I was more than repeating my
+father's words. They expressed a truth for me. I meant not only rebellion
+against what was in you, but against the thing that was in me. Why, Jack,
+I do not even remember my own mother! I have only heard father speak of
+her sadly when I was much younger. Of late years he has not mentioned
+her. He and the desert and the garden are all I have and all I know; and
+probably, yes--probably I'm a strange sort of being. But what I am, I am;
+and to that I will be true. Father went to the desert to save my life;
+and broken-hearted, old, he is greater to me than the sum of any worldly
+success. And, Jack, you forget--riding over the pass so grandly with your
+impulses, as if to want a thing is to get it--you--but we have had good
+times together; and, as I said, you belong on one side of the pass and I
+on the other. This and much else, which one cannot see or define, is
+between us. From the day you came, some forbidding influence seemed at
+work in my father's life and mine; and when you had gone another man,
+with your features and your smile, came to Little Rivers; one that I
+understand even less than you!"
+
+Jack recalled the references to the new rancher by Bob Worther on the day
+of his departure for the East and, later, in Jim Galway's letter. But he
+did not speak. Something more compelling than his promise was keeping him
+silent: her own apprehension, with its story of phantoms of her own.
+
+"And yesterday I saw your father's face," she went on, "as it appeared in
+the doorway for a second before he saw my father and was struck with
+fear, and how like yours it was--but more like John Prather's. And the
+high-sounding preachments about the poverty that might go with fine gowns
+became real to me. They were not banal at all. They were simple truth,
+free of rhetoric and pretence. I knew that my cry of 'It's not in the
+blood' was as true in me as any impulse of yours ever could be in you!"
+
+To the end, under the dominance of her will, she had not faltered; and
+with the end she looked up with a faint smile of stoicism and an
+invincible flame in her eyes. Anything that he might be able to say would
+be as flashing a blade in and out of a blaze. She had become superior to
+the resources of barrier or armor, confident of a self whose richness he
+realized anew. He saw and felt the tempered fineness of her as something
+that would mind neither siege nor prayer.
+
+"I am not afraid," she said, "and I know that you are not. It is all
+right!" Then she added, with a desperate coolness, but still clasping the
+boa rigidly: "The hotel is only a block away, and to-morrow you will be
+back in the store and I shall soon be on my side of the pass."
+
+This was her right word for a situation when his temples were throbbing,
+harking back, with time's reversal of conditions, to a situation after
+the duel in the _arroyo_ was over and he had used the right word when her
+temples were throbbing and her hands splashed. If retribution were her
+object, she had repaid in nerve-twitch of torture for nerve-twitch of
+torture. The picture that had been alive and out of its frame was back on
+cold canvas. Even the girl he had known across the barrier, even the girl
+in armor, seemed more kindly. But one can talk, even to a picture in a
+frame; at least, Jack could, with wistful persistence.
+
+"You don't mind if I tell you again--if I speak my one continuous thought
+aloud again?" he asked. "Mary, I love you! I love you in such a way that
+I"--with a faint bravery of humor as he saw danger signals--"I would
+build mud-houses all day for you to knock to pieces!"
+
+"Foolish business, Jack!" she answered.
+
+"Or drag a plow."
+
+"Very hard work!"
+
+"Or set out to tunnel a mountain single-handed, with hammer and chisel."
+
+"I think you would find it dreadfully monotonous at the end of the
+first week."
+
+He had spoken his extravagances without winning a glance from her. She
+had answered with a precision that was more trying than silence.
+
+"_I_ shouldn't find it so if you were in the neighborhood to welcome
+me when I knocked off for the day," he declared. "You see, I can't
+help it. I can't help what is in me, just as surely as the breath of
+life is in me."
+
+"Jack!" she flashed back, with arresting sharpness, but without looking
+around, while her step quickened perceptibly, "suppose I say that I am
+sorry and I, too, cannot help it; that I, too, have temperament, as well
+as you;" her tone was almost harsh; "that even you cannot have everything
+you command; that for you to want a thing does not mean that I want it;
+that I cannot help the fact that I do not--"
+
+With a quick interruption he stayed the end of the sentence, as if it
+were a descending blade.
+
+"Don't say that!" he implored. "It is too much like taking a vow that
+might make you fearfully stubborn in order to live up to it. Perhaps the
+thing will come some day. It's wonderful how such a thing does come. You
+see, I speak from experience," he went on, in wan insistence, with the
+entrance to the hotel in sight. "Why, it is there before you realize it,
+like the morning sunshine in a room while you are yet asleep. And you
+open your eyes and there is the joyous wonder, settling itself all
+through you and making itself at home forever. You know for the first
+time that you are alive. You know for the first time that you were born
+into this world merely because one other person was born into it."
+
+"Very well said," she conceded, in hasty approval, without vouchsafing
+him a glance. "I begin to think you get more inspiration for compliments
+on this side of the pass than on the other,"--and they were at the hotel
+door. Precipitately she hastened through it, as if with her last display
+of strength after the exhaustion of that walk.
+
+
+
+
+XXXI
+
+PRATHER WOULD NOT WAIT
+
+
+When he returned to the house, Jack found a letter that had come in the
+late mail from Jim Galway:
+
+"First off, that story you sent for Belvy," Jim wrote. "We've heard it
+read and reread, and the more it's worn with reading the fresher it gets
+in our minds. As I size up the effect on the population, we folks in the
+forties and fifties got more fun out of it than anybody except the folks
+in the seventies and the five-to-twelve-year-olds. Some of the thirteen
+and fourteen-year-olds were inclined to think at first that it wasn't
+quite grown up enough for them, until they saw what fashionable
+literature it was becoming. Then their dignified maturity limbered up a
+little. Jack, it certainly did us a world of good. It seemed as if you
+were back home again."
+
+"Back home again!" Jack repeated, joyously; and then shook his head at
+himself in solemn warning.
+
+"And those of us that don't take our meat without salt sort of needed
+cheering up," Jim went on. "Only a few days after I wrote you, the Doge
+and Mary suddenly started for New York. Maybe he has looked you up." (The
+"maybe" followed an "of course," which had been scratched through.) "And
+maybe if he has you know more about what is going on here than we do. We
+practically don't know anything; but I've sure got a feeling of that
+uncertainty in the atmosphere that I used to have before a cyclone when I
+lived in Kansas. This Prather, that so many thought at first looked like
+you, has also gone to New York.
+
+"He left only two days ago. Maybe you will run across him. I don't know,
+but it seems to me he's gone to get the powder for some kind of a blow-up
+here. Jack, you know what would happen if we lost our water rights and
+you know what I wrote you in my last letter. Leddy and Ropey Smith are
+hanging around all the time, and since the Doge went a whole lot of
+fellows that don't belong to the honey-bee class have been turning up and
+putting up their tents out on the outskirts, like they expected something
+to happen. If things get worse and I've got something to go on and we
+need you, I'm going to telegraph just as I said I would; because, Jack,
+though you're worth a lot of millions, someway we feel you're one of us.
+
+"Very truly yours for Little Rivers,
+
+"JAMES R. GALWAY.
+
+"P.S.--Belvy said to put in P.S. because P.S.'s are always the most
+important part of a letter. She wants to know if you won't write
+another story."
+
+"I will!" said Jack. "I will, immediately!"
+
+He made it a long story. He took a deal of pains with it in the very
+relief of something to do when sleep was impossible and he must count the
+moments in wretched impatience until his interview with the one person
+who could answer his questions.
+
+As he went down town in the morning the very freshness of the air
+inspired him with the hope that he should come out of his father's office
+with every phantom reduced to a figment of imagination springing from the
+abnormality of his life-story; with a message that should allay Mary's
+fears and soften her harshness toward him; with the certainty that the
+next time he and his father sat together at dinner it would be in a
+permanent understanding, craved of affection. Mary might come to New
+York; the Doge might spend his declining years in leisurely patronage of
+bookshops and galleries; and he would learn how to run the business,
+though his head split, as became a simple, normal son.
+
+These eddying thoughts on the surface of his mind, however, could not
+free him of a consciousness of a deep, unsounded current that seemed to
+be the irresistible, moving power of Mary's future, the store's, his
+fathers, Jasper Ewold's and his own. With it he was going into a gorge,
+over a cataract, or out into pleasant valleys, he knew not which. He knew
+nothing except that there was no stopping the flood of the current which
+had its source in streams already flowing before he was born. When the
+last question had been asked his future would be clear. Relief was ahead,
+and after relief would come the end of introspection and the beginning of
+his real career.
+
+But another question was waiting for him in the store. It was walking the
+streets of his father's city in the freedom of a spectator who comes to
+observe and not to buy. Crossing the first floor as he came to the
+court, Jack saw, with sudden distinctness among the many faces coming and
+going, a profile which, in its first association, developed on his vision
+as that of his own when he shaved in front of the ear in the morning. He
+had only a glimpse before it was turned away and its owner, a young man
+in a quiet gray suit, started up the stairs.
+
+Jack studied the young man's back half amusedly to see if this, too, were
+like his own, and laughed at himself because he was sure that he would
+not know his own back if it were preceding him in a promenade up the
+Avenue. In peculiar suspense he was hoping that the young man would pause
+and look around, as his father always did and shoppers often did, in a
+survey of the busy, moving picture of the whole floor. But the young man
+went on to the top of the flight. There he proceeded along the railing of
+the court. His profile was again in view under a strong light, and Jack
+realized that his first recognition of a resemblance was the recognition
+of an indisputable fact.
+
+"Have I a double out West and another in New York?" he thought. "It gives
+a man a kind of secondhand feeling!"
+
+Then he recalled Jim's letter saying that John Prather had gone to New
+York. Was this John Prather? He had no doubt that it was when the object
+of his scrutiny, with full face in view, stopped and leaned over the
+balcony just above the diamond counter. There was a mole patch on the
+cheek such as Jack remembered that the accounts of John Prather had
+mentioned.
+
+"I am as much fussed as the giant was at the sight of yellow!"
+Jack mused.
+
+But for the mole patch the features were his own, as he knew them,
+though no one not given to more frequent personal councils with mirrors
+than Señor Don't Care of desert trails knows quite the lights and shadows
+of his own countenance, which give it its character even more than does
+its form. John Prather was regarding the jewelry display, where the
+diamonds were scintillating under the light from the milk glass roof,
+with a smile of amused contemplation. His expression was unpleasant to
+Jack. It had a quality of satire and of covetousness as its owner leaned
+farther over the rail and rubbed the palms of his hands together as
+gleefully as if the diamonds were about to fly into his pockets by
+enchantment.
+
+All the time Jack had stood motionless in fixed and amazed observation.
+He wondered that his stare had not drawn the other's attention. But John
+Prather seemed too preoccupied with the dazzle of wealth to be
+susceptible to any telepathic influence.
+
+"Great heavens! I am gaping at him as if he were climbing hand over hand
+up the face of a sky-scraper!" Jack thought. It was time something
+happened. Why should he get so wrought up over the fact that another man
+looked like him? "I'll get acquainted!" he declared, shaking himself free
+of his antipathy. "We are both from Little Rivers and that's a ready
+excuse for introducing myself."
+
+As he started across the floor toward the stairs, Prather straightened
+from his leaning posture. For an instant his glance seemed to rest on
+Jack. Indeed, eye met eye for a flash; and then Prather moved away. His
+decision to go might easily have been the electric result of Jack's own
+decision to join him. Jack ran up the stairs. At the head of the flight
+he saw, at half the distance across the floor, Prather's back entering an
+elevator on the down trip. He hurried forward, his desire to meet and
+speak with the man whose influence Jim Galway and Mary feared now
+overwhelming.
+
+"Hello!" Jack sang out; and this to Prather's face after he had turned
+around in the elevator.
+
+In the second while the elevator man was swinging to the door, Jack
+and Prather were fairly looking at each other. Prather had seen that
+Jack wanted to speak to him, even if he had not heard the call. His
+answer was a smile of mixed recognition and satire. He made a
+gesture of appreciative understanding of the distinction in their
+likeness by touching the mole on his cheek with his finger, which
+was Jack's last glimpse of him before he was shot down into the
+lower regions of the store.
+
+"He did it neatly!" Jack gasped, with a sense of defeat and chagrin. "And
+it is plain that he does not care to get acquainted. Perhaps he takes it
+for granted that I am not friendly and foresaw that I would ask him a lot
+of questions about Little Rivers that he would not care to answer." At
+all events, the only way to accept the situation was lightly, his reason
+insisted. "Having heard about the likeness, possibly he came to the store
+to have a look at me, and after seeing me felt that he had been libeled!"
+
+But his feelings refused to follow his reason in an amused view.
+
+"I do not like John Prather!" he concluded, as he took the next elevator
+to the top floor. "Yes, I liked Pete Leddy better at our first meeting. I
+had rather a man would swear at me than smile in that fashion. It is
+much more simple."
+
+The incident had had such a besetting and disagreeable effect that Jack
+would have found it difficult to rid his mind of it if he had not had a
+more centering and pressing object in prospect in the citadel of the
+push-buttons behind the glass marked "Private."
+
+John Wingfield, Sr. looked up from his desk in covert watchfulness to
+detect his son's mood, and he was conscious of a quality of manner that
+recalled the returning exile's entry into the same room upon his arrival
+from the West.
+
+"Well, Jack," the father said, with marked cheeriness, "I hear you have
+been taking a holiday. It's all right, and you will find motoring beats
+pony riding."
+
+"In some ways," Jack answered; and then he came a step nearer, his hand
+resting on the edge of the desk, as he looked into his father's eyes with
+glowing candor.
+
+John Wingfield, Sr.'s eyes shifted to the pushbuttons and later to a
+paper on the desk, with which his fingers played gently. He realized
+instantly that something unusual was on Jack's mind.
+
+"Father," Jack went on, "I want a long talk quite alone with you. When it
+is over I feel that we shall both know each other better; we can work
+together in a fuller understanding."
+
+"Yes, Jack," answered the father, cautiously feeling his way with a
+swift upward glance, which fell again to the paper. "Well, what is it
+now? Come on!"
+
+"There are a lot of questions I want to ask--family questions."
+
+"Family questions?" The fingers paused in playing with the paper for an
+instant and went on playing again. The soft hands were as white as the
+paper. "Family questions, eh? Well, there isn't much to our family except
+you and I and that old ancestor--and a long talk, you say?"
+
+"Yes. I thought that probably this would be a good time; you could give
+me an hour now. It might not take that long."
+
+Jack's voice was even and engaging and respectful. But it seemed to fill
+the room with many echoing whispers.
+
+"I have a very busy day before me," the father said, still without
+looking up. He was talking to a little pad at one corner of the green
+blotter which had a list of his appointments. "Your questions are not so
+imperative that they cannot wait?"
+
+"Then shall it be at dinner?" Jack asked.
+
+"At dinner? No. I have an engagement for dinner."
+
+"Shall you be home early? Shall I wait up for you?" Jack persisted.
+
+"Yes, that's it! Say at nine. I'll make a point of it--in the library at
+nine!" John Wingfield, Sr.'s hand slipped away from the papers and
+patted the back of Jack's hand. "And come on with your questions. I will
+answer every one that I can." He was looking up at Jack now, smilingly
+and attractively in his frankness. "Every one that I can, from the first
+John Wingfield right down to the present!"
+
+But the hand that lay on Jack's was cold and its movement nervous and
+spasmodic.
+
+"Thank you, father. I knew you would. I haven't forgotten your wish that
+I should bring all my doubts and questions to you," said Jack, happily.
+And in an impulse which had the devoutness of a rising hope he took that
+cold, soft hand in both of his and gave it a shake; and the feel of the
+son's grip, firm and warm, remained with John Wingfield, Sr. while he
+stared at the door through which Jack had passed out. When he had pulled
+himself together he asked Mortimer to connect him with Dr. Bennington.
+
+"Doctor, I want a little talk with you to-night before nine," he said.
+"Could you dine with me--not at the house--say at the club?
+Yes--excellent--and make it at seven. Yes. Good-by!"
+
+
+
+
+XXXII
+
+A CRISIS IN THE WINGFIELD LIBRARY
+
+
+A library atmosphere was missing from the Wingfield library, with its
+heavy panelling and rows of red and blue morocco backs. Rather the
+suggestion was of a bastion of privacy, where a man of action might make
+his plans or take counsel at leisure amid rich and mellow surroundings.
+Here, John Wingfield, Sr. had gained points through post-prandial
+geniality which he could never have won in the presence of the battery of
+push-buttons; here, his most successful conceptions had come to him;
+here, he had known the greatest moments of his life. He was right in
+saying that he loved his library; but he hardly loved it for its books.
+
+When he returned to the house shortly before nine from his session with
+Dr. Bennington, it was with the knowledge that another great moment was
+in prospect. He took a few turns up and down the room before he rang for
+the butler to tell Jack that he had come in. Then he placed a chair near
+the desk, where its occupant would sit facing him. After he sat down he
+moved the desk lamp, which was the only light in the room, so that its
+rays fell on the back of the chair and left his own face in shadow--a
+precaution which he had taken on many other occasions in adroitness of
+stage management. He drew from the humidor drawer of his desk a box of
+the long cigars with blunt ends which need no encircling gilt band in
+praise of their quality.
+
+As Jack entered, the father welcomed him with a warm, paternal smile. And
+be it remembered that John Wingfield, Sr. could smile most pleasantly,
+and he knew the value of his smile. Jack answered the smile with one of
+his own, a little wan, a little subdued, yet enlivening under the glow of
+his father's evident happiness at seeing him. The father, who had
+transgressed the rules of longevity by taking a second cigar after
+dinner, now pushed the box across the desk to his son. Jack said that he
+would "roll one"; he did not care to smoke much. He produced a small
+package of flake tobacco and a packet of rice paper and with a deftness
+that was like sleight of hand made a cigarette without spilling a single
+flake. He had not always chosen the "makings" in place of private stock
+Havanas, but it seemed to suit his mood to-night.
+
+"That is one of the things you learned in the West," the father observed
+affably, to break the ice.
+
+"I can do them with one hand," Jack answered. "But you are likely to
+have an overflow--which is all right when you have the whole desert for
+the litter. Besides, in a library it would have the effect of gallery
+play, I fear."
+
+He was seated in a way that revealed all the supple lines of his figure.
+However relaxed his attitude before his father, it was always suggestive
+of latent strength, appealing at once to paternal pride and paternal
+uncertainty as to what course the strength would take. His face under the
+light of the lamp was boyish and singularly without trace of guile.
+
+The father struck a match and held it to light his son's cigarette;
+another habit of his which he had found flattering to men who were
+brought into the library for conference. Jack took a puff slowly and,
+after a time, another puff, and then dropped the cigarette on the ash
+receiver as much as to say that he had smoked enough. Something told John
+Wingfield, Sr. that this was to be a long interview and in no way
+hurried, as he saw the smile dying on the son's lips and misery coming
+into the son's eyes.
+
+"These last two days have been pretty poignant for me," Jack began, in a
+simple, outright fashion; "and only half an hour ago I got this. It was
+hard to resist taking the first train West." He drew a telegram from his
+pocket and handed it to his father.
+
+"We want you and though we don't suppose you can come, we simply had to
+let you know.
+
+"JAMES R. GALWAY."
+
+"It is Greek to me," said the father. "From your Little Rivers
+friends, I judge."
+
+"Yes. I suppose that we may as well begin with it, as it drove everything
+else out of my mind for the moment."
+
+John Wingfield, Sr. swung around in his chair, with his face in the
+shadow. His attitude was that of a companionable listener who is prepared
+for any kind of news.
+
+"As you will, Jack," he said. "Everything that pertains to you is my
+interest. Go ahead in your own way."
+
+"It concerns John Prather. I don't know that I have ever told you about
+him in my talks of Little Rivers."
+
+"John Prather?" The father reflectively sounded the name, the while he
+studied the spiral of smoke rising from his cigar. "No, I don't think you
+have mentioned him."
+
+It was Jack's purpose to take his father entirely into his confidence; to
+reveal his own mind so that there should be nothing of its perplexities
+which his father did not understand. He might not choose a logical
+sequence of thought or event, but in the end nothing should be left
+untold. Indeed, he had not studied how to begin his inquiries. That he
+had left to take care of itself. His chief solicitude was to keep his
+mind open and free of bitterness whatever transpired, and it was evident
+that he was under a great strain.
+
+He told of the coming of John Prather to Little Rivers while he was
+absent; of the mention of the likeness by his fellow-ranchers; and of the
+fears entertained by Jim Galway and Mary. When he came to the scene in
+the store that afternoon it was given in a transparent fulness of detail;
+while all his changing emotions, from his first glimpse of Prather's
+profile to the effort to speak with him and the ultimatum of Prather's
+satirical gesture, were reflected in his features. He was the
+story-teller, putting his gift to an unpleasant task in illumination of
+sober fact and not the uses of imagination; and his audience was his
+father's cheek and ear in the shadow.
+
+"Extraordinary!" John Wingfield, Sr. exclaimed when Jack had finished,
+glancing around with a shrug. "Naturally, you were irritated. I like to
+think that only two men have the Wingfield features--the features of the
+ancestor--yes, only two: you and I!"
+
+"It was more than irritation; it was something profound and disturbing,
+almost revolting!" Jack exclaimed, under the disagreeable spell of his
+vivid recollection of the incident. "The resemblance to you was so
+striking, father, especially in the profile!" Jack was leaning forward,
+the better to see his father's profile, dim in the half light. "Yes,
+recognizable instantly--the nose and the lines about the mouth! You have
+never met anyone who has seen this man? You have never heard of him?" he
+asked, almost morbidly.
+
+John Wingfield, Sr. broke into a laugh, which was deprecatory and
+metallic. He looked fairly into Jack's eyes with a kind of inquiring
+amazement at the boy's overwrought intensity.
+
+"Why, no, Jack," he said, reassuringly. "If I had I shouldn't have
+forgotten it, you may be sure. And, well, Jack, there is no use of being
+sensitive about it, though I understand your indignation--especially
+after he flaunted the fact of the resemblance in such a manner and
+refused to meet you. From what I have heard about that fight with
+Leddy--Dr. Bennington told me--I can appreciate why he did not care to
+meet you." He laughed, more genially this time, in the survey of his
+son's broad shoulders. "I fear there is something of the old ancestor's
+devil in you when you get going!" he added.
+
+So his father had seen this, too--what Mary had seen--this thing born in
+him with the coming of his strength!
+
+"Yes, I suppose there is," he admitted, ruefully. "Yes, I have reason to
+know that there is."
+
+His face went moody. Any malice toward John Prather passed. He was
+penitent for a feeling against a stranger that seemed akin to the dormant
+instinct that had made him glory in holding a bead on Pete Leddy.
+
+"And I am glad of it!" said John Wingfield, Sr., with a flash of stronger
+emotion than he had yet shown in the interview.
+
+"I am not. It makes me almost afraid of myself," Jack answered.
+
+"Oh, I don't mean firing six-shooters--hardly! I mean backbone," he
+hastened to add, almost ingratiatingly. "It is a thing to control, Jack,
+not to worry about."
+
+"Yes, to control!" said Jack, dismally.
+
+He was hearing Ignacio's cry of "The devil is out of Señor Don't Care!"
+and seeing for the thousandth time Mary's horrified face as he pressed
+Pedro Nogales against the hedge. Now poise was all on the side of the
+father, who glanced away from Jack at the glint of the library cases in
+the semi-darkness in satisfaction. But only a moment did the son's absent
+mood last. He leaned forward quivering, free from his spell of
+reflection, and his words came pelting like hail. He was at grip with the
+phantoms and nothing should loosen his hold till the truth was out.
+
+"Father, I could not fail to see the look on your face and the look on
+Jasper Ewold's when you found him in the drawing-room!"
+
+At the sudden reversal of his son's attitude, John Wingfield, Sr. had
+drawn back into the shadow, as, if in defensive instinct before the force
+that was beating in Jack's voice.
+
+"Yes, I was startled; yes, very startled! But, go on! Speak everything
+that you have in mind; for it is evident that you have much to say. Go
+on!" he repeated more calmly, and turned his face farther into the
+shadow, while he inclined his head toward Jack as if to hear better. One
+leg had drawn up under him and was pressing against the chair.
+
+Jack waited a moment to gather his thoughts. When he spoke his
+passion was gone.
+
+"We have always been as strangers, father," he began. "I have no
+recollection of you in childhood until that day you came as a stranger to
+the house at Versailles. I was seven, then. My mother was away, as you
+will recall. I remember that you did not kiss me or show any affection.
+You did not even say who you were. You looked me over, and I was very
+frail. I saw that I did not please you; and I did not like you. In my
+childish perversity I would speak only French to you, which you did not
+understand. When my mother came home, do you remember her look? I do. She
+went white as chalk and trembled. I was frightened with the thought that
+she was going to die. It was a little while before she spoke and when she
+did speak she was like stone. She asked you what you wanted, as if you
+were an intruder. You said: 'I have been looking at the boy!' Your
+expression told me again that you were not pleased with me. Without
+another word you departed. I can still hear your steps on the walk as you
+went away; they were so very firm."
+
+"Yes, Jack, I can never forget." The tone was that of a man racked. "What
+else?" he asked. "Go on, Jack!"
+
+"You know the life my mother and I led, study and play together. And
+that was the only time you saw me until I was fourteen. I was mortally in
+awe of you then and in awe of you the day I went West with your message
+to get strong. But I got strong; yes, strong, father!"
+
+"Yes, Jack," said the father. "Yes, Jack, leave nothing unsaid--nothing!"
+
+Now Jack swept back to the villa garden in Florence, the day of the
+Doge's call; and from there to the Doge's glance of recognition that
+first night in Little Rivers; then to the scene in front of the
+bookstore, when the Doge hesitated about going to see the Velasquez. He
+pictured the Doge's absorption over the mother's portrait; he repeated
+Mary's story on the previous evening.
+
+All the while the profile, so dimly outlined in the outer darkness beyond
+the lamp's circle of light, to which he had been speaking, had not
+stirred. The father's cigar had gone out. It lay idly in his fingers,
+which rested on the arm of the chair, above a tiny pile of ashes on the
+rug. But there was no other sign of emotion, except his half affirmative
+interjections, with a confessional's encouragement to empty the mind of
+its every affliction.
+
+"Why were my mother and myself always in exile? What was this barrier
+between you and her? Why was it that I never saw you? Why this bitterness
+of Jasper Ewold against you? Why should that bitterness be turned against
+me? I want to know, father, so that we can start afresh and right. I no
+longer want to be in the dark, with its mystery, but in the light, where
+I can grapple with the truth!"
+
+There was no rancor, no crashing of sentences; only high tension in the
+finality of an inquiry in which hope and fear rose together.
+
+"Yes, Jack!" exclaimed John Wingfield, Sr., after a silence in which he
+seemed to be passing all that Jack had said in review. "I am glad you
+have told me this; that you have come to the one to whom you should come
+in trouble. You have made it possible for me to speak of something that I
+never found a way to speak about, myself. For, Jack, you truly have been
+a stranger to me and I to you, thanks to the chain of influences which
+you have mentioned."
+
+Very slowly John Wingfield, Sr. had turned in his chair. Distress was
+rising in his tone as he leaned toward Jack. His face under the rim of
+light of the lamp had a new charm, which was not that of the indulgent or
+flattering or winning smile, or the masterful set of his chin on an
+object. He seemed pallid and old, struggling against a phantom himself;
+almost pitiful, this man of strength, while his eyes looked into Jack's
+with limpid candor.
+
+"Jack, I will tell you all I can," he said. "I want to. It is duty. It is
+relief. But first, will you tell me what your mother told you? What her
+reasons were? I have a right to know that, haven't I, in my effort to
+make my side clear?" He spoke in direct, intimate appeal.
+
+Jack's lips were trembling and his whole nature was throbbing in a
+new-found sympathy. For the first time he saw his father as a man of
+sensitive feeling, capable of deep suffering. And he was to have the
+truth, all the truth, in kindness and affection.
+
+"After you had left the house at Versailles," said Jack, "she took me in
+her arms and said that you were my father. 'Did you like him?' she asked;
+and I said no, realizing nothing but the childish impression of the
+interview. At that she was wildly, almost hysterically, triumphant. I was
+glad to have made her so happy. 'You are mine alone! You have only me!'
+she declared over and over again. 'And you must never ask me any
+questions, for that is best.' She never mentioned you afterward; and in
+all my life, until I was fourteen, I was never away from her."
+
+Again the palm of John Wingfield, Sr.'s hand ran back and forth over his
+knee and the foot that was against the chair leg beat a nervous tattoo;
+while he drew a longer breath than usual, which might have been either of
+surprise or relief. His face fell back behind the rim of the lamp's rays,
+but he did not turn it away as he had when Jack was talking.
+
+"You know only the Jasper Ewold who has been mellowed by time," he began.
+"His scholarship was a bond of companionship for you in the isolation of
+a small community. I know him as boy and young man. He was very
+precocious. At the age of eight, as I remember, he could read his Caesar.
+You will appreciate what that meant in a New England town--that he was
+somewhat spoiled by admiration. And, naturally, his character and mine
+were very different, thanks to the difference in our situations; for the
+Ewolds had a good deal of money in those days. I was the type of boy who
+was ready to work at any kind of odd job in order to get dimes and
+quarters for my little bank.
+
+"Well, it is quite absurd to go back to that as the beginning of Jasper
+Ewold's feelings toward me; but one day young Wingfield felt that young
+Ewold was patronizing him. We had a turn at fisticuffs which resulted in
+my favor. Jasper was a proud boy, and he never quite forgave me. In fact,
+he was not used to being crossed. Learning was easy for him; he was
+good-looking; he had an attractive manner, and it seemed only his right
+that all doors should open when he knocked. Soon after our battle he went
+away to school. Not until we were well past thirty did our paths cross
+again. He was something of a painter, but he really had had no set
+purpose in life except the pleasures of his intellectual diversions. I
+will not say that he was wild, but at least he had lived in the abundant
+freedom of his opportunities. He fell in love at the same time that I did
+with Alice Jamison. You have seen your mother's picture, but that gives
+you little idea of her beauty in girlhood."
+
+"I have always thought her beautiful!" Jack exclaimed spontaneously.
+
+"Yes. I am glad. She always was beautiful to me; but I like best to think
+of her before she turned against me. I like to think of her as she was in
+the days of our courtship. Fortune favored me instead of Jasper Ewold. I
+can well understand the blow it was to him, that she should take the
+storekeeper, the man without learning, the man without family, as people
+supposed then, when he thought that she belonged entirely to his world.
+But his enmity thereafter I can only explain by his wounded pride; by a
+mortal defeat for one used to having his way, for one who had never known
+discipline. Your mother and I were very happy for a time. I thought that
+she loved me and had chosen me because I was a man of purpose, while
+Jasper Ewold was not."
+
+John Wingfield, Sr. spoke deliberately, measuring his thought before he
+put it into words, as if he were trying to set himself apart as one
+figure in a drama while he aimed to do exact justice to the others.
+
+"It was soon after you were born that your mother's attitude changed. She
+was, as you know, supersensitive, and whatever her grievances were she
+kept them to herself. My immersion in my affairs was such that I could
+not be as attentive to her as I ought to have been. Sometimes I thought
+that the advertisement with our name in big letters in every morning
+paper might be offensive to her; again, that she missed in me the
+education I had had to forfeit in youth, and that my affection could
+hardly take its place. I know that Jasper Ewold saw her occasionally, and
+in his impulse I know that he said things about me that were untrue. But
+that I pass over. In his place I, too, might have been bitter.
+
+"The best explanation I can find of your mother's change toward me is one
+that belongs in the domain of psychology and pathology. She suffered a
+great deal at your birth and she never regained her former strength. When
+she rose from her bed it was with a shadow over her mind. I saw that she
+was unhappy and nervous in my presence. Indeed, I had at times to face
+the awful sensation of feeling that I was actually repugnant to her. She
+was especially irritable if I kissed or fondled you. She dropped all her
+friends; she never made calls; she refused to see callers. I consulted
+specialists and all the satisfaction I had was that she was of a
+peculiarly high-strung nature and that in certain phases of melancholia,
+where there is no complete mental and physical breakdown, the patient
+turns on the one whom she would hold nearest and dearest if she were
+normal. The child that had taken her strength became the virtual passion
+of her worship, which she would share with no one.
+
+"When she proposed to go to Europe for a rest, taking you with her, I
+welcomed the idea. I rejoiced in the hope that the doctors held out that
+she would come back well, and I ventured to believe in a happy future,
+with you as our common object of love and care. But she never returned,
+as you know; and she only wrote me once, a wild sort of letter about what
+a beautiful boy you were and that she had you and I had the store and I
+was never to send her any more remittances.
+
+"I made a number of trips to Europe. I could not go frequently, because
+in those days, Jack, I was a heavy borrower of money in the expansion of
+my business, and only one who has built up a great business can
+understand how, in the earlier and more uncertain period of our banking
+credits, the absence of personal attention in any sudden crisis might
+throw you on the rocks. Naturally, when I went I wrote to Alice that I
+was coming; but I always found that she had gone and left no address for
+forwarding mail from the Crédit Lyonnais. Once when I went without
+writing she eluded me, and the second time I found that she had a cottage
+at Versailles. That, as you know, was the only occasion when I ever saw
+you or her until I came to bring you home after her sudden death."
+
+"Yes," Jack whispered starkly. "That day I had left her as well as
+usual and came home to find her lying still and white on a couch, her
+book fallen out of her hand onto the floor and--" the words choked in
+his throat.
+
+"And the stranger, your father, who came for you seemed very hard and
+forbidding to you!"
+
+"Yes," Jack managed to say.
+
+"But, Jack, when my steps sounded so firm the day I left you at
+Versailles it was the firmness of force of will fighting to accept the
+inevitable. For I had seen your face. It was like mine, and yet I had to
+give you up! I had to give you up knowing that I might not see you again;
+knowing that this tragic, incomprehensible fatality had set you against
+me; knowing that any further efforts to see you meant only pain for Alice
+and for me. Whatever happiness she knew came from you, and that she
+should have. And remember, Jack, that out of all this tragedy I, too, had
+my point of view. I had my moments of reproach against fate; my moments
+of bitterness and anger; my moments when I set all my mind with, volcanic
+energy into my affairs in order to forget my misfortune. I had to build
+for the sake of building. Perhaps that hardened me.
+
+"When you came home I saw that you were mine in blood but not mine in
+heart. All your training had been foreign, all of estrangement from the
+business and the ways of the home-country; which you could not help, I
+could not help, nothing now could help. But, after all, I had been
+building for you; that was my new solace. I wanted you to be equal to
+what was coming to you, and that change meant discipline. To be frank
+with you, as you have been with me, you were sickly, hectic, dreamy; and
+when word came that you must go to the desert if your life were to be
+saved--well, Jack, I had to put affection aside and consider this blow
+for what it was, and think not of kind words but of what was best for you
+and your future. I knew that my duty to you and your duty to yourself was
+to see you become strong, and for your sake you must not return until you
+were strong.
+
+"Now, as for the scene in the drawing-room the other day: I could not
+forget what Jasper Ewold had said of me. That was one thing. Another was
+that I had detected his influence over you; an influence against the
+purpose and steadiness that I was trying to inculcate in you; and
+suddenly coming upon him in my own house, in view of his enmity and the
+way in which he had spoken about me, I was naturally startled and
+indignant and withdrew to avoid a scene. That is all, Jack. I have
+answered your questions to the best of my knowledge. If others occur to
+you I will try my best to answer them, too;" and the father seemed ready
+to submit every recess of his mind to the son's inquisition.
+
+"You have answered everything," said Jack; "everything--fairly,
+considerately, generously."
+
+There was a flash of triumph in the father's eyes. Slowly he rose and
+stood with his finger-ends caressing the blotting-pad. Jack rose at
+the same time, his movement automatic, instinctively in sympathy with
+his father's. His head was bowed under stress of the emotion,
+incapable of translation into language, which transfixed him. It had
+all been made clear, this thing that no one could help. His feeling
+toward his mother could never change; but penetrating to the depths in
+which it had been held sacred was a new feeling. The pain that had
+brought him into the world had brought misery to the authors of his
+being. There was no phantom except the breath of life in his nostrils
+which they had given him.
+
+Watchfully, respecting the son's silence, the father's lips tightened,
+his chin went out slightly and his brows drew together in a way that
+indicated that he did not consider the battle over. At length, Jack's
+head came up and his face had the strength of a youthful replica of the
+ancestor's, radiant in gratitude, and in his eyes for the first time, in
+looking into his father's, were trust and affection. There was no word,
+no other demonstration except the steady, liquid look that spoke the
+birth of a great, understanding comradeship. The father fed his hunger
+for possession, which had been irresistibly growing in him for the last
+two months, on that look. He saw his son's strength as something that had
+at last become malleable; and this was the moment when the metal was at
+white heat, ready for knowing turns with the pincers and knowing blows of
+the hammer.
+
+The message from Jim Galway was still on the table where the father had
+laid it after reading. Now he pressed his fingers on it so hard that the
+nails became a row of red spots.
+
+"And the telegram, Jack?" he asked.
+
+Jack stared at the yellow slip of paper as the symbol of problems that
+reappeared with burning acuteness in his mind. It smiled at him in the
+satire of John Prather triumphing in Little Rivers. It visualized
+pictures of lean ranchers who had brought him flowers in the days of his
+convalescence; of children gathered around him on the steps of his
+bungalow; of all the friendly faces brimming good-will into his own on
+the day of his departure; of a patch of green in desert loneliness, with
+a summons to arms to defend its arteries of life.
+
+"They want me to help--I half promised!" he said.
+
+"Yes. And just how can you help?" asked his father, gently.
+
+"Why, that is not quite clear yet. But a stranger, they made me one of
+themselves. They say that they need me. And, father, that thrilled me. It
+thrilled the idler to find that there was some place where he could be of
+service; that there was some one definite thing that others thought he
+could do well!"
+
+The father proceeded cautiously, reasonably, with his questions, as one
+who seeks for light for its own sake. Jack's answers were luminously
+frank. For there was always to be truth between them in their new
+fellowship, unfettered by hopes or vagaries.
+
+"You could help with your knowledge of law? With political influence?
+Help these men seasoned by experience in land disputes in that region?"
+
+"No!"
+
+"And would Jasper Ewold, whom I understand is the head and founder of the
+community, want you to come? Has he asked you?" the father continued,
+drawing in the web of logic.
+
+"On the contrary, he would not want me."
+
+"And Miss Ewold? Would she want you?"
+
+There Jack hesitated. When he spoke, however, it was to admit the fact
+that was stabbing him.
+
+"No, she would not. She has dismissed me. But--but I half promised," he
+added, his features setting firmly as they had after Leddy had fired at
+him. "It seems like duty, unavoidable."
+
+The metal was cooling, losing its malleability, and the father proceeded
+to thrust it back into the furnace.
+
+"Then, I take it that your value to Little Rivers is your cool hand
+with a gun," he said, "and the summons is to uncertainties which may
+lead to something worse than a duel. You are asked to come because you
+can fight. Do you want to go for that? To go to let the devil, as you
+call it, out of you?"
+
+Now the metal was soft with the heat of the shame of the moment when Jack
+had called to Leddy, "I am going to kill you!" and of the moment when he
+saw Pedro Nogales's limp, broken arm and ghastly face.
+
+"No, no!" Jack gasped. "I want no fight! I never want to draw a bead on a
+man again! I never want to have a revolver in my hand again!"
+
+He was shuddering, half leaning against the desk for support. His
+father waited in observant comprehension. Convulsively, Jack
+straightened with desperation and all the impassioned pleading to Mary
+on the pass was in his eyes.
+
+"But the thing that I cannot help--the transcendent thing, not of logic,
+not of Little Rivers' difficulties--how am I to give that up?" he cried.
+
+"Miss Ewold, you mean?"
+
+"Yes!"
+
+"Jack, I know! I understand! Who should understand if not I?" The father
+drew Jack's hand into his own, and the fluid force of his desire for
+mastery was flowing out from his finger-ends into the son's fibres, which
+were receptively sensitive to the caress. "I know what it is when the
+woman you love dismisses you! You have her to think of as well as
+yourself. Your own wish may not be lord. You may not win that which will
+not be won"--how well he knew that!--"either by protest, by persistence,
+or by labor. You are dealing with the tender and intangible; with
+feminine temperament, Jack. And, Jack, it is wise for you, isn't it, to
+bear in mind that your life has not been normal? With the switch from
+desert to city life homesickness has crept over you. From to-night things
+will not be so strange, will they? But if you wish a change, go to
+Europe--yes, go, though I cannot bear to think of losing you the very
+moment that we have come to know each other; when the past is clear and
+amends are at hand.
+
+"And, Jack, if your mother were here with us and were herself, would she
+want you to go back to take up a rifle instead of your work at my side? I
+do not pretend to understand Jasper Ewold's or Mary Ewold's thoughts. She
+has preferred to make another generation's ill-feeling her own in a thing
+that concerns her life alone. She has seen enough of you to know her
+mind. For, from all I hear, you have not been a faint-hearted lover. Is
+it fair to her to follow her back to the desert? Is it the courage of
+self-denial, of control of impulse on your part? Would your mother want
+you to persist in a veritable conquest by force of your will, whose
+strength you hardly realize, against Mary Ewold's sensibilities? And if
+you broke down her will, if you won, would there be happiness for you and
+for her? Jack, wait! If she cares for you, if there is any germ of love
+for you in her, it will grow of itself. You cannot force it into blossom.
+Come, Jack, am I not right?"
+
+Jack's hands lay cold and limp in his father's; so limp that it seemed
+only a case of leading, now. Yet there was always the uncertain in the
+boy; the uncertain hovering under that face of ashes that the father was
+so keenly watching; a face so clearly revealing the throes of a struggle
+that sent cold little shivers into his father's warm grasp. Jack's eyes
+were looking into the distance through a mist. He dropped the lids as if
+he wanted darkness in which to think. When he raised them it was to look
+in his father's eyes firmly. There was a half sob, as if this
+sentimentalist, this Señor Don't Care, had wrung determination from a
+precipice edge, even as Mary Ewold had. He gripped his father's hands
+strongly and lifted them on a level with his breast.
+
+"You have been very fine, father! I want you to be patient and go on
+helping me. The trail is a rough one, but straight, now. I--I'm too
+brimming full to talk!" And blindly he left the library.
+
+When the door closed, John Wingfield, Sr. seized the telegram, rolled it
+up with a glad, fierce energy and threw it into the waste-basket. His
+head went up; his eyes became points of sharp flame; his lips parted in a
+smile of relief and triumph and came together in a straight line before
+he sank down in his chair in a collapse of exhaustion. After a while he
+had the decanter brought in; he gulped a glass of brandy, lighted another
+cigar, and, swinging around, fell back at ease, his mind a blank except
+for one glowing thought:
+
+"He will not go! He will give up the girl! He is to be all mine!"
+
+It is said that the best actors never go on the stage. They play real
+parts in private life, making their own lines as they watch the other
+players. One of this company, surveying the glint of his bookcases, was
+satisfied with the greatest effort of his life in his library.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIII
+
+PRATHER SEES THE PORTRAIT
+
+
+It did not occur to Jack to question a word of the narrative that had
+reduced a dismal enigma to luminous, connected facts. With the swift
+processes of reason and the promptness of decision of which he was
+capable on occasion, he had made up his mind as to his future even as he
+ascended the stairs to his room. The poignancy of his father's appeal had
+struck to the bed-rock of his affection and his conscience, revealing
+duty not as a thing that you set for yourself, but which circumstances
+set for you.
+
+Never before had he realized how hopelessly he had been a dreamer. Firio,
+P.D., Wrath of God, and Jag Ear became the fantastic memory of another
+incarnation. His devil should never again rejoice in having his finger on
+a trigger or send him off an easy traveller in search of gorgeous
+sunrises. His devil should be transformed into a backbone of unremitting
+apprenticeship in loving service for the father who had built for him in
+love. Though his head split, he would master every detail of the
+business. And when Jack stepped into the Rubicon he did not splash around
+or look back. He went right over to the new country on the other bank.
+
+But there were certain persons whom he must inform of the crossing.
+First, he wrote a telegram to Jim Galway: "Sorry, but overwhelming duty
+here will not permit. Luck and my prayers with you." Then to Firio a
+letter, which did not come quite so easily: "You see by now that you are
+mistaken, Firio. I am not coming back. Make the most of the ranch--your
+ranch--that you can." The brevity, he told himself, was in keeping with
+Firio's own style. Besides, anything more at length would have opened up
+an avenue of recollections which properly belonged to oblivion.
+
+And Mary? Yes, he would write to her, too. He would cut the last strand
+with the West. That was best. That was the part of his new courage of
+self-denial stripping itself of every trammeling association of
+sentiment. Other men had given up the women of their choice; and he could
+never be the man of this woman's choice. Somehow, his father's talk had
+made him realize an inevitable outcome which had better be met and
+mastered in present fortitude, rather than after prolonged years of
+fruitless hope centering two thousand miles away. He started a dozen
+letters to Mary, meaning each to be a fitting _envoi_ to their
+comradeship and a song of good wishes. Each one he wrote in the haste of
+having the task quickly over, only to throw away what he had written when
+he read it. The touch that he wanted would not come. He was simply
+flashing out a few of a thousand disconnected thoughts that ran away
+incoherently with his pen.
+
+But wasn't any letter, any communication of any kind, superfluous? Wasn't
+it the folly of weak and stupid stubbornness? She had spoken her final
+word in their relations at the hotel door. There was no Little Rivers;
+there was no Mary; there was nothing but the store. To enforce this fiat
+he had only to send the wire to Jim and post the letter to Firio. This he
+would do himself. A stroll would give him fresh air. It was just what he
+needed after all he had been through that evening; and he would see the
+streets not with any memory of the old restlessness when he and his
+father were strangers, but kindly, as the symbol of the future.
+
+His room was on the second floor. As he left it, he heard the door-bell
+ring, its electric titter very clear in the silence of the house. No
+doubt it meant a telegram for his father. At the turn of the stairs on
+the first floor he saw the back of the butler before the open door.
+Evidently it was not a matter of a telegram, but of some late caller.
+Jack paused in the darkness of the landing, partly to avoid the bother of
+having to meet anyone and partly arrested by the manner of the butler,
+who seemed to be startled and in doubt about admitting a stranger at that
+hour. Indistinctly, Jack could hear the caller's voice. The tone was
+familiar in a peculiar quality, which he tried to associate with a voice
+that he had heard frequently. The butler, apparently satisfied with the
+caller's appearance, or, at least, with his own ability to take care of a
+single intruder, stepped back, with a word to come in. Then, out of the
+obscurity of the vestibule, appeared the pale face of John Prather. Jack
+withdrew farther into the shadows instinctively, as if he had seen a
+ghost; as if, indeed, he were in fear of ghosts.
+
+"I will take your card to Mr. Wingfield," said the butler.
+
+Prather made a perfunctory movement as if for a card-case, but
+apparently changed his mind under the prompting suggestion that it was
+superfluous.
+
+"My name is John Prather," he announced. "Mr. Wingfield knows who I am
+and I am quite sure that he will see me."
+
+While the butler, after rapping cautiously, went into the library with
+the message, John Prather stood half smiling to himself as he looked
+around the hall. The effect seemed to please him in a contemplative
+fashion, for he rubbed the palms of his hands together, as he had in his
+survey of the diamond counters. He was serenity itself as John Wingfield,
+Sr. burst out of the library, his face hard-set.
+
+"I thought you were going this evening!" he exclaimed. "By what right do
+you come here?"
+
+He placed himself directly in front of Prather, thus hiding Prather's
+figure, but not his face, which Jack could see was not in the least
+disturbed by the other's temper.
+
+"Oh, no! The early morning train has the connections I want for Arizona,"
+he answered casually, as if he were far from being in any hurry. "I was
+taking a walk, and happening to turn into Madison Avenue I found myself
+in front of the house. It occurred to me what a lot I had heard about
+that ancestor, and seeing a light in the library, and considering how
+late it was, I thought I might have a glimpse of him without
+inconveniencing any other member of the family. Do you mind?"
+
+He put the question with an inflection that was at once engaging and
+confident.
+
+"Mind!" gasped John Wingfield, Sr.
+
+"I am sure you do not!" Prather returned. Now a certain deference and a
+certain pungency of satire ran together in his tone, the mixture being
+nicely and pleasurably controlled. "Is it in there, in the drawing-room?"
+
+"And then what else? Where do you mean to end? I thought that--"
+
+"Nothing else," Prather interrupted reassuringly. "Everything is settled,
+of course. This is sort of a farewell privilege."
+
+"Yes, in there!" snapped John Wingfield, Sr. "It's the picture on the
+other side of the mantel. I will wait here--and be quick, quick, I tell
+you! I want you out of this house! I've done enough! I--"
+
+"Thanks! It is very good-natured of you!"
+
+John Prather passed leisurely into the drawing-room and John Wingfield,
+Sr. stood guard by the door, his hand gripping the heavy portieres for
+support, while his gaze was steadily fixed at a point in the turn of the
+stairs just below where Jack was obscured in the shadow. His face was
+drawn and ashen against the deep red of the hangings, and torment and
+fear and defiance, now one and then the other, were in ascendency over
+the features which Jack had always associated with composed and
+unchanging mastery until he had seen them illumined with affection only
+an hour before. And the father had said that he had never met or heard of
+John Prather! The father had said so quietly, decidedly, without
+hesitation! This one thought kept repeating itself to Jack's stunned
+brain as he leaned against the wall limp from a blow that admits of no
+aggressive return.
+
+"The ancestor certainly must have been a snappy member of society in his
+time! It has been delightful to have a look at him," said John Prather,
+as he came out of the drawing-room.
+
+He paused as he spoke. He was still smiling. The mole on his cheek was
+toward the stairway; and it seemed to heighten the satire of his smile.
+The faces of the young man and the old man were close together and they
+were standing in much the same attitude, giving an effect of likeness in
+more than physiognomy. That note of John Prather's voice that had sounded
+so familiar to Jack was a note in the father's voice when he was
+particularly suave.
+
+"This is the end--that is the understanding--the end?" demanded John
+Wingfield, Sr.
+
+"Oh, quite!" John Prather answered easily, moving toward the door. He
+did not offer his hand, nor did John Wingfield, Sr. offer to take it.
+But as he went out he said, his smile broadening: "I hope that Jack
+makes a success with the store, though he never could run it as well as
+I could. Good-by!"
+
+"Good-by!" gasped John Wingfield, Sr.
+
+He wheeled around distractedly and stood still, his head bowed, his
+fingers working nervously before his hands parted in a shrugging,
+outspread gesture of relief; then, his head rising, his body stiffening,
+once more his arbitrary self, he started up the stairs with the firm yet
+elastic step with which he mounted the flights of the store.
+
+If Jack remained where he was they would meet. What purpose in questions
+now? The answer to all might be as false as to one. He was no more in a
+mood to trust himself with a word to his father than he had been to trust
+himself with a word to John Prather. He dropped back into the darkness
+of the dining-room and sank into a chair. When a bedroom door upstairs
+had closed softly he was sequestered in silence with his thoughts.
+
+His own father had lied to him! Lied blandly! Lied with eyes limpid with
+appeal! And the supreme commandment on which his mother had ever insisted
+was truth. The least infraction of it she would not forgive; it was the
+only thing for which she had ever punished him. He recalled the one
+occasion when she had seemed harsh and merciless, as she said:
+
+"A lie fouls the mouth of the one who utters it, Jack. A lie may torture
+and kill. It may ruin a life. It is the weapon of the coward--and never
+be a coward, Jack, never be afraid!"
+
+At the New England preparatory school which he had attended after he came
+home, a lie was the abomination on which the discipline of student
+comradeship laid a scourge. Out on the desert, where the trails run
+straight and the battle of life is waged straight against thirst and
+fatigue and distance, men spoke straight.
+
+And nothing had been explained, after all! The phantom was back,
+definite of form and smiling in irony. For it had a face, now, the face
+of John Prather! How was he connected with the story of the mother? the
+father? the Doge?
+
+Then, like a shaft of light across memory, came the recollection of a
+thing that had been so negligible to Jack at the time. It was Dr.
+Bennington's first question in Jack's living-room; a question so
+carelessly put and so dissociated from the object of his visit! Jack
+remembered Dr. Bennington's curious glance through his eyebrows as he
+asked him if he had met John Prather. And Dr. Bennington had brought Jack
+into the world! He knew the family history! The Jack that now rose from
+the chair was a Jack of action, driven by the scourge of John Prather's
+smile into obsession with the one idea which was crying: "I will know! I
+will know!"
+
+Downstairs in the hall he learned over the telephone that Dr. Bennington
+had just gone out on a call. It would be possible to see him yet
+to-night! An hour later, as the doctor entered his reception-room he was
+startled by a pacing figure in the throes of impatience, who turned on
+him without formality in an outburst:
+
+"Dr. Bennington, you asked me in Little Rivers if I had ever met John
+Prather. I have met him! Who is he? What is he to me?"
+
+The doctor's suavity was thrown off its balance, but he did not lose
+his presence of mind. He was too old a hand at his profession, too
+capable, for that.
+
+"I refuse to answer!" he said quickly and decisively.
+
+"Then you do know!" Jack took a step toward the doctor. His weight was on
+the ball of his foot; his eyes had the fire of a command that was not to
+be resisted.
+
+"Heavens! How like the ancestor!" the doctor exclaimed involuntarily.
+
+"Then you do know! Who is he? What is he to me?"
+
+It seemed as if the ceiling were about to crack. The doctor looked away
+to avoid the bore of Jack's unrelenting scrutiny. He took a turn up and
+down, rapidly, nervously, his fingers pressed in against the palms and
+the muscles of his forearms moving in the way of one who is trying to
+hold himself in control by an outward expression of force against inward
+rebellion.
+
+"I dined with your father to-night!" he exclaimed. "I counseled him to
+tell you the truth! I said that if he did not want to tell it for its own
+sake, as policy it was the only thing to you! I--I--" he stopped, facing
+Jack with a sort of grisly defiance. "Jack, a doctor is a confessor of
+men! He keeps their secrets! Good-night!" And he strode through the
+office door, which he closed behind him sharply, in reminder that the
+interview was at an end.
+
+As Jack went down the steps into the night, the face of John Prather,
+with a satirical turn to the lips, was preceding him. Now he walked madly
+up and down and back and forth across town to the river fronts, with
+panting energy of stride, as he fastened the leash of will on quivering
+nerves. When dawn came it was the dawn of the desert calling to a brain
+that had fought its way to a lucid purpose. It started him to the store
+in the fervor of a grateful mission, while a familiar greeting kept
+repeating itself in his ears on the way:
+
+"You won't forget, Jack, about giving me a chance to come along if you
+ever go out West again, will you?"
+
+The question was one in answer to a promise; a reminder from certain
+employees into whom he had fused his own spirit of enthusiasm about dry
+wastes yielding abundance.
+
+"But you must work very hard," he had told them. "Not until you have
+callouses on your hands can you succeed or really know how to enjoy a
+desert sunrise or sunset. After that, you will be able to stand erect and
+look destiny in the face."
+
+"No February slush!" Burleigh, the fitter, had said. "No depending on
+one man to hold your job!"
+
+"Your own boss! You own some land and you just naturally get what you
+earn!" according to Joe Mathewson.
+
+"And from what I can make out," observed one of the automobile van
+drivers whom Jack had accompanied on the suburban rounds, "it requires
+about as much brains as running an automobile to be what you'd call a
+first-class, a number one desert Rube, Jack!"
+
+"Yes," Jack told him. "The process that makes the earth fruitful is not
+less complicated than a motor, simply because it is one of the earliest
+inventions. You mix in nature's carbureter light and moisture with the
+chemical elements of the soil."
+
+"I'm on!" the chauffeur rejoined. "If a man works with a plow instead of
+a screwdriver, it doesn't follow that his mind is as vacant as a cow that
+stands stockstill in the middle of the road to show you that you can't
+fool her into thinking that radiators are good to eat."
+
+In explaining the labor and pains of orange-growing, which ended only
+with the careful picking and packing, Jack would talk as earnestly as his
+father would about the tedious detail which went into the purchase and
+sale of the articles in any department of the store. He might not be able
+to choose the best expert for the ribbon counter, but he had a certain
+confidence that he could tell the man or the woman who would make good in
+Little Rivers. No manager was more thorough in his observation of clerks
+for promotion than Jack in observing would-be ranchers. He had given his
+promise to one after another of a test list of disciples; and at times he
+had been surprised to find how serious both he and the disciples were
+over a matter that existed entirely on the hypothesis that he was not
+going to stay permanently in New York.
+
+This morning he was at the store for the last time, arriving even before
+the delivery division, to circulate the news that he was returning to
+Little Rivers. Trouble was brewing out there, he explained, but they
+could depend on him. He would make a place for them and send word when he
+was ready; and all whom he had marked as faithful were eager to go. Thus
+he had builded unwittingly for another future of responsibilities when he
+had paused in the midst of the store's responsibilities to tell stories
+of how a desert ranch is run.
+
+But one disciple did not even want to wait on the message. It was Peter
+Mortimer, whom Jack caught on his way to the elevator at eight, his usual
+hour, to make sure of having the letters opened and systematically
+arranged when his employer should appear.
+
+"So you are going, Jack! And--and, Jack, you know?" asked Peter
+significantly.
+
+"Yes, Peter. And I see that you know."
+
+"I do, but my word is given not to tell."
+
+Through that night's march Jack had guessed enough. He had guessed his
+fill of chill misery, which now took the place of the hunger of inquiry.
+The full truth was speeding out to the desert. It was with John Prather.
+
+"Then I will not press you, Peter," he said. "But, Peter, just one
+question, if you care to answer; was it--was it this thing that drove my
+mother into exile?"
+
+"Yes, Jack."
+
+Then a moment's silence, with Peter's eyes full of sympathy and Jack's
+dull with pain.
+
+"And, Jack," Peter went on, "well, I've been so long at it that suddenly,
+now you're going, I feel choked up, as if I were about to overflow with
+anarchy. Jack, I'm going to give notice that I will retire as soon as
+there is somebody to take my place. I want to rest and not have to keep
+trying to remember if I have forgotten anything. I've saved up a little
+money and whatever happens out there, why, there'll be some place I can
+buy where I can grow roses and salads, as you say, if nothing more
+profitable, won't there?"
+
+"Yes, Peter. I know other fertile valleys besides that of Little Rivers,
+though none that is its equal. I shall have a garden in one of them and
+you shall have a garden next to mine."
+
+"Then I feel fixed comfortable for life!" said Peter, with a perfectly
+wonderful smile enlivening the wrinkles of his old face, which made Jack
+think once more that life was worth living.
+
+Later in the morning, after he had bought tickets for Little Rivers, Jack
+returned to the house. When he stood devoutly before the portrait, whose
+"I give! I give!" he now understood in new depths, he thought:
+
+"I know that you would not want to remain here another hour. You would
+want to go with me."
+
+And before the portrait on the other side of the mantel he thought,
+challengingly and affectionately:
+
+"And you? You were an old devil, no doubt, but you would not lie! No,
+you would not lie to the Admiralty or to Elizabeth even to save your
+head! Yes, you would want to go with me, too!"
+
+Tenderly he assisted the butler to pack the portraits, which were put in
+a cab. When Jack departed in their company, this note lay on the desk in
+the library, awaiting John Wingfield, Sr.'s return that evening:
+
+"Father:
+
+"The wire to Jim Galway which I enclose tells its own story. It was
+written after our talk. When I was going out to send it I saw John
+Prather and you in the hall. You said that you knew nothing of him. I
+overheard what passed between you and him. So I am going back to Little
+Rivers. The only hope for me now is out there.
+
+"I am taking the portrait of my mother, because it is mine. I am taking
+the portrait of the ancestor, because I cannot help it any more than he
+could help taking a Spanish galleon. That is all I ask or ever could
+accept in the way of an inheritance.
+
+"Jack."
+
+
+
+
+XXXIV
+
+"JOHN WINGFIELD, YOU--"
+
+
+John Wingfield, Sr. had often made the boast that he never worried;
+that he never took his business to bed with him. When his head touched
+the pillow there was oblivion until he awoke refreshed to greet the
+problems left over from yesterday. Such a mind must be a reliably
+co-ordinated piece of machinery, with a pendulum in place of a heart. It
+is overawing to average mortals who have not the temerity to say
+"Nonsense!" to great egos. Yet the best adjusted clocks may have a lapse
+in a powerful magnetic storm, and in an earthquake they might even be
+tipped off the shelf, with their metal parts rendered quite as helpless
+by the fall as those of a human organism subject to the constitutional
+weaknesses of the flesh.
+
+It was also John Wingfield, Sr.'s boast to himself that he had never been
+beaten, which average mortals with the temerity to say "Nonsense!"--that
+most equilibratory of words--might have diagnosed as a bad case of
+self-esteem finding a way to forget the resented incidental reverses of
+success. Yet, even average mortals noted when John Wingfield, Sr.
+arrived late at the store the morning after Jack's departure for the West
+that he had not slept well. His haggardness suggested that for once the
+pushbutton to the switch of oblivion had failed him. The smile of
+satisfied power was lacking. In the words of the elevator boy,
+impersonal observer and swinger of doors, "I never seen the old man like
+that before!"
+
+But the upward flight through the streets of his city, if it did not
+bring back the smile, brought back the old pride of ownership and
+domination. He still had a kingdom; he was still king. Resentment rose
+against the cause of the miserable twelve hours which had thrown the
+machinery of his being out of order. He passed the word to himself that
+he should sleep to-night and that from this moment, henceforth things
+would be the same as they had been before Jack came home. Yes, there was
+just one reality for him. It was enthroned in his office. This morning
+was to be like any other business morning; like thousands of mornings to
+come in the many years of activity that stretched ahead of him.
+
+"A little late," he said, explaining his tardiness to his secretary; a
+superfluity of words in which he would not ordinarily have indulged. "I
+had some things to attend to on the outside."
+
+With customary quiet attentiveness, Mortimer went through the mail with
+his employer, who was frequently reassuring himself that his mind was as
+clear, his answers as sure, and his interest as concentrated as usual.
+This task finished, Mortimer, with his bundle of letters and notes in
+hand, instead of going out of the room when he had passed around the
+desk, turned and faced the man whom he had served for thirty years.
+
+"Mr. Wingfield--"
+
+"Well, Peter?"
+
+John Wingfield, Sr. looked up sharply, struck by Mortimer's tone, which
+seemed to come from another man. In Mortimer's eye was a placid,
+confident light and his stoop was less marked.
+
+"Mr. Wingfield, I am getting on in years, now," he said, "and I have
+concluded to retire as soon as you have someone for my place; the sooner,
+sir, the more agreeable to me."
+
+"What! What put this idea into your head?" John Wingfield, Sr. snapped.
+Often of late he had thought that it was time he got a younger man in
+Peter's place. But he did not like the initiative to come from Peter; not
+on this particular morning.
+
+"Why, just the notion that I should like to rest. Yes, rest and play a
+little, and grow roses and salads," said the old secretary, respectfully.
+
+"Roses and salads! What in--where are you going to grow them?"
+
+There was something so serene about Peter that his highly imperious,
+poised employer found it impertinent, not to say maddening. Peter had a
+look of the freedom of desert distances in his eyes already. A lieutenant
+was actually radiating happiness in that neutral-toned sanctum of power,
+particularly this morning.
+
+"I am going out to Little Rivers, or to some place that Jack finds
+for me, where I am to have a garden and work--or maybe I better call
+it potter around--out of doors in January and February, just like it
+was June."
+
+Peter spoke very genially, as if he were trying to win a disciple on his
+own account.
+
+"With Jack! Oh!" gasped John Wingfield, Sr. He struck his closed fist
+into the palm of his hand in his favorite gesture of anger, the
+antithesis of the crisp rubbing of the palms, which he so rarely used of
+late years. Rage was contrary to the rules of longevity, exciting the
+heart and exerting pressure on the artery walls.
+
+"Yes, sir," answered Peter, pleasantly.
+
+"Well--yes--well, Jack has decided to go back!" Then there rose strongly
+in John Wingfield, Sr.'s mind a suspicion that had been faintly signaled
+to his keen observation of everything that went on in the store. "Are any
+other employees going?" he demanded.
+
+"Yes, sir, I think there are; not immediately, but as soon as he finds a
+place for them."
+
+"How many?"
+
+"I don't think it is any secret. About fifty, sir."
+
+"Name some of them!"
+
+"Joe Mathewson, that big fellow who drives a warehouse truck, and
+Burleigh;" and Peter went on with those of the test proof list
+whom he knew.
+
+Every one of them had high standing. Every one represented a value. While
+at first John Wingfield, Sr. had decided savagely that Mortimer should
+remain at his pleasure, now his sense of outraged egoism took an opposite
+turn. He could get on without Mortimer; he could get on if every employee
+in the store walked out. There were more where they came from in a city
+of five millions population; and no one in the world knew so well as he
+how to train them.
+
+"Very good, Peter!" he said rigidly, as if he were making a declaration
+of war. "Fix up your papers and leave as soon as you please. I will have
+one of the clerks take your place."
+
+"Thank you. That is very kind, Mr. Wingfield!" Mortimer returned, so
+politely, even exultantly, that his aspect seemed treasonable.
+
+John Wingfield, Sr. tried to concentrate his attention on some long and
+important letters that had been left on his desk for further
+consideration; but his mind refused to stick to the lines of typewriting.
+
+"This one is a little complicated," he thought, "I will lay it aside."
+
+He tried the second and the third letters, with no better results. A
+tanned face and a pair of broad shoulders kept appearing between him and
+the paper. Again he was thinking of Jack, as he had all night, to the
+exclusion of everything else. Unquestionably, this son had a lot of
+magnetic force in him; he had command of men. Why, he had won fifty of
+the best employees out of sheer sentiment to follow him out to the
+desert, when they had no idea what they were in for!
+
+His gaze fell and rested for some time on the bunch of roses on his desk.
+Every morning there had been a fresh bunch, in keeping with the custom
+that Jack had established. The father had become so used to their
+presence that he was unconscious of it. For all the pleasure he got out
+of them, they might as well have been in the cornucopia vase in the
+limousine. His hand went out spasmodically toward the roses, as if he
+would crush them; crush this symbol of the thing drawn from the mother
+that had invaded the calm autocracy of his existence. The velvety
+richness of the petals leaning toward him above the drooping grace of
+their stems made him pause in realization of the absurdity of his anger.
+A feeling to which he had been a stranger swept over him. It was like a
+breaking instinct of dependableness; and then he called up Dr.
+Bennington.
+
+"Well, he has gone!" he told the doctor, desperately.
+
+"You did not tell him the truth!" came the answer; and he noted that the
+doctor's voice was without its usual suavity. It was as matter-of-fact to
+the man of millions as if it had been advising an operation in a
+dispensary case.
+
+"No, not exactly," John Wingfield, Sr. confessed.
+
+"I told you what his nature was; how it had drawn on the temperament of
+his mother. I told you that with candor, with a decently human humility
+appealing to his affections, everything was possible. And remember, he is
+strong, stronger than you, John Wingfield! There's a process of fate in
+him! John Wingfield, you--" The sentence ended abruptly, as if the doctor
+had dropped the receiver on the hooks with a crash.
+
+Phantoms were closing in around John Wingfield, Sr.... His memory
+ranged back over the days of ardent youth, in the full tide of growing
+success, when to want a thing, human or material, meant to have it....
+And in his time he had told a good many lies. The right lie, big and
+daring, at the right moment had won more than one victory. With John
+Prather out of the way, he had decided on an outright falsehood to his
+son. Why had he not compromised with Dr. Bennington's advice and tried
+part falsehood and part contrition? But no matter, no matter. He would
+go on; he was made of steel.
+
+Again the tanned face and broad shoulders stood between him and the
+page. Jack was strong; yes, strong; and he was worth having. All the old
+desire of possession reappeared, in company with his hatred of defeat.
+He was thinking of the bare spot on the wall in the drawing-room in place
+of the Velasquez. There would be an end of his saying: "The boy is the
+spit of the ancestor and just as good a fighter, too; only his abilities
+are turned into other channels more in keeping with the spirit of the
+age!" An end of: "Fine son you have there!" from men at the club who had
+given him only a passing nod in the old days. For he was not displeased
+that the boy was liked, where he himself was not. The men whom he admired
+were those who had faced him with "No!" across the library desk; who had
+got the better of him, even if he did not admit it to himself. And the
+strength of his son, baffling to his cosmos, had won his admiration. No,
+he would not lose Jack's strength without an effort; he wanted it for his
+own. Perhaps something else, too, there in the loneliness of the office
+in the face of that bunch of roses was pulling him: the thrill that he
+had felt when he saw the moisture in Jack's eyes and felt the warmth of
+his grasp before Jack left the library.
+
+And Jack and John Prather were speeding West to the same destination!
+They would meet! What then? There was no use of trying to work in an
+office on Broadway when the forces which he had brought into being over
+twenty years ago were in danger of being unloosed out on the desert, with
+Jack riding free and the fingers of the ancestor-devil on the reins. John
+Wingfield, Sr. called in the general manager.
+
+"You are in charge until I return," he said; and a few hours later he was
+in a private car, bound for Little Rivers.
+
+
+
+
+PART III
+
+HE FINDS HIS PLACE IN LIFE
+
+
+
+
+XXXV
+
+BACK TO LITTLE RIVERS
+
+
+As with the gentle touch of a familiar hand, the ozone of high altitudes
+gradually and sweetly awakened Jack. The engine was puffing on an
+upgrade; the car creaked and leaned in taking a curve. Raising the shade
+of his berth he looked out on spectral ranges that seemed marching and
+tumbling through dim distances. With pillows doubled under his head he
+lay back, filling sight and mind with the indistinctness and spacious
+mystery of the desert at night; recalling his thoughts with his last
+view of it over two months ago in the morning hours after leaving El
+Paso and seeing his future with it now, where then he had seen his
+future with the store.
+
+"Think of old Burleigh raising oranges! I am sure that the trees will be
+well trimmed," he whispered. "Think of Mamie Devore in the thick of the
+great jelly competition, while the weight of Joe Mathewson's shoulders
+starts a spade into the soil as if it were going right to the centre of
+the earth. Why, Joe is likely to get us into international difficulties
+by poking the ribs of a Chinese ancestor! Yes--if we don't lose our
+Little Rivers; and we must not lose it!"
+
+The silvery face of the moon grew fainter with the coming of a ruddier
+light; the shadows of the mountains were being etched definitely on the
+plateaus that stretched out like vast floors under the developing glow
+of sunrise; and the full splendor of day had come, with its majestic
+spread of vision.
+
+"When Joe sees that he will feel so strong he will want to get out and
+carry the Pullman," Jack thought. "But Mamie will not let him for fear
+that he will overdo!"
+
+How slow the train seemed to travel! It was a snail compared to Jack's
+eagerness to arrive. He was inclined to think that P.D., Wrath of God,
+and Jag Ear were faster than through expresses. He kept inquiring of the
+conductor if they were on time, and the conductor kept repeating that
+they were. How near that flash of steel at a bend around a tongue of
+chaotic rock, stretching out into the desert sea, with its command to man
+to tunnel or accept a winding path for his iron horse! How long in coming
+to it in that rare air, with its deceit of distances! Landmark after
+landmark of peak or bold ridge took the angle of some recollected view of
+his five years' wanderings. It was already noon when he saw Galeria from
+the far end of the long basin that he had crossed, with the V as the
+compass of his bearings, on the ride that brought him to the top to meet
+Mary and Pete Leddy.
+
+Then the V was lost while the train wound around the range that formed
+one side of the basin's rim. The blaze of midday had passed before it
+entered the reaches of the best valley yet in the judgment of a
+connoisseur in valleys; and under the Eternal Painter's canopy a spot of
+green quivered in the heat-rays of the horizon. His Majesty was in a
+dreamy mood. He was playing in delicate variations, tranquil and
+enchanting, of effects in gold and silver, now gossamery thin, now
+thick and rich.
+
+"What is this thing crawling along on two silken threads and so afraid of
+the hills?" he was asking, sleepily. "Eh? No! Bring the easel to me, if
+you want a painting. I am not going to rise from my easy couch. There!
+Fix that cushion so! I am a leisurely, lordly aristocrat. Palette? No, I
+will just shake my soft beard of fine mist back and forth across the sky,
+a spectrum for the sunrays. So! so! I see that this worm is a railroad
+train. Let it curl up in the shadow of a gorge and take a nap. I will
+wake it up by and by when I seize my brush and start a riot in the
+heavens that will make its rows of window-glass eyes stare."
+
+"I am on this train and in a hurry!" Jack objected.
+
+"Do I hear the faint echo of a human ego down there on the earth?"
+demanded the Eternal Painter. "Who are you? One of the art critics?"
+
+"One of Your Majesty's loving subjects, who has been away in a foreign
+kingdom and returns to your allegiance," Jack answered.
+
+"So be it. I shall know if what you say is true when I gaze into your
+eyes at sunset."
+
+"I am bringing you a Velasquez!" Jack added.
+
+"Good! Put him where he can have a view out of the window of his first
+teacher at work in the studio of the universe."
+
+The train crept on toward the hour of the Eternal Painter's riot and
+toward Little Rivers, while the patch of green was softly, impalpably
+growing, growing, until the crisscross breaks of the streets developed
+and Jack could identify the Doge's and other bungalows. He was on the
+platform of the car before the brakes ground on the wheels, leaning out
+to see a crowd at the station, which a minute later became a prospect of
+familiar, kindly, beaming faces. There was a roar of "Hello, Jack!" in
+the heavy voices of men and the treble of children. Then he did not see
+the faces at all for a second; he saw only mist.
+
+"Not tanned, Jack, but you'll brown up soon!"
+
+"Gosh! But we've been lonesome without you!"
+
+"Cure any case of sore eyes on record!"
+
+Jack was too full of the glory of this unaffected welcome in answer to
+his telegram that he was coming to find words at first; but as he fairly
+dropped off the steps into the arms of Jim Galway and Dr. Patterson he
+shouted in a shaking voice:
+
+"Hello, everybody! Hello, Little Rivers!"
+
+He noted, while all were trying to grasp his hands at once, that the men
+had their six-shooters. A half-dozen were struggling to get his suit
+case. Not one of his friends was missing except the Doge and Mary.
+
+"Let the patient have a little air!" protested Dr. Patterson, as some
+started in to shake hands a second time.
+
+"Fellow-citizens, if there's anything in the direct primary I feel sure
+of the nomination!" said Jack drily.
+
+"You're already elected!" shouted Bob Worther.
+
+Around at the other side of the station Jack found Firio waiting his turn
+in patient isolation, with P.D., Wrath of God, and Jag Ear.
+
+"_Sí! sí_!" called Firio triumphantly to all the sceptics who had told
+him that Jack would not return.
+
+Jack took the little Indian by the shoulders and rocked him back and
+forth in delight, while Firio's eyes were burning coals of jubilation.
+
+"You knew!" Jack exclaimed. "You were right! I have come back!"
+
+"_Sí, sí_! I know!" repeated Firio.
+
+"No stopping him from bringing the whole cavalcade to the station,
+either," said Jim Galway. "And he wouldn't join the rest of us out in
+front of the station. He was going to be his own reception committee and
+hold an overflow meeting all by himself!"
+
+There was no disguising the fact that the equine trio of veterans
+remembered Jack. With P.D. and Jag Ear the demonstration was
+unrestrained; but however exultant Wrath of God might be in secret, he
+was of no mind to compromise his reputation for lugubriousness by any
+public display of emotional weakness.
+
+"Wrath of God, I believe you were a cross-eyed Cromwellian soldier in
+your previous incarnation!" said Jack; "and as it is hard for a horse to
+be crosseyed, you could not retain the characteristic. Think of that!
+Wouldn't a cross-eyed Cromwellian soldier strike fear to the heart of any
+loyalist? And Jag Ear, you're getting fat!"
+
+"I keep his hoofs hard. When he fat he eat less on trail!" explained
+Firio, becoming almost voluble. "All ready for trail!" he hinted.
+
+"Not now, Firio," said Jack. "And, Firio, there's a package at the
+station, a big, flat case. It came by express on the same train with
+me--the most precious package in the world. See that it is taken to
+the house."
+
+"Sí! You ride?" asked Firio, offering P.D.'s reins.
+
+"No, we'll all walk."
+
+The procession had started toward the town when Jack felt something soft
+poking him in the small of the back and looked around to find that the
+cause was P.D.'s muzzle. Wrath of God and Jag Ear might go with Firio,
+but P.D. proposed to follow Jack.
+
+"And after I have ridden you thousands of miles and you've heard all my
+songs over and over! Well, well, P.D., you are a subtle flatterer! Come
+along!" Then he turned to Jim Galway: "Has John Prather arrived?"
+
+"Yes, last night."
+
+"He is here now?" Jack put in quickly.
+
+"No; he pulled out at dawn on his way to Agua Fria."
+
+"Oh!" Jack was plainly disappointed. "He has the grant for the
+water rights?"
+
+"Yes," said Jim, "though he hasn't made the fact public. He does
+everything in his smooth, quiet fashion, with a long head, and I suppose
+he hasn't things just right yet to spring his surprise. But there is no
+disputing the fact--he has us!"
+
+One man henceforth was in control of the water. His power over the
+desert community would be equivalent to control of the rains in a
+humid locality.
+
+"You see," Jim continued, "old man Lefferts' partners had really never
+sold out to him; so his transfer to the Doge wasn't legal. He turned his
+papers over to Prather, giving Prather full power to act for him in
+securing the partners' surrender of their claims and straighten out
+everything with the Territory and get a bonafide concession. That is as I
+understand it, for the whole business has been done in an underhand way.
+Prather represented to the Doge that he was acting entirely in the
+interests of the community and his only charge would be the costs. The
+Doge quite believed in Prather's single-mindedness and public spirit.
+Well, with the use of money and all the influences he could command,
+including the kind that Pete Leddy exercises, he got the concession and
+in his name. It was very smart work. I suppose it was due to the crafty
+way he could direct the Doge to do his wishes that the Doge happened to
+be off the scene at the critical stage of the negotiations. When he went
+to New York all that remained was for him to obtain the capital for his
+scheme. Lefferts and his partners had the underlying rights and the Doge
+the later rights, thanks to his improvements, and Prather has them both.
+Well, Leddy and his crowd have been taking up plots right and left;
+that's their share in the exploitation. They're here, waiting for the
+announcement to be made and--well, the water users' association is still
+in charge; but it won't be when Prather says the word."
+
+"And you have no plans?" Jack asked.
+
+"None."
+
+"And the Doge?"
+
+"None. What can the old man do? Though nobody exactly blames him, a good
+many aren't of a mind to consult him at all. The crisis has passed beyond
+him. Three or four men, good men, too, were inclined to have it out with
+John Prather; but that would have precipitated a general fight with
+Leddy's gang. The conservatives got the hot-heads to wait till you came.
+You see, the trouble with every suggestion is that pretty much everybody
+is against it except the fellow who made it. The more we have talked,
+the more we have drifted back to you. It's a case of all we've got in the
+world and standing together, and we are ready to get behind you and take
+orders, Jack."
+
+"Yes, ready to fight at the drop of the hat, seh, or to sit still on our
+doorsteps with our tongues in our cheeks and doing the wives' mending, as
+you say!" declared Bob Worther. "It's right up to you!"
+
+"You are all of the same opinion?" asked Jack.
+
+They were, with one voice, which was not vociferous. For theirs was that
+significantly quiet mood of an American crowd when easy-going good nature
+turns to steel. Their partisanship in pioneerdom had not been with
+six-shooters, but with the ethics of the Doge; and such men when aroused
+do not precede action with threats.
+
+"All right!" said Jack.
+
+There was a rustle and an exchange of satisfied glances and a chorus of
+approval like an indrawing of breath.
+
+"First, I will see the Doge," Jack added; "and then I shall go to
+the house."
+
+Galway, Dr. Patterson, Worther, and three or four others went on with him
+toward the Ewold bungalow. They were halted on the way by Pete Leddy,
+Ropey Smith, and a dozen followers, who appeared from a side street and
+stopped across Jack's path, every one of them with a certain slouching
+aggressiveness and staring hard at him. Pete and Ropey still kept faith
+with their pledge to Jack in the _arroyo_. They were without guns, but
+their companions were armed in defiance of the local ordinance which had
+been established for Jack's protection.
+
+"Howdy do, Leddy?" said Jack, as amiably as if there had never been
+anything but the pleasantest of relations between them.
+
+"Getting polite, eh! Where's your pretty whistle?" Leddy answered.
+
+"I put it in storage in New York," Jack said laughing; then, with a
+sudden change to seriousness: "Leddy, is it true that you and John
+Prather have got the water rights to this town?"
+
+"None of your d----d business!" Leddy rapped out. "The only business I've
+got with you has been waiting for some time, and you can have it your way
+out in the _arroyo_ where we had it before, right now!"
+
+"As I said, Pete, I put the whistle in storage and I have already
+apologized for the way I used it," returned Jack. "I can't accommodate
+you in the _arroyo_ again. I have other things to attend to."
+
+"Then the first time you get outside the limits of this town you will
+have to play my way--a man's way!"
+
+"I hope not, Pete!"
+
+"Naturally you hope so, for you know I will get you, you--"
+
+"Careful!" Jack interrupted. "You'd better leave that out until we are
+both armed. Or, if you will not, why, we both have weapons that nature
+gave us. Do you prefer that way?" and Jack's weight had shifted to the
+ball of his foot.
+
+Plainly this was not to Pete's taste.
+
+"I don't want to bruise you. I mean to make a clean hole through you!"
+he answered.
+
+"That is both courteous and merciful; and you are very insistent, Leddy,"
+Jack returned, and walked on.
+
+"Just as sweet as honey, just as cool as ice, and just as sunny as
+June!" whispered Bob Worther to the man next him.
+
+Again Jack was before the opening in the Ewold hedge, with its glimpse
+of the spacious living-room. The big ivory paper-cutter lay in its
+accustomed place on the broad top of the Florentine table. In line with
+it on the wall was a photograph of Abbey's mural in the Pennsylvania
+capitol and through the open window a photograph of a Puvis de Chavannes
+was visible. Evidently the Doge had already hung some of the
+reproductions of masterpieces which he had brought from New York. But no
+one was on the porch or in the living-room; the house was silent. As
+Jack started across the cement bridge he was halted by a laugh from his
+companions. He found that P.D. was taking no risks of losing his master
+again; he was going right on into the Doge's, too. Jim took charge of
+him, receiving in return a glance from the pony that positively reeked
+of malice.
+
+Again Jack was on his way around the Doge's bungalow on the journey he
+had made so many times in the growing ardor of the love that had mastered
+his senses. The quiet of the garden seemed a part of the pervasive
+stillness that stretched away to the pass from the broad path of the
+palms under the blazonry of the sun. As he proceeded he heard the
+crunching of gravel under a heavy tread. The Doge was pacing back and
+forth in the cross path, fighting despair with the forced vigor of his
+steps, while Mary was seated watching him. As the Doge wheeled to face
+Jack at the sound of his approach, it was not in surprise, but rather in
+preparedness for the expected appearance of another character in a
+drama. This was also Mary's attitude. They had heard of his coming and
+they received his call with a trace of fatalistic curiosity. The Doge
+suddenly dropped on a bench, as if overcome by the weariness and
+depression of spirits that he had been defying; but there was something
+unyielding and indomitable in Mary's aspect.
+
+"Well, Sir Chaps, welcome!" said the Doge. "We still have a seat in the
+shade for you. Will you sit down?"
+
+But Jack remained standing, as if what he had to say would be soon said.
+
+"I have come back and come for good," he began. "Yes, I have come back to
+take all the blue ribbons at ranching," he added, with a touch of garden
+nonsense that came like a second thought to soften the abruptness of his
+announcement.
+
+"For good! For good! You!" The Doge stared at Jack in incomprehension.
+
+"Yes, my future is out here, now."
+
+"You give up the store--the millions--your inheritance!" cried the Doge,
+still amazed and sceptical as he sounded the preposterousness of this
+idea to worldly credulity.
+
+"Quite!"
+
+There was no mistaking the firmness of the word. "To make your fortune,
+your life, out here?"
+
+The Doge's voice was throbbing with the wonder of the thing.
+
+"Yes!"
+
+"Why? Why? I feel that I have a right to ask why!" demanded the Doge, in
+all the majesty of the moment when he faced John Wingfield, Sr. in the
+drawing-room.
+
+"Because of a lie and what it concealed. Because of reasons that may not
+be so vague to you as they are to me."
+
+"A lie! Yes, a lie that came home!" the Doge repeated, while he passed
+his hand back and forth over his eyes. The hand was trembling. Indeed,
+his whole body was trembling, while he sought for self-control and to
+collect his thoughts for what he had to say to that still figure awaiting
+his words. When he looked up it was with an expression wholly new to
+Jack. Its candor was not that of transparent mental processes in serene
+philosophy or forensic display, but that of a man who was about to lay
+bare things of the past which he had kept secret.
+
+"Sir Chaps, I am going to give you my story, however weak and blameworthy
+it makes me appear," he said. "Sir Chaps, you saw me in anger in the
+Wingfield drawing-room, further baffling you with a mystery which must
+have begun for you the night that you came to Little Rivers when we
+exchanged a look in which I saw that you knew that I recognized you. I
+tried to talk as if you were a welcome stranger, when I was holding in my
+rancor. There was no other face in the world that I would not rather have
+seen in this community than yours!
+
+"How glad I was to hear that you were leaving by the morning train! How I
+counted the days of your convalescence after you were wounded! How glad I
+was at the news that you were to go as soon as you were well! With what a
+revelry of suggestion I planned to speed your parting! How demoralized I
+was when you announced that you were going to stay! How amazed at your
+seriousness about ranching--but how distrustful! Yet what joy in your
+companionship! At times I wanted to get my arms around you and hug you as
+a scarred old grizzly bear would hug a cub. And, first and last, your
+success with everybody here! Your cool hand in the duel! That iron in
+your will which would triumph at any cost when you broke Nogales's arm!
+For some reason you had chosen to stop, in the play period of youth, on
+the way to the inheritance to overcome some obstacle that it pleased you
+to overcome and to amuse yourself a while in Little Rivers--you with your
+steadiness in a fight and your airy, smiling confidence in yourself!"
+
+"I--I did not know that I was like that!" said Jack, in hurt, groping
+surprise. "Was I truly?"
+
+The Doge nodded.
+
+"As I saw you," he said.
+
+Jack looked at Mary, frankly and calmly.
+
+"Was I truly?" he asked her.
+
+"As I saw you!" she repeated, as an impersonal, honest witness.
+
+"Then I must have been!" he said, with conviction. "But I hope that I
+shall not be in the future." And he smiled at Mary wistfully. But her
+gaze was bent on the ground.
+
+"And you want it all--all the story from me?" the Doge asked, hesitating.
+
+"All!" Jack answered.
+
+"It strikes hard at your father."
+
+"The truth must strike where it will, now!"
+
+"Then, your face, so like your father's, stood for the wreck of two
+lives to me, and for recollections in my own career that tinged my view
+of you, Jack. You were one newcomer to Little Rivers to whom I could not
+wholly apply the desert rule of oblivion to the past and judgment of
+every man solely by his conduct in this community. No! It was out of the
+question that I could ever look at you without thinking who you were.
+
+"You know, of course, that your father and I spent our boyhood in
+Burbridge. Once I found that he had told me an untruth and we had our
+difference out, as boys will; and, as I was in the right, he confessed
+the lie before I let him up. That defeat was a hurt to his egoism that he
+could not forget. He was that way, John Wingfield, in his egoism. It was
+like flint, and his ambition and energy were without bounds. I remember
+he would say when teased that some day he should have more money than all
+the town together, and when he had money no one would dare to tease him.
+He had a remarkable gift of ingratiation with anyone who could be of
+service to him. My uncle, who was the head of the family, was fond of
+him; he saw the possibilities of success in this smart youngster in a New
+England village. It was the Ewold money that gave John Wingfield his
+start. With it he bought the store in which he began as a clerk. He lost
+a good part of the Ewold fortune later in one of his enterprises that did
+not turn out well. But all this is trifling beside what is to come.
+
+"He went on to his great commercial career. I, poor fool, was an egoist,
+too. I tried to paint. I had taste, but no talent. In outbursts of
+despair my critical discrimination consigned my own work to the rubbish
+heap. I tried to write books, only to find that all I had was a head
+stuffed with learning, mixed with the philosophy that is death to the
+concentrated application that means positive accomplishment. But I could
+not create. I was by nature only a drinker at the fountain; only a
+student, the pitiful student who could read his Caesar at eight, learn a
+language without half trying, but with no ability to make my knowledge of
+service; with no masterful purpose of my own--a failure!"
+
+"No one is a failure who spreads kindliness and culture as he goes
+through life," Jack interrupted, earnestly; "who gives of himself
+unstintedly as you have; who teaches people to bring a tribute of flowers
+to a convalescent! Why, to found a town and make the desert bloom--that
+is better than to add another book to the weight of library shelves or to
+get a picture on the line!"
+
+"Thank you, Jack!" said the Doge, with a flash of his happy manner of
+old, while there was the play of fleeting sunshine over the hills and
+valleys of his features. "I won't call it persiflage. I am too selfish,
+too greedy of a little cheer to call it persiflage. I like the illusion
+you suggest."
+
+He was silent for a while, and when he spoke again it was with the tragic
+simplicity of one near his climax.
+
+"Your father and I loved the same girl---your mother. It seemed that in
+every sympathy of mind and heart she and I were meant to travel the long
+highway together. But your father won her with his gift for ingratiation
+with the object of his desire, which amounts to a kind of genius. He won
+her with a lie and put me in a position that seemed to prove that the
+lie was truth. She accepted him in reaction; in an impulse of heart-break
+that followed what she believed to be a revelation of my true character
+as something far worse than that of idler. I married the woman whom he
+had made the object of his well-managed calumny. My wife knew where my
+heart was and why I had married her. It is from her that Mary gets her
+dark hair and the brown of her cheeks which make her appear so at home on
+the desert. Soon after Mary's birth she chose to live apart from me--but
+I will not speak further of her. She is long ago dead. I knew that your
+mother had left your father. I saw her a few times in Europe. But she
+never gave the reason for the separation. She would talk nothing of the
+past, and with the years heavy on our shoulders and the memory of what we
+had been to each other hovering close, words came with difficulty and
+every one was painful. Her whole life was bound up in you, as mine was in
+Mary. It was you that kept her from being a bitter cynic; you that kept
+her alive.
+
+"Some of the Ewold money that John Wingfield lost was mine. You see how
+he kept on winning; how all the threads of his weaving closed in around
+me. I came to the desert to give Mary life with the fragments of my
+fortune; and here I hope that, as you say, I have done something worthier
+than live the life of a wandering, leisurely student who had lapsed into
+the observer for want of the capacity by nature or training to do
+anything else.
+
+"But sometimes I did long for the centres of civilization; to touch
+elbows with their activities; to feel the flow of the current of
+humanity in great streets. Not that I wanted to give up Little Rivers,
+but I wanted to go forth to fill the mind with argosies which I could
+enjoy here at my leisure. And Mary was young. The longing that she
+concealed must be far more powerful than mine. I saw the supreme
+selfishness of shutting her up on the desert, without any glimpse of the
+outer world. I sensed the call that sent her on her lonely rides to the
+pass. I feared that your coming had increased her restlessness.
+
+"But I wander! That is my fault, as you know, Sir Chaps. Well, we come to
+the end of the weaving; to the finality of John Wingfield's victory.
+Little Rivers was getting out of hand. I could plan a ranch, but I had
+not a business head. I had neither the gift nor the experience to deal
+with lawyers and land-grabbers. I knew that with the increase of
+population and development our position was exciting the cupidity of
+those who find quicker profit in annexing what others have built than in
+building on their own account. I knew that we ought to have a great dam;
+that there was water to irrigate ten times the present irrigated area.
+
+"Then came John Prather. I saw in him the judgment, energy, and ability
+for organization of a real man of affairs. He was young, self-made,
+engaging and convincing of manner. He liked our life and ideals in Little
+Rivers; he wanted to share our future. In his resemblance to you I saw
+nothing but a coincidence that I passed over lightly. He knew how to
+handle the difficult situation that arose with the reappearance of old
+man Lefferts' partners. He would get the water rights legalized beyond
+dispute and turn them over to the water users' association; he would
+bring in capital for the dam; the value of our property would be
+enhanced; Little Rivers would become a city in her own right, while I was
+growing old delectably in the pride of founder. So he pictured it and so
+I dreamed. I was so sure of the future that I dared the expense of a trip
+to New York.
+
+"And always to me, when I looked at you and when I thought of you, you
+were the son of John Wingfield; you incarnated the inheritance of his
+strength. But when, from the drawing-room, I saw your father, whom I had
+not seen for fifteen years, then--well, the thing came to me in a burning
+second, the while I glimpsed his face before he saw mine. He was smiling
+as if pleased with himself and his power; he was rubbing the palms of his
+hands together; and I saw that it was John Prather who was like John
+Wingfield in manner, pose, and feature. You were like the fighting man,
+your ancestor, and your airy confidence was his. And I, witless and
+unperceiving, had been won by the same methods of ingratiation with which
+John Wingfield had won the assistance of the Ewold fortune for the first
+step of his career; with which he had won Alice Jamison and kept me
+unaware of his plan while he was lying to her.
+
+"Finally, let us say, in all charity, that your father is what he is
+because of what is born in him and for the same reason that the snowball
+gathers size as it rolls; and I am what I am for the same reason that the
+wind scatter the sands of the desert--a man full of books and tangent
+inconsequence of ideas, without sense; a simpleton who knows a painting
+but does not know men; a garrulous, philosophizing, blind, old
+simpleton, whose pompous incompetency has betrayed a trust! Through me,
+men and women came here to settle and make a home! Through me they
+lose--to my shame!"
+
+The Doge buried his face in his hands and drew a deep breath more
+pitiful than a sob, which, as it went free of the lungs, seemed to leave
+an empty ruin of what had once been a splendid edifice. He was in
+striking contrast to Mary, who, throughout the story fondly regarding
+him, had remained as straight as a young pine. Now, with her rigidity
+suddenly become so pliant that it was a fluid thing mixed of
+indignation, fearlessness, and compelling sympathy, she sprang to his
+side. She knew the touchstone to her father's emotion. He did not want
+his cheek patted in that moment of agony. He wanted a stimulant; some
+justification for living.
+
+"There is no shame in believing in those who speak fairly! There is
+honor, the honor of faith in mankind!" she cried penetratingly. "There is
+no shame in being the victim of lies!"
+
+"No! No shame!" the Doge cried, rising unsteadily to his feet
+under the whip.
+
+"And we are not afraid for the future!" she continued. "And the other men
+and women in Little Rivers are not afraid for the future!"
+
+"No, not afraid under this sun, in this air. Afraid!"
+
+An unconquerable flame had come into his eyes in answer to that in
+Mary's.
+
+"The others have asked me to act for them, and I think I may yet save our
+rights," said Jack. "Will you also trust me?"
+
+"Will I trust you, Jack? Trust you who gave up your inheritance?"
+exclaimed the Doge. "I would trust you on a mission to the stars or to
+lead a regiment; and the wish of the others is mine."
+
+Jack had turned to go, but he looked back at Mary.
+
+"And you, Mary? I have your good wishes?"
+
+He could not resist that question; and though it was clear that nothing
+could stay him--as clear as it had been in the _arroyo_ that he would
+keep his word and face Leddy--he was hanging on her word and he was
+seeing her eyes moist, with a bright fire like that of sunshine on still
+water. She was swaying slightly as a young pine might in a wind. Her eyes
+darkened as with fear, then her cheeks went crimson with the stir of her
+blood; and suddenly, her eyes were sparkling in their moisture like water
+when it ripples under sunshine.
+
+"Yes, Jack," she said quietly, with the tense eagerness of a good cause
+that sends a man away to the wars.
+
+"That is everything!" he answered.
+
+So it was! Everything that he could ask now, with his story and hers so
+fresh in mind! He started up the path, but stopped at the turn to look
+back and wave his hand to the two figures in a confident gesture.
+
+"Luck with you, Sir Chaps!" called the Doge, with all the far-carrying
+force of his oldtime sonorousness.
+
+"Luck! luck!" Mary called, on her part; and her voice had a flute note
+that seemed to go singing on its own ether waves through the tender
+green foliage, through all the gardens of Little Rivers, and even away
+to the pass.
+
+"Mary! Mary!" he answered, with a ring of cheeriness. "Luck for me will
+always come at your command!"
+
+A moment later Galway and the others saw him smiling with a hope that ran
+as high as his purpose, as he passed through the gateway of the hedge.
+
+"It will all be right!" he told them.
+
+With P.D. keeping his muzzle close to the middle of Jack's back, the
+party started toward his house, which took them almost the length of the
+main street.
+
+"Prather went by the range trail, of course?" Jack asked Galway.
+
+"No, straight out across the desert," said Galway.
+
+"Straight out across the desert!" exclaimed Jack, mystified.
+
+For one had a choice of two routes to Agua Fria, which was well over the
+border in Mexico. Not a drop of water was to be had on the way across the
+trackless plateau, but halfway on the range trail was a camping-place,
+Las Cascadas, where a spring which spouted in a tiny cascade welcomed the
+traveller. Under irrigation, most of the land for the whole stretch
+between the two towns would be fertile. There was said to be a big
+underground run at Agua Fria that could be pumped at little expense.
+
+"All I can make out of Prather's taking a straight line, which really is
+slower, as you know, on account of the heavy sand in places, is to look
+over the soil," said Galway. "He may be preparing to get a concession in
+Mexico at the same time as on this side, so as to secure control of the
+whole valley. It means railroads, factories, new towns, millions--but you
+and I have talked all this before in our dreams."
+
+"Who was with him?" Jack asked.
+
+"Pedro Nogales. He seems to have taken quite a fancy to Pedro and Pedro
+is acting as guide. Leddy recommended him, I suppose."
+
+"No one else?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Good!" said Jack.
+
+As they turned into the side street where the front of Jack's bungalow
+was visible, Jim Galway observed that they had seen nothing of Leddy or
+any of his followers.
+
+"Maybe he's gone to join Prather," said Bob Worther.
+
+But Jack paid no attention to the remark. He was preoccupied with the
+first sight of his ranch in over two months.
+
+"It will be all right!" he called out to the crowd in his yard; for the
+others who had met him at the station were waiting for him there. "Bob,
+those umbrella-trees could shade a thin, short man now, even if he didn't
+hug the trunk! Firio has done well, hasn't he?" he concluded, after he
+had walked through the garden and surveyed the fields and orchards in
+fond comparison as to progress.
+
+"The best I ever knew an Indian to do!" said Jim Galway.
+
+"And everything kept right on growing while I was away! That's the joy of
+planting things. They are growing for somebody, if not for you!"
+
+Inside the house he found Firio, with the help of some of the ranchers,
+taking the pictures out of their cases. Firio surveyed the buccaneer
+for some time, squinting his eyes and finally opening them saucer-wide
+in approval.
+
+"You!" he said to Jack. And of the Sargent, after equally deliberate
+observation, he said: "A lady!"
+
+That seemed about all there was to say and expressed the thought of the
+onlookers.
+
+"And, Firio, now it's the trail!" said Jack.
+
+"_Sí, sí_!" said Firio, ever so softly. "We take rifles?"
+
+"Yes. Food for a week and two-days' water."
+
+It pleased Jack to hang the portraits while Firio was putting on Jag
+Ear's pack; and he made it a ceremony in which his silence was
+uninterrupted by the comments of the ranchers. They stood in wondering
+awe before John Wingfield, Knight, hung where he could watch the Eternal
+Painter at his sunset displays and looking at the "Portrait of a Lady"
+across the breadth of the living-room, whose neutral tones made a perfect
+setting for their dominant genius.
+
+"I believe they are at home," said Jack, with a fond look from one to the
+other, when Firio came to say that everything was ready.
+
+"Señor Jack," whispered Firio insinuatingly, "for the trail you wear the
+grand, glad trail clothes and the big spurs. I keep them shiny--the big
+spurs!" He was speaking with the authority of an expert in trail
+fashions, who would consider Jack in very bad form if he refused.
+
+"Why, yes, Firio, yes; it is so long since we have been on the trail!"
+And he went into the bedroom to make the change.
+
+"I've never seen him quite so dumb quiet!" said Worther.
+
+Jack certainly had been quiet, ominously quiet and self-contained. When
+he came out of the bedroom he was without the jaunty freedom of manner
+that Little Rivers always associated with his full regalia. In place of
+the dreamy distances in his eyes on such occasions were a sad
+preoccupation and determination. When they went outside to Firio and the
+waiting ponies, the Eternal Painter was in his evening orgy of splendor.
+But even Jack did not look up at the sky this time as he walked along in
+silence with his fellow-citizens to the point where the farthest furrow
+of his ranch had been drawn across the virgin desert. His foot was
+already in the stirrup when Jim Galway spoke the thought of all:
+
+"Jack, there's only two of you, and if it happened that you met
+Leddy--"
+
+"It is Prather that I want to see," Jack answered.
+
+"But Leddy's whole gang! We don't know what your plans are, but if
+there's going to be a mix-up, why, we've got to be with you!"
+
+"No!" said Jack, decidedly. "Remember, Jim, you were to trust me. This is
+a mission that requires only two; it is between Prather and me. We are
+going to get acquainted for the first time."
+
+Already Firio, riding Wrath of God, had started, and the bells of Jag Ear
+were jingling, while the rifles, their bores so clean from Firio's care,
+danced with the gleams of sunset in their movement with the burro's
+jogging trot. Jack sprang into the saddle, his face lighting as the foot
+came home in the stirrup.
+
+"It will be all right!" he called back.
+
+P.D. in the freshness of his long holiday, feeling a familiar pressure of
+a leg, hastened to overtake his companions; and the group of Little
+Riversites watched a chubby horseman and a tall, gaunt horseman, bathed
+in gold, riding away on a hazy sea of gold, with Jag Ear's bells growing
+fainter and fainter, until the moving specks were lost in the darkness.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVI
+
+AROUND THE WATER-HOLE
+
+
+Easy traveller had turned speedy traveller, on a schedule. Never had he
+and Firio ridden so fast as in pursuit of John Prather, who had eight
+hours' start of them on a two-days' journey. Jag Ear had to trot all the
+time to keep up. Ounce by ounce he was drawing on his sinking fund of fat
+in a constitutional crisis.
+
+"I keep his hoofs good. I keep his wind good. All right!" said Firio.
+
+It was after midnight before the steady jingle of Jag Ear's orchestra had
+any intermission. An hour for food and rest and the little party was off
+again in the delicious cool of the night, toward a curtain pricked with
+stars which seemed to be drawn down over the edge of the world.
+
+"What sort of horses had Prather and Nogales?" Jack asked. He must reach
+the water-hole as soon as Prather; for it was not unlikely that Prather
+might have fresh mounts waiting there to take him on to the nearest
+railroad station in Mexico.
+
+"Look good, but bad. Nogales no know horses!" Firio answered.
+
+"And they rode in the heat of the day!" said Jack, confidently.
+
+"_Sí_! And we ride P.D. and Wrath of God!"
+
+There were no sign-posts on this highway of desert space except the
+many-armed giant cacti, in their furrowed armor set with clusters of
+needles, like tawny auroras gleaming faintly; no trail on the hard earth
+under foot, mottled with bunches of sagebrush and sprays of low-lying
+cacti, all as still as the figures of an inlaid flooring in the violet
+sheen, with an occasional quick, irregular, shadowy movement when a
+frightened lizard or a gopher beat a precipitate retreat from the
+invading thud of hoofs in this sanctuary of dust-dry life. And the course
+of the hoofs was set midway between the looming masses of the mountain
+walls of the valley.
+
+Firio listened for songs from Señor Jack; he waited for stories from
+Señor Jack; but none came. He, the untalkative one of the pair, the
+living embodiment of a silent and happy companionship back and forth from
+Colorado to Chihuahua, liked to hear talk. Without it he was lonesome.
+If, by the criterion of a school examination, he never understood more
+than half of what Jack said, yet, in the measure of spirit, he understood
+everything.
+
+Now Jack was going mile after mile with nothing except occasional urging
+words to P.D. His close-cut hair well brushed back from his forehead
+revealed the sweep of his brow, lengthening his profile and adding to the
+effect of his leanness. The moonlight on his face, which had lost its
+tan, gave him an aspect of subdued and patient serenity in keeping with
+the surroundings. You would have said that he could ride on forever
+without tiring, and that he could go over a precipice now without even
+seeing any danger sign. He had never been like this in all Firio's
+memory. The silence became unsupportable for once to Indian taciturnity.
+If Jack would not talk Firio would. Yes, he would ask a question, just to
+hear the sound of a voice.
+
+"We go to fight?"
+
+"No, Firio."
+
+"Not to fight Prather?"
+
+"No."
+
+"To fight Leddy?"
+
+"I hope not."
+
+"Why we go? Why so--why so--" he had not the language to express the
+strange, brooding inquiry of his mind.
+
+"I go to save Little Rivers."
+
+"_Sí_!" said Firio, but as if this did not answer his question.
+
+"I go to get the end of a story, Firio--my story!" continued Jack. "I
+have travelled long for the story and now I shall have it all from
+John Prather."
+
+"_Sí, sí_!" said Firio, as if all the knowledge in the world had flashed
+into his head quicker than the hand of legerdemain could run the leaves
+of a pack of cards through its fingers. "And then?"
+
+At last Firio had won a smile from the untanned face which could not be
+the same to him until it was tanned.
+
+"Then I shall plant seeds and keep the ground around them soft and
+the weeds out of it; and I shall wear my heart on my sleeve and lay a
+siege--a siege in the open, without parallels or mines! A siege in
+the open!"
+
+Firio did not understand much about parallels or mines or, for that
+matter, about sieges; but he could see the smile fading from Jack's lips
+and could comprehend that the future of which Jack was speaking was very
+far from another prospect, which was immediate and vivid in his mind.
+
+"But you must fight Leddy! _Sí, sí_! You must fight Leddy first!"
+
+"Then I must, I suppose," said Jack, absently. "All things in their turn
+and time."
+
+"_Sí_!" answered Firio. All things in their turn and time! This desert
+truth was bred in him through his ancestry, no less than in the Eternal
+Painter himself.
+
+Again the silence of the morning darkness, with all the stars twinkling
+more faintly and some slipping from their places in the curtain into the
+deeper recesses of the broad band of night on the surface of the rolling
+ball. The plodding hoofs kept up their regular beat of the march of their
+little world of action in the presence of the Infinite; plodding,
+plodding on into the dawn which sent the last of the stars in flight,
+while the curtain melted away before blue distances swimming with light.
+Still bareheaded, Jack looked into the face of the sun which heaved above
+an irregular roof of rocks. It blazed into the range on the other side of
+the valley. It slaked its thirst with the slight fall of dew as a great,
+red tongue would lick up crumbs. Sun and sky, cactus and sagebrush, rock
+and dry earth and sand, that was all. Nowhere in that stretch of basin
+that seemed without end was there a sign of any other horseman or of
+human life.
+
+But at length, as they rode, their eyes saw what only eyes used to desert
+reaches could see, that the speck in the distance was not a cactus or
+even two or three cacti in line, but something alive and moving.
+Perceptibly they were gaining on it, while it developed into two riders
+and a pack animal in single file. Now Jack and Firio were coming into a
+region of more stunted vegetation, and soon the two figures emerged into
+a stretch of gray carpet on which they were as clearly silhouetted as a
+white sail on a green sea.
+
+"Very thick sand there--five or six miles of it. It make this the
+long way," said Firio. "They call it the apron of hell to fools who
+ride at noon."
+
+"And beyond that how many miles to the water-hole?"
+
+"Five or six."
+
+But Firio knew a way around where the going was good. It made a
+difference of two or three miles in distance against them, but two or
+three times that in their favor in time and the strength taken out of
+their ponies.
+
+"How long will Prather be in getting through the sand?" Jack asked.
+
+Firio squinted at the objects of their pursuit for a while, as if he
+wanted to be exact.
+
+"Almost as many hours as miles," he said.
+
+Near the zenith now, the sun was a bulging furnace eye, piercing through
+shirts into the flesh and sucking the very moisture of the veins. A
+single catspaw was all that the Eternal Painter had to offer over that
+basin shut in between the long, jagged teeth of the ranges biting into
+the steel-blue of the sky. The savage, merciless hours of the desert day
+approached; the hours of reckoning for unknowing and unprepared
+travellers.
+
+Jag Ear's bells had a faint plaintiveness at intervals and again their
+jingling was rapid and hysterical, as he tried to make up the distance
+lost through a lapse in effort. He had ceased altogether to wiggle the
+sliver of ear--the baton with which he conducted his orchestra--because
+this was clearly a waste of energy. P.D.'s steps still retained their
+dogged persistence, but their regular beat was slower, like that of a
+clock that needs winding. His head hung low. Wrath of God was no more and
+no less melancholy than when he was rusticating in Jack's yard. It seemed
+as if his sad visage, so reliably and grandly sad, might still be
+marching on toward the indeterminate line of the horizon when his legs
+were worn off his body.
+
+"Firio, you brown son of the sun," said Jack, with a sudden display of
+his old-time trail imagery, "you prolix, garrulous Firio, you knew! You
+had the great equine trio ready, and look at the miles they have done
+since sunset to prove it! You, P.D., favorite trooper of our household
+cavalry! You, Wrath of God, don't be afraid to make an inward smile, for
+your face will never tell on you! You, Jag Ear, beat a tattoo with the
+fragment of the gothic glory of burrohood, for we rest, to go on all the
+faster when the heat of the day is past!"
+
+While Prather and Nogales were riding over hell's apron, their pursuers
+had saddles off hot, moist backs, over which knowing hands were run to
+find no sores. After they had eaten, P.D. and Wrath of God and Jag Ear
+stood in drooping relaxation which would make the most of every moment of
+respite. Jack and Firio, with a blanket fastened to the rifles as
+standards, made a patch of shade in which they lay down.
+
+"Have a nap, Firio," said Jack. "I will wake you when it is time
+to start."
+
+"And you--you no sleep?" asked Firio.
+
+"I could not sleep to-day," Jack answered. "I don't feel as if I could
+sleep until I've seen Prather and heard his story--my story--Firio!" And
+he lay with eyes half closed, staring at the steel blue overhead.
+
+It was well after midday when they mounted for the remainder of the
+journey. The Eternal Painter was shaking out the silvery cloud-mist of
+his beard across a background that had a softer, kindlier, deeper blue.
+The shadows of the ponies and their riders and Jag Ear and his pack no
+longer lay under their bellies heavily, but were stretched out to one
+side by the angle of the sun, in cheerful, jogging fraternity. Prather
+and Nogales had again become only a speck.
+
+"Do you think that they are out of the sand?" asked Jack.
+
+"Very near," Firio answered.
+
+"Their ponies had a whole night's rest--we must not forget that," said
+Jack; "and they must be in a hurry, for certainly Nogales had sense
+enough to rest over noon."
+
+"_Quien sabe_!" answered Firio. "But we catch them--_sí, sí_!"
+
+Leading the way, Firio turned toward the eastern range until he came to a
+narrow tongue of shale almost as hard to the hoofs as asphalt, that ran
+like a shoal across that sea of sand. Rest had given the great equine
+trio renewed life. P.D., reduced in rank to second place, could not think
+of allowing more than a foot between his muzzle and the tail of Wrath of
+God, who was bound to make up the time he had lost in pursuit of the
+horizon. Another hypothesis of Jack's as to the cause of Wrath of God's
+melancholy was that solemn Covenanter's inability to get any nearer to
+the edge of the earth. Once he could poke his nose through the blue
+curtain and see what was on the other side, the satisfaction of his
+eternal curiosity might have made him a rollicking comedian. As for Jag
+Ear, his baton was once more conducting his orchestra in spirited tempo.
+He, who was nearest of all three in heart to Firio, might well have been
+saying to himself: "I knew! I knew we were not going through the sand!
+Firio and I knew!"
+
+So rapidly were they gaining that, when past the sand and they turned
+back westward, it was only a question of half an hour or so to come up
+with Prather and Nogales. Nogales had been riding ahead; but now Prather,
+after gazing over his shoulder for some time at his pursuers, took the
+lead. He was urging his horse as if he would avoid being overtaken.
+Evidently Nogales did not share that desire, for he let Prather go on
+alone. But Prather's horse was too tired after its effort in the sand and
+he halted and waited until Nogales, at a slow walk, closed up the gap
+between them, when they proceeded at their old, weary gait.
+
+As Jack and Firio came within hailing distance, both Prather and Nogales
+glanced at them sharply; but no word was spoken on either side. The
+absence of any call between these isolated voyagers of the desert sea was
+strangely unlike the average desert meeting. Prather and Nogales did not
+look back again, not even when Jack and Firio were very near. A neigh by
+P.D., a break into a trot by him and Wrath of God, and Firio was saying
+to Nogales:
+
+"You went right through the sand!"
+
+"_Sí_!" answered Pedro, with a grin.
+
+Still Prather did not so much as turn his head to get a glimpse of Jack,
+nor did he offer any sign of knowledge of Jack's presence when Jack
+reined alongside him so close that their stirrup leathers were brushing.
+Prather was gazing at the desert exactly in front of him, the reins
+hanging loose, almost out of hand. His horse was about spent, if not on
+the point of foundering. Jack was so near the mole on the cheek of the
+peculiar paleness that never tans that by half extending his arm he might
+have touched it. After all, it was only a raised patch of blue, a blemish
+removable by the slightest surgical operation which its owner must have
+preferred to retain.
+
+Firio and Nogales, also riding side by side, were also silent. There was
+no sound except Jag Ear's bells, now sunk to a faint tinkle in keeping
+with the slow progress of Prather's beaten horse. Looking at Prather's
+hands, Jack was thinking of another pair of hands amazingly like them. In
+the uncanniness of its proximity he was imagining how the profile would
+look without the birthmark, and he found himself grateful for the
+silence, which spoke so powerfully to him, in the time that it provided
+for bringing his faculties under control.
+
+"How do you do?" he said at last, pleasantly.
+
+Probably the silence had been equally welcome to Prather in charting his
+own course in the now unavoidable interview. He looked around slowly, and
+he was smiling with a trace of the satire that Jack had seen in the
+elevator, but smiling watchfully in a way that covers the apprehension of
+a keen glance. And he saw features that were calm and eyes that were
+still as the sky.
+
+"How do you do?" he answered; and paused as one who is about to slip a
+point of steel home into a scabbard. "How do you do, brother?" he
+added, as if uttering a shibboleth that could protect him from any
+physical violence.
+
+"Brother! Brother! Yes!" repeated Jack, with dry lips.
+
+This shaping of conviction into fact so nakedly, so coolly, made all the
+desert and the sky swim before him in kaleidoscopic patches of blue and
+gray, shot with zigzag flashes. He half reeled in the saddle; his hands
+gripped the pommel to hold himself in place. It was as if a long strain
+of nervous tension had come to an end with a crack. Prather's smile took
+a turn of deeper satisfaction. It was like John Wingfield, Sr.'s after
+Jack had left the library.
+
+"This is the first time we have ever met to speak," said Prather, easily.
+
+"Yes!" assented Jack, the gray settling back into desert and the blue
+into sky and the zigzag flashes becoming only the brilliance of late
+afternoon sunshine.
+
+"Certainly it is time that we got acquainted, brother," said Prather.
+
+"It is!" agreed Jack. "It is time that I knew your story!"
+
+"Which you have hardly heard from your--I mean, our father!" The pause
+between the "your" and the "our" was made with an appreciative
+significance. "Well, you see, I was the brother who had the mole on
+his cheek!"
+
+"Yes--pitifully yes!" said Jack, with a kind of horror at the expression
+of this face in his father's likeness, no less than at the words.
+
+"Why, no! I've often thought of _you_ rather pitifully!" said Prather.
+
+"You well might!" Jack answered, feelingly. "We may well share a common
+pity for each other."
+
+There was no sign that John Prather subscribed to the sentiment except in
+a certain quizzical turn of his lips, as he looked away.
+
+"Yes, the story has been kept from me. I have come for it!" said Jack.
+
+"That is raking out the skeletons. But why not rake out our skeletons
+together, you and I?" said Prather.
+
+It was clear that he enjoyed the prospect as an opportunity for
+retributive enlightenment.
+
+"To begin with, I have the rights of primogeniture in my favor," he said.
+"I was born a day before you were, in the same city of New York. My
+mother's name was not down in the telephone list as Mrs. Wingfield,
+however--I look at it all philosophically, you understand--and it was
+just that which made the difference between you and me, outside of the
+difference of our natures. But I am proud of my birth on both sides, in
+my own way. My mother was won without marriage and she was true to
+father. A woman of real ability, my mother! She was well suited to be
+John Wingfield's wife; better, I think, in the practical world of
+materialism than your mother. By a peculiar coincidence, unknown to
+father, my mother called in Dr. Bennington. So you and I have a further
+bond, in that the same doctor brought us into the world."
+
+"And my mother must have known this!" Jack exclaimed, in racking horror.
+
+At last the cause of her exile was clear in all its grisly monstrousness;
+the source of the pain in her eyes in the portrait had been traced home.
+Again he saw her white and trembling when she returned to the house in
+Versailles to find a visitor there; and now he realized the fulness of
+her relief when the frail boy said that he did not like his father. Her
+travels had spoken the restlessness of flight in search of oblivion to
+the very fact of his paternity. The "I give! I give!" of the portrait was
+the giving of the infinity of her fine, sensitive being to him to make
+him all hers. His feeling which had held him on the desert when he should
+have gone home, that feeling of literal revulsion toward his inheritance,
+was a thing born in him which had grown under her caresses and her
+training. She had been living solely for him to that last moment when the
+book dropped out of her hand; and the incarnation of that which had
+killed her was riding beside him now in the flesh. He felt a weaving of
+his muscles, a tightening of his nerves, as if waiting on the spark of
+will, and all the strength that he had built in the name of the store was
+madly tempted. But no! John Prather was not to blame, any more than
+himself. He would listen to John Prather, as justice listens to evidence,
+and endure his stare to the end.
+
+"Yes, your mother knew," continued Prather. "My mother made a point of
+having her know. That was part of my mother's own bitterness. That was
+her teaching to me from the first. She had no illusions. She knew the
+advantages and the disadvantages of her position. She was and is one of
+the few persons in the world of whom my father is a little afraid."
+
+"Then she still lives?" asked Jack sharply.
+
+"Yes, she is in California," Prather returned. "She often referred to the
+mole on my cheek as the symbol of my handicap in the world of convention.
+'But for the mole, Jack, you would have the store,' she often said. It
+delighted her that I had my father's face. As I grew older the
+resemblance became more marked. I could see that I pleased my father with
+my practical ideas of life, which I developed when quite young. He saw to
+it that my mother and I lived well and that I went to a good school. From
+my books I drew the same lesson as from my peculiar inheritance; the
+lesson that my mother was always inculcating. 'A bank account,' she would
+repeat, 'will erase even a mole patch on the cheek. It is the supreme
+power that will carry you anywhere, Jack. You must make money!'
+
+"When father came to see her he would talk with a candor with which I am
+sure he never talked to your mother. He would tell of his successes,
+revealing the strategy and system by which they were won, finding her
+both understanding and sympathetic. I became a little blade that
+delighted to get sharp against his big blade by asking him questions. He
+did not want me about the store, and this was one of the things in which
+my mother humored him. She knew just when to humor and just when to
+threaten the play of the strong card which she always held.
+
+"All the while her ambition was laying its plans. It was that I should
+have the Wingfield store one day, myself. Out of school hours I would
+range the other department stores. You see, I had not only inherited my
+father's face more strikingly than you had, but also his talents. I
+spent the summer vacations of my fourteenth and fifteenth years in a
+store. I won the attention of my superiors and promise of promotion. I
+foresaw the day when I should so prove my ability that father would take
+me into his own store, and then, gradually, I would make my place,
+secure, while you were idling about Europe. And in those days you were
+frail and I was vigorous.
+
+"There was no mistaking that father's sense of convention was the one
+thing that stood between him and my desire. He feared the world's opinion
+if the truth became known, and deep down in heart he could never get over
+the pride of having married into your mother's family. You had very good
+blood on the maternal side, as they say, while my mother had begun in the
+cloak department and was self-made, like father. Again, I was so truly
+his son in every instinct that he may have been a little jealous of me.
+Father does not like to think that any other man was ever quite as great
+as he is. I confess that is the way I feel, too. That is what life is,
+after all--it is yourself. Yes, I saw the store as mine--surely mine,
+with time!"
+
+Prather's reins lay across the pommel of the saddle drawn taut by the
+drooping head of his horse, which was barely dragging one foot after
+another. He gave Jack a glance of flashing resentment and then, in his
+first impulse of real emotion, made a fist of one hand and drove it
+angrily into the palm of the other before continuing.
+
+"Then father went to Europe to bring you home. He had decided for the
+son of convention, the son of blood! Though self-made, he was for family
+as against talent. Besides, it was a victory for him. At last you were
+his. After your return there was a scene between mother and him, a cool,
+bitter argument. He defied her to play her last card. He said that you
+knew the truth and that she could at best only make a row. And he wanted
+us out of New York; the place for me was a new country. He would make us
+a handsome allowance. So my mother agreed to his terms and we went to the
+Pacific coast. There I was to enter one of the colleges. My mother wanted
+me to have a college education, you see. The last meeting between father
+and me was very interesting, blade playing on blade. He really hated to
+let me go, for by this time he knew how hopeless you were. He embraced me
+and said that I would get on, anyway. I told him that the only trouble
+was that while I was the real son, I had a mole on my cheek.
+
+"The West was best. There we could claim the favor of convention, Mrs.
+Prather and her son. I matriculated at Stanford, but I saw nothing in it
+for me. It was all dream stuff. Greek and Latin don't help in building a
+fortune. They handicap you with the loss of time it takes to learn them,
+at least; and I meant to be worth a million before I was thirty. Now I
+know that I shall be worth two or three or four millions at thirty, if
+all goes as I plan. So I cut college and broke for Goldfield. I ran a
+store and was a secret partner in a saloon that paid better than the
+store. I was in the game morning, noon, and night; it beat marching to
+class to recite Horace and fiddle with the binomial theorem, as it must
+for every man who counts for something in the world."
+
+Throughout, Prather's tone, except for the one moment of anger, had been
+that of an even recital of facts by one who does not allow himself to
+consider anything but facts in the judgment of his position. At times he
+gave Jack covert glances out of the tail of his eye and saw Jack's face
+white and drawn and his head lowered. Now Prather became the victim--so
+he would have put it, no doubt--of another outburst of feeling.
+
+"But it was not like having the store!" he said. "No, my heart was in the
+store; and that morning when you saw me looking down from the gallery I
+was permitting myself to dream. I was thinking of what had come to you,
+the fairy prince of good fortune, who had no talent for your inheritance,
+and of what I might have done with it. I was thinking how I could win men
+to work for me"--and there he was smiling with the father's charm--"and
+of the millions to come if I could begin to build on the foundation that
+father had laid. I saw branches in Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia--a great
+chain of stores all co-ordinated under my directing hand--I the master!"
+
+He rubbed the palms of his hands together as he had over the
+scintillation of the jewelry counters. Though Jack had not looked around,
+his ear recognized that crisp sound of exultant power.
+
+"Yes," Jack murmured thoughtfully, as if inviting Prather to go on with
+anything further he might have to say.
+
+"All mine--mine!" Prather concluded, in a sort of hypnosis with his
+own picture.
+
+Jack still stared at the earth, his profile limned in gold and the side
+of his face toward Prather in shadow. They were nearing the clump of
+cotton-woods around the water-hole at the base of a tongue of the range
+which ran out into the desert, and Firio rode up to whisper in Spanish:
+
+"Señor Jack, see there! Horsemen!"
+
+Jack raised his head with a returning sense of his surroundings to see
+some mounted men, eight in all he counted, riding along the range trail a
+half mile nearer the water-hole than themselves. Their horses had the
+gait of exhaustion after a long, hard ride.
+
+"You know who it is?" Firio whispered.
+
+"Yes," Jack answered. "They had the better trail and have outridden us.
+All right, Firio!"
+
+"Leddy--Pete Leddy and some of his men!" exclaimed Prather, shading his
+eyes to watch the file of figures now passing under the cotton-woods. It
+seemed to relieve him. "I suppose he came on my account," he added,
+nodding to Nogales.
+
+"Yes," said Nogales, with a grin. He always either grinned or his face
+had a half savage impassiveness.
+
+"I wonder if Leddy thought I was in danger," and Prather gave Jack a
+knowing glance of satisfaction. "We shall all camp together," he
+added, smiling.
+
+Jack did not answer for a moment. He was intent on the cotton-woods.
+Leddy and his companions appeared on the other side, the figures of
+riders and horses bathed in the sunset glow. Then they disappeared as if
+the earth had swallowed them up.
+
+"They are going on! They are not going to stop!" said Prather
+apprehensively.
+
+"There is a basin beyond the water-hole and the seepage makes a little
+pasture," Jack explained. "You will see them back in a moment."
+
+"Oh, yes!" said Prather, with a thrill in his voice; and again the
+palms of his hands were making that refrain of delight. "But I have
+told my story," he resumed. "Now may I ask you a question? Why have you
+come back?"
+
+Jack looked around frankly and dispassionately.
+
+"To save Little Rivers from you! I understand that you have secured the
+water rights."
+
+"Well, then, I have!" declared Prather, confidently, "and I mean to have
+the rights for the whole valley!" and he struck his fist into his palm.
+"You see," he went on, with another flash of satire, "it is not exactly
+fair that you should have the store and Little Rivers, too. I had heard
+of the possibilities here from my friend Leddy, who was also at
+Goldfield. A useful man in his place! He got his sixth notch there. When
+I came and looked around and saw that here was the opportunity I wanted,
+I wired father that in any fair division of territory everything west of
+the Mississippi belonged to me"--he was showing some bravado in his sense
+of security now, when he saw that Leddy and his men were returning
+through the cotton-woods to the water-hole--"and I should like to have
+you out of my way. I told him you were the picture of health, even if you
+didn't have anything in your head, and if you were ever going to learn
+the business it was time that you began. But father is always careful.
+Naturally he wanted to check off my report with another's; for he didn't
+want you back if you were ill. So he sent Dr. Bennington out to get
+professional confirmation of my statement."
+
+"And you told Jasper Ewold that you wanted the rights only to turn them
+over to the water users' association and then bring in capital to build a
+dam, with everybody sharing alike in the prosperity that was to come."
+
+"Yes, and Jasper Ewold was so simple! Well, what I told him was
+strategy--strategy of which I think father would approve. When you have a
+big object in view the end must justify the means. Look at the situation!
+Two hundred thousand acres of land waiting on water to be the most
+fertile in the world! Why, when I rode up the valley the first time and
+saw what could be done, I was amazed to think that such an opportunity
+should be lying around loose. Little Rivers was so out of the way that
+other promoters had overlooked it, and everybody had sort of taken it for
+granted that Jasper Ewold and his water users' association really had
+legal possession. It was my chance. I thought big. That dam should be
+mine. I had the money I had made in Goldfield, but it was not enough for
+my purpose.
+
+"Where should I turn for outside capital that would not demand a
+majority interest in the project? I concluded that it was time father
+did something for me in return for giving up the store. Besides this
+call of justice I had another influence with him. I was sure that when
+he told my mother that you knew the truth he was making a statement that
+suited his purpose. I was sure that you knew nothing of my story and
+that father did not want you to know it. I was ready to tell if he did
+not meet my demands.
+
+"Well, you know how he can talk when he wants to gain a point. I fancy
+that I talked as well as father when I showed him how that dam would pay
+for itself in five years in tolls and twenty per cent on the capital
+after that; when I showed him how a population ten times that of his
+store would have to take their water from me; when I showed him all the
+side issues of profit from town sites and the increase of values of the
+big holdings which Leddy's men would take up for me. You ought to have
+seen his eyes glow. He could not withstand his pride in me. 'You have the
+gift, the one gift!' he said. I told him yes, it was in the blood; and I
+struck while the iron was hot. I got an outright sum from him; and he
+could not resist a chance to share all that profit when capital was to be
+had in New York for three or four per cent. He went in as silent partner,
+as I was in the saloon at Goldfield; as a partner with a minority
+interest."
+
+John Prather paused to laugh to himself over his victory, while the
+movement of palm on palm was rapid and prolonged.
+
+"Our arrangement amounted to the commercial division of territory for the
+family, which I had suggested," he went on with appreciative irony. "You
+and he were to have the east side of the Mississippi and I was to have
+the west, and you were never to know my story. Publicly, father and I
+were strangers and quits, and we came to this agreement in the room of a
+down-town hotel.
+
+"The day before I started West I simply had to have a look through the
+store--the store that I loved and that I had to lose. Yes, the store is
+far more to my taste than this rough western life. Naturally, as my
+existence was to be kept a secret from you, when you followed me to the
+elevator and tried to get acquainted I couldn't have it."
+
+"But as the elevator descended you pointed to the mole," said Jack.
+
+"Did I? I suppose that was an involuntary, instinctive pleasantry. The
+previous evening father and I had had a farewell visit together. We went
+into the country."
+
+"The night after the scene in the drawing-room!" Jack thought.
+
+"I knew that father was worried because he had to make an effort to show
+that he was not. Usually he can cover his worries perfectly. He said that
+he might have a fight in order to keep you and that he very much wanted
+you to stay. But he did not succeed," concluded Prather, fist driving
+into palm. "You came on the express after me."
+
+"Because, fortunately, you went to the house to have a look at the
+ancestor!"
+
+"Yes," said Prather. "But I did not see you."
+
+"However, I saw you from the landing and overheard what passed between
+you and father!"
+
+"No matter!" cried Prather harshly. "I am prepared for you!" He looked
+toward the water-hole significantly. "And the concession is mine! The dam
+will be mine!"
+
+"The dam could be built and all the valley might bloom without so much
+power passing into the hands of one man," said Jack.
+
+P.D. scenting the pasturage and feeling the pangs of thirst was starting
+forward at a smarter pace; but Jack held him back to the snail's crawl of
+Prather's pony.
+
+"Who would do it? Jasper Ewold? Jim Galway?" Prather demanded. "What
+these men need is a leader. They don't realize what I am doing for them.
+Do they think I want to put in ten years out here for nothing? For every
+dollar that they make for me they are going to make one for themselves.
+That's the rule of prosperity. I am not robbing them. I am taking only my
+fair share in return for creative business genius. The fellows in Little
+Rivers who sulk and don't get on will have only themselves to thank."
+
+"But they lose their independence," Jack was arguing quietly, as if he
+would thrash out the subject. "There are other things than money in
+this world."
+
+"There's nothing much money won't do!" said Prather.
+
+"It will not give one self-respect or courage or moral fibre; it will not
+bring the gift of poetry, music, or painting; or turn a lie into truth;
+or bring back virtue to a woman who has been defiled; or make the courage
+to face death calmly."
+
+"It will do all I want!" Prather answered. "Father not having been true
+to his agreement by keeping you in New York, why should I keep his
+secret? He breaks faith; I break faith. It seems to me as if there were
+no escaping the penalty of my birth. I no sooner arrive than I find the
+whole town knows of your return; and not only that, but a wire comes from
+father saying that we had better not meet until he comes."
+
+"Until he comes! Yes, go on!"
+
+"Well, as you say, you are here to save Little Rivers and that meant an
+interview with me, and--well," again the palms in their crisp movement,
+"before I started out I told Pete Leddy that if you came after me I
+should look to him for protection, and it seems he is on time."
+
+"Yes," said Jack, without looking at Prather. All the while he had kept
+watch on the water-hole, and he received Prather's announcement stoically
+as a confirmation of his suspicions.
+
+"So, if you will take my advice, brother, the best thing for you to do is
+to ride back before we reach the water-hole, unless you prefer Leddy's
+company. This time he will fight you in his way."
+
+"My horse is tired and there is neither water nor feed for him except
+there." Jack stated this quietly and stubbornly, as he nodded toward the
+cotton-woods. Then he looked around to Prather. Suddenly Prather found
+himself looking at a face that seemed to have only the form of that face
+by the side of which he had been riding. It was as if another man had
+taken Jack's place in the saddle. The ancestor was rising in Jack.
+Prather saw an electric spark in Jack's eyes, the spark of the high
+voltage that made his muscles weave and a flutter come in his cheeks.
+"No, I am not going back until I have recovered the rights that you have
+taken from Little Rivers!" he said.
+
+Prather in sudden confusion realized that he had let his feelings go too
+soon. They were not yet at the water-hole, and he was within easy reach
+of that hand working on the reins in a way that promised an outburst.
+
+"You think of physical violence against me--your own flesh and blood!" he
+said defensively.
+
+He saw Jack shudder in reaction and knew that he was safe for the moment.
+When Jack looked away at the water-hole Prather's fingers slipped to his
+own six-shooter and rested there, twitching nervously; and in the rear
+Firio was watching both him and Nogales shrewdly.
+
+From any outward sign now, Jack might have been starting on another
+journey with quiet eagerness; a journey that might end at a precipice a
+few yards ahead or at the other side of the world. Of this alone you
+could be sure from the resoluteness of his features, that he was going
+straight on; while Firio, in the telepathy of desert companionship,
+understood that he was missing no developing detail within the narrow
+range of vision in front of P.D.'s nose. Trusting all to Jack, Firio was
+on wires, ready for a spring in any direction.
+
+They were coming to the edge of a depression of an old watercourse that
+wound around past the cotton-woods to the ridge itself and included the
+basin where Leddy and his followers had tethered their horses. But this
+part of it was dry sand. The standing figures around the water-hole had
+sunk down. Jack could see them as lumps in a row. A blade of flame from
+the setting sun fell on them, revealing the glint of rifle barrels.
+
+"Firio! Quick--down! P.D., down!" Jack called, dismounting with a leap;
+and as though in answer to his warning came the singing of bullets about
+their ears.
+
+P.D. had been trained to sink on all fours at a word and he and Jack
+together dropped into the cover of the _arroyo_, below the desert line.
+When he looked around Firio was at his side, still holding the reins of
+Wrath of God. But Wrath of God's sturdy, plodding nature had little
+facility in learning tricks. A tiny stream of blood was flowing down his
+forehead and he lay still. At last, all in loyal service, he had reached
+the horizon. His bony, homely, good old face seemed singularly peaceful,
+as if satisfied with the reward at his journey's end. Jag Ear was
+standing beside P.D. and Prather's burro next to him, both unharmed.
+Nogales's horse had also been killed, but its rider was safe. Prather was
+crawling down the side of the _arroyo_ on his belly, digging his hands
+into the dirt, his face white and contorted and his eyes shifting back
+and forth in ghastly incomprehension. His horse followed him and sank
+down in final surrender to exhaustion.
+
+By common impulse, Jack and Firio seized the rifles from Jag Ear's pack,
+while Nogales, a spectator, squatted beside Prather.
+
+"What--what does it mean?" Prather gasped, spasmodically. "I--I--was it
+Leddy that fired on us?"
+
+"Yes," said Jack over his shoulder, as he and Firio started up the bank
+of the _arroyo_ facing the water-hole. "No doubt of it."
+
+"It was you they wanted--not me--not me! I--I--"
+
+"I don't know. At all events, I do not mean they shall rush us!" Jack
+answered, as he and Firio hugged the slope with their rifles resting on
+top and only their heads showing above it.
+
+"No! It couldn't be that they recognized me. They will let me by! They
+expect me!"
+
+"Yes, you belong on their side!" Jack called back.
+
+"I will send out a flag of truce!" said Prather, brightening with
+the thought. "You, Nogales, take my handkerchief and go and explain
+to Leddy!"
+
+Nogales seemed agreeable to the suggestion. Indeed, he was very
+expeditious in starting. While Jack never took his eye off the sight of
+his barrel, Nogales walked across the gleaming interval between the two
+parties waving Prather's handkerchief. Leddy rose on his knee watchfully,
+rifle in hand, while he spoke with Nogales. Then Nogales started back
+with his head thrown up jubilantly, but stopped when he was within
+calling distance and sang out, truculently:
+
+"Leddy get you both! He get everything!"
+
+He turned on his heel and soon was another lump around the water-hole.
+
+"That makes nine, Firio!" said Jack.
+
+He smiled in relief to be rid of Nogales; smiled in happy confidence, as
+if he were truly the ancestor's child.
+
+"_Sí_!" answered Firio, as if he had just as soon there were a regiment
+against them. He was happy beyond words. He patted his rifle barrel; he
+spread out his big red bandanna beside his elbow and on it nicely
+arranged a couple of extra charges of cartridges.
+
+Prather remained flat on the bottom of the _arroyo_, overwhelmed. It was
+some time before he could speak.
+
+"I--I don't understand! It isn't possible!" he said finally.
+
+"Everything is possible with Leddy. It seems that there can be peace
+between him and me in this valley in only one way," Jack answered.
+
+"But me! I suppose he found out that I--" Prather stopped without
+finishing the sentence. "What am I to do?" he asked Jack in livid appeal.
+
+"Why, it is three against nine, if you choose!" Jack answered. "You have
+a rifle, and it is for your life."
+
+"My life!" Prather gasped, another wave of fear submerging him.
+
+"Yes. We have no horses with which to make our escape and we should be
+winged as soon as we exposed ourselves. Leddy means that we shall die of
+thirst, or die fighting."
+
+Through all this dialogue Jack had been speaking to the head that lay
+between his eye and a target. As Prather reached up a trembling hand to
+take his rifle from the back of his burro one of the lumps around the
+water-hole rose, possibly to change position. When it became the
+silhouette of a kneeling man, Jack fired and the figure plunged forward
+like an automaton that had had its back broken.
+
+"Eight!" whispered Firio.
+
+"Duck!" Jack told him; for a response instantly came in a volley that
+kicked up the dust around their heads.
+
+But Jack's rifle lay in limp hands.
+
+"Eight!" he repeated, dazedly. "And I shot to kill--to kill!"
+
+His face blanched with horror at the thing that he had done. It seemed as
+if the strength had been struck out of him. He appeared ready to let
+destiny overtake him rather than fire again. Then as in a flash, the
+ancestor in him reappeared and in his features was written that very
+process of fate which Dr. Bennington had said was in him. Again his hand
+was firm on the barrel and his eye riveted on the sight, as he drew
+himself up until he lay even with the bank of the _arroyo_.
+
+The volley from the cotton-woods had swept over Prather's head at the
+instant that he had taken hold of his rifle. It dropped from his grasp.
+He burrowed in the sand under the pressure of that near and sinister rush
+of singing breaths.
+
+"I can't! I can't!" he said helplessly.
+
+He was leaden flesh, without the power to move. At his words Jack glanced
+back to see a dropped jaw and glassy, staring eyes.
+
+"You are suffering!" exclaimed Jack. "Are you hit?"
+
+"No!" Prather managed to say, and reached out for his rifle in clumsy
+desperation, as if he were feeling for it in the dark.
+
+"Take your time!" said Jack encouragingly, as one would to a victim of
+stage fright. "There isn't any danger for the moment, while advantage of
+position is with us--the sun over our shoulders and in their faces."
+
+The lumps around the water-hole grew smaller. Evidently, as a result of
+the lesson, they were creeping backward on their stomachs to a less
+exposed position. Two had quite disappeared, or else the brilliant play
+of light had melted them into the golden carpet of reflected sunshine on
+which they rested. Directly, Jack saw two figures creeping over the rim
+of the pasturage basin.
+
+"So, that's it!" he said to Firio.
+
+Firio nodded his understanding of Leddy's plan to take them in flank
+under cover of the _arroyo_.
+
+"We shall have to respond in kind!" said Jack.
+
+He left his hat where his head had been and began crawling along the side
+of the _arroyo_, but paused to call to Prather, who, now that no bullets
+were flying, was trying the mechanism of his rifle with a somewhat
+steadier hand:
+
+"Prather, if you could manage to get up there beside Firio and join him
+in pouring out a magazine full at the right moment, it would help! If
+not, put your hat up there beside mine. You can do that without exposing
+yourself."
+
+Jack's tone was that of one who urges a tired man to take a few more
+steps, or an invalid without any appetite to try another sup of broth. It
+had no hint of irony.
+
+"No matter," said Firio. "Leddy know he can't fight. Leddy know there is
+only two of us!" His tone was without satire, but its sting was sharper
+than satire; that of an Indian shrug over a negligible quantity. It
+started Prather on all fours laboriously toward him.
+
+"I am going to the turn in the _arroyo_ that commands the next turn,"
+Jack explained. "When I whistle you empty your magazines. Keep your heads
+down and fire fast, no matter if not accurately, so as to disturb their
+aim at me!"
+
+"_Sí_!" said Firio. "I know!" No one could deny that he was having a very
+good time making war in the company of Señor Jack. "Yes, Mister Prather,"
+he added, when, after toiling painfully on his belly for the few feet he
+had to go, Prather lay with his stark face near Firio's; a face strangely
+like that of John Wingfield, Sr. when he saw Jasper Ewold from the
+drawing-room doorway. "For your life, Mister Prather! _Sí_! Up a little
+more! Chin high as mine, so! Eye on sight, so!"
+
+Prather obeyed in an abyssmal sort of shame which, for the time being,
+conquered his fear, though not his palsy; for his rifle barrel trembled
+on its rest.
+
+Meanwhile, Jack had crept to the bend in the _arroyo_. He was listening.
+It would not do to show his head as a warning of his presence. Faintly he
+heard men moving in the sand, moving slowly and cautiously. At the moment
+he chose as the right one, with rifle cocked and finger on trigger, he
+gave his signal. Then he sprang to the top of the bank, fully exposed to
+the marksmen at the water-hole. For no half measure would do. He must
+have a full view of the bottom of the next bend. There he saw two
+crawling figures. He fired twice and dropped down with three or four
+stinging whispers in his ears and a second volley overhead as he was
+under cover. Again he sprang up over the bank in the temptation to see
+the result of his aim. One of the would-be flankers lay prostrate and
+still, face downward. The other was disappearing beyond the second bend.
+
+"Seven, now!" he thought miserably, in comprehension of the whole
+business as ridicule in human savagery. "They won't trouble us again
+immediately. They will wait on darkness and thirst," he concluded; and
+called, as he turned back, to Firio: "It worked like a charm, O son of
+the sun! They could not fire at all straight with your bullets flying
+about their heads, disturbing their--" His speech ended at sight of
+Prather, half rolling, half tumbling down the slope, his hands over his
+face, while he uttered a prolonged moan.
+
+"Bullet hit a rock under sand!" said Firio, as Jack hastened to assist
+Prather, who had come to a halt at the very bottom of the _arroyo_ and
+lay gasping on his side. Jack took hold of Prather's wrists to draw his
+hands away from the wound.
+
+"My God! Out here, like a rat in a trap!" Prather groaned. "When I have
+all life before me! In sight of millions and power--a rat in a trap out
+on this damnable desert, as if I were of no more account than a rancher!"
+
+"Let me see!" said Jack; for Prather was holding his hands tight against
+his face, as if he feared that all the blood in his body would pour out
+if he removed them. "Let me see! Maybe it is not so bad!"
+
+Prather let his hands drop and the right one which was over the cheek
+with the mole was splashed red between the fingers. On the cheek was a
+raw spot, from which ran a slight trickle. The mole had gone. A splinter
+of rock, or perhaps a bullet, with its jacket split, ricocheting
+sidewise, had torn it clean from the flesh.
+
+"Not at all dangerous!" said Jack.
+
+"No?" exclaimed Prather, in utter relief.
+
+"It will heal in a fortnight!"
+
+A small medicine case was among the regular supplies that were always
+packed on that omnibus of a burro, Jag Ear. While Jack was bandaging the
+wound, Firio, who kept watch, had no news to report.
+
+"Nothing matters! They will get us, anyway!" Prather moaned. The shock of
+being hit had quite finished any pretence at concealing his mortal fear
+of the outcome.
+
+"Oh, I wouldn't say that! We already have them down to seven!" said Jack
+encouragingly, as he made a pillow of a blanket and bade Prather rest
+his head on it.
+
+But he knew well that they were a seven who had learned wisdom from the
+fate of their comrades. From Nogales, Leddy must have heard of the loss
+of two horses. At best, but one of the beleaguered three had any means of
+escape. Leddy could well afford to curb his impatience as he camped
+comfortably by the water-hole, while his own horses grazed.
+
+The sun was still above the western ridge in the effulgence of its adieu
+for the day. Jack was on his knee, with the broad, level glare full on
+him, looking at Prather, who was in the shadow; and his reflections were
+mixed with that pity which one feels toward another who is lame or blind
+or suffers for the want of any sense or faculty that is born to the
+average human being. For a man of true courage rarely sees a coward as
+anything but a man ailing; he is grateful for nature's kindness to
+himself. And the spark of John Wingfield, Knight, skipping generations
+before it settled on a descendant, had not chosen John Prather for its
+favor. The ancestor was all Jack's.
+
+Prather, in his agony of mind, had moments of wondering envy as he
+watched Jack's changing expression. He could see that Jack, in entire
+detachment from his problem of fighting Leddy, was thinking soberly in
+the silence of the desert, unconscious in his absorption of the presence
+of any other human being. Suddenly his eyes opened wide in the
+luminousness of a happy discovery; his lips turned a smile of supreme
+satisfaction, and his face seemed to be giving back the light of the sun.
+
+"It's all right!" he said. "Yes, everything is going to be all right!"
+
+"How?" asked Prather wistfully, feeling the infection of the confident
+ring of Jack's tone.
+
+"There is one horse left," said Jack. "He is in better condition than
+Leddy imagines. When darkness comes you can get away with him and by
+morning he will have brought you to water at Las Cascadas, halfway on the
+range trail. Then you will be quite safe."
+
+"Yes! Yes!" Prather half rose, his breath coming fast, his eyes ravenous.
+
+"And in return you will give Little Rivers back its water rights! Is that
+a bargain?" Jack asked.
+
+"Give up my concession and all it means to me! Give it up absolutely--its
+millions!" objected Prather, in an uncontrollable impulse of greed.
+
+"King Richard III, you remember," Jack declared, with a trace of his old
+humor breaking out over the new aspect of the situation, "said he would
+give his kingdom for a horse. He could not get the horse and he lost both
+his kingdom and his life. If he had been able to make the trade he might
+have saved his life and perhaps--who knows?--have won another kingdom."
+
+"I will save my life!" Prather concluded; but under his breath he added
+bitterly: "And you get both the store and Little Rivers!" in the
+prehensile instinct which gains one thing only to covet another.
+
+"You have the papers for the concession with you?" Jack asked.
+
+"I--I--"
+
+"Yes!" interposed Jack firmly.
+
+"Yes!" Prather admitted.
+
+"And you have pencil and paper to make some sort of transfer that will be
+the first legal step in undoing what you have done?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+While Prather was occupied with this, Jack found pencil and paper on his
+own account and by the light of the sun's last rays and in the happiness
+of one who has brought a story to a good end, he wrote to his father:
+
+"John Prather will tell you how he and I met out on the desert before you
+came and of the long talk we had.
+
+"You wanted a son who would go on building on the great foundation you
+had laid. You have one. He said that you wanted to give him the store.
+The reason why you might not give it to him no longer exists. The mole is
+gone. Of course there will be a scar where the mole was. I, too, shall
+have to carry a scar. But the means is in your power to go far toward
+erasing his, for his mother, Mrs. Prather, is still living.
+
+"So everything is clear. Everything is coming out right. John Prather and
+I change places, as nature intended that we should. You need have no
+apprehensions on my account. Though I had not a cent in the world I could
+make my living out here--a very sweet thought, this, to me, with its
+promise of something real and practical and worth while, at which I can
+make good. I know that you are going to keep the bargain that Prather and
+I have made; and think of me as over the pass and very happy as I write
+this, in the confidence that at last all accounts have been balanced and
+we can both turn to a fresh page in the ledger. JACK."
+
+When Jack, after he had received the transfer, gave the letter to Prather
+to read, Prather was transfixed with incredulity.
+
+"You mean this?" he gasped blankly, as his surprise became articulate.
+
+"Yes. You have quite the better of King Richard--you gain both the
+kingdom and the horse."
+
+"The store, yes, the store--mine! Mine--the store!" said Prather, in a
+slow, passionate monotone, his fingers trembling with the very triumph of
+possession as he thrust the letter into his pocket. "The store, yes, the
+store!" he repeated, amazement mixed with exultation. "But--" his keen,
+practical mind was recovering its balance; he was on guard again. Between
+him and the realization of his inheritance lay the shadow of the fear of
+the miles in the night. "But--there is no trick?" he hazarded in
+suspicion.
+
+"No!"
+
+Jack spoke in such a way that it removed the last doubt for Prather, who
+kneaded his palms together in a kind of frenzy, oblivious of all except
+the moneyed prospect of the kingdom craved that had become a kingdom won.
+
+"How long before I start?" he asked.
+
+"As soon as the first darkness settles and before the moon rises."
+
+"I shall need some food," Prather went on ingratiatingly. "And they say
+wounds bring on fever. Have you any water to drink on the way?"
+
+"We will fix you up the best we can. I will divide what water remains
+between you and P.D. He shall have his share now and you can drink
+yours later."
+
+The sun had set. The afterglow was fading, and in a few minutes, when the
+light was quite out of the heavens, Jack announced that it was time for
+Prather to start.
+
+"How shall I know the direction?" Prather asked.
+
+"Trust P.D. He will find it," said Jack. He held the stirrup for Prather
+to mount with the relief of freeing himself at last from the clinging
+touch of the phantoms. "You are perfectly safe. In two days you will be
+mounting the steps of a Pullman on your way to New York."
+
+"And you? What--what are you going to do?" Prather inquired hectically,
+with a momentary qualm of shame.
+
+"Why, if Firio and I are to have water to make coffee for breakfast we
+must take the water-hole!" Jack answered, as if this were a thing of
+minor importance beside seeing Prather safely on his way. "Be sure not to
+overwater P.D. after the night's ride, and don't overdo him on the final
+stretch, and turn him over to Galway when you arrive. Home, P.D.! Home!"
+he concluded, striking that good soldier with the flat of his hand on the
+buttocks. And P.D. trotted away into the night.
+
+Jack listened to the hoof-beats on the soft earth dying away and then
+crept up beside Firio on the bank and gazed into the black wall in the
+direction of the cotton-woods. A slight glow in the basin, which must be
+Leddy's camp-fire, was the only sign of life in the neighborhood. The
+silence was profound. He had not spoken a word to Firio. With one
+problem forever solved, he was absorbed in another.
+
+"Leddy drinks, eats, waits!" whispered Firio. "If we try to go they
+hunt us down!"
+
+"Yes," said Jack.
+
+"And we not go, eh? We stay? We fight?"
+
+"For water, Firio, yes! Two against seven!"
+
+"_Sí_!" Firio had no illusions about the situation. "_Sí_!" he repeated
+stoically.
+
+"And, Firio--" Jack's hand slipped with a quick, gripping caress onto
+Firio's shoulder. An inspiration had come to the mind of action, just as
+a line comes to a poet in a flash; as one must have come to the ancestor
+many times after he had gone into a tight place trusting to his wits and
+his blade to bring him out. "And, Firio, we are going to change our base,
+as the army men say--and change it before the moon rises. Jag Ear, we
+shall have to leave you behind," he added, when they had dropped back to
+the burro's side. "Just make yourself comfortable. Leddy surely wouldn't
+think of killing so valuable a member of the non-combatant class. We will
+come for you, by and by. It will be all right!"
+
+He gave the sliver of ear an affectionate corkscrew twist before he and
+Firio, taking all their ammunition, crawled along the bottom of the
+_arroyo_ and up the ridge where they settled down comfortably behind a
+ledge commanding the water-hole at easy range.
+
+"It's lucky we learned to shoot in the moonlight!" Jack whispered.
+
+"_Sí"!_ Firio answered, in perfect understanding.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVII
+
+THE END OF THE WEAVING
+
+
+For over a week a private car had stood on a siding at Little Rivers.
+Every morning a porter polished the brasswork of the platform in heraldry
+of the luxury within. Occasionally a young man with a plaster over a
+wound on his cheek would walk up and down the road-bed on the far side of
+the car. Indeed, he had worn a path there. He never went into town, and
+any glances that he may have cast in that direction spoke his desire to
+be forever free of its sight. Not a train passed that he did not wish
+himself aboard and away. But as heir-apparent he had no thought of
+endangering his new kingdom by going before his father went. He meant to
+keep very close to the throne. He had become clingingly, determinedly
+filial. At times the gleam of the brasswork would exercise the same
+hypnosis over his senses as the scintillation of the jewelry counters of
+the store, and he would rub his hands crisply together.
+
+John Wingfield, Sr. spent little time in the car. Morning and afternoon
+and evening he would go over to Dr. Patterson's with the question: "How
+is he?" which all Little Rivers was asking. The rules of longevity were
+in oblivion and the routine channels of a mind, so used to teeming
+detail, had become abysses as dark and void as the canyons of the range.
+
+On the day of his arrival in Little Rivers he found a town peopled
+mostly by women and children. All of the men who could bear arms and get
+a horse had departed, and with them Mary. Thereby hangs a story all to
+the honor of little Ignacio. After Jack had ridden away with his
+insistent refusal of assistance, apprehension among the group that
+watched him disappear in the gathering darkness was allayed by reports of
+men who had been at the store, where they found the Leddyites hanging
+about as usual. True, no one had seen either Pete or Ropey Smith, but
+Lang said that they were upstairs playing poker, a favorite relaxation
+from the strain of their intellectual life.
+
+But Ignacio learned from another Indian in Lang's service that Pete and
+seven of his best shots had started for Agua Fria about the same time as
+Jack, while the rest of the gang that had been left behind were making it
+their business to cover the leader's absence. Distrusting Ignacio, they
+locked him in a closet off the bar. In the early hours of the morning he
+succeeded in escaping with his news, which he carried first to Mary. She
+was not asleep when he rapped at her door. It had been a night of
+wakefulness for her, recalling the night after her meeting with Jack on
+the pass before the duel in the _arroyo_.
+
+"I for Señor Don't Care, now! I for every devil in him! And they go to
+kill him!" was the incoherent way in which he began his announcement.
+
+In an hour the alarm had travelled from house to house. While the gang
+slept at Lang's or in their tents, a solemn cavalcade set forth quietly
+into the night, with rifles slung over their shoulders or lying across
+the pommels of their saddles, bound to rescue Jack Wingfield. They had
+protested against Mary's going with all the old, familiar arguments that
+occur to the male at thought of a woman in physical danger.
+
+"It is the least that any of us can do," she declared.
+
+"But of what service will you be?" Dr. Patterson asked.
+
+"No one can say yet," she replied. "And no one shall stop me!" She was
+driven by the same impulse that had sent her across the _arroyo_ in face
+of the ruffians on the bank to Jack's side after he was wounded. "My pony
+can keep up with the best of yours," she added.
+
+Leddy had eight hours' start on a two-days' journey. It was not in
+horse-flesh to gain much on his fast and hardened ponies. There was
+little chance that Jack could hold out against such odds as he must face,
+even if he had escaped an ambush. So they rode in desperation and in
+silence, each too certain of what was in the minds of the others to make
+pretence of a hope that was not in the heart.
+
+Their only stop for rest was at Las Cascadas in the hot hours of midday.
+Darkness had fallen when they overtook a solitary horseman coming from
+Agua Fria. John Prather drew rein well to one side of the trail. He had
+a moment, as they approached, in which to think out his explanation of
+his position.
+
+"It's Prather, and riding P.D.!" Galway announced.
+
+"Where is Jack Wingfield?" came the merciless question as in one
+voice from all.
+
+"You are his friends! You have come to rescue him!" Prather cried.
+
+He seemed overcome by his relief. At all events, the wildness of his
+exclamation in face of the force barring the trail was without
+affectation.
+
+"There is time? There is hope?"
+
+"Yes! yes!" gasped Prather, as the men began to surround him.
+
+"Why are you here? Why on his horse?"
+
+"Leddy turned on me, too! I was fighting at Wingfield's side! We got two
+of them before dark! Then I was wounded and couldn't see to shoot. And I
+came for help. And you will be in time! He's in a good position!"
+
+"I think you are lying!" said Galway.
+
+"He couldn't help it!" said Bob Worther.
+
+"How--how would I have his horse if he weren't willing?" protested
+Prather, frantically.
+
+"By stealing it, in keeping with your character!"
+
+"Yes! On general principles we ought to--"
+
+"I have a piece of rope!" called a voice from the rear.
+
+"There isn't any tree. But we can drop him over the wall of a chasm!"
+
+Spectral figures with set faces appallingly grim in the thin moonlight
+pressed close to Prather.
+
+"My God! No!" he pleaded, throatily. "We fought together, I tell you! We
+drew lots to see which one should take the risk of riding through danger
+to save the other!"
+
+"Lying again!"
+
+"Here's the rope! All we've got to do is to slip a noose over his head!"
+
+"It's a clean piece of rope, isn't it?" said the Doge, in his mellow
+voice. "I don't think it's worth while soiling a clean piece of
+rope. Come! Taking his life is no way to save Jack's. Come, we are
+losing time!"
+
+"Right, Doge!" said the man with the rope. "But it is some satisfaction
+to give him a scare."
+
+"And take care of P.D.!" called another.
+
+"Yes, if you founder Jack's pony you'll hear from us a-plenty!"
+
+This was their adieu to John Prather, who was left to pursue his way in
+safety to his kingdom, while they rode on, following a hard path at the
+base of the range. Those with the best horses took the lead, while the
+heavier men, including the Doge, whose weight was telling on their
+mounts, fell to the rear. Mary was at the head, between Dr. Patterson and
+Jim Galway.
+
+The stars flickered out; the moon grew pale, and for a while the horsemen
+rode into a wall of blackness, conscious of progress only by the sound of
+hoof-beats which they were relentlessly urging forward. Then dawn flashed
+up over the chaos of rocks, pursuing night with the sweep of its
+broadening, translucent wings across the valley to the other range. The
+tops of the cotton-woods rose out of the sparkling sea, floating free of
+any visible support of trunks, and the rescuers saw that they were near
+the end of their journey.
+
+There was a faint sound of a shot; then of another shot and another.
+After that, the radiant, baffling silence of daybreak on uninhabited
+wastes, when the very active glory of the spreading, intensifying light
+ought, one feels, to bring paeans of orchestral splendor. It set
+desperation in the hearts of the riders, which was communicated to weary
+ponies driven to a last effort of speed. And still no more shots. The
+silence spoke the end of some tragedy with the first streaks from the
+rising sun clearing a target to a waiting marksman's eye.
+
+Around the cotton-woods was no sign of human movement; nothing but
+inanimate, dark spots which developed into prostrate human forms, in
+pantomimic expression of the story of that night's work done in the
+moonlight and finished with the first flush of morning. Two of the
+outstretched figures were lying head to head a few yards apart on either
+side of the water-hole. The one on the side toward the ridge was
+recognized as Jack, still as death. Another a short distance behind him,
+at the sound of hoof-beats looked up with face blanched despite its dark
+skin, the parched lips stretched over the teeth; but in Firio's eyes
+there was still fire, as he whispered, "All right!" before he sank back
+unconscious. A wound in his shoulder had been bandaged, but the wrist of
+his gun hand lay beside a fresh red spot on the earth.
+
+Jack had a bullet hole in the upper left arm plugged with a bit of
+cotton; and a deep furrow across the temple, which was bleeding. His
+rigid fingers were still gripping his six-shooter. He lay partly on his
+side, facing Leddy, who had rolled over on his back dead.
+
+Mary and Dr. Patterson dropped from their horses simultaneously. The
+doctor pressed his hand over Jack's heart, to find it still beating.
+
+"Jack!" they whispered. "Jack!" they called aloud.
+
+He roused slightly, lifting his weary eyelids and gazing at them as if
+they were uncertain shadows who wanted some kind of an explanation from
+him which he had not the strength to give.
+
+"We must drink--blaze away, Leddy," he murmured. "I'm coming down after
+the stars go out--close--close as you like--we must drink!"
+
+"No vital hit!" said the doctor; while Mary bringing water assisted him
+to bathe the wounds before he dressed them. "No, not from a bullet!" he
+added, after the dressing was finished and he had one hand on Jack's hot
+brow and the other on his pulse.
+
+Then he attended to Firio, who was talking incoherently:
+
+"Take water-hole--boil coffee in the morning--quail for dinner, Señor
+Jack--_sí, sí_!"
+
+When they had moved Jack and Firio into the shadow of the cotton-woods
+and forced water down their throats, Firio revived enough to recognize
+those around him and to cry out an inquiry about Jack; but Jack himself
+continued in a stupor, apparently unconscious of his surroundings and
+scarcely alive except for breathing. Yet, when litters of blankets and
+rifles tied together had been fashioned and attached to the pack-saddles
+of tandem burros, as he was lifted into place for the return he seemed to
+understand that he was starting on a journey; for he said, disjointedly:
+
+"Don't forget Wrath of God--and Jag Ear is thirsty--and bury Wrath of God
+fittingly--give him an epitaph! He was gloomy, but it was a good gloom, a
+kind of kingly gloom, and he liked the prospect when at last he stuck his
+head through the blue blanket of the horizon."
+
+Those of the party who remained behind for the last duty to the dead
+counted its most solemn moment, perhaps, the one that gave Wrath of God
+the honorable due of a soldier who had fallen face to the enemy. Bob
+Worther wrote the epitaph with a pencil on a bit of wood: "Here lies the
+gloomiest pony that ever was. The gloomier he was the better he went and
+the better Jack Wingfield liked him;" which was Bob's way of interpreting
+Jack's instructions.
+
+Then Worther and his detail rode as fast as they might to overtake the
+slow-marching group in trail of the litters with the question that all
+Little Rivers had been asking ever since, "How is he?" A ghastly,
+painfully tedious journey this homeward one, made mostly in the night,
+with the men going thirsty in the final stretches in order that wet
+bandages might be kept on Jack's feverish head; while Dr. Patterson was
+frequently thrusting his little thermometer between Jack's hot,
+cracking lips.
+
+"If he were free of this jouncing! It is a terrible strain on him, but
+the only thing is to go on!" the doctor kept repeating.
+
+But when Jack lay white and still in his bedroom and Firio was rapidly
+convalescing, the fever refused to abate. It seemed bound to burn out the
+life that remained after the hemorrhage from his wounds had ceased. Men
+found it hard to work in the fields while they waited on the crisis. John
+Wingfield, Sr. sat for hours under Dr. Patterson's umbrella-tree in
+moody absorption. He talked to all who would talk to him. Always he was
+asking about the duel in the _arroyo_ which was fought in Jack's way. He
+could not hear enough of it; and later he almost attached himself to the
+one eye-witness of the final duel, which had been fought in Leddy's way.
+
+When Firio was well enough to walk out he was to be found in a long
+chair on Jack's porch, ever raising a warning finger for silence to
+anyone who approached and looking out across the yard to Jag Ear, who was
+winning back the fat he had lost in a constitutional crisis, and P.D.,
+who, after bearing himself first and last in a manner characteristic of a
+pony who was P.D. but never Q., seemed already none the worse for the
+hardships he had endured. The master of twenty millions would sit on the
+steps, while Firio occupied the chair and regarded him much as if he were
+a blank wall. But at times Firio would humor the persistent inquirer with
+a few abbreviated sentences. It was out of such fragments as this that
+John Wingfield, Sr. had to piece the story of the fight for the
+water-hole.
+
+"Señor Jack and Mister Prather, they no look alike," said Firio one day,
+evidently bound to make an end of the father's company. "Anybody say
+that got bad eyes. Mister Prather"--and Firio smiled peculiarly--"I call
+him the mole! He burrow in the sand, so! His hand tremble, so! He act
+like a man believe himself the only god in the world when he in no
+danger, but when he get in danger he act like he afraid he got to meet
+some other god!"
+
+"But Jack? Now, after Prather had gone?" persisted the father greedily.
+
+"We glad the mole go. It sort of hurt inside to think a man like him. He
+make you wonder what for he born."
+
+John Wingfield, Sr. half rose in a sudden movement, as if he were about
+to go, but remained in response to another emotion that was stronger than
+the impulse.
+
+"And Jack? He kept his head! He figured out his chances coolly! Now,
+that trick he played by going up on the ridge under cover of darkness?"
+
+"No trick!" said Firio resentfully, in instinctive defence. "That the
+place to fight! Señor Jack he see it."
+
+"And all through the night you kept firing?"
+
+"_Sí,_ after moon very bright and over our shoulders in their faces!
+_Sí_, at the little lumps that lie so still. When they move quick like
+they stung, we know we hit!"
+
+"Ah, that was it! You hit! You hit! And the other fellows couldn't. You
+had the light with you--everything! Jack had seen to that! He used his
+head! He--he was strong, strong!"
+
+Quite unconsciously, John Wingfield, Sr. rubbed his palms together.
+
+"When you pleased you always rub your hands same as Mister Prather,"
+observed Firio.
+
+"Oh! Do I? I--" John Wingfield, Sr. clasped his fingers together
+tightly. "Yes, and the finish of the fight--how was that?"
+
+"Sometimes, when there no firing, Señor Jack and Leddy call out to each
+other. Leddy he swear hard, like he fight. Señor Jack he sing back his
+answers cheerful, like he fight. Toward morning we both wounded and
+only Leddy and one other man alive on his side. When a cloud slip over
+the moon and the big darkness before morning come, we creep down from
+the ridge and with first light we bang-bang quick--and I no remember
+any more."
+
+"Forced the fighting--forced it right at the end!" cried John Wingfield,
+Sr. in the flush of a great pride.
+
+"The aggressive, that is it--that is the way to win, always!"
+
+"But Señor Jack no fight just to win!" said Firio. "He no want to fight.
+In the big darkness, before we crawl down to the water-hole, he call out
+to Leddy to make quits. He almost beg Leddy. But Leddy, he say: 'I never
+quit and I get you!' 'Sorry,' says Señor Jack, with the devil out again,
+'sorry--and we'll see!' No, Señor Jack no like to fight till you make him
+fight and the devil is out. He fight for water; he fight for peace. He no
+want just to win and kill, but--but--" bringing his story to an end,
+Firio looked hard at the father, his velvety eyes shot with a
+comprehending gleam as he shrugged his shoulders--"but you no understand,
+you and the mole!"
+
+John Wingfield, Sr. shifted his gaze hurriedly from the little Indian.
+His face went ashen and it was working convulsively as he assisted
+himself to rise by gripping the veranda post.
+
+"Why do you think that?" he asked.
+
+"I know!" said Firio.
+
+His lips closed firmly. That was all he had to say. John Wingfield, Sr.
+turned away with the unsteady step of a man who is afraid of slipping or
+stumbling, though the path was hard and even.
+
+Out in the street he met the cold nods of the people of a town where his
+son had a dominion founded on something that was lacking in his own. And
+one of those who nodded to him ever so politely was a new citizen, who
+had once been a unit of his own city within a city.
+
+Peter Mortimer had arrived in Little Rivers only two days after his late
+employer. Peter had been like some old tree that everybody thinks has
+seen its last winter. But now he waited only on the good word from the
+sick-room for the sap of renewed youth to rise in his veins and his
+shriveled branches to break into leaf at the call of spring.
+
+And the good word did come thrilling through the community. The physical
+crisis had passed. The fever was burning itself out. But a mental crisis
+developed, and with it a new cause for apprehension. Even after Jack's
+temperature was normal and he should have been well on the road to
+convalescence, there was a veil over his eyes which would not allow him
+to recognize anybody. When he spoke it was in delirium, living over some
+incident of the past or of sheer imagination.
+
+Now he was the ancestor, fitting out his ship:
+
+"No, you can't come! A man who is a malingerer on the London docks would
+be a malingerer on the Spanish Main. I don't want bullies and boasters.
+Let them stay at home to pick quarrels in the alleys and cheer the Lord
+Mayor's procession!"
+
+Now his frigate was under full sail, sighting the enemy:
+
+"Suppose they have two guns to our one! That makes it about even! We'll
+get the windward side, as we have before! Who cares about their guns once
+we start to board!"
+
+Another time he was on the trail:
+
+"I'll grow so strong, so strong that he can never call me a weakling
+again! He will be proud of me. That is my only way to make good."
+
+Then he was apprenticed to the millions:
+
+"All this detail makes me feel as if my brains were a tangled spool of
+thread. But I will master it--I will!"
+
+Again, he was happily telling stories to the children; or tragically
+pleading with Leddy that there had been slaughter enough around the
+water-hole; or serenely planning the future which he foresaw for himself
+when the phantoms were laid:
+
+"I may not know how to run the store, but I do seem to fit in here. We
+can find the capital! We will build the dam ourselves!"
+
+His body grew stronger, with little appreciable change otherwise. For an
+instant he would seem to know the person who was speaking to him; then he
+was away on the winds of delirium.
+
+"His mind is too strong for him not to come out of this all right. It is
+only a question of time, isn't it?" insisted the father.
+
+"There was a far greater capacity in him for suffering in that hellish
+fight than there was in Pete Leddy," said Dr. Patterson. "He had
+sensitiveness to impressions which was born in him, at the same time that
+a will of steel was born in him--the sensitiveness of the mother,
+perhaps, and the will of the ancestor. His life hung by a thread when we
+found him and his nerves had been twisted and tortured by the ordeal of
+that night. And that isn't all. There was more than fighting. Something
+that preceded the fight was even harder on him. I knew from his look when
+he set out for Agua Fria that he was under a terrible strain; a strain
+worse than that of a few hours' battle--the kind that had been weighing
+day after day on the will that grimly sustained its weight. And that
+wound in the head was very close, very, and it came at the moment when
+he collapsed in reaction after that last telling shot. Something snapped
+then. There was a fracture of the kind that only nature can set. Will he
+come out of this delirium, you ask? I don't know. Much depends upon
+whether that strain is over for good or if it is still pressing on his
+mind. When he rises from his bed he may be himself or he may ride away
+madly into the face of the sun. I don't know. Nobody on earth can know."
+
+"Yes, yes!" said John Wingfield, Sr. slowly.
+
+In Jack's wildest moments it was Mary's voice that had the most telling
+effect. However low she spoke he seemed always to recognize the tone and
+would greet it with a smile and frequently break into verses and scraps
+of remembered conversations of his boyhood exile in villa gardens. One
+morning, when she and Dr. Patterson had entered the room together, Jack
+called out miserably:
+
+"Just killing, killing, killing! What will Mary say to me, now?"
+
+He raised his hands, fingers spread, and stared at them with a ghastly
+look. She sprang to the bedside and seized them fast in hers, and bending
+very close to him, as if she would impart conviction with every quivering
+particle of her being, she said:
+
+"She thinks you splendid! She is glad, glad! It is just what she wanted
+you to do. She wished every bullet that you fired luck--luck for your
+sake, to speed it straight to the mark!"
+
+He seemed to understand what she was saying, as one understands that
+shade is cool after the broiling torment of the sun.
+
+"Luck will always come at your command, Mary!" he whispered, repeating
+his last words when he left the Ewold garden to go to the wars.
+
+"And she wants you to rest--just rest--and not worry!"
+
+This had the effect of a soothing draught. Smilingly he fell back on the
+pillow and slept.
+
+"You put some spirit into that!" said the doctor, after he and Mary had
+tiptoed out of the room; "a little of the spirit in keeping with a
+dark-eyed girl who lives in the land of the Eternal Painter."
+
+"All I had!" answered Mary, with simple earnestness.
+
+At noon Jack was still sleeping. He slept on through the last hours
+of the day.
+
+"The first long stretch he has had," ran the bulletin, from tongue to
+tongue, "and real sleep, too--the kind that counts!"
+
+In the late afternoon, when the coolness and the shadows of evening were
+creeping in at the doors and windows, the doctor, Peter Mortimer, the
+father, and Firio were on the veranda, while Mrs. Galway was on watch by
+the bedside.
+
+"He's waking!" she came out to whisper.
+
+The doctor hastened past her into the sick-room. As he entered, Jack
+looked up with a bright, puzzled light in his eyes.
+
+"Just what does this mean?" he asked. "Just how does it happen that I am
+here? I thought that I--"
+
+"We brought you in some days ago," the doctor explained. "And since you
+took the water-hole your mind has been enjoying a little vacation, while
+we moved your body about as we pleased."
+
+"I took the water-hole, then! And Firio? Firio? He--"
+
+"He is just waiting outside to congratulate you on the re-establishment
+of the old cordial relations between mind and body," the doctor returned;
+and slipped out to call Firio and to announce: "He is right as rain,
+right as rain!" news that Mrs. Galway set forth immediately to herald
+through the community.
+
+As for Firio, he strode into Jack's presence with the air of conqueror,
+sage, and prophet in one.
+
+"Is it really you, Firio? Come here, so that I can feel of you and make
+sure, you son of the sun!"
+
+Jack put out his thin, white hand to Firio, and the velvet of Firio's
+eyes was very soft, indeed.
+
+"Did you know when they brought you in?" Jack asked.
+
+"When burro stumble I feel ouch and see desert and then I drift away
+up to sky again," answered Firio. "All right now, eh? Pretty soon
+you so strong I have to broil five--six--seven quail a day and still
+you hungry!"
+
+The doctor who had been looking on from the doorway felt a vigorous touch
+on the arm and turned to hear John Wingfield, Sr. asking him to make
+way. With a grimace approaching a scowl he drew back free of Jack's sight
+and held up his hand in protest. "You had better not excite him!" he
+whispered.
+
+"But I am his father!" said John Wingfield, Sr. with something of his
+old, masterful manner in a moment of irritation, as he pushed by the
+doctor. He paused rather abruptly when his eyes met Jack's. A faint
+flush, appearing in Jack's cheeks, only emphasized his wanness and the
+whiteness of his neck and chin and forehead.
+
+"Well, Jack, right as rain, they say! I knew you would come out all
+right! It was in the blood that--" and the rest of John Wingfield, Sr.'s
+speech fell away into inarticulateness.
+
+It was a weak, emaciated son, this son whom he saw in contrast to the one
+who had entered his office unannounced one morning; and yet the father
+now felt that same indefinable radiation of calm strength closing his
+throat that he had felt then. Jack was looking steadily in his father's
+direction, but through him as through a thin shadow and into the
+distance. He smiled, but very faintly and very meaningly.
+
+"Father, you will keep the bargain I have made," he said, as if this were
+a thing admitting of no dispute. "It is fair to the other one, isn't it?
+Yes, we have found the truth at last, haven't we? And the truth makes it
+all clear for him and for you and for me."
+
+"You mean--it is all over--you stay out here for good--you--" said John
+Wingfield, Sr. gropingly.
+
+Then another figure appeared in the doorway and Jack's eyes returned from
+the distances to rest on it fondly. In response to an impulse that he
+could not control, Peter Mortimer was peering timidly into the sick-room.
+
+"Why, Peter!" exclaimed Jack, happily. "Come farther in, so I can see
+more of you than the tip of your nose."
+
+After a glance of inquiry at the doctor, which received an affirmative
+nod, Peter ventured another step.
+
+"So it's salads and roses, is it, Peter?" Jack continued. "Well, I think
+you may telegraph any time, now, that the others can come as soon as they
+are ready and their places are filled."
+
+Thus John Wingfield, Sr. had his answer; thus the processes of fate that
+Dr. Bennington had said were in the younger man had worked out their end.
+Under the spur of a sudden, powerful resolution, the father withdrew. In
+the living-room he met Jasper Ewold. The two men paused, facing each
+other. They were alone with the frank, daring features from Velasquez's
+brush and with the "I give! I give!" of the Sargent, both reflecting the
+afterglow of sunset; while the features of the living--John Wingfield,
+Sr.'s, in stony anger, and Jasper Ewold's, serene in philosophy--told
+their story without the touch of a painter's genius.
+
+"You have stolen my son, Jasper Ewold!" declared John Wingfield, Sr.
+with the bitterness of one whose personal edict excluded defeat from his
+lexicon, only to find it writ broad across the page. "I suppose you think
+you have won, damn you, Jasper Ewold!"
+
+The Doge flushed. He seemed on the point of an outburst. Then he
+looked significantly from the portrait of the ancestor to the portrait
+of the mother.
+
+"He was never yours to lose!" was the answer, without passion.
+
+John Wingfield, Sr. recoiled, avoiding a glance at the walls where the
+pictures hung. The Doge stepped to one side to leave the way clear. John
+Wingfield, Sr. went out unsteadily, with head bowed. But he had not gone
+far before his head went up with a jerk and he struck fist into palm
+decisively. Rigidly, ignoring everyone he passed and looking straight
+ahead, he walked rapidly toward the station, as if every step meant
+welcome freedom, from the earth that it touched.
+
+His private car was attached to the evening express, and while it started
+homeward with the king and the determinedly filial heir-apparent to the
+citadel of the push-buttons, through all the gardens of Little Rivers ran
+the joyous news that Jack was "right as rain." It was a thing to start a
+continual exchange of visits and to keep the lights burning in the houses
+unusually late.
+
+But all was dark and silent out at Bill Lang's store. After their return
+from Agua Fria, the rescuing party, Jim Galway leading, had attended to
+another matter. The remnants of Pete Leddy's gang, far from offering any
+resistance, explained that they had business elsewhere which admitted of
+no delay. There was peace in the valley of Little Rivers. Its phantoms
+had been laid at the same time as Jack's.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVIII
+
+THEIR SIDE OF THE PASS
+
+
+"Persiflage! Persiflage!" cried the Doge.
+
+He and Jack were in the full tilt of controversy, Jack pressing an
+advantage as they came around the corner of the Ewold house. It was like
+the old times and better than the old times. For now there was
+understanding where then there had been mystery. The stream of their
+comradeship ran smoothly in an open country, with no unsounded depths.
+
+"But I notice that you always say persiflage just as I am getting the
+better of the argument!" Jack whipped back.
+
+"Has it taken you all this time to find that out? For what purpose is
+the word in the English vocabulary? But I'll take the other side, which
+is the easy one, next time, and then we'll see! Boom! boom!" The Doge
+pursed out his lips in mock terrorization of his opponent. "You are
+pretty near yourself again, young sir," he added, as he paused at the
+opening in the hedge.
+
+"Yes, strength has been fairly flooding back the last two or three days.
+I can feel it travelling in my veins and making the tissues expand. It is
+glorious to be alive, O Doge!"
+
+"Now, do you want me to take the other side on that question so you can
+have another unearned victory? I refuse to humor the invalid any longer
+and I agree. The proposition that it is glorious to live on such an
+afternoon as this is carried unanimously. But I will never agree that you
+can grow dates the equal of mine."
+
+"Not until my first crop is ripe; then there will be no dispute!"
+
+"That is real persiflage!" the Doge called after Jack.
+
+Jack had made his first visit to the Doge's garden since he had left it
+to meet Prather and Leddy rather brief when he found that Mary was not at
+home. She had ridden out to the pass. Her trips to the pass had been so
+frequent of late that he had seen little of her during his convalescence.
+Yet he had eaten her jelly exclusively. He had eaten it with his bread,
+his porridge, his dessert, and with the quail that Firio had broiled. He
+had even intimated his willingness to mix it with his soup. She advised
+him to stir it into his coffee, instead.
+
+When he was seated in the long chair on the porch and she called to ask
+how he was, they had kept to the domain of nonsense, with never a
+reference to sombre memories; but she was a little constrained, a little
+shy, and he never gave her cause to raise the barrier, even if she had
+been of the mind in face of a possible recurrence of former provocations
+while he was weak and easily tired. It was enough for him to hear her
+talk; enough to look out restfully toward the gray masses of the range;
+enough to know that the desert had brought him oblivion to the past;
+enough to see his future as clear as the V of Galeria against the sky,
+sharing the life of the same community with her.
+
+And what else? He was almost in fear of the very question that was never
+out of his mind. She might wish him luck in the wars, but he knew her too
+well to have any illusions that this meant the giving of the great thing
+she had to give, unless in the full spontaneity of spirit. This
+afternoon, with the flood of returning strength, the question suddenly
+became commanding in a fresh-born suspense.
+
+As he walked back to the house he met Belvy Smith and some of the
+children. Of course they asked for a story, and he continued one about a
+battered knight and his Heart's Desire, which he had begun some days
+previously.
+
+"He wasn't a particularly handsome knight or particularly good--inclined
+to mischief, I think, when he forgot himself--but he was mightily in
+earnest. He didn't know how to take no. Say 'No!' to him and push him off
+the mountain top and there he was, starting for the peak again! And he
+was not so foolish as he might seem. When he reached the top he was happy
+just to get a smile from his Heart's Desire before he was tossed back
+again. His fingers were worn clear down to the first joint and his feet
+off up to the knees, so he could not hold on to the seams of canyons as
+well as before. He would have been a ridiculous spectacle if he weren't
+so pitiful. And that wasn't the worst of it. He was pretty well shot to
+pieces by the brigands whom he had met on his travels. With every ascent
+there was less of him to climb, you see. In fact, he was being worn down
+so fast that pretty soon there wouldn't be much left of him except his
+wishbone. That was indestructible. He would always wish. And after the
+hardest climb of all, here he is very near the top again, and--"
+
+"And--and--"
+
+"I'll have to finish this story later," said Jack, sending the youngsters
+on their way, while he went his own to call to Firio, as he entered the
+yard: "Son of the sun, I feel so strong that I am going for a ride!"
+
+"You wear the big spurs and the grand chaps?" Firio asked.
+
+Jack hesitated thoughtfully.
+
+"No, just plain togs," he answered. "I think we will hang up that
+circus costume as a souvenir. We are past that stage of our career. My
+devil is dead."
+
+It was Firio's turn to be thoughtful.
+
+"_Sí_! We had enough fight! We get old and sober! _Sí_, I know! We settle
+down. I am going to begin to shave!" he concluded, stroking the black
+down on his boyish lip.
+
+With the town behind him and the sinking sun over his shoulder, the
+battered knight rode toward the foothills and on up the winding path,
+oblivious of the Eternal Painter's magic and conscious only that every
+step brought him nearer his Heart's Desire. Here was the rock where she
+was seated when he had first seen her. What ages had passed since then!
+And there, around the escarpment, he saw her pony on the shelf! Dropping
+P.D.'s reins, he hurried on impetuously. With the final turn he found
+Mary seated on the rock where she had been the day that he had come to
+say farewell before he went to battle with the millions. Now as then, she
+was gazing far out over that sea of singing, quivering light, and the
+crunch of his footsteps awakened her from her revery.
+
+But how differently she looked around! Her breaths were coming in a happy
+storm, her face crimsoning, her nostrils playing in trembling dilation.
+In her eyes he saw open gates and a long vista of a fair highway in a
+glorious land; and the splendor of her was something near and yielding.
+He sank down beside her. Her hands stole into his; her head dropped on
+his shoulder; and he felt a warm and palpitating union with the very
+breath of her life.
+
+"What do I see!" cried the Eternal Painter. "Two human beings who have
+climbed up as near heaven as they could and seem as happy as if they had
+reached it!"
+
+"We have reached it!" Jack called back. "And we like it, you
+hoary-bearded, Olympian impersonality!"
+
+Thus they watched the sun go down, gilding the foliage of their
+Little Rivers, seeing their future in the fulness and richness of the
+life of their choice, which should spread the oasis the length of
+that valley, and knowing that any excursions to the world over the
+pass would only sink their roots deeper in the soil of the valley
+that had given them life.
+
+"Jack, oh, Jack! How I did fight against the thing that was born in me
+that morning in the _arroyo_! I was in fear of it and of myself. In fear
+of it I ran from you that day you climbed down to the pine. But I
+shan't run again--not so far but that I can be sure you can catch me.
+Jack, oh, Jack! And this is the hand that saved you from Leddy--the
+right hand! I think I shall always like it better than the left hand!
+And, Jack, there is a little touch of gray on the temples"--Mary was
+running her fingers very, very gently over the wound--"which I like. But
+we shall be so happy that it will be centuries before the rest of your
+hair is gray! Jack, oh, Jack!"
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Over the Pass, by Frederick Palmer
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Over the Pass, by Frederick Palmer
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Over the Pass
+
+Author: Frederick Palmer
+
+Release Date: February 4, 2004 [EBook #10932]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OVER THE PASS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Audrey Longhurst, Mary Meehan, and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+                              OVER THE PASS
+
+                           BY FREDERICK PALMER
+
+                AUTHOR OF THE VAGABOND, DANBURY RODD, ETC.
+
+                                   1912
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+PART I--AN EASY TRAVELLER
+
+CHAPTER
+
+      I YOUTH IN SPURS
+
+     II DINOSAUR OR DESPERADO
+
+    III JACK RIDES IN COMPANY
+
+     IV HE CARRIES THE MAIL
+
+      V A SMILE AND A SQUARE CHIN
+
+     VI OBLIVION IS NOT EASY
+
+    VII WHAT HAPPENED AT LANG'S
+
+   VIII ACCORDING TO CODE
+
+     IX THE DEVIL IS OUT
+
+      X MARY EXPLAINS
+
+     XI SENOR DON'T CARE RECEIVES
+
+    XII MARY BRINGS TRIBUTE
+
+   XIII A JOURNEY ON CRUTCHES
+
+    XIV "HOW FAST YOU SEW!"
+
+     XV WHEN THE DESERT BLOOMS
+
+    XVI A CHANGE OF MIND
+
+   XVII THE DOGE SNAPS A RUBBER BAND
+
+  XVIII ANOTHER STRANGER ARRIVES
+
+    XIX LOOKING OVER PRECIPICES
+
+     XX A PUZZLED AMBASSADOR
+
+    XXI "GOOD-BY, LITTLE RIVERS!"
+
+   XXII "LUCK, JACK, LUCK!"
+
+
+PART II--HE FINDS HIMSELF
+
+  XXIII LABELLED AND SHIPPED
+
+   XXIV IN THE CITADEL OF THE MILLIONS
+
+    XXV "BUT WITH YOU, YES, SIR!"
+
+  XXVII BY RIGHT OF ANCESTRY
+
+ XXVIII JACK GETS A RAISE
+
+   XXIX A MEETING ON THE AVENUE TRAIL
+
+    XXX WITH THE PHANTOMS
+
+   XXXI PRATHER WOULD NOT WAIT
+
+  XXXII A CRISIS IN THE WINGFIELD LIBRARY
+
+ XXXIII PRATHER SEES THE PORTRAIT
+
+  XXXIV "JOHN WINGFIELD, YOU--"
+
+
+PART III--HE FINDS HIS PLACE IN LIFE
+
+   XXXV BACK TO LITTLE RIVERS
+
+  XXXVI AROUND THE WATER-HOLE
+
+ XXXVII THE END OF THE WEAVING
+
+XXXVIII THEIR SIDE OF THE PASS
+
+
+
+
+PART I
+
+AN EASY TRAVELLER
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+YOUTH IN SPURS
+
+Here time was as nothing; here sunset and sunrise were as incidents
+of an uncalendared, everlasting day; here chaotic grandeur was that
+of the earth's crust when it cooled after the last convulsive
+movement of genesis.
+
+In all the region about the Galeria Pass the silence of the dry Arizona
+air seemed luminous and eternal. Whoever climbed to the crotch of that V,
+cut jagged against the sky for distances yet unreckoned by tourist
+folders, might have the reward of pitching the tents of his imagination
+at the gateway of the clouds.
+
+Early on a certain afternoon he would have noted to the eastward a speck
+far out on a vast basin of sand which was enclosed by a rim of tumbling
+mountains. Continued observation at long range would have shown the speck
+to be moving almost imperceptibly, with what seemed the impertinence of
+infinitesimal life in that dead world; and, eventually, it would have
+taken the form of a man astride a pony.
+
+The man was young, fantastically young if you were to judge by his garb,
+a flamboyant expression of the romantic cowboy style which might have
+served as a sensational exhibit in a shop-window. In place of the
+conventional blue wool shirt was one of dark blue silk. The
+_chaparejos_, or "chaps," were of the softest leather, with the fringe
+at the seams generously long; and the silver spurs at the boot-heels
+were chased in antique pattern and ridiculously large. Instead of the
+conventional handkerchief at the neck was a dark red string tie; while
+the straight-brimmed cowpuncher hat, out of keeping with the general
+effect of newness and laundered freshness, had that tint which only
+exposure to many dewfalls and many blazing mid-days will produce in
+light-colored felt.
+
+There was vagrancy in the smile of his singularly sensitive mouth and
+vagrancy in the relaxed way that he rode. From the fondness with which
+his gaze swept the naked peaks they might have been cities _en fete_
+calling him to their festivities. If so, he was in no haste to let
+realization overtake anticipation. His reins hung loose. He hummed
+snatches of Spanish, French, and English songs. Their cosmopolitan
+freedom of variety was as out of keeping with the scene as their lilt,
+which had the tripping, self-carrying impetus of the sheer joy of living.
+
+Lapsing into silence, his face went ruminative and then sad. With a
+sudden indrawing of breath he freed himself from his reverie, and bending
+over from his saddle patted a buckskin neck in affectionate tattoo. Tawny
+ears turned backward in appreciative fellowship, but without any break in
+a plodding dog-trot. Though the rider's aspect might say with the desert
+that time was nothing, the pony's expressed a logical purpose. Thus the
+speed of their machine-like progress was entirely regulated by the
+prospect of a measure of oats at the journey's end.
+
+When they came to the foot-hills and the rider dismounted and led the
+way, with a following muzzle at times poking the small of his back, up
+the tortuous path, rounding pinnacles and skimming the edge of abysses,
+his leg muscles answered with the readiness of familiarity with climbing.
+At the top he saw why the pass had received its name of Galeria from the
+Spanish. A great isosceles of precipitous walls formed a long, natural
+gallery, which the heaving of the earth's crust had rent and time had
+eroded. It lay near the present boundary line of two civilizations: in
+the neutral zone of desert expanses, where the Saxon pioneer, with his
+lips closed on English _s's_, had paused in his progress southward; and
+the _conquistadore_, with tongue caressing Castilian vowels, had paused
+in his progress northward.
+
+At the other side the traveller beheld a basin which was a thousand
+feet higher than the one behind him. It approached the pass at a
+gentler slope. It must be cooler than the other, its ozone a little
+rarer. A sea of quivering and singing light in the afternoon glow, it
+was lost in the horizon.
+
+Not far from the foot-hills floated a patch of foliage, checkered by the
+roofs of the houses of an irrigation colony, hanging kitelike at the end
+of the silver thread of a river whose waters had set gardens abloom in
+sterile expanses. There seemed a refusal of intimacy with the one visible
+symbol of its relations with the outer world; for the railroad, with its
+lines of steel flashing across the gray levels, passed beyond the outer
+edge of the oasis.
+
+"This beats any valley I've seen yet," and the traveller spoke with the
+confidence of one who is a connoisseur of Arizona valleys.
+
+He paused for some time in hesitancy to take a farewell of the rapturous
+vista. A hundred feet lower and the refraction of the light would present
+it in different coloring and perspective. With his spell of visual
+intoxication ran the consciousness of being utterly alone. But the egoism
+of his isolation in the towering infinite did not endure; for the sound
+of voices, a man's and a woman's, broke on his ear.
+
+The man's was strident, disagreeable, persistent. Its timbre was such as
+he had heard coming out of the doors of border saloons. The woman's was
+quiet and resisting, its quality of youth peculiarly emphasized by its
+restrained emotion.
+
+Now the easy traveller took stock of his immediate surroundings, which
+had interested him only as a foothold and vantage-point for the panorama
+that he had been breathing in. Here, of all conceivable places, he was in
+danger of becoming eavesdropper to a conversation which was evidently
+very personal. Rounding the escarpment at his elbow he saw, on a shelf of
+decaying granite, two waiting ponies. One had a Mexican saddle of the
+cowboy type. The other had an Eastern side-saddle, which struck him as
+exotic in a land where women mostly ride astride. And what woman,
+whatever style of riding she chose, should care to come to this pass?
+
+Judging by the direction from which the voices came, the speakers were
+hidden by still another turn in the defile. A few more steps brought eye
+as well as ear back to the living world with the sight of a girl seated
+on a bowlder. He could see nothing of her face except the cheek, which
+was brown, and the tip of a chin, which he guessed was oval, and her
+hair, which was dark under her hatbrim and shimmering with gold where it
+was kissed by the rays of the sun. An impression as swift as a flash of
+light could not exclude inevitable curiosity as to the full face; a
+curiosity emphasized by the poised erectness of her slender figure.
+
+The man was bending over her in a familiar way. He was thirty, perhaps,
+in the prime of physical vigor, square-jawed, cocksure, a six-shooter
+slung at his hip. Though she was not giving way before him, her attitude,
+in its steadiness, reflected distress in a bowstrung tremulousness.
+Suddenly, at something he said which the easy traveller could not quite
+understand, she sprang up aflame, her hand flying back against the rock
+wall behind her for support. Then the man spoke so loud that he was
+distinctly audible.
+
+"When you get mad like that you're prettier'n ever," he said.
+
+It was a peculiar situation. It seemed incredible, melodramatic, unreal,
+in sight of the crawling freight train far out on the levels.
+
+"Aren't you overplaying your part, sir?" the easy traveller asked.
+
+The man's hand flew to his six-shooter, while the girl looked around in
+swift and eager impulse to the interrupting voice. Its owner, the color
+scheme of his attire emphasized by the glare of the low sun, expressed in
+his pose and the inquiring flicker of a smile purely the element of the
+casual. Far from making any movement toward his own six-shooter, he
+seemed oblivious of any such necessity. With the first glimpse of her
+face, when he saw the violet flame of her anger go ruddy with surprise
+and relief, then fluid and sparkling as a culminating change of emotion,
+he felt cheap for having asked himself the question--which now seemed so
+superficial--whether she were good-looking or not. She was, undoubtedly,
+yes, undoubtedly good-looking in a way of her own.
+
+"What business is it of yours?" demanded the man, evidently under the
+impression that he was due to say something, while his fingers still
+rested on his holster.
+
+"None at all, unless she says so," the deliverer answered. "Is it?" he
+asked her.
+
+After her first glance at him she had lowered her lashes. Now she raised
+them, sending a direct message beside which her first glance had been
+dumb indifference. He was seeing into the depths of her eyes in the
+consciousness of a privilege rarely bestowed. They gave wing to a
+thousand inquiries. He had the thrill of an explorer who is about to
+enter on a voyage of discovery. Then the veil was drawn before his ship
+had even put out from port. It was a veil woven with fine threads of
+appreciative and conventional gratitude.
+
+"It is!" she said decisively.
+
+"I'll be going," said the persecutor, with a grimace that seemed mixed
+partly of inherent bravado and partly of shame, as his pulse slowed down
+to normal.
+
+"As you please," answered that easy traveller. "I had no mind to exert
+any positive directions over your movements."
+
+His politeness, his disinterestedness, and his evident disinclination to
+any kind of vehemence carried an implication more exasperating than an
+open challenge. They changed melodrama into comedy. They made his
+protagonist appear a negligible quantity.
+
+"There's some things I don't do when women are around," the persecutor
+returned, grudgingly, and went for his horse; while oppressive silence
+prevailed. The easy traveller was not looking at the girl or she at him.
+He was regarding the other man idly, curiously, though not contemptuously
+as he mounted and started down the trail toward the valley, only to draw
+rein as he looked back over his shoulder with a glare which took the easy
+traveller in from head to foot.
+
+"Huh! You near-silk dude!" he said chokingly, in his rancor which had
+grown with the few minutes he had had for self-communion.
+
+"If you mean my shirt, it was sold to me for pure silk," the easy
+traveller returned, in half-diffident correction of the statement.
+
+"We'll meet again!" came the more definite and articulate defiance.
+
+"Perhaps. Who can tell? Arizona, though a large place, has so few people
+that it is humanly very small."
+
+Now the other man rose in his stirrups, resting the weight of his body on
+the palm of the hand which was on the back of his saddle. He was rigid,
+his voice was shaking with very genuine though dramatic rage drawn to a
+fine point of determination.
+
+"When we do meet, you better draw! I give you warning!" he called.
+
+There was no sign that this threat had made the easy traveller tighten a
+single muscle. But a trace of scepticism had crept into his smile.
+
+"Whew!" He drew the exclamation out into a whistle.
+
+"Whistle--whistle while you can! You won't have many more chances! Draw,
+you tenderfoot! But it won't do any good--I'll get you!"
+
+With this challenge the other settled back into the saddle and proceeded
+on his way.
+
+"Whew!" The second whistle was anything but truculent and anything but
+apologetic. It had the unconscious and spontaneous quality of the delight
+of the collector who finds a new specimen in wild places.
+
+From under her lashes the girl had been watching the easy traveller
+rather than her persecutor; first, studiously; then, in the confusion of
+embarrassment that left her speechless.
+
+"Well, well," he concluded, "you must take not only your zoology, but
+your anthropology as you find it!"
+
+His drollness, his dry contemplation of the specimen, and his
+absurdly gay and unpractical attire, formed a combination of elements
+suddenly grouped into an effect that touched her reflex nerves after
+the strain with the magic of humor. She could not help herself: she
+burst out laughing. At this, he looked away from the specimen; looked
+around puzzled, quizzically, and, in sympathetic impulse, began
+laughing himself. Thus a wholly unmodern incident took a whimsical
+turn out of a horror which, if farcical in the abstract, was no less
+potent in the concrete.
+
+"Quite like the Middle Ages, isn't it?" he said.
+
+"But Walter Scott ceased writing in the thirties!" she returned, quick to
+fall in with his cue.
+
+"The swooning age outlasted him--lasted, indeed, into the era of
+hoop-skirts; but that, too, is gone."
+
+"They do give medals," she added.
+
+"For rescuing the drowning only; and they are a great nuisance to carry
+around in one's baggage. Please don't recommend me!"
+
+Both laughed again softly, looking fairly at each other in
+understanding, twentieth-century fashion. She was not to play the
+classic damsel or he the classic rescuer. Yet the fact of a young man
+finding a young woman brutally annoyed on the roof of the world, five
+or six miles from a settlement--well, it was a fact. Over the bump of
+their self-introduction, free of the serious impression of her
+experience, she could think for him as well as for herself. This struck
+her with sudden alarm.
+
+"I fear I have made you a dangerous enemy," she said. "Pete Leddy is the
+prize ruffian of our community of Little Rivers."
+
+"I thought that this would be an interesting valley," he returned, in
+bland appreciation of her contribution of information about the habits of
+the specimen.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+DINOSAUR OR DESPERADO
+
+
+She faced a situation irritating and vitalizing, and inevitably, under
+its growing perplexity, her observation of his appearance and
+characteristics had been acute with feminine intuition, which is so
+frequently right, that we forget that it may not always be. She imagined
+him with a certain amiable aimlessness turning his pony to one side so as
+not to knock down a danger sign, while he rode straight over a precipice.
+
+What would have happened if Leddy had really drawn? she asked herself.
+Probably her deliverer would have regarded the muzzle of Leddy's gun in
+studious vacancy before a bullet sent him to kingdom come. All
+speculation aside, her problem was how to rescue her rescuer. She felt
+almost motherly on his account, he was so blissfully oblivious to
+realities. And she felt, too, that under the circumstances, she ought to
+be formal.
+
+"Now, Mister--" she began; and the Mister sounded odd and stilted in her
+ears in relation to him.
+
+"Jack is my name," he said simply.
+
+"Mine is Mary," she volunteered, giving him as much as he had given
+and no more. "Now, sir," she went on, in peremptory earnestness, "this
+is serious."
+
+"It _was_," he answered. "At least, unpleasant."
+
+"It is, _now_. Pete Leddy meant what he said when he said that he
+would draw."
+
+"He ought to, from his repeated emphasis," answered Jack, in agreeable
+affirmation.
+
+"He has six notches on his gun-handle--six men that he has killed!"
+Mary went on.
+
+"Whew!" said Jack. "And he isn't more than thirty! He seems a hard worker
+who keeps right on the job."
+
+She pressed her lips together to control her amusement, before she asked
+categorically, with the precision of a school-mistress:
+
+"Do you know how to shoot?"
+
+He was surprised. He seemed to be wondering if she were not making
+sport of him.
+
+"Why should I carry a six-shooter if I did not?" he asked.
+
+This convinced her that his revolver was a part of his play cowboy
+costume. He had come out of the East thinking that desperado etiquette of
+the Bad Lands was _opera bouffe_.
+
+"Leddy is a dead shot. He will give you no chance!" she insisted.
+
+"I should think not," Jack mused. "No, naturally not; otherwise there
+might have been no sixth notch. The third or the fourth, even the second
+object of his favor might have blasted his fair young career as a
+wood-carver. Has he set any limit to his ambition? Is he going to make it
+an even hundred and then retire?"
+
+"I don't know!" she gasped.
+
+"I must ask," he added, thoughtfully.
+
+Was he out of his head? Certainly his eye was not insane. Its bluish-gray
+was twinkling enjoyably into hers.
+
+"You exasperated him with that whistle. It was a deadly insult to his
+desperado pride. You are marked--don't you see, marked?" she persisted.
+"And I brought it on! I am responsible!"
+
+He shook his head in a denial so unmoved by her appeal that she was sure
+he would send Job into an apoplectic frenzy.
+
+"Pardon me, but you're contradicting your own statement. You just said it
+was the whistle," he corrected her. "It's the whistle that gives me Check
+Number Seven. You haven't the least bit of responsibility. The whistle
+gets it all, just as you said."
+
+This was too much. Confuting her with her own words! Quibbling with his
+own danger in order to make her an accomplice of murder! She lost her
+temper completely. That fact alone could account for the audacity of her
+next remark.
+
+"I wonder if you really know enough to come in out of the rain!"
+she stormed.
+
+"That's the blessing of living in Arizona," he returned. "It is such a
+dry climate."
+
+She caught herself laughing; and this only made her the more intense a
+second later, on a different tack. Now she would plead.
+
+"Please--please promise me that you will not go to Little Rivers
+to-night. Promise that you will turn back over the pass!"
+
+"You put me between the devil and the dragon. What you ask is impossible.
+I'll tell you why," he went on, confidentially. "You know this is the
+land of fossil dinosaurs."
+
+"I had a brute on my hands," she thought; "now I have the Mad Hatter and
+the March Hare in collaboration!"
+
+"There is a big dinosaur come to life on the other side," he proceeded.
+"I just got through the pass in time. I could feel his breath on my
+back--a hot, gun-powdery breath! It was awful, simply awful and horrible,
+too. And just as I had resigned myself to be his entree, by great luck
+his big middle got wedged in the bottom of the V, and his scales scraped
+like the plates of a ship against a stone pier!"
+
+To her disgust she was laughing again.
+
+"If I went back now out of fear of Pete Leddy," he continued, "that
+dinosaur would know that I was such insignificant prey he would not even
+take the trouble to knock me down with a forepaw. He would swallow me
+alive and running! Think of that slimy slide down the red upholstery of
+his gullet, not to mention the misery of a total loss of my dignity and
+self-respect!"
+
+He had spoken it all as if he believed it true. He made it seem
+almost true.
+
+"I like nonsense as much as anybody," she began, "and I do not forget
+that you did me a great kindness."
+
+"Which any stranger, any third person coming at the right moment might
+have done," he interrupted. "Sir Walter's age has passed."
+
+"Yes, but Pete Leddy belongs still farther back. We may laugh at his
+ruffianly bravado, but no one may laugh at a forty-four calibre bullet!
+Think what you are going to make me pay for your kindness! I must pay
+with memory of the sound of a shot and the fall of a body there in the
+streets of Little Rivers--a nightmare for life! Oh, I beg of you, though
+it is fun for you to be killed, consider me! Don't go down into that
+valley! I beg of you, go back over the pass!"
+
+There was no acting, no suspicion of a gesture. She stood quite still,
+while all the power of her eyes reflected the misery which she pictured
+for herself. The low pitch of her voice sounded its depths with that
+restraint which makes for the most poignant intensity. As she reached her
+climax he had come out of his languid pose. He was erect and rigid. She
+saw him as some person other than the one to whom she had begun her
+appeal. He was still smiling, but his smile was of a different sort.
+Instead of being the significant thing about him in expression of his
+casualness, it seemed the softening compensation for his stubbornness.
+
+"I'd like to, but it is hardly in human nature for me to do that. I
+can't!" And he asked if he might bring up her pony.
+
+"Yes," she consented.
+
+She thought that the faint bow of courtesy with which he had accompanied
+the announcement of his decision he would have given, in common
+politeness, to anyone who pointed at the danger sign before he rode over
+the precipice.
+
+"May I ride down with you, or shall I go ahead?" he inquired, after he
+had assisted her to mount.
+
+"With me!" she answered, quickly. "You are safe while you are with me."
+
+The decisive turn to her mobile lips and the faint wrinkles of a frown,
+coming and going in various heraldry, formed a vividly sentient and
+versatile expression of emotions while she watched his silhouette against
+the sky as he turned to get his own pony.
+
+"Come, P.D.--come along!" he called.
+
+In answer to his voice an equine face, peculiarly reflective of trail
+wisdom, bony and large, particularly over the eyes, slowly turned toward
+its master. P.D. was considering.
+
+"Come along! The trail, P.D.!" And P.D. came, but with democratic
+independence, taking his time to get into motion. "He is never fast,"
+Jack explained, "but once he has the motor going, he keeps at it all day.
+So I call him P.D. without the Q., as he is never quick."
+
+"Pretty Damn, you mean!" she exclaimed, with a certain spontaneous pride
+of understanding. Then she flushed in confusion.
+
+"Oh, thank you! It was so human of you to translate it out loud! It isn't
+profane. Look at him now. Don't you think it is a good name for him?"
+Jack asked, seriously.
+
+"I do!"
+
+She was laughing again, oblivious of the impending tragedy.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+JACK RIDES IN COMPANY
+
+
+Let not the Grundy woman raise an eyebrow of deprecation at the informal
+introduction of Jack and Mary, or we shall refute her with her own
+precepts, which make the steps to a throne the steps of the social
+pyramid. If she wishes a sponsor, we name an impeccable majesty of the
+very oldest dynasty of all, which is entirely without scandal. We remind
+her of the ancient rule that people who meet at court, vouched for by
+royal favor, need no introduction.
+
+These two had met under the roof of the Eternal Painter. His palette is
+somewhere in the upper ether and his head in the interplanetary spaces.
+His heavy eyebrows twinkle with star-dust. Dodging occasional flying
+meteors, which harass him as flies harass a landscapist out of doors on a
+hot day, he is ever active, this mighty artist of the changing desert
+sky. So fickle his moods, so versatile his genius, so quick to creation
+his fancy, that he never knows what his next composition will be till the
+second that it is begun.
+
+No earthly rival need be jealous of him. He will never clog the
+galleries. He always paints on the same canvas, scraping off one picture
+to make room for another. And you do not mind the loss of the old. You
+live for the new.
+
+His Majesty has no artistic memory. He is as young as he was the day
+that he flung out his first tentative lunette after chaos. He is the
+patron saint of all pilgrims from the city's struggle, where they found
+no oases of rest. He melts "pasts" and family skeletons and hidden
+stories of any kind whatsoever into the blue as a background with the
+abandoned preoccupation of his own brushwork. His lieges, who seek
+oblivion in the desert, need not worry about the water that will never
+run over the millwheel again, or dwell in prophecy on floods to come. The
+omnipotence of the moment transports and soothes them.
+
+"Time is nothing!" says the Eternal Painter. "If you feel important,
+remember that man's hectic bustling makes but worm-work on the planet.
+Live and breathe joyfully and magnificently! Do not strain your eyes over
+embroidery! Come to my open gallery! And how do you like the way I set
+those silver clouds a-tumbling? Do you know anything better under the
+dome of any church or capitol? Shall I bank them? Line them with purple?
+It is done! But no! Let us wipe it all out, change the tint of our
+background, and start afresh!"
+
+With his eleven hundred million billionth sunset, or thereabouts, His
+Majesty held a man and a woman who had met on the roof of the world in
+thrall. He was lurid at the outset, dipping his camel's hair in at the
+round furnace door sinking toward the hills, whose red vortex shot
+tongues of flame into canyons and crevasses and drove out their lurking
+shadows with the fire of its inquisition. The foliage of Little Rivers
+became a grove of quivering leaves of gold, set on a vast beaten platter
+of gold. And the man and the woman, like all things else in the
+landscape, were suffused in this still, Parnassian, penetrating
+brilliancy, which ought to make even a miser feel that his hoarded eagles
+and sovereigns are ephemeral dross.
+
+"I love it all--all the desert!" said Mary Ewold.
+
+"And I, too!"
+
+"I have for six years."
+
+"I for five."
+
+The sentences had struck clearly as answering chimes, impersonally, in
+their preoccupied gazing.
+
+"It gave me life!" he added.
+
+"And it gave me life!"
+
+Then they looked at each other in mutual surprise and understanding; each
+in wonder that the other had ever been anything but radiant of
+out-of-doors health. That fleck on the lungs which brought a doctor's
+orders had long ago been healed by the physician of the ozone they were
+breathing.
+
+"And you remained," he said.
+
+"And you, also," she answered.
+
+Their own silence seemed to become a thing apart from the silence of the
+infinite. It was as if both recognized a common thought that even the
+Eternal Painter could not compel oblivion of the past to which they did
+not return; of the faith of cities to which they had been bred. But it is
+one of the Eternal Painter's rules that no one of his subjects should ask
+another of his subjects why he stays on the desert. Jack was the first to
+speak, and his voice returned to the casual key.
+
+"Usually I watch the sunset while we make camp," he said. "I am very late
+to-night--late beyond all habit; and sunset and sunrise do make one a
+creature of habit out here. Firio and my little train will grow impatient
+waiting for me."
+
+"You mean the Indian and the burro with the silver bells that came over
+the pass some time before you?"
+
+Of course they belonged to him, she was thinking, even as she made the
+inquiry. This play cowboy, with his absurdly enormous silver spurs, would
+naturally put bells on his burro.
+
+"Yes, I sent Firio with Wrath of God and Jag Ear on ahead and told him to
+wait at the foot of the descent. Wrath of God will worry--he is of a
+worrying nature. I must be going."
+
+In view of the dinosaur nonsense she was already prepared for a variety
+of inventional talk from him. As they started down from the pass in
+single file, she leading, the sun sank behind the hills, leaving the
+Eternal Painter, unhindered by a furnace glare in the centre of the
+canvas, to paint with a thousand brushes in the radiant tints of the
+afterglow.
+
+"You don't like that one, O art critics!" we hear him saying. "Well, here
+is another before you have adjusted your _pince-nez,_ and I will brush it
+away before you have emitted your first Ah! I do not criticise. I
+paint--I paint for the love of it. I paint with the pigments of the
+firmament and the imagination of the universe."
+
+The two did not talk of that sky which held their averted glances, while
+knowing hoofs that bore their weight kept the path. For how can you talk
+of the desert sky except in the banality of exclamations? It is _lese
+majeste_ to the Eternal Painter to attempt description.
+
+At times she looked back and their eyes met in understanding, as true
+subjects of His Majesty, and then they looked skyward to see what changes
+the Master's witchery had wrought. In supreme intoxication of the
+senses, breathing that dry air which was like cool wine coming in long
+sips to the palate, they rode down the winding trail, till, after a
+surpassing outburst, the Eternal Painter dropped his brush for the night.
+
+It was dusk. Shadows returned to the crevasses. Free of the magic of the
+sky, with the curtains of night drawing in, the mighty savagery of the
+bare mountains in their disdain of man and imagination reasserted itself.
+It dropped Mary Ewold from the azure to the reality of Pete Leddy. She
+was seeing, the smoking end of a revolver and a body lying in a pool of
+blood; and there, behind her, rode this smiling stranger, proceeding so
+genially and carelessly to the fate which she had provided for him.
+
+With the last turn, which brought them level with the plain, they came
+upon an Indian, a baggage burro, and a riding-pony. The Indian sprang up,
+grinning: his welcome and doffing a Mexican steeple-hat.
+
+"I must introduce you all around," Jack told Mary.
+
+She observed in his manner something new!--a positive enthusiasm for his
+three retainers, which included a certain well-relished vanity in their
+loyalty and character.
+
+"Firio has Sancho Panza beaten to a frazzle," Jack said. "Sancho was fat
+and unresourceful; even stupid. Fancy him broiling a quail on a spit!
+Fancy what a lot of trouble Firio could have saved Don Quixote de la
+Mancha! Why, confound it, he would have spoiled the story!"
+
+Firio was a solid grain, to take Jack's view, winnowed out of bushels of
+aboriginal chaff; an Indian, all Indian, without any strain of Spanish
+blood in the primitive southern strain.
+
+"And Firio rides Wrath of God," Jack continued, nodding to a pony with a
+low-hung head and pendant lip, whose lugubrious expression was
+exaggerated by a scar. "He looks it, don't you think?--always miserable,
+whether his nose is in the oats or we run out of water. He is our sad
+philosopher, who has just as dependable a gait as P.D. I have many
+theories about the psychology of his ego. Sometimes I explain it by a
+desire both to escape and to pursue unhappiness, which amounts to a
+solemn kind of perpetual motion. But he has a positively sweet nature.
+There is no more malice in his professional mournfulness than in the
+cheerful humor of Jag Ear."
+
+"It is plain to see which is Jag Ear," she observed, "and how he earned
+his name."
+
+Every time a burro gets into the corn, an Indian master cuts off a bit
+of long, furry ear as a lesson. Before Jag Ear passed into kindlier
+hands he had been clipped closer than a Boston terrier. Only a single
+upstanding fragment remained in token of a graded education which had
+availed him nothing.
+
+"There's no curtailing Jag Ear's curiosity," said Jack. "To him,
+everything is worth trying. That is why he is a born traveller. He
+has been with me from Colorado to Chihuahua, on all my wanderings
+back and forth."
+
+While he spoke, Firio mounted Wrath of God and, with Jag Ear's bells
+jingling, the supply division set out on the road. Jack and Mary
+followed, this time riding side by side, pony nose to pony nose, in an
+intimacy of association impossible in the narrow mountain trail. It was
+an intimacy signalized by silence. There was an end to the mighty
+transports of the heights; the wells of whimsicality had dried up. The
+weight of the silence seemed balancing on a brittle thread. All the
+afternoon's events aligned themselves in a colossal satire. In the half
+light Jack became a gaunt and lonely figure that ought to be confined in
+some Utopian kindergarten.
+
+Mary could feel her temples beating with the fear of what was waiting for
+him in Little Rivers, now a dark mass on the levels, just dark, without
+color or any attraction except the mystery that goes with the shroud of
+night. She knew how he would laugh at her fears; for she guessed that he
+was unafraid of anything in the world which, however, was no protection
+from Pete Leddy's six-shooter.
+
+"I--I have a right to know--won't you tell me how you are going to defend
+yourself against Pete Leddy?" she demanded, in a sudden outburst.
+
+"I hadn't thought of that. Certainly, I shall leave it to Pete himself to
+open hostilities. I hadn't thought of it because I have been too busy
+thinking out how I was going to break a piece of news to Firio. I have
+been an awful coward about it, putting it off and putting it off. I had
+planned to do it on my birthday two weeks ago, and then he gave me these
+big silver spurs--spent a whole month's wages on them, think of that! I
+bought this cowboy regalia to go with them. You can't imagine how that
+pleased him. It certainly was great fun."
+
+Mary could only shake her head hopelessly.
+
+"Firio and Jag Ear and Wrath of God and old P.D. here--we've sort of
+grown used to one another's foolishness. Now I can't put it off any
+longer, and I'd about as soon be murdered as tell him that I am going
+East in the morning."
+
+"You mean you are going to leave here for good?" She mistrusted her
+own hearing. She was dazzled by this sudden burst of light through
+the clouds.
+
+"Yes, by the first train. This is my last desert ride."
+
+Why had he not said so at first? It would not only have saved her from
+worry, but from the humiliation of pleading with a stranger. Doubtless he
+had enjoyed teasing her. But no matter. The affair need not last much
+longer, now. She told herself that, if necessary, she would mount guard
+over him for the remaining twelve hours of his stay. Once he was aboard
+the Pullman he would be out of danger; her responsibility would be over
+and the whole affair would become a bizarre memory; an incident closed.
+
+"Back to New York," he said, as one who enters a fog without a
+compass. "Back to fight pleosaurs, dinosaurs, and all kinds of
+monsters," he added, with a cheeriness which rang with the first false
+note she had heard from him. "I don't care," he concluded, and broke
+into a Spanish air, whose beat ran with the trickling hoof-beats of
+the ponies in the sand.
+
+"That is it!" she thought. "That explains. He just does not care about
+anything."
+
+Ahead, the lamps were beginning to twinkle in the little settlement which
+had sent such a contrast in citizenship as Mary Ewold and Pete Leddy out
+to the pass. They were approaching a single, isolated building, from the
+door of which came a spray of light and the sound of men's voices.
+
+"That is Bill Lang's place," Mary explained. "He keeps a store, with a
+bar in the rear. He also has the post-office, thanks to his political
+influence, and this is where I have to stop for the mail when I return
+from the pass."
+
+She had not spoken with any sense of a hint which it was inevitable he
+should accept.
+
+"Let me get it for you;" and before she had time to protest, he had
+dismounted, drawing rein at the edge of the wooden steps.
+
+She rode past where his pony was standing. When he entered the door, his
+tallness and lean ease of posture silhouetted in the light, she could
+look in on the group of idling male gossips.
+
+"Don't!"
+
+It was a half cry from her, hardly audible in an intensity which she knew
+was futile in the surge of her torturing self-incrimination. Why had she
+not thought that it would be here that Pete Leddy was bound to wait for
+anyone coming in by the trail from Galeria? The loungers suddenly dropped
+to the cover of boxes and barrels, as a flicker of steel shot upward, and
+behind the gleaming rim of a revolver muzzle held rigid was a brown hand
+and Leddy's hard, unyielding face.
+
+What matter if the easy traveller could shoot? He was caught like a man
+coming out of an alley. He had no chance to draw in turn. In the click of
+a second-hand the thing would be over. Mary's eyes involuntarily closed,
+to avoid seeing the flash from the revolver. She listened for the report;
+for the fall of a body which should express the horror she had visualized
+for the hundredth time. A century seemed to pass and there was no sound
+except the beat of her heart, which ran in a cataract throb to her
+temples; no sound except that and what seemed to be soft, regular steps
+on the bare floor of the store.
+
+"Coward!" she told herself, with the agony of her suspense
+breaking. "He saved you from inexpressible humiliation and you are
+afraid even to look!"
+
+She opened her eyes, prepared for the worst. Had she gone out of her
+head? Could she no longer trust her own eyesight? What she saw was
+inconceivable. The startled faces of the loungers were rising from
+behind the boxes and barrels. Pete Leddy's gun had dropped to his side
+and his would-be victim had a hand on Pete's shoulder. Jack was talking
+apparently in a kindly and reasoning tone, but she could not make out
+his words.
+
+One man alone evidently had not taken cover. It was Jim Galway, a
+rancher, who had been standing at the mail counter. To judge by his
+expression, what Jack was saying had his approval.
+
+With a nod to Leddy and then a nod to the others, as if in amicable
+conclusion of the affair, Jack wheeled around to the counter, disclosing
+Leddy's face wry with insupportable chagrin. His revolver was still in
+his hand. In the swift impulse of one at bay who finds himself released,
+he brought it up. There was murder, murder from behind, in the catlike
+quickness of his movement; but Jim Galway was equally quick. He threw his
+whole weight toward Leddy in a catapult leap, as he grasped Leddy's wrist
+and bore it down. Jack faced about in alert readiness. Seeing that Galway
+had the situation pat, he put up his hand in a kind of questioning,
+puzzled remonstrance; but Mary noticed that he was very erect. He spoke
+and Galway spoke in answer. Evidently he was asking that Leddy be
+released. To this Galway consented at length, but without drawing back
+until he had seen Leddy's gun safe in the holster.
+
+Then Leddy raised himself challengingly on tiptoes to Jack, who turned to
+Galway in the manner of one extending an invitation. On his part, Leddy
+turned to Ropey Smith, another of Little Rivers' ruffians. After this,
+Leddy went through the door at the rear; the loungers resumed their seats
+on the cracker barrels and gazed at one another with dropped jaws, while
+Bill Lang proceeded with his business as postmaster.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+HE CARRIES THE MAIL
+
+
+When the suspense was over for Mary, the glare of the store lamp went
+dancing in grotesque waves, and abruptly, uncannily, fell away into the
+distant, swimming glow of a lantern suffused with fog. She swayed. Only
+the leg-rest kept her from slipping off the pony. Her first returning
+sense of her surroundings came with the sound of a voice, the same
+careless, pleasant voice which she had heard at Galeria asking Pete Leddy
+if he were not overplaying his part.
+
+"You were right," said the voice. "It was the whistle that made him
+so angry."
+
+Indistinctly she associated a slowly-shaping figure with the voice and
+realized that she had been away in the unknown for a second. Yes, it was
+all very well to talk about Sir Walter being out of fashion, but she had
+been near to fainting, and in none of the affectation of the hoop-skirt
+age, either. Had she done any foolish thing in expression of a weakness
+that she had never known before? Had she extended her hand for support?
+Had he caught her as she wobbled in the saddle? No. She was relieved to
+see that he was not near enough for that.
+
+"By no stretch of ethics can you charge yourself with further
+responsibility or fears," he continued. "Pete and I understand each other
+perfectly, now."
+
+But in his jocularity ran something which was plain, if unspoken. It was
+that he would put an end to a disagreeable subject. His first words to
+her had provided a bridge--and burned it--from the bank of the
+disagreeable to the bank of agreeable. Her own desire, with full mastery
+of her faculties coming swiftly, fell in with his. She wanted to blot out
+that horror and scotch a sudden uprising of curiosity as to the exact
+nature of the gamble in death through which he had passed. It was enough
+that he was alive.
+
+The blurry figure became distinct, smiling with inquiry in a glance from
+her to the stack of papers, magazines, and pamphlets which crowded his
+circling arms. He seemed to have emptied the post-office. There had not
+been any Pete Leddy; there had been no display of six-shooters. He had
+gone in after the mail. Here he was ready to deliver it by the bushel,
+while he waited for orders. She had to laugh at his predicament as he
+lowered his chin to steady a book on the top of the pile.
+
+"Oh, I meant to tell you that you were not to bring the second-class
+matter!" she told him. "We always send a servant with a basket for that.
+You see what comes of having a father who is not only omnivorous, but has
+a herbivorous capacity."
+
+He saw that the book had a row of Italian stamps across the wrapper.
+Unless that popular magazine stopped slipping, both the book and a heavy
+German pamphlet would go. He took two hasty steps toward her, in mock
+distress of appeal.
+
+"I'll allow salvage if you act promptly!" he said.
+
+She lifted the tottering apex just in time to prevent its fall.
+
+"I'll take the book," she said. "Father has been waiting months for
+it. We can separate the letters and leave the rest in the store to be
+sent for."
+
+"The railroad station is on the other side of the town, isn't it?" he
+asked.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I shall camp nearby, so it will be no trouble to leave my burden at your
+door as I pass."
+
+"He does have the gift of oiling the wheels in either, big or little
+moments," she thought, as she realized how simple and considerate had
+been his course from the first. He was a stranger going on his way,
+stopping, however, to do her or any other traveller a favor _en route_.
+
+"Firio, we're ready to hear Jag Ear's bells!" he called.
+
+"_Si_!" answered Firio.
+
+All the while the Indian had kept in the shadow, away from the spray of
+light from the store lamp, unaware of the rapid drama that had passed
+among the boxes and barrels. He had observed nothing unusual in the young
+lady, whose outward manifestation of what she had, witnessed was the
+closing of her eyes.
+
+It was out of the question that Jack should mount a horse when both
+arms were crowded with their burden. He walked beside Mary's stirrup
+leather in the attitude of that attendant on royalty who bears a crown
+on a cushion.
+
+"Little Rivers is a new town, isn't it?" he asked.
+
+"Yes, the Town Wonderful," she answered. "Father founded it."
+
+She spoke with an affection which ran as deep into the soil as young
+roots after water. If on the pass she had seemed a part of the desert,
+of great, lonely distances and a far-flung carpet of dreams, here she
+seemed to belong to books and gardens.
+
+"I wish I had time to look over the Town Wonderful in the morning, but my
+train goes very early, I believe."
+
+After his years of aimless travelling, to which he had so readily
+confessed, he had tied himself to a definite hour on a railroad
+schedule as something commanding and inviolable. Such inconsistency
+did not surprise her. Had she not already learned to expect
+inconsistencies from him?
+
+"Oh, it is all simple and primitive, but it means a lot to us," she said.
+
+"What one's home and people mean to him is pretty well all of one's own
+human drama," he returned, seriously.
+
+The peace of evening was in the air and the lights along the single
+street were a gentle and persistent protest of human life against the
+mighty stretch of the enveloping mantle of night. From the cottages of
+the ranchers came the sound of voices. The twang of a guitar quivering
+starward made medley with Jag Ear's bells.
+
+Here, for a little distance, the trail, in its long reach on the desert,
+had taken on the dignity of the urban name of street. On either side,
+fronting the cottages, ran the slow waters of two irrigation ditches,
+gleaming where lamp-rays penetrated the darkness. The date of each
+rancher's settlement was fairly indicated by the size of the
+quick-growing umbrella and pepper-trees which had been planted for shade.
+Thus all the mass of foliage rose like a mound of gentle slope toward the
+centre of the town, where Jack saw vaguely the outlines of a rambling
+bungalow, more spacious if no more pretentious than its neighbors in its
+architecture. At a cement bridge over the ditch, leading to a broad
+veranda under the soft illumination of a big, wrought-iron lantern, Mary
+drew rein.
+
+"This is home," she said; "and--and thank you!"
+
+He could not see her face, which was in the shadow turned toward him, as
+he looked into the light of the lantern from the other side of her pony.
+
+"And--thank you!"
+
+It was as if she had been on the point of saying something else and
+could not get the form of any sentence except these two words. Was there
+anything further to say except "Thank you"? Anything but to repeat
+"Thank you"?
+
+There he stood, this stranger so correctly introduced by the Eternal
+Painter, with his burden, waiting instructions in this moment of awkward
+diffidence. He looked at her and at the porch and at his bundle of mail
+in a quizzical appeal. Then she realized that, in a peculiar lapse of
+abstraction, she had forgotten about his encumberment.
+
+Before she could speak there was a sonorous hail from the house; a hail
+in keeping with the generous bulk of its owner, who had come through the
+door. He was well past middle-age, with a thatch of gray hair half
+covering his high forehead. In one hand he held the book that he had been
+reading, and in the other a pair of big tortoise-shell glasses.
+
+"Mary, you are late--and what have we here?"
+
+He was beaming at Jack as he came across the bridge and he broke into
+hearty laughter as he viewed Jack's preoccupation with the
+second-class matter.
+
+"At last! At last we have rural free delivery in Little Rivers! We are
+the coming town! And your uniform, sir"--Jasper Ewold took in the cowboy
+outfit with a sweeping glance which warmed with the picturesque
+effect--"it's a great improvement on the regulation; fit for free
+delivery in Little Rivers, where nobody studies to be unconventional in
+any vanity of mistaking that for originality, but nobody need be
+conventional."
+
+He took some of the cargo in his own hands. With the hearty breeze of his
+personality he fairly blew Jack onto the porch, where magazines and
+pamphlets were dropped indiscriminately in a pile on a rattan settee.
+
+"You certainly have enough reading matter," said Jack. "And I must be
+getting on to camp."
+
+For he had no invitation to stay from Mary and the conventional fact
+that he had to recognize is that a postman's call is not a social call.
+As he turned to go he faced her coming across the bridge. An Indian
+servant, who seemed to have materialized out of the night, had taken
+charge of her pony.
+
+"To camp! Never!" said Jasper Ewold. "Sir Knight, slip your lance in the
+ring of the castle walls--but having no lance and this being no castle,
+well, Sir Knight in _chaparejos_--that is to say, Sir Chaps--let me
+inform you"--here Jasper Ewold threw back his shoulders and tossed his
+mane of hair, his voice sinking to a serious basso profundo--"yes, inform
+you, sir, that there is one convention, a local rule, that no stranger
+crosses this threshold at dinner-time without staying to dinner." There
+was a resonance in his tone, a liveliness to his expression, that was
+infectious.
+
+"But Firio and Jag Ear and Wrath of God wait for me," Jack said, entering
+with real enjoyment into the grandiose style.
+
+"High sounding company, sir! Let me see them!" demanded Jasper Ewold.
+
+Jack pointed to his cavalcade waiting in the half shadows, where the
+lamp-rays grew thin. Wrath of God's bony face was pointed lugubriously
+toward the door; Jag Ear was wiggling his fragment of ear.
+
+"And Moses on the mountain-top says that you stay!" declared
+Jasper Ewold.
+
+Jack looked at Mary. She had not spoken yet and he waited on her word.
+
+"Please do!" she said. "Father wants someone to talk to."
+
+"Yes, Sir Chaps, I shall talk; otherwise, why was man given a tongue in
+his head and ideas?"
+
+Refusal was out of the question. Accordingly, Firio was sent on to make
+camp alone.
+
+"Now, Sir Chaps, now, Mr.--" began Jasper Ewold, pausing blankly. "Why,
+Mary, you have not given me his city directory name!"
+
+"Mr.--" and Mary blushed. She could only pass the, blame back to the
+Eternal Painter's oversight in their introduction.
+
+"Jack Wingfield!" said Jack, on his own account.
+
+"Jack Wingfield!" repeated Jasper Ewold, tasting the name.
+
+A flicker of surprise followed by a flicker of drawn intensity ran over
+his features, and he studied Jack in a long glance, which he masked just
+in time to save it from being a stare. Jack was conscious of the
+scrutiny. He flushed slightly and waited for some word to explain it;
+but none came. Jasper Ewold's Olympian geniality returned in a
+spontaneous flood.
+
+"Come inside, Jack Wingfield," he said. "Come inside, Sir Chaps--for that
+is how I shall call you."
+
+The very drum-beat of hospitality was in his voice. It was a wonderful
+voice, deep and warm and musical; not to be forgotten.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+A SMILE AND A SQUARE CHIN
+
+
+When a man comes to the door book in hand and you have the testimony of
+the versatility and breadth of his reading in half a bushel of mail for
+him, you expect to find his surroundings in keeping. But in Jasper
+Ewold's living-room Jack found nothing of the kind.
+
+Heavy, natural beams supported the ceiling. On the gray cement walls were
+four German photographs of famous marbles. The Venus de Milo looked
+across to the David of Michael Angelo; the Flying Victory across to
+Rodin's Thinker. In the centre was a massive Florentine table, its broad
+top bare except for a big ivory tusk paper-knife free from any mounting
+of silver. On the shelf underneath were portfolios of the reproductions
+of paintings.
+
+An effect which at first was one of quiet spaciousness became impressive
+and compelling. Its simplicity was without any of the artificiality that
+sometimes accompanies an effort to escape over-ornamentation. No one
+could be in the room without thinking through his eyes and with his
+imagination. Wherever he sat he would look up to a masterpiece as the
+sole object of contemplation.
+
+"This is my room. Here, Mary lets me have my way," said Jasper Ewold.
+"And it is not expensive."
+
+"The Japanese idea of concentration," said Jack.
+
+Jasper Ewold, who had been watching the effect of the room on Jack, as he
+watched it on every new-comer, showed his surprise and pleasure that this
+young man in cowboy regalia understood some things besides camps and
+trails; and this very fact made him answer in the vigorous and enjoyed
+combatancy of the born controversialist.
+
+"Japanese? No!" he declared. "The little men with their storks and vases
+have merely discovered to us in decoration a principle which was Greek in
+a more majestic world than theirs. It was the true instinct of the
+classic motherhood of our art before collectors mistook their residences
+for warehouses."
+
+"And the books?" Jack asked, boyishly. "Where are they? Yes, what do you
+do with all the second-class matter?"
+
+The question was bait to Jasper Ewold. It gave him an opportunity for
+discourse.
+
+"When I read I want nothing but a paper-cutter close at hand--a good, big
+paper-cutter, whose own weight carries it through the leaves. And I want
+to be alone with that book. If I am too lazy to go to the library for
+another, then it is not worth reading. When I get head-achy with print
+and look up, I don't want to stare at the backs of more books. I want
+something to rest and fill the eye. I--"
+
+"Father," Mary admonished him, "I fear this is going to be long. Why not
+continue after Mr. Wingfield has washed off the dust of travel and we are
+at table?"
+
+"Mary is merely jealous. She wants to hurry you to the dining-room, which
+was designed to her taste," answered her father, with an affectation of
+grand indignation. "The dust of travel here is clean desert dust--but I
+admit that it is gritty. Come with me, Sir Chaps!"
+
+He bade Jack precede him through a door diagonally opposite the one by
+which he had entered from the veranda. On the other side Jack found
+himself surrounded by walls of books, which formed a parallelogram around
+a great deal table littered with magazines and papers. Here, indeed, the
+printed word might riot as it pleased in the joyous variety and chaos of
+that truly omnivorous reader of herbivorous capacity. Out of the library
+Jack passed into Jasper Ewold's bedroom. It was small, with a soldier's
+cot of exaggerated size that must have been built for his amplitude of
+person, and it was bare of ornament except for an old ivory crucifix.
+
+"There's a pitcher and basin, if you incline to a limited operation for
+outward convention," said Jasper Ewold; "and through that door you will
+find a shower, if you are for frank, unlimited submersion of the
+altogether."
+
+"Have I time for the altogether?" Jack asked.
+
+"When youth has not in this house, it marks a retrocession toward
+barbarism for Little Rivers which I refuse to contemplate. Take your
+shower, Sir Chaps, and"--a smile went weaving over the hills and valleys
+of Jasper Ewold's face--"and, mind, you take off those grand boots or
+they will get full of water! You will find me in the library when you are
+through;" and, shaking with subterranean enjoyment of his own joke, he
+closed the door.
+
+Cool water from the bowels of the mountains fell on a figure as slender
+as that of the great Michael's David pictured in the living-room; a
+figure whose muscles ran rippling with leanness and suppleness, without
+the bunching over-development of the athlete. He bubbled in shivery
+delight with the first frigid sting of the downpour; he laughed in
+ecstasy as he pulled the valve wide open, inviting a Niagara.
+
+While he was still glowing with the rough intimacy of the towel, he
+viewed the trappings thrown over the chair and his revolver holster on
+the bureau in a sense of detachment, as if in the surroundings of
+civilization some voice of civilization made him wish for flannels in
+which to dine. Then there came a rap at the door, and an Indian appeared
+with an envelope addressed in feminine handwriting. On the corner of the
+page within was a palm-tree--a crest to which anybody who dwelt on the
+desert might be entitled; and Jack read:
+
+"DEAR MR. WINGFIELD:
+
+"Please don't tell father about that horrible business on the pass. It
+will worry him unnecessarily and might interfere with my afternoon rides,
+which are everything to me. There is not the slightest danger in the
+future. After this I shall always go armed.
+
+"Sincerely yours,
+
+"MARY EWOLD."
+
+The shower had put him in such lively humor that his answer was born in a
+flash from memory of her own catechising of him on Galeria.
+
+"First, I must ask if you know how to shoot," he scribbled beneath her
+signature.
+
+The Indian seemed hardly out of the doorway before he was back
+with a reply:
+
+"I do, or I would not go armed," it said.
+
+She had capped his satire with satire whose prick was, somehow,
+delicious. He regarded the sweep of her handwriting with a lingering
+interest, studying the swift nervous strokes before he sent the note back
+with still another postscript:
+
+"Of course I had never meant to tell anybody," he wrote. "It is not a
+thing to think of in that way."
+
+This, he thought, must be the end of the correspondence; but he was
+wrong. The peripatetic go-between reappeared, and under Jack's last
+communication was written, "Thank you!" He could hardly write "Welcome!"
+in return. It was strictly a case of nothing more to say by either
+duelist. In an impulse he slipped the sheet, with its palm symbolic of
+desert mystery and oasis luxuriance, into his pocket.
+
+"Here I am in the midst of the shucks and biting into the meat of the
+kernel," said Jasper Ewold, as Jack entered the library to find him
+standing in the midst of wrappings which he had dropped on the floor;
+"yes, biting into very rich meat."
+
+He held up the book which was evidently the one that had balanced
+uncertainly on the pile which Jack had brought from the post-office.
+
+"Professor Giuccamini's researches! It is as interesting as a novel. But
+come! You are hungry!"
+
+Book in hand, and without removing his tortoise-shell spectacles, he
+passed out into the garden at the rear. There a cloth was laid under
+a pavilion.
+
+"In a country where it never rains," said the host, "where it is eternal
+spring, walls to a house are conventions on which to stack books and hang
+pictures. Mary has chosen nature for her decorative effect--cheaper,
+even, than mine. In the distance is Galeria; in the foreground, what was
+desert six years ago."
+
+The overhead lamp deepened to purple the magenta of the bougainvillea
+vines running up the pillars of the pavilion; made the adjacent rows of
+peony blossoms a pure, radiant white; while beyond, in the shadows, was a
+broad path between rows of young palms.
+
+Mary appeared around a hedge which hid the open-air kitchen. The girl of
+the gray riding-habit was transformed into a girl in white. Jack saw her
+as a domestic being. He guessed that she had seen that the table was set
+right; that she had had a look-in at the cooking; that the hands whose
+boast it was that they could shoot, had picked the jonquils in the
+slender bronze vase on the table.
+
+"Father, there you are again, bringing a book to the dining-room against
+the rules," she warned him; "against all your preachments about reading
+at meals!"
+
+"That's so, Mary," said Jasper Ewold, absently, regarding the book as if
+some wicked genius had placed it in his hand quite unbeknown to him.
+"But, Mary, it is Professor Giuccamini at last! Giuccamini that I have
+waited for so long! I beg your pardon, Sir Chaps! When I have somebody to
+talk to I stand doubly accused. Books at dinner! I descend into dotage!"
+
+In disgust he started toward the house with the book. But in the very
+doorway he paused and, reopening the book, turned three or four pages
+with ravenous interest.
+
+"Giuccamini and I agree!" he shouted. "He says there is no doubt that
+Burlamacchi and Pico were correct. Cosmo de' Medici did call Savonarola
+to his death-bed, and I am glad of it. I like good stories to turn out
+true! But here I have a listener--a live listener, and I ramble on about
+dead tyrants and martyrs. I apologize--I apologize!" and he disappeared
+in the library.
+
+"Father does not let me leave books in the living-room, which is his.
+Why should he bring them to the dining-room, which is mine?" Mary
+explained.
+
+"There must be law in every household," Jack agreed.
+
+"Yes, somebody fresh to talk to, at, around, and through!" called Jasper
+Ewold, as he reappeared. "Yes, and over your head; otherwise I shall not
+be flattered by my own conversation."
+
+"He glories in being an intellectual snob," Mary said. "Please pretend at
+times not to understand him."
+
+"Thank you, Mary. You are the corrective that keeps my paternal
+superiority in balance," answered her father, with a comprehending wave
+of his hand indicating his sense of humor at the same time as playful
+insistence on his role as forensic master of the universe.
+
+How he did talk! He was a mill to which all intellectual grist was
+welcome. Over its wheel the water ran now singing, again with the roar of
+a cataract. He changed theme with the relish of one who rambles at will,
+and the emotion of every opinion was written on the big expanse of his
+features and enforced with gestures. He talked of George Washington, of
+Andrea del Sarto, of melon-growing, trimming pepper-trees, the Divina
+Commedia, fighting rose-bugs, of Schopenhauer and of Florence--a great
+deal about Florence, a city that seemed to hang in his mind as a sort of
+Renaissance background for everything else, even for melon-growing.
+
+"You are getting over my head!" Jack warned him at times, politely.
+
+"That is the trouble," said Jasper Ewold. "Consider the hardship of
+being the one wise man in the world! I find it lonely, inconvenient,
+stupefying. Why, I can't even convince Jim Galway that I know more about
+dry farming than he!"
+
+Jack listened raptly, his face glowing. Once, when he looked in his
+host's direction suddenly, after speaking to Mary, he found that he was
+the object of the same inquiring scrutiny that he had been on the porch.
+In lulls he caught the old man's face in repose. It had sadness, then,
+the sadness of wreckage; sadness against which he seemed to fence in his
+wordy feints and thrusts.
+
+"Christian civilization began in the Tuscan valley," the philosopher
+proceeded, harking back to the book which had arrived by the evening's
+mail. "Florence was a devil--Florence was divine. They raised geniuses
+and devils and martyrs: the most cloud-topping geniuses, the worst
+devils, the most saintly martyrs. But better than being a drone in a
+Florence pension is all this"--with a wave of his hand to the garden and
+the stars--"which I owe to Mary and the little speck on her lungs which
+brought us here after--after we had found that we had not as much money
+as we thought we had and an old fellow who had been an idling student,
+mostly living abroad all his life, felt the cramp of the material facts
+of board-and-clothes money. It made Mary well. It made me know the
+fulness of wisdom of the bee and the ant, and it brought me back to the
+spirit of America--the spirit of youth and accomplishment. Instead of
+dreaming of past cities, I set out to make a city like a true American.
+Here we came to camp in our first travelled delight of desert spaces for
+her sake; and here we brought what was left of the fortune and started a
+settlement."
+
+The spectator-philosopher attitude of audience to the world's stage
+passed. He became the builder and the rancher, enthusiastically dwelling
+on the growth of orchards and gardens in expert fondness. As Jack
+listened, the fragrance of flowers was in his nostrils and in intervals
+between Jasper Ewold's sentences he seemed to hear the rustle of borning
+leaf-fronds breaking the silence. But the narrative was not an idyll.
+Toil and patience had been the handmaidens of the fecundity of the soil.
+Prosperity had brought an entail of problems. Jasper Ewold mentioned them
+briefly, as if he would not ask a guest to share the shadows which they
+brought to his brow.
+
+"The honey of our prosperity brings us something besides the bees. It
+brings those who would share the honey without work," said he. "It brings
+the Bill Lang hive and Pete Leddy."
+
+At the mention of the name, Jack's and Mary's glances met.
+
+"You have promised not to tell," hers was saying.
+
+"I will not," his was answering.
+
+But clearly he had grasped the fact that Little Rivers was getting out of
+its patron's hands, and every honest man in that community wanted to be
+rid of Pete Leddy.
+
+"I should think your old friend, Cosmo de' Medici, would have found a
+way," Jack suggested.
+
+"Cosmo is for talk," said Mary. "At heart father is a Quaker."
+
+"Some are for lynching," said Jasper Ewold, thoughtfully. "Begin to
+promote order with disorder and where will you end?" he inquired,
+belligerently. "This is not the Middle Ages. This is the Little Rivers
+of peace."
+
+Then, after a quotation from Cardinal Newman, which seemed pretty
+far-fetched to deal with desert ruffians, he was away again, setting out
+fruit trees and fighting the scale.
+
+"And our Date Tree Wonderful!" he continued. "This year we get our first
+fruit, unless the book is wrong. You cannot realize what this first-born
+of promise means to Little Rivers. Under the magic of water it completes
+the cycle of desert fecundity, from Scotch oats and Irish potatoes to the
+Arab's bread. Bananas I do not include. Never where the banana grows has
+there been art or literature, a good priesthood, unimpassioned
+law-makers, honest bankers, or a noble knighthood. It is just a little
+too warm. Here we can build a civilization which neither roasts us in
+summer nor freezes us in winter."
+
+There was a fluid magnetism in the rush of Jasper Ewold's junketing
+verbiage which carried the listener on the bosom of a pleasant stream.
+Jack was suddenly reminded that it must be very late and he had far
+overstayed the retiring hour of the desert, where the Eternal Painter
+commands early rising.
+
+"Going--going so soon!" protested Jasper Ewold.
+
+"So late!" Jack smiled back.
+
+To prove that it was, he called attention to the fact, when they passed
+through the living-room to the veranda, that not a light remained in any
+ranch-house.
+
+"I have not started my talk yet," said Jasper. "But next time you come I
+will really make a beginning--and you shall see the Date Tree Wonderful."
+
+"I go by the morning train," Jack returned.
+
+"So! so!" mused Jasper. "So! so!" he objected, but not gloomily. "I get a
+good listener only to lose him!"
+
+But Jack was hardly conscious of the philosopher's words. In that
+interval he had still another glimpse of Mary's eyes without the veil and
+saw deeper than he had before; saw vast solitudes, inviting yet offering
+no invitation, where bright streams seemed to flash and sing under the
+sunlight and then disappear in a desert. That was her farewell to the
+easy traveller who had stopped to do her a favor on the trail. And he
+seemed to ask nothing more in that spellbound second; nor did he after
+the veil had fallen, and he acquitted himself of some spoken form of
+thanks for an evening of happiness.
+
+"A pleasant journey!" Mary said.
+
+"Luck, Sir Chaps, luck!" called Jasper Ewold.
+
+Jack's easy stride, as he passed out into the night, confirmed the last
+glimpse of his smiling, whimsical "I don't care" attitude, which never
+minded the danger sign on the precipice's edge.
+
+"He does not really want to go back to New York," Mary remarked, and was
+surprised to find that she had spoken her thought aloud.
+
+"I hardly agree with that opinion," said her father absently, his
+thoughts far afield from the fetter of his words. "But of one thing I am
+sure, John Wingfield! A smile and a square chin!"
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+OBLIVION IS NOT EASY
+
+
+"A smile and a square chin!" Mary repeated, as they went back into the
+living-room.
+
+"Yes, hasn't he both, this Wingfield?" asked her father.
+
+"This Wingfield"--on the finish of the sentence there was a halting,
+appreciable accent. He moved toward the table with the listlessness of
+some enormous automaton of a man to whom every step of existence was a
+step in a treadmill. There was a heavy sadness about his features which
+rarely came, and always startled her when it did come with a fear that
+they had so set in gloom that they would never change. He raised his hand
+to the wick screw of the lamp, waiting for her to pass through the room
+before turning off the flame which bathed him in its rays, giving him the
+effect of a Rodinesque incarnation of memory.
+
+Any melancholy that beset him was her own enemy, to be fought and
+cajoled. Mary slipped to his side, dropping her head on his shoulder and
+patting his cheek. But this magic which had so frequently rallied him
+brought only a transient, hazy smile and in its company what seemed a
+random thought.
+
+"And you and he came down the pass together? Yes, yes!" he said. His tone
+had the vagueness of one drawing in from the sea a net that seemed to
+have no end.
+
+Had Jack Wingfield been more than a symbol? Had he brought something
+more than an expression of culture, manner, and ease of a past which
+nothing could dim? Had he suggested some personal relation to that past
+which her father preferred to keep unexplained? These questions crowded
+into her mind speculatively. They were seeking a form of conveyance when
+she realized that she had been adrift with imaginings. He was getting
+older. She must expect his preoccupation and his absent-mindedness to
+become more exacting.
+
+"Yes, yes!" His voice had risen to its customary sonority; his eyes were
+twinkling; all the hard lines had become benignant wrinkles of Olympian
+charm. "Yes, yes! You and this funny tourist! What a desert it is! I
+wonder--now, I wonder if he will go aboard the Pullman in that stage
+costume. But come, come, Mary! It's bedtime for all pastoral workers and
+subjects of the Eternal Painter. Off you go, or we shall be playing
+blind-man's-buff in the dark!" He was chuckling as he turned down the
+wick. "His enormous spurs, and Jag Ear and Wrath of God!" he said.
+
+Her fancy ran dancing rejoicingly with his mood.
+
+"Don't forget the name of his pony!" she called merrily from the stairs.
+"It's P.D."
+
+"P.D.!" said her father, with the disappointment of one tempted by a good
+morsel which he finds tasteless. "There he seems to have descended to
+alphabetic commonplace. No imagery in that!"
+
+"He is a slow, reliable pony," put in Mary, "without the Q."
+
+"Pretty Damn, without the Quick! Oh, I know slang!"
+
+Jasper Ewold burst into laughter. It was still echoing through the house
+when she entered her room. As it died away it seemed to sound hollow and
+veiled, when the texture of sunny, transparent solidity in his laugh was
+its most pronounced characteristic.
+
+Probably this, too, was imagination, Mary thought. It had been an
+overwrought day, whose events had made inconsiderable things supreme over
+logic. She always slept well; she would sleep easily to-night, because it
+was so late. But she found herself staring blankly into the darkness and
+her thoughts ranging in a shuttle play of incoherency from the moment
+that Leddy had approached her on the pass till a stranger, whom she never
+expected to see again, walked away into the night. What folly! What folly
+to keep awake over an incident of desert life! But was it folly? What
+sublime egoism of isolated provincialism to imagine that it had been
+anything but a great event! Naturally, quiet, desert nerves must still be
+quivering after the strain. Inevitably, they would not calm instantly,
+particularly as she had taken coffee for supper. She was wroth about the
+coffee, though she had taken less than usual that evening.
+
+She heard the clock strike one; she heard it strike two, and three. And
+he, on his part--this Sir Chaps who had come so abruptly into her life
+and evidently set old passions afire in her father's mind--of course he
+was sleeping! That was the exasperating phlegm of him. He would sleep on
+horseback, riding toward the edge of a precipice!
+
+"A smile and a square chin--and dreamy vagueness," she kept repeating.
+
+The details of the scene in the store recurred with a vividness which
+counting a flock of sheep as they went over a stile or any other trick
+for outwitting insomnia could not drive from her mind. Then Pete Leddy's
+final look of defiance and Jack Wingfield's attitude in answer rose out
+of the pantomime in merciless clearness.
+
+All the indecisiveness of the interchange of guesses and rehearsed
+impressions was gone. She got a message, abruptly and convincingly. This
+incident of the pass was not closed. An ultimatum had been exchanged.
+Death lay between these two men. Jack had accepted the issue.
+
+The clock struck four and five. Before it struck again daylight would
+have come; and before night came again, what? To lie still in the torment
+of this new experience of wakefulness with its peculiar, half-recognized
+forebodings, had become unbearable. She rose and dressed and went down
+stairs softly, candle in hand, aware only that every agitated fibre of
+her being was whipping her to action which should give some muscular
+relief from the strain of her overwrought faculties. She would go into
+the garden and walk there, waiting for sunrise. But at the edge of the
+path she was arrested by a shadow coming from the servants'
+sleeping-quarters. It was Ignacio, the little Indian who cared for her
+horse, ran errands, and fought garden bugs for her--Ignacio, the
+note-bearer.
+
+"Senorita! senorita!" he exclaimed, and his voice, vibrant with something
+stronger than surprise, had a certain knowing quality, as if he
+understood more than he dared to utter. "Senorita, you rise early!"
+
+"Sometimes one likes to look at the morning stars," she remarked.
+
+But there were no stars; only a pale moon, as Ignacio could see
+for himself.
+
+"Senorita, that young man who was here and Pete Leddy--do you know,
+senorita?"
+
+"The young man who came down from the pass with me, you mean?" she asked,
+inwardly shamed at her simulation of casual curiosity.
+
+"Yes, he and Leddy--bad blood between them'" said Ignacio. "You no know,
+senorita? They fight at daybreak."
+
+The pantomime in the store, Jack's form disappearing with its easy step
+into the night, analyzed in the light of this news became the natural
+climax of a series of events all under the spell of fatality.
+
+"Come, Ignacio!" she said. "We must hurry!" And she started around the
+house toward the street.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+WHAT HAPPENED AT LANG'S
+
+
+While Jack had been playing the pioneer of rural free delivery in Little
+Rivers, Pete Leddy, in the rear of Bill Lang's store, was refusing all
+stimulants, but indulging in an unusually large cud of tobacco.
+
+"Liquor ain't no help in drawing a bead," he explained to the loungers
+who followed him through the door after Jack had gone.
+
+If Pete did not want to drink it was not discreet to press him,
+considering the mood he was in. The others took liberal doses, which
+seemed only to heighten the detail of the drama which they had witnessed.
+To Mary it had been all pantomime; to them it was dynamic with language.
+It was something beyond any previous contemplation of possibility in
+their cosmos.
+
+The store had been enjoying an average evening. All present were
+expressing their undaunted faith in the invincibility of James J.
+Jeffries, when a smiling stranger appeared in the doorway. He was dressed
+like a regular cowboy dude. His like might have appeared on the stage,
+but had never been known to get off a Pullman in Arizona. And the instant
+he appeared, up flashed Pete Leddy's revolver.
+
+The gang had often discussed when and how Pete would get his seventh
+victim, and here they were about to be witnesses of the deed. Instinct
+taught them the proper conduct on such occasions. The tenderfoot was as
+good as dead; but, being a tenderfoot and naturally a bad shot and prone
+to excitement, he might draw and fire wild. They ducked with the avidity
+of woodchucks into their holes--all except Jim Galway, who remained
+leaning against the counter.
+
+"I gin ye warning!" they heard Pete say, and closed their eyes
+involuntarily--all except Jim Galway--with their last impression the
+tenderfoot's ingenuous smile and the gleam on Pete's gun-barrel. They
+waited for the report, as Mary had, and then they heard steps and looked
+up to see that dude tenderfoot, still smiling, going straight toward the
+muzzle pointed at his head, his hands at his side in no attempt to draw.
+The thing was incredible and supernatural.
+
+"Pete is letting him come close first," they thought.
+
+But there, unbelievable as it was, Pete was lowering his revolver and
+the tenderfoot's hand was on his shoulder in a friendly, explanatory
+position. Pete seemed in a trance, without will-power over his trigger
+finger, and Pete was the last man in the world that you would expect
+to lose his nerve. Jim Galway being the one calm observer, whose
+vision had not been disturbed by precipitancy in taking cover, let us
+have his version.
+
+"He just walked over to Pete--that's all I can say--walked over to him,
+simple and calm, like he was going to ask for a match. All I could think
+of and see was his smile right into that muzzle and the glint in his
+eyes, which were looking into Pete's. Someway you couldn't shoot into
+that smile and that glint, which was sort of saying, 'Go ahead! I'm
+leaving it to you and I don't care!'--just as if a flash of powder was
+all the same to him as a flash of lightning."
+
+The desert had given Jack life; and it would seem as if what the desert
+had given, it might take away. He was not going to humble himself by
+throwing up his arms or standing still for execution. He was on his way
+into the store and he continued on his way. If something stopped him,
+then he would not have to take the train East in the morning.
+
+"Now if you want to kill me, Pete Leddy," the astonished group heard this
+stranger say, "why, I'm not going to deny you the chance. But I don't
+want you to do it just out of impulse, and I know that is not your own
+reasoned way. You certainly would want sporting rules to prevail and that
+I should have an equal chance of killing you. So we will go outside,
+stand off any number of paces you say, let our gun-barrels hang down even
+with the seams of our trousers, and wait for somebody to say 'one, two,
+three--fire!'"
+
+Not once had that peculiar smile faded from Jack's lips or the glint in
+his eyes diverted from its probe of Leddy's eyes. His voice went well
+with the smile and with an undercurrent of high voltage which seemed the
+audible corollary of the glint. Every man knew that, despite his gay
+adornment, he was not bluffing. He had made his proposition in deadly
+earnest and was ready to carry it out. Pete Leddy shuffled and bit the
+ends of his moustache, and his face was drawn and white and his shoulder
+burning under the easy grip of Jack's hand. From the bore of the
+unremitting glance that had confounded him he shifted his gaze
+sheepishly.
+
+"Oh, h--l!" he said, and the tone, in its disgust and its attempt to
+laugh off the incident, gave the simplicity of an exclamation from his
+limited vocabulary its character. "Oh, h--l! I was just trying you out as
+a tenderfoot--a little joke!"
+
+At this, all the crowd laughed in an explosive breath of relief. The
+inflection of the laugh made Pete go red and look challengingly from face
+to face, with the result that all became piously sober.
+
+"Then it is all right? I meant in no way to wound your feelings or even
+your susceptibilities," said Jack; and, accepting the incident as closed,
+he turned to the counter and asked for the Ewold mail.
+
+Free from that smile and the glint of the eyes, Pete came to in a torrent
+of reaction. He, with six notches on his gun-handle, had been trifled
+with by a grinning tenderfoot. Rage mounted red to his brow. No man who
+had humiliated him should live. He would have shot Jack in the back if it
+had not been for Jim Galway, lean as a lath, lantern-jawed, with deep-set
+blue eyes, his bearing different from that of the other loungers. Jim had
+not joined in the laugh over Pete's explanation; he had remained
+impassive through the whole scene; but the readiness with which he
+knocked Leddy's revolver down showed that this immovability had let
+nothing escape his quiet observation.
+
+When Jack looked around and understood what had passed, his face
+was without the smile. It was set and his body had stiffened free
+of the counter.
+
+"I'll take the gun away from him. It's high time somebody did,"
+said Galway.
+
+"I think you had better, if that is the only way that he knows how to
+fight," said Jack. "I have wondered how he got the six. Presumably he
+murdered them."
+
+"To their faces, as I'll get you!" Leddy answered. "I'll play your way
+now, one, two, three--fire!"
+
+Galway, convinced that this stranger did not know how to shoot,
+turned to Jack:
+
+"It's not worth your being a target for a dead shot," he said.
+
+"In the morning, yes," answered Jack; and he was smiling again in a way
+that swept the audience with uncanniness. "But to-night I am engaged.
+Make it early to-morrow, as I have to take the first train East."
+
+"Well, are you going to let me go?" Leddy asked Jim, while he looked in
+appeal to the loungers, who were his men.
+
+"Yes, by all means," Jack told Galway. "And as I shall want a man with
+me, may I rely on you? Four of us will be enough, with a fifth to give
+the word."
+
+"Ropey Smith can go with me," said Leddy.
+
+It scarcely occurred to them to give the name of duel to this meeting,
+which Jack held was the only fair way when one felt that he must have
+satisfaction from an adversary in the form of death. An _arroyo_ a mile
+from town was chosen and the time dawn, for a meeting which was to
+reverse the ethics of that boasted fair-play in which the man who first
+gets a bead is the hero.
+
+"It seems a mediaeval day for me," Jack said, when the details were
+concluded. "Good-night, gentlemen," he added, after Bill Lang, with
+fingers that bungled from agitation, had filled his arms with
+second-class matter.
+
+Jim Galway resumed his position, leaning against the counter watchfully
+as the gang filed out to the rear to wet up, and in his right hand, which
+was in his pocket, nestled an automatic pistol.
+
+"I'd shot Pete Leddy dead--'twas the first real fair chance within the
+law--so help me, God! I would," he thought, "if there had been time to
+spare, and save that queer tenderfoot's life. And me a second in a
+regular duel! Well, I'll be--but it ain't no regular duel. One of 'em is
+going to drop--that is, the tenderfoot is. I don't just know how to line
+him up. He beats me!"
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+ACCORDING TO CODE
+
+
+It was the supreme moment of night before dawn. A violet mist shrouded
+everything. The clamminess of the dew touched Mary's forehead and her
+hand brushed the moisture-laden hedge as she left the Ewold yard. She
+remembered that Jack had said that he would camp near the station, so
+there was no doubt in which direction she should go. Hastening along the
+silent street, it was easy for her to imagine that she and Ignacio were
+the only sentient beings, abroad in a world that had stopped breathing.
+
+Softly, impalpably, with both the graciousness of a host and the
+determinedness of an intruder who will not be gainsaid, the first rays of
+morning light filtered into the mist. The violet went pink. From pale
+pink it turned to rose-pink; to the light of life which was as yet as
+still as the light of the moon. The occasional giant cactus in the open
+beyond the village outskirts ceased to be spectral.
+
+For the first time Mary Ewold was in the presence of the wonder of
+daybreak on the desert without watching for the harbinger of gold in the
+V of the pass, with its revelation of a dome of blue where unfathomable
+space had been. For the first time daybreak interested her only in
+broadening and defining her vision of her immediate surroundings.
+
+When the permeating softness suddenly yielded to full transparency,
+spreading from the fanfare of the rising sun come bolt above the range,
+and the mist rose, she left the road at sight of two ponies and a burro
+in a group, their heads together in drooping fellowship. She knew them at
+once for P.D., Wrath of God, and Jag Ear. Nearby rose a thin spiral of
+smoke and back of it was a huddled figure, Firio, preparing the morning
+meal. Animals and servant were as motionless as the cactus. Evidently
+they did not hear her footsteps. They formed a picture of nightly
+oblivion, unconscious that day had come. Firio's face was hidden by his
+big Mexican hat; he did not look up even when she was near. She noted the
+two blanket-rolls where the two comrades of the trail had slept. She saw
+that both were empty and knew that Jack had already gone.
+
+"Where is Mr. Wingfield?" she demanded, breathlessly.
+
+Firio was not startled. To be startled was hardly in his Indian nature.
+The hat tipped upward and under the brim-edge his black eyes gleamed, as
+the sandy soil all around him gleamed in the dew. He shrugged his
+shoulders when he recognized the lady speaking as the one who had delayed
+him at the foot of the pass the previous afternoon. Thanks to her, he had
+been left alone without his master the whole evening.
+
+"He go to stretch his legs," answered Firio.
+
+Apparently, Sir Chaps had been disinclined to disturb the routine of camp
+by telling Firio anything about the duel.
+
+"Where did he go? In which direction?" Mary persisted.
+
+Firio moved the coffee-pot closer to the fire. This seemed to require
+the concentration of all his faculties, including that of speech. He was
+a fit servant for one who took duels so casually.
+
+"Where? Where?" she repeated.
+
+"Where? Have you no tongue?" snapped Ignacio.
+
+Firio gazed all around as if looking for Jack; then nodded in the
+direction of rising ground which broke at the edge of a depression about
+fifty yards away. Her impatience had made the delay of a minute seem
+hours, while the brilliance of the light had now become that of broad
+day. She forgot all constraint. She ran, and as she ran she listened for
+a shot as if it were something inevitable, past due.
+
+And then she uttered a muffled cry of relief, as the scene in a
+depression which had been the bed of an ancient river flashed before her
+with theatric completeness. In the bottom of it were five men, two
+moving and three stationary. Jim Galway and Ropey Smith were walking
+side by side, keeping a measured step as they paced off a certain
+distance, while Bill Lang and Pete Leddy and Jack stood by. Leddy and
+Lang were watching the process inflexibly. Jack was in the costume which
+had flushed her curiosity so vividly on the pass and he appeared the
+same amused, disinterested and wondering traveller who had then come
+upon strange doings.
+
+She stopped, her temples throbbing giddily, her breaths coming in gasps;
+stopped to gain mastery of herself before she decided what she would do
+next. On the opposite bank of the _arroyo_ was a line of heads, like
+those of infantry above a parapet, and she comprehended that, in the
+same way that news of a cock-fight travels, the gallery gods of Little
+Rivers had received a tip of a sporting event so phenomenal that it
+changed the sluggards among them into early risers. They were making
+themselves comfortable lying flat on their stomachs and exposing as
+little as possible of their precious bodies to the danger of that
+tenderfoot firing wild.
+
+It was a great show, of which they would miss no detail; and all had
+their interest whetted by some possible new complication of the plot when
+they saw the tall, familiar figure of Jasper Ewold's daughter standing
+against the skyline. She felt the greedy inquiry of their eyes; she
+guessed their thoughts.
+
+This new element of the situation swept her with a realization of the
+punishment she must suffer for that chance meeting on Galeria and then
+with resentful anger, which transformed Jack Wingfield's indifference to
+callous bravado.
+
+Must she face that battery of leers from the town ruffians while she
+implored a stranger, who had been nothing to her yesterday and would be
+nothing tomorrow, to run away from a combat which was a creation of his
+own stubbornness? She was in revolt against herself, against him, and
+against the whole miserable business. If she proceeded, public opinion
+would involve her in a sentimental interest in a stranger. She must live
+with the story forever, while to an idle traveller it was only an
+adventure at a way-station on his journey.
+
+She had but to withdraw in feigned surprise from the sight of a scene
+which she had come upon unawares and she would be free of any association
+with it. For all Little Rivers knew that she was given to random walks
+and rides. No one would be surprised that she was abroad at this early
+hour. It would be ascribed to the nonsense which afflicted the Ewolds,
+father and daughter, about sunrises.
+
+Yes, she had been in a nightmare. With the light of day she was seeing
+clearly. Had she not warned him about Leddy? Had not she done her part?
+Should she submit herself to fruitless humiliation? Go to him in as much
+distress as if his existence were her care? If he would not listen to her
+yesterday, why should she expect him to listen to her now?
+
+She would return to her garden. Its picture of content and isolation
+called her away from the stare of the faces on the other bank. She turned
+on her heel abruptly, took two or three spasmodic steps and stopped
+suddenly, confronted with another picture--one of imagination--that of
+Jack Wingfield lying dead. The recollection of a voice, the voice that
+had stopped the approach of Leddy's passion-inflamed face to her own on
+the pass, sounded in her ears.
+
+She faced around, drawn by something that will and reason could not
+overcome, to see that Jim Galway and Ropey Smith had finished their task
+of pacing off the distance. The two combatants were starting for their
+stations, their long shadows in the slant of the morning sunlight
+travelling over the sand like pursuing spectres. Leddy went with the
+quick, firm step which bespoke the keenness of his desire; Jack more
+slowly, at a natural gait. His station was so near her that she could
+reach him with a dozen steps. And he was whistling--the only sound in a
+silence which seemed to stretch as far as the desert--whistling gaily in
+apparent unconsciousness that the whole affair was anything but play.
+The effect of this was benumbing. It made her muscles go limp. She sank
+down for very want of strength to keep erect; and Ignacio, hardly
+observed, keeping close to her dropped at her side.
+
+"Ignacio, tell the young man, the one who was our guest last evening,
+that I wish to see him!" she gasped.
+
+With flickering, shrewd eyes Ignacio had watched her distress. He craved
+the word that should call him to service and was off with a bound. His
+rushing, agitated figure was precipitated into a scene hard set as men on
+a chess-board in deadly serenity. Leddy and Jack, were already facing
+each other.
+
+"Senor! Senor!" Ignacio shouted, as he ran. "Senor Don't Care of the Big
+Spurs--wait!"
+
+The message which he had to give was his mistress's and, therefore,
+nobody else's business. He rose on tiptoes to whisper it into Jack's
+ear. Jack listened, with head bent to catch the words. He looked over to
+Mary for an instant of intent silence and then raised his empty left
+hand in signal.
+
+"Sorry, but I must ask for a little delay!" he called to Leddy. His tone
+was wonderful in its politeness and he bowed considerately to his
+adversary.
+
+"I thought it was all bluff!" Leddy answered. "You'll get it,
+though--you'll get it in the old way if you haven't the nerve to take it
+in yours!"
+
+"Really, I am stubbornly fond of my way," Jack said. "I shall be only a
+minute. That will give you time to steady your nerves," he added, in the
+encouraging, reassuring strain of a coach to a man going to the bat.
+
+He was coming toward Mary with his easy, languid gait, radiant of casual
+inquiry. The time of his steps seemed to be reckoned in succeeding
+hammer-beats in her brain. He was coming and she had to find reasons to
+keep him from going back; because if it had not been for her he would be
+quite safe. Oh, if she could only be free of that idea of obligation to
+him! All the pain, the confusion, the embarrassment was on her side. His
+very manner of approach, in keeping with the whole story of his conduct
+toward her, showed him incapable of such feelings. She had another
+reaction. She devoutly wished that she had not sent for him.
+
+Had not his own perversity taken his fate out of her hands? If he
+preferred to die, why should it be her concern? Should she volunteer
+herself as a rescuer of fools? The gleaming sand of the _arroyo_ rose in
+a dazzling mist before her eyes, obscuring him, clothing him with the
+unreality of a dream; and then, in physical reality, he emerged. He was
+so near as she rose spasmodically that she could have laid her hand on
+his shoulder. His hat under his arm, he stood smiling in the bland,
+questioning interest of a spectator happening along the path, even as he
+had in her first glimpse of him on the pass.
+
+"I don't care! Go on! Go on!" she was going to say. "You have made sport
+of me! You make sport of everything! Life itself is a joke to you!"
+
+The tempest of the words was in her eyes, if it did not reach her
+tongue's end. It was halted by the look of hurt surprise, of real pain,
+which appeared on his face. Was it possible, after all, that he could
+feel? The thought brought forth the passionate cry of her mission after
+that sleepless night.
+
+"I beg of you--I implore you--don't!"
+
+Had anyone told her yesterday that she would have been begging any man
+in melodramatic supplication for anything, she would have thought of
+herself as mad. Wasn't she mad? Wasn't he mad? Yet she broke into
+passionate appeal.
+
+"It is horrible--unspeakable! I cannot bear it!"
+
+A flood of color swept his cheeks and with it came a peculiar, feminine,
+almost awkward, gentleness. His air was that of wordless humility. He
+seemed more than ever an uncomprehending, sure prey for Leddy.
+
+"Don't you realize what death is?" she asked.
+
+The question, so earnest and searching, had the contrary effect on him.
+It changed him back to his careless self. He laughed in the way of one
+who deprecates another's illusion or passing fancy. This added to her
+conviction that he did not realize, that he was incapable of realizing,
+his position.
+
+"Do you think I am about to die?" he asked softly.
+
+"With Pete Leddy firing at you twenty yards away--yes! And you pose--you
+pose! If you were human you would be serious!"
+
+"Pose?" He repeated the word. It startled him, mystified him. "The
+clothes I bought to please Firio, you mean?" he inquired, his face
+lighting.
+
+"No, about death. It is horrible--horrible! Death for which I am
+responsible!"
+
+"Why, have you forgotten that we settled all that?" he asked. "It was not
+you. It was the habit I had formed of whistling in the loneliness of the
+desert. I am sorry, now, that I did not stick to singing, even at the
+expense of a sore throat."
+
+Now he called to Leddy, and his voice, high-pitched and powerful, seemed
+to travel in the luminous air as on resilient, invisible wires.
+
+"Leddy, wasn't it the way I whistled to you the first time we met that
+made you want satisfaction? You remember"--and he broke into a whistle.
+His tone was different from that to Leddy on the pass; the whistle was
+different. It was shrill and mocking.
+
+"Yes, the whistle!" yelled Leddy. "No man can whistle to me like that
+and live!"
+
+Jack laughed as if he appreciated all the possibilities of humor inherent
+in the picture of the bloodthirsty Leddy, the waiting seconds and the
+gallery. He turned to Mary with a gesture of his outstretched hands:
+
+"There, you see! I brought it on myself."
+
+"You are brutal! You are without feeling--you are ridiculous--you--" she
+stormed, chokingly.
+
+And in face of this he became reasoning, philosophical.
+
+"Yes, I admit that it is all ridiculous, even to farce, this little
+_comedie humaine_. But we must remember that beside the age of the desert
+none of us last long. Ridiculous, yes; but if I will whistle, why, then,
+I must play out the game I've started."
+
+He was looking straight into her eyes, and there was that in his gaze
+which came as a surprise and with something of the effect of a blade out
+of a scabbard. It chilled her. It fastened her inactive to the earth with
+a helplessness that was uncanny. It mixed the element of fear for him
+with the element of fear of him.
+
+"Remember I am of age--and I don't mind," he added, with the faintest
+glint of satire in his reassurance.
+
+He was walking away, with a wave of his hand to Leddy; he was going
+over the precipice's edge after thanking the danger sign. He did not
+hasten, nor did he loiter. The precipice resolved itself into an
+incident of a journey of the same order as an ankle-deep stream
+trickling across a highway.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+THE DEVIL IS OUT
+
+
+She had done her best and she had failed. What reason was there for her
+to remain? Should she endure witnessing in reality the horror which she
+had pictured so vividly in imagination? A flash of fire! The fall of a
+careening figure to the earth! Leddy's grin of satisfaction! The
+rejoicing of his clan of spectators over the exploit, while youth which
+sang airs to the beat of a pony's hoofs and knew the worship of the
+Eternal Painter lay dead!
+
+What reason to remain except to punish herself! She would go. But
+something banished reason. She was held in the leash of suspense, staring
+with clearness of vision in one second; staring into a mist the next;
+while the coming and going of Ignacio's breaths between his teeth was the
+only sound in her ears.
+
+"Senor Don't Care of the Big Spurs will win!" he whispered.
+
+"He will?" she repeated, like one marvelling, in the tautness of every
+nerve and muscle, that she had the power of speech.
+
+She peered into Ignacio's face. Its Indian impassivity was gone. His lips
+were twitching; his eyes were burning points between half-closed lids.
+
+"Why?" she asked. "How?"
+
+"I know. I watch him. I have seen a mountain lion asleep in a tree. His
+paw is like velvet. He smiles. There seems no fight in him. I know. There
+is a devil, a big devil, in Senor Don't Care. It sleeps so much it very
+terrible when it awakes. And Pete Leddy--he is all the time awake; all
+the time too ready. Something in him will make his arm shake when the
+moment to shoot comes and something in Senor Don't Care--his devil--will
+make his arm steady."
+
+Could Ignacio be right? Did Jack really know how to shoot? Was he
+confident of the outcome? Were his smiles the mask of a conviction that
+he was to kill and not to be killed? After all, had his attitude toward
+her been merely acting? Had she undergone this humiliation as the fish on
+the line of the mischievous play of one who had stopped over a train in
+order to do murder? No! If he were capable of such guile he knew that
+Leddy could shoot well and that twenty yards was a deadly range for a
+good shot. He was taking a chance and the devil in him was laughing at
+the chance, while it laughed at her for thinking that he was an innocent
+going to slaughter in expression of a capricious sense of chivalry.
+
+"He will win--he will win if Leddy plays fair!" Ignacio repeated.
+
+Now she was telling herself that it was solely for the sake of her
+conscience that she wanted to see Senor Don't Care survive; solely for
+the sake of her conscience that she wanted to see him go aboard the train
+safe. After that, she could forget ever having owed this trifler the
+feeling of gratitude for a favor done. Literally, he must live in order
+to be a dead and unremembered incident of her existence.
+
+And Jack was back at his station, with the bright sunlight heightening
+the colors of his play cowboy attire, his weight on the ball of his right
+foot thrown well ahead of the other, his head up, but the whole effect
+languid, even deferential. He seemed about to take off his hat to the
+joyous sky of a fair day in May. His shadow expressed the same feeling as
+his pose, that of tranquil youth with its eyes on the horizon. Leddy had
+the peculiar slouch of the desperado, which is associated with the spread
+of pioneering civilization by the raucous criers of red-blooded
+individualism. If Jack's bearing was amateurish, then Pete's was
+professional in its threatening pose; and his shadow, like himself, had
+an unrelieved hardness of outline.
+
+Both drew their guns from their holsters and lowered them till the
+barrels lay even with the trousers seams. They awaited the word to fire
+which Bill Lang, who stood at an angle equidistant from the two men,
+was to give.
+
+"Wait!" Jack called, in a tone which indicated that something had
+recurred to him. Then a half laugh from him fell on the brilliant,
+shining, hard silence with something of the sound of a pebble slipping
+over glare ice.
+
+"Leddy, it has just occurred to me that we are both foolish--honestly, we
+are!" he said. "The idea when Arizona is so sparsely settled of our
+starting out to depopulate it in such a premeditated manner on such a
+beautiful morning, and all because I was such an inept whistler! Why, if
+I had realized what a perfectly bad whistler I was I would never have
+whistled again. If my whistle hurt your feelings I am sorry, and I--"
+
+"No, you don't!" yelled Leddy. "I've waited long enough! It's
+fight, you--"
+
+"Oh, all right! You are so emphatic," Jack answered. His voice was still
+pleasant, but shot with something metallic. The very shadow of him seemed
+to stiffen with the stiffening of his muscles.
+
+"Ready!" called Bill Lang.
+
+The ruling passion that had carved six notches on his gun-handle
+overwhelmed Pete Leddy. At least, let us give him the benefit of the
+doubt and say that this and not calculation was responsible for his
+action. Before the word for preparation was free of Lang's lips, and
+without waiting for the word to fire, his revolver came up in a swift
+quarter-circle. He was sure of his aim at that range with a ready draw.
+Again and again he had thus hit his target in practice and six times he
+had winged his man by such agile promptness.
+
+With the flash from the muzzle all the members of the gallery rose on
+hands and knees. They were as sure that there was to be a seventh notch
+as of their identity. There was no question in their minds but Pete had
+played a smart trick. They had known from the first that he would win.
+And the proof of it was in the sudden, uncontrollable movement of the
+adversary.
+
+Jack whirled half round. He was falling. But even as he fell he was still
+facing his adversary. He plunged forward unsteadily and came to rest on
+his left elbow. A trickle of blood showed on the chap of his left leg,
+which had tightened as his knee twisted under him. Leddy's rage had been
+so hot that for once his trigger finger had been too quick. He had aimed
+too low. But he was sure that he had done for his man and he looked
+triumphantly toward the gallery gods whose hero he was. They had now
+risen to their feet. In answer to their congratulations he waved his
+left hand, palm out, in salutation. His gun-hand had dropped back to his
+trousers seam.
+
+Even as it dropped, Jack's revolver had risen, his own gun-hand steadied
+in the palm of his left hand, which had an elbow in the sand for a rest.
+Victor and spectators, in their preoccupation with the relief and elation
+of a drama finished, had their first warning of what was to come in a
+voice that did not seem like the voice of the tenderfoot as they had
+heard it, but of another man. And Leddy was looking at a black hole in a
+rim of steel which, though twenty yards away, seemed hot against his
+forehead, while he turned cold.
+
+"Now, Pete Leddy, do not move a muscle!" Jack told him. "Pete Leddy,
+you did not play my way. I still have a shot due, and I am going to
+kill you!"
+
+Jack's face seemed never to have worn a smile. It was all chin, and thin,
+tightly-pressed lips, and solid, straight nose, bronze and unyielding.
+
+"And I am going to kill you!"
+
+This was surely the devil of Ignacio's imagery speaking in him--a cold,
+passionless, gray-eyed devil. Though they had never seen him shoot,
+everybody felt now that he could shoot with deadly accuracy and that
+there was no play cowboy in his present mood. He had the bead of death
+on Leddy and he would fire with the first flicker of resistance. His
+call seemed to have sunk the feet of everyone beneath the sand to
+bed-rock and riveted them there. Lang and the two seconds were as
+motionless as statues.
+
+Mary recalled Leddy's leer at her on the pass, with its intent of
+something more horrible than murder. Savagery rose in her heart. It was
+right that he should be killed. He deserved his fate. But no sooner was
+the savagery born--born, she felt, of the very hypnosis of that carved
+face--than she cast it out shudderingly in the realization that she had
+wished the death of a fellow human being! She looked away from Jack; and
+then it occurred to her that he must be bleeding. He was again a
+companion of the trail, his strength ebbing away. Her impulse was
+retarded by no fear of the gallery now. It brought her to her feet.
+
+"But first drop your revolver!" she heard Jack call, as she ran.
+
+She saw it fall from Leddy's trembling hand, as a dead leaf goes free of
+a breeze-shaken limb. All the fight was out of him. The courage of six
+notches was not the courage to accept in stoicism the penalty of foul
+play. And that black rim was burning his forehead.
+
+"Galway, you have a gun?" Jack asked.
+
+"Yes," Galway answered, mechanically. His presence of mind, which had
+been so sure in the store, was somewhat shaken. He had seen men killed,
+but never in such deliberate fashion.
+
+"Take it out'"
+
+There was a quality in the command like frosty madness, which one
+instinctively obeyed. The half-prostrate figure of the tenderfoot seemed
+to dominate everything--men, earth, and air.
+
+Mary had a glimpse of Galway drawing an automatic pistol from his pocket
+when she dropped at Jack's side. She knew that Jack had not heard or seen
+her approach. All his will was flowing out along a pistol's sight, even
+as his blood was flowing out on the sand in a broadening circle of red.
+
+It was well that she had come. Her fingers were splashed as she felt for
+the artery, which she closed by leaning her whole weight on the thumb.
+
+Ignacio had followed her and immediately after him came Firio, who had
+been startled in his breakfast preparations by the sound of a shot and
+had set out to investigate its cause. He was as changed as his master; a
+twitching, fierce being, glaring at her and at the wound and then
+prolongedly and watchfully at Pete Leddy.
+
+"Can you shoot to kill?" Jack asked Galway, in a piercing summons.
+
+"Yes," drawled Galway.
+
+"Then up with your gun--quick! There! A bead on Ropey Smith!"
+
+Galway had the bead before Ropey could protest.
+
+"Give Ropey ten seconds to drop his gun or we will care for him at the
+same time as Pete'" Jack concluded.
+
+Ropey did not wait the ten seconds. He was over-prompt for the
+same reasons of temperament that made Pete Leddy prefer his own
+way of fighting.
+
+"I take it that we can count on the neutrality of our spectators. They
+cannot be interested in the success of either side," Jack observed, with
+dry humor, but still methodically. "All they ask is a spectacle."
+
+"Yes, you bet!" came a voice from the gallery, undisguisedly eager
+to concur.
+
+"Now, Pete and Ropey," Jack began, and broke off.
+
+There was a poignant silence that waited on the processes of his mind.
+Not only was there no sound, but to Mary there seemed no movement
+anywhere in the world, except the pulse of the artery trying to drive its
+flood past the barrier of her thumb. Jack kept his bead unremittingly on
+Pete. It was Firio who broke the silence.
+
+"Kill him! He is bad! He hates you!" said Firio.
+
+"_Si, si_! If you do not kill him now, you must some time," said Ignacio.
+
+Mary felt that even if Jack heard them he would not let their advice
+influence him. On the bank before she had hastened to him a strange and
+awful visitor in her heart had wished for Leddy's death. Now she wished
+for him to go away unharmed. She wished it in the name of her own
+responsibility for all that had happened. Yet her tongue had no urging
+word to offer. She waited in a supernatural and dreadful curiosity on
+Jack's decision. It was as if he were to answer one more question in
+explanation of the mystery of his nature. Could he deliberately shoot
+down an unarmed man? Was he that hard?
+
+"I am thinking just how to deal with you, Pete and Ropey," Jack
+proceeded. "As I understand it, you have not been very useful citizens of
+Little Rivers. You can live under one condition--that you leave town and
+never return armed. Half a minute to decide!"
+
+"I'll go!" said Pete.
+
+"I'll go!" said Ropey.
+
+"And keep your words?"
+
+"Yes!" they assented.
+
+But neither moved. The fact that Jack had not yet lowered his
+revolver made them cautious. They were obviously over-anxious to play
+safe to the last.
+
+"Then go!" called Jack.
+
+Pete and Ropey slouched away, leaving behind Ropey's gun, which was
+unimportant as it had only one notch, and Pete's precious companion of
+many campaigns with its six notches, lying on the sand.
+
+"And, gentlemen," Jack called to the spectators, "our little
+entertainment is over now. I am afraid that you will be late for
+breakfast."
+
+Apparently it came as a real inspiration to all at once that they might
+be, for they began to withdraw with a celerity that was amazingly
+spontaneous. Their heads disappeared below the skyline and only the
+actors were left. Pete and Ropey--Bill Lang following--walked away along
+the bed of the _arroyo_, instead of going over the bank. Pete paused when
+he was out of range. The old threat was again in his pose.
+
+"I'm not through with you, yet!" he called.
+
+"Why, I hope you are!" Jack answered.
+
+He let his revolver fall with a convulsion of weakness. Mary wondered if
+he were going to faint. She wondered if she herself were not going to
+faint, in a giddy second, while the red spot on the sand shaped itself in
+revolving grotesquery. But the consciousness that she must not lift her
+weight from the artery was a centering idea to keep her faculties in some
+sort of equilibrium.
+
+He was looking around at her, she knew. Now she must see his face after
+this transformation in him which had made her fears of his competency
+silly imaginings; after she had linked her name with his in an
+overwhelming village sensation. She was stricken by unanalyzable emotions
+and by a horror of her nearness to him, her contact with his very blood,
+and his power. She was conscious of a glimpse of his turning profile,
+still transfixed with the cool purpose of action. Then they were gazing
+full at each other, eyes into eyes, directly, questioningly. He was
+smiling as he had on the pass; as he had when he stood with his arms
+full of mail waiting for the signal to deposit his load. His devil had
+slipped back into his inner being.
+
+He spoke first, and in the voice that went with his vaguest mood; the
+voice in which he had described his escape from the dinosaur whose scales
+had become wedged in the defile at the critical moment.
+
+"You have a strong thumb and it must be tired, as well as all
+bluggy," he said, falling into a childhood symbol for taking the
+whole affair in play.
+
+Could he be the same man who had said, "I am going to kill you!" so
+relentlessly? He had eased the situation with the ready gift he had for
+easing situations; but, at the same time, he had made those unanalyzable
+emotions more complex, though they were swept into the background for the
+moment. He glanced down at his leg with comprehending surprise.
+
+"Now, certainly, you are free of all responsibility," he added. "You kept
+the strength in me to escape the fate you feared. Jim Galway will make a
+tourniquet and relieve you."
+
+The first available thing for tightening the tourniquet was the barrel
+of Pete Leddy's gun and the first suggestion for material came from her.
+It was the sash of her gown, which Galway knotted with his strong,
+sunburned fingers.
+
+When she could lift her numbed thumb from its task and rose to her feet
+she had a feeling of relief, as if she were free of magnetic bonds and
+uncanny personal proximity. The incident was closed--surely closed. She
+was breathing a prayer of thanks when a remark from Galway to Jack
+brought back her apprehension.
+
+"I guess you will have to postpone catching to-day's train," he said.
+
+Certainly, Jack must remain until his wound had healed and his strength
+had returned. And where would he go? He could not camp out on the desert.
+As Jasper Ewold had the most commodious bungalow it seemed natural that
+any wounded stranger should be taken there. The idea chilled her as an
+insupportable intrusion. Jack hesitated a moment. He was evidently
+considering whether he could not still keep to his programme.
+
+"Yes, Jim, I'm afraid I shall have to ask you for a cot for a few days,"
+he said, finally.
+
+Again he had the right thought at the right moment. Had he surmised what
+was passing in her mind?
+
+"Seeing that you've got Pete Leddy out of town, I should say that you
+were fairly entitled to a whole bed," Jim drawled. "These two Indians
+here can make a hustle to get some kind of a litter."
+
+Now she could go. That was her one crying thought: She could go! And
+again he came to her rescue with his smiling considerateness.
+
+"You have missed your breakfast, I'll warrant," he said to her. "Please
+don't wait. You were so brave and cool about it all, and--I--" A faint
+tide of color rose to his cheeks, which had been pale from loss of blood.
+For once he seemed unable to find a word.
+
+Mary denied him any assistance in his embarrassment.
+
+"Yes," she answered, almost bluntly. Then she added an excuse: "And you
+should have a doctor at once. I will send him."
+
+She did not look at Jack again, but hastened away. When she was over the
+bank of the _arroyo_ out of sight she put her fingers to her temples in
+strong pressure. That pulse made her think of another, which had been
+under her thumb, and she withdrew her fingers quickly.
+
+"It is the sun! I have no hat," she said to herself, "and I didn't
+sleep well."
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+MARY EXPLAINS
+
+
+Dr. Patterson was still asleep when Mary rapped at his door. Having
+aroused him to action by calling out that a stranger had been wounded in
+the _arroyo_, she did not pause to offer any further details. With her
+eyes level and dull, she walked rapidly along the main street where
+nobody was yet abroad, her one thought to reach her room uninterrupted.
+As she approached the house she saw her father standing on the porch, his
+face beaming with the joy of a serenely-lived moment as he had his
+morning look at the Eternal Painter's first display for the day. She had
+crossed the bridge before he became conscious of her presence.
+
+"Mary! You are up first! Out so early when you went to bed so late!" he
+greeted her.
+
+"I did not sleep well," she explained.
+
+"What, Mary, you not sleep well!" All the preoccupation with the
+heavens went from his eyes, which swept her from head to foot. "Mary!
+Your hand is covered with blood! There is blood on your dress' What
+does this mean?"
+
+She looked down and for the first time saw dark red spots on her skirt.
+The sight sent a shiver through her, which she mastered before she spoke.
+
+"Oh, nothing--or a good deal, if you put it in another way. A real
+sensation for Little Rivers!" she said.
+
+"But you are not telling!"
+
+"It is such a remarkable story, father, it ought not to be spoiled by
+giving away its plot," she said, with assumed lightness. "I don't feel
+equal to doing full justice to it until after I've had my bath. I will
+tell you at breakfast. That's a reason for your waiting for me."
+
+And she hastened past him into the house.
+
+"Was it--was it something to do with this Wingfield?" he called excitedly
+after her.
+
+"Yes, about the fellow of the enormous spurs--Senor Don't Care, as
+Ignacio calls him," she answered from the stair.
+
+Some note underneath her nonchalance seemed to disturb, even to distress
+him. He entered the house and started through the living-room on his way
+to the library. But he paused as if in answer to a call from one of the
+four photographs on the wall, Michael Angelo's young David, in the
+supple ease of grace. The David which Michael made from an imperfect
+piece of marble! The David which sculptors say is ill-proportioned! The
+David into which, however, the master breathed the thing we call genius,
+in the bloom of his own youth finding its power, even as David found his
+against Goliath.
+
+This David has come out of the unknown, over the hills, with the dew of
+morning freshness on his brow. He is unconscious of self; of everything
+except that he is unafraid. If all other aspirants have failed in downing
+the old champion, why, he will try.
+
+Now, Jasper Ewold frowned at David as if he were getting no answer to a
+series of questions.
+
+"I must make a change. You have been up a long time, David," he
+thought; for he had many of these photographs which he kept in a
+special store-room subject to his pleasure in hanging. "Yes, I will
+have a Madonna--two Madonnas, perhaps, and a Velasquez and a Rembrandt
+next time."
+
+In the library he set to reading Professor Giuccamini; but he found
+himself disagreeing with the professor.
+
+"I want your facts which you have dug out of the archives," he said,
+speaking to the book as if it were alive. "I don't want your opinions.
+Confound it!" he threw Giuccamini on the table. "I'll make my own
+opinions! Nothing else to do out here on the desert. Time enough to
+change them as often as I want, too."
+
+He went into the garden--the garden which, next to Mary, was the most
+intimate thing in his affections. Usually, every new leaf that had burst
+forth over night set itself in the gelatine of his mind like so many
+letterpress changes on a printed page to a proof-reader. This time,
+however, a new palm leaf, a new spray of bougainvillea blossoms, a bud
+on the latest rose setting which he had from Los Angeles, said "Good
+morning," without any response from him.
+
+He paced back and forth, his hands clasped behind him, his head bowed
+moodily, and his shoulders drawn together in a way that made him seem
+older and more portly. With each turn he looked sharply, impatiently,
+toward the door of the house.
+
+Never had Mary so felt the charm of her room as on this morning; never
+had it seemed so set apart from the world and so personal. It was the
+breadth of the ell and the size of her father's library and bedroom
+combined. The windows could hardly be called windows in a Northern sense,
+for there was no glass. It was unnecessary to seal up the source of
+light and air in a dry climate, where a blanket at night supplied all the
+extra warmth one's body ever required. The blinds swung inward and the
+shades softened the light and added to the privacy which the screen of
+the growing young trees and creeping vines were fast supplying. Here she
+could be more utterly alone than on the summit of the pass itself. She
+paused in the doorway, surveying familiar objects in the enjoyed triumph
+of complete seclusion.
+
+While she waited for the water to run into the bowl, she looked fixedly
+at the stains of a fluid which had been so warm in its touch. It was only
+blood, she told herself. It would wash off, and she held her hands in the
+water and saw the spread of the dye through the bowl in a moment of
+preoccupation. Then she scrubbed as vigorously as if she were bent on
+removing the skin itself. After she had held up her dripping fingers in
+satisfied inspection, the spots on her gown caught her eye. For a moment
+they, too, held her staring attention; then she slipped out of the gown
+precipitately.
+
+With this, her determined haste was at an end. She was about to enjoy the
+feminine luxury of time. The combing of her hair became a delightful and
+leisurely function in the silky feel of the strands in her fingers and
+the refreshing pull at the roots. The flow of the bath water made the
+music of pleasurable anticipation, and immersion set the very spirit of
+physical life leaping and tingling in her veins. And all the while she
+was thinking of how to fashion a narrative.
+
+When she started down-stairs she was not only refreshed but remade. She
+was going to breakfast at the usual hour, after the usual processes of
+ushering herself from the night's rest into the day's activities. There
+had been no stealthy trip out to the _arroyo_; no duel; no wound; no
+Senor Don't Care. She had only a story which involved all these elements,
+a most preposterous story, to tell.
+
+"Now you shall hear all about it!" she called to her father as soon as
+she saw him; "the strangest, most absurd, most amusing affair"--she piled
+up the adjectives--"that has ever occurred in Little Rivers!"
+
+She began at once, even before she poured his coffee, her voice a trifle
+high-pitched with her simulation of humor. And she was exactly veracious,
+avoiding details, yet missing nothing that gave the facts a pleasant
+trail. She told of the meeting with Leddy on the pass and of the arrival
+of the gorgeous traveller; of Jack's whistle; of Pete's challenge.
+
+Jasper Ewold listened with stoical attentiveness. He did not laugh, even
+when Jack's vagaries were mentioned.
+
+"Why didn't you tell me last night?" was his first question.
+
+"To be honest, I was afraid that it would worry you. I was afraid that
+you would not permit me to go to the pass alone again. But you will?" She
+slipped her hand across the table and laid her fingers appealingly on the
+broad back of his heavily tanned hand, from which the veins rose in
+bronze welts. "And he was nice about it in his ridiculous, big-spurs
+fashion. He said that it was all due to the whistle."
+
+"Go on! Go on! There must be more!" her father insisted impatiently.
+
+She gave him the pantomime of the store, not as a bit of tragedy--she was
+careful about that--but as something witnessed by an impersonal
+spectator and narrator of stories.
+
+"He walked right toward a muzzle, this Wingfield?" Jasper asked, his
+brows contracting.
+
+"Why, yes. I told you at the start it was all most preposterous,"
+she answered.
+
+"And he was not afraid of death--this Wingfield!" Jasper repeated.
+
+He was looking away from her. The contraction of his brows had become a
+scowl of mystification.
+
+"Why do you always speak of him as 'this Wingfield,'" she demanded, "as
+if the town were full of Wingfields and he was a particular one?"
+
+He looked around quickly, his features working in a kind of confusion.
+Then he smiled.
+
+"I was thinking of the whistle," he explained. "Well, we'll call him this
+Sir Chaps, this Senor Don't Care, or whatever you please. As for his
+walking into the gun, there is nothing remarkable in that. You draw on a
+man. You expect him to throw up his hands or reach for his gun. He does
+nothing but smile right along the level of the sight into your eyes. It
+was disturbing to Pete's sense of etiquette on such occasions. It threw
+him off. There are similar instances in history. A soldier once put a
+musket at Bonaparte's head. Some of Caesar's legionaries once pressed
+their swords at his breast. Such old hands in human psychology had the
+presence of mind to smile. And the history of the West is full of
+examples which have not been recorded. Go on, Mary!"
+
+"Ignacio says he has a devil in him," she added.
+
+"That little Indian has a lot of primitive race wisdom. Probably he is
+right," her father said soberly.
+
+"It explains what followed," she proceeded.
+
+She was emphatic about the reason for her part. She went out to the
+_arroyo_ on behalf of her responsibility for a human life.
+
+"But why did you not rouse me? Why did you go alone?" he asked.
+
+"I didn't think--there wasn't time--I was upset and hurried."
+
+She proceeded in a forced monotone which seemed to allow her hardly a
+single full breath.
+
+"And I am going to kill you!" she repeated, shuddering, at the close of
+the narrative.
+
+"When he said that did his face change completely? Did it seem like the
+face of another man? Yes, did it seem as if there were one face that
+could charm and another that could kill?" Jasper's words came slowly and
+with a drawn exactness. They formed the inquiry of one who expected
+corroboration of an impression.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You felt it--you felt it very definitely, Mary?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+She was living over the moment of Jack's transformation from silk to
+steel. The scene in the _arroyo_ became burning clear. Under the strain
+of the suppression of her own excitement, concentrated in her purpose to
+make all the realism of the duel an absurdity, she did not watch keenly
+for the signs of expression by which she usually knew what was passing
+in her father's mind. But she was not too preoccupied to see that he was
+relieved over her assent that there was a devil in Jack Wingfield, which
+struck her as a puzzle in keeping with all that morning's experience.
+It added to the inward demoralization which had suddenly dammed her
+power of speech.
+
+"Ignacio saw it, too, so I was interested," Jasper added quickly,
+in a more natural tone, settling back into his chair. His agitation
+had passed.
+
+So that was it. Her father's dominant, fine old egoism was rejoicing in
+another proof of his excellence as a judge of character.
+
+"Finis! The story is told!" he continued softly.
+
+All told! And it had been a success. Mary caught her breath in a gay,
+high-pitched exclamation of realization that she had not to go on with
+explanations.
+
+"Our singular cavalier is safe!" she said. "My debt is paid. I need not
+worry any further lest someone who did me a favor should suffer for it!"
+
+"True! true!"
+
+Jasper's outburst of laughter when he had paused in turning down the wick
+of the lamp the previous evening had been as a forced blast from the
+brasses. Anyone with strong lungs may laugh majestically; but it takes
+depth of feeling and years rich with experience to express the
+gratification that now possessed him. He stretched his hands across the
+table to her and the laugh that came then came as a cataract of
+spontaneity.
+
+"Exactly, Mary! The duel provided the way to pay a debt," he said. "Why,
+it is you who have done our Big Spurs a favor! He has a wound to show to
+his friends in the East! I am proud that you could take it all so coolly
+and reasonably."
+
+She improved her opportunity while he held her hands.
+
+"I will go armed next time, and I do know how to shoot, so you won't
+worry"--she put it that way, rather than openly ask his consent--"if I
+ride out to the pass?"
+
+"Mary, I have every reason to believe that you know how to take care of
+yourself," he answered.
+
+And that very afternoon she rode out to Galeria, starting a little
+earlier than usual, returning a little later than usual, in
+jubilant mood.
+
+"Everything is the same!" she had repeated a dozen times on the road.
+"Everything is the same!" she told herself before she fell asleep;
+and her sleep was long and sweet, in nature's gratitude for rest
+after a storm.
+
+The sunlight breaking through the interstices of the foliage of a poplar,
+sensitive to a slight breeze, came between the lattices in trembling
+patchwork on the bed, flickering over her face and losing itself in the
+strands of her hair.
+
+"Everything is the same!" she said, when her faculties were cleared of
+drowsiness.
+
+For the second time she gave intimate, precious thanks for a simple thing
+that had never occurred to her as a blessing before: for the seclusion
+and silence of her room, free from all invasion except of her own
+thoughts. The quicker flow of blood that came with awaking, the expanding
+thrill of physical strength and buoyancy of life renewed, brought with it
+the moral courage which morning often brings to flout the compromises of
+the confusion of the evening's weariness. The inspiriting, cool air of
+night electrified by the sun cleared her vision. She saw all the pictures
+on the slate of yesterday and their message plainly, as something that
+could not be erased by any Buddhistic ritual of reiterated phrase.
+
+"No, everything is not the same, not even the ride--not yet!" she
+admitted. "But time will make it so--time and a sense of humor, which I
+hope I have."
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+SENOR DON'T CARE RECEIVES
+
+
+Jack lounged in an armchair in the Galway sitting-room with his bandaged
+leg bolstered on a stool after Dr. Patterson had fished a bit of lead
+out of the wound. Tribute overflowed from the table to the chairs and
+from the chairs to the floor; pineapples, their knobby jackets all
+yellow from ripening in the field, with the full succulency of root-fed
+and sun-drawn flavor; monstrous navel oranges, leaden with the weight of
+juice, richer than cloth of gold and velvet soft; and every fruit of the
+fertile soil and benignant climate; and jellies, pies, and custards. But
+these were only the edibles. There were flowers in equal abundance. They
+banked the windows.
+
+"It's Jasper Ewold's idea to bring gifts when you call," explained Jim
+Galway. "Jasper is always sowing ideas and lots of them have sprung up
+and flourished."
+
+Jack had not been in Little Rivers twenty-four hours, and he had played a
+part in its criminal annals and become subject to all the embarrassment
+of favors of a royal bride or a prima donna who is about to sail. In a
+bower, amazed, he was meeting the world of Little Rivers and its wife.
+Men of all ages; men with foreign accent; men born and bred as farmers;
+men to whom the effect of indoor occupation clung; men still weak, but
+with red corpuscles singing a song of returning health in their
+arteries--strapping, vigorous men, all with hands hardened by manual
+labor and in their eyes the far distances of the desert, in contrast to
+the sparkle of oasis intimacy.
+
+Women with the accent of college classrooms; women who made plural nouns
+the running mates of singular verbs; women who were novices in
+housework; women drilled in drudgery from childhood--all expanding, all
+dwelling in a democracy that had begun its life afresh in a new land,
+and all with the wonder of gardens where there had been only sagebrush
+in their beings.
+
+There was something at odds with Jack's experience of desert towns in the
+picture of a bronzed rancher, his arms loaded with roses, saying, in
+boyish diffidence:
+
+"Mister, you fit him fair and you sure fixed him good. Just a few
+roses--they're so thick over to our place that they're getting a pest.
+Thought mebbe they'd be nice for you to look at while you was tied up to
+a chair nursing Pete's soovenir!"
+
+One visitor whose bulk filled the doorway, the expansion of his smile
+spreading over a bounteous rotundity of cheek, impressed himself as a
+personality who had the distinction in avoirdupois that Jim Galway had in
+leanness. In his hand he had five or six peonies as large as saucers.
+
+"Every complete community has a fat man, seh!" he announced, with a
+certain ample bashfulness in keeping with his general amplitude and a
+musical Southern accent.
+
+"If it wants to feel perfectly comfortable it has!" said Jack, by way
+of welcome.
+
+"Well, I'm the fat man of Little Rivers, name being Bob Worther!"
+said he, grinning as he came across the room with an amazingly quick,
+easy step.
+
+"No rivals?" inquired Jack.
+
+"No, seh! I staked out the first claim and I've an eye out for any
+new-comers over the two hundred mark. I warn them off! Jasper Ewold is up
+to two hundred, but he doesn't count. Why, you ought to have seen me,
+seh, before I came to this valley!"
+
+"A living skeleton?"
+
+"No, seh! Back in Alabama I had reached a point where I broke so many
+chairs and was getting so nervous from sudden falls in the midst of
+conversation, when I made a lively gesture that I didn't dare sit down
+away from home except at church, where they had pews. I weighed three
+hundred and fifty!"
+
+"And now?"
+
+"I acknowledge two hundred and forty, including my legs, which are very
+powerful, having worked off that extra hundred. I've got the boss job
+for making a fat man spider-waisted--inspector of ditches and dams. Any
+other man would have to use a horse, but I hoof it, and that's economy
+all around. And being big I grow big things. Violets wouldn't be much
+more in my line than drawnwork. I've got this whole town beat on
+peonies and pumpkins. Being as it's a fat man's pleasure to cheer
+people up, I dropped in to bring you a few peonies and to say that,
+considering the few well-selected words you spoke to Pete Leddy on this
+town's behalf, I'm prepared to vote for you for anything from coroner
+to president, seh!"
+
+Later, after Bob had gone, a small girl brought a spray of gladiolus,
+their slender stems down to her toe-tips and the opening blossoms half
+hiding her face. Jack insisted on having them laid across his knee She
+was not a fairy out of a play, as he knew by her conversation.
+
+"Mister, did you yell when you was hit?" she asked.
+
+Jack considered thoughtfully. It would not do to be vagarious under such
+a shrewd examination; he must be exact.
+
+"No, I don't think I did. I was too busy."
+
+"I'll bet you wanted to, if you hadn't been so busy. Did it hurt much?"
+
+"Not so very much."
+
+"Maybe that was why you didn't yell. Mother says that all you can see is
+a little black spot--except you can't see it for the bandages. Is that
+the way yours is?"
+
+"I believe so. In fact, I'll tell you a secret: That's the fashion
+in wounds."
+
+"Mother will be glad to know she's right. She sets a lot by her opinion,
+does mother. Say, do you like plums?"
+
+Jack already had a peck of plums, but another peck would not add much to
+the redundancy as far as he was concerned.
+
+"I'll bring you some. We've got the biggest plums in Little Rivers--oh,
+so big! Bigger'n Mr. Ewold's! I'll bring some right away." She paused,
+however, in the doorway. "Don't you tell anybody I said they were
+bigger'n Mr. Ewold's," she went on. "It might hurt his feelings. He's
+what they call the o-rig-i-nal set-tler, and we always agree that he
+grows the biggest of everything, because--why, because he's got such a
+big laugh and such a big smile. Mother says sour-faced people oughtn't to
+have a face any bigger'n a crab apple; but Mr. Ewold's face couldn't be
+too big if it was as big as all outdoors! Good-by. I reckon you won't be
+s'prised to hear that I'm the dreadful talker of our family."
+
+"Wait!" Jack called. "You haven't told me your name."
+
+"Belvedere Smith. Father says it ain't a name for living things. But
+mother is dreadfully set in her ideas of names, and she doesn't like it
+because people call me Belvy; but they just naturally will."
+
+"Belvedere, did you ever hear of the three little blue mice"--Jack was
+leaning toward her with an air of fascinating mystery--"that thought they
+could hide in the white clover from the white cat that had two black
+stripes on her back?"
+
+There was a pellmell dash across the room and her face, with wide-open
+eyes dancing in curiosity, was pressed close to his:
+
+"Why did the cat have two black stripes? Why? why?"
+
+"Just what I was going to tell," said the pacifier of desperadoes.
+
+"They were off on a tremendous adventure, with anthills for mountains
+and clover-stems for the tree-trunks of forests in the path. Tragedy
+seemed due for the mice, when a bee dropped off a thistle blossom for a
+remarkable reason--none other than that a hummingbird cuffed him in the
+ear with his wing--and the bee, looking for revenge with his stinger on
+the first vulnerable spot, stung the cat right in the Achilles tendon of
+his paw, just as that paw was about to descend with murderous purpose.
+The cat ran away crying, with both black stripes ridges of fur sticking
+up straight, while the rest of the fur lay nice and smooth; and the
+mice giggled so that their ears nearly wiggled off their heads. So all
+ended happily."
+
+"He does beat all!" thought Mrs. Galway, who had overheard part of the
+nonsense from the doorway. "Wouldn't it make Pete Leddy mad if he could
+hear the man who took his gun away getting off fairy stuff like that!"
+
+Mrs. Galway had brought in a cake of her own baking. She was
+slightly jealous of the neighbors' pastry as entering into her own
+particular field of excellence. Jack saw that the supply of cake in
+the Galway pantry must be as limitless as the pigments on the
+Eternal Painter's palette.
+
+"The doctor said that I was to have a light diet," he expostulated; "and
+I am stuffed to the brim."
+
+"I'll make you some floating island," said Mrs. Galway, refusing to
+strike her colors.
+
+"That isn't filling and passes the time," Jack admitted.
+
+"Jim says if you had to Fletcherize on floating island you would starve
+to death and your teeth would get so used to missing a step on the stairs
+that they would never be able to deal with real victuals at all."
+
+"Mrs. Galway," Jack observed sagely, dropping his head on the back of the
+chair, "I see that it has occurred to you and Jim that it is an excellent
+world and full of excellent nonsense. I am ready to eat both fluffy isles
+and the yellow sea in which they float. I am ready to keep on getting
+hungry with my efforts, even though you make it continents and oceans!"
+
+From his window he had a view, over the dark, polished green of Jim's
+orange trees, of the range, brown and gray and bare, holding steady
+shadows of its own and host to the shadows of journeying clouds, with the
+pass set in the centre as a cleft in a forbidding barrier. In the yard
+Wrath of God, Jag Ear, and P.D. were tethered. Deep content illumined the
+faces of P.D. and Jag Ear; but Wrath of God was as sorrowful as ever. A
+cheerful Wrath of God would have excited fears for his health.
+
+"Yet, maybe he is enjoying his rest more than the others," Jack told
+Firio, who kept appearing at the window on some excuse or other. "Perhaps
+he takes his happiness internally. Perhaps the external signs are only
+the last stand of a lugubriousness driven out by overwhelming forces of
+internal joy."
+
+"_Si, si_!" said Firio.
+
+"Firio, you are eminently a conversationalist," said Jack. "You agree
+with any foolishness as if it were a new theory of ethics. You are an
+ideal companion. I never have to listen to you in order that I may in
+turn have my say."
+
+"_Si_," said Firio. He leaned on the windowsill, his black eyes shining
+with ingenuous and flattering appeal: "I will broil you a quail on a
+spit," he whispered. "It's better than stove cooking."
+
+"Don't talk of that!" Jack exclaimed, almost sharply. The suggestion
+brought a swift change to sadness over his face and drew a veil of
+vagueness over his eyes. "No, Firio, and I'll tell you why: the odor of a
+quail broiled on a spit belongs at the end of a day's journey, when you
+camp in sight of no habitation. You should sit on a dusty blanket-roll;
+you should eat by the light of the embers or a guttering candle. No,
+Firio, we'll wait till some other day. And it's not exactly courtesy to
+our hostess to bring in provender from the outside."
+
+The trail had apparently taught Firio all the moods of his master. He
+knew when it was unwise to persist.
+
+"_Si_!" he whispered, and withdrew.
+
+Jack looked at Galeria and then back quickly, as if resisting its call.
+He smiled half wryly and readjusted his position in the chair. Over the
+hedge he could see the heads and shoulders of passers-by. Jim Galway had
+come into the room, when Jasper Ewold's broad back and great head hove
+in sight with something of the steady majesty of progress of a
+full-rigged ship.
+
+"The Doge!" Jack exclaimed, brightening.
+
+Jim was taken unawares. Was it the name of a new kind of semi-tropical
+fruit not yet introduced into Arizona?
+
+"Not the Doge of Venice--hardly, when Mr. Ewold's love runs to Florence!
+The Doge of Little Rivers!"
+
+"Why, the Doge--of course!" Jim was "on" now and grinning. "I didn't
+think of my history at first. That's a good one for Jasper Ewold!"
+
+"O Doge of Little Rivers, I expected you in a gondola of state!" said
+Jack, with a playfully grandiloquent gesture, as Jasper's abundance
+filled the doorway. "But it is all the more compliment to me that you
+should walk."
+
+"Doge, eh?" Jasper tasted the word. "Pooh!" he said. "Persiflage!
+persiflage! I saw at once yesterday that you had a weakness for it."
+
+"And Miss Ewold? How is she?" Jack asked. Remembering the promise
+that Mary had exacted from him, he took care not to refer to her part
+in the duel.
+
+His question fell aptly for what Jasper had to say. Being a man used to
+keeping the gate ever open to the full flood of spontaneity, he became
+stilted in the repetition of anything he had thought out and rehearsed.
+He was overcheerful, without the mellowness of tone which gave his cheer
+its charm on the previous evening.
+
+"She's not a bit the worse. Why, she went for a ride out to the pass this
+afternoon as usual! I've had the whole story, from the pass till the
+minute that Jim put the tourniquet on your leg. She recognizes the great
+kindness you did her."
+
+"Not a kindness--an inevitable interruption by any passer-by,"
+Jack put in.
+
+"Naturally she felt that it was a kindness, a service, and when she knew
+you were in danger she acted promptly for herself, with a desert girl's
+self-reliance. When it was all over she saw the whole thing in its proper
+perspective, as an unpleasant, preposterous piece of barbarism which had
+turned out fortunately."
+
+"Oh, I am glad of that!" Jack exclaimed, in relief that spoke rejoicing
+in every fibre. "I had worried. I had feared lest I had insisted too much
+on going on. But I had to. And I know that it was a scene that only men
+ought to witness--so horrible I feared it might leave a disagreeable
+impression."
+
+"Ah, Mary has courage and humor. She sees the ridiculous. She laughs at
+it all, now!"
+
+"Laughs?" asked Jack. "Yes, it was laughable;" and he broke into
+laughter, in which Jasper joined thunderously.
+
+Jasper kept on laughing after Jack stopped, and in genuine relief to find
+that the affair was to be as uninfluencing a chapter in the easy
+traveller's life as in Mary's.
+
+"Our regret is that we may have delayed you, sir," Jasper proceeded. "You
+may have had to postpone an important engagement. I understand that you
+had planned to take the train this morning."
+
+"When one has been in the desert for a long time," Jack answered, "a few
+days more or less hardly matter in the time of his departure. In a week
+Dr. Patterson says that I may go. Meanwhile, I shall have the pleasure
+of getting acquainted with Little Rivers, which, otherwise, I should
+have missed."
+
+"I am glad!" Jasper Ewold exclaimed with dramatic quickness. "Glad that
+your wound is so slight--glad that you need not be shut up long when you
+are due elsewhere."
+
+What books should he bring to the invalid to while away the time? "The
+Three Musketeers" or "Cyrano"? Jack seemed to know his "Cyrano" so well
+that a copy could be only a prompt. He settled deeper in his chair and,
+more to the sky than to Jasper Ewold, repeated Cyrano's address to his
+cadets, set to a tune of his own. His body might be in the chair, with a
+bandaged leg, but clearly his mind was away on the trail.
+
+"Yes, let me see," he said, coming back to earth. "I should like the
+'Road to Rome,' something of Charles Lamb, Aldrich's 'Story of a Bad
+Boy,' Heine---but no! What am I saying? Bring me any solid book on
+economics. I ought to be reading economics. Economics and Charles Lamb,
+that will do. Do you think they could travel together?"
+
+"All printed things can, if you choose. I'll include Lamb."
+
+"And any Daudet lying loose," Jack added.
+
+"And Omar?"
+
+"I carry Omar in my head, thank you, O Doge!"
+
+"Sir Chaps of the enormous spurs, you have a broad taste for one who
+rides over the pass of Galeria after five years in Arizona," said the
+Doge as he rose. He was covertly surveying that soft, winning, dreamy
+profile which had turned so hard when the devil that was within came to
+the surface.
+
+"I was fed on books and galleries in my boyhood," Jack said; but
+with a reticence that indicated that this was all he cared to tell
+about his past.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+MARY BRINGS TRIBUTE
+
+
+Every resident except the cronies of Pete Leddy considered it a duty,
+once a day at least, to look over the Galway hedge and ask how Senor
+Don't Care was doing. That is, everyone with a single exception, which
+was Mary. Jack had never seen her even pass the house. It was as if his
+very existence had dropped out of her ken. The town remarked the anomaly.
+
+"You have not been in lately," Mrs. Galway reminded her.
+
+"My flowers have required a lot of attention; also, I have been riding
+out to the pass a good deal," she answered, and changed the subject to
+geraniums, for the very good reason that she had just been weeding her
+geranium bed.
+
+Mrs. Galway looked at her strangely and Mary caught the glance. She
+guessed what Mrs. Galway was thinking: that she had been a little
+inconsiderate of a man who had been wounded in her service.
+
+"Probably it is time I bore tribute, too," she said to herself.
+
+That afternoon she took down a glass of jelly from the pantry shelves and
+set forth in the line of duty, frowning and rehearsing a presentation
+speech as she went. With every step toward the Galway cottage she was
+increasingly confused and exasperated with herself for even thinking of a
+speech. As she drew near she heard a treble chorus of "ohs!" and "ahs!"
+and saw Jack on the porch surrounded by children.
+
+"It's dinosaur foolishness again!" she thought, pungently.
+
+He was in the full fettle of nonsense, his head a little to one side and
+lowered, while he looked through his eyebrows at his hearers, measuring
+the effect of his words. She thought of that face when he called to
+Leddy, "I am going to kill you!" and felt the pulse of inquiry beat over
+all that lay in this man's repertory between the two moods.
+
+"Then, counting each one in his big, deep, bass voice, like this," he was
+saying, "that funny little dwarf kept dropping oranges out of the tree on
+the big giant, who could not wiggle and was squeaking in protest in his
+little, old woman's voice. Every orange hit him right on the bridge of
+his nose, and he was saying: 'You know I never could bear yellow! It
+fusses me so.'"
+
+"He doesn't need any jelly! I am going on!" Mary thought.
+
+Then Jack saw a slim, pliant form hastening by and a brown profile under
+hair bare of a hat, with eyes straight ahead. Mary might have been a unit
+of marching infantry. The story stopped abruptly.
+
+"Yes--and--and--go on!" cried the children.
+
+Jack held up his hand for silence.
+
+"How do you do?" he called, and she caught in his tone and in her first
+glimpse of his face a certain mischievousness, as if he, who missed no
+points for idle enjoyment of any situation, had a satisfaction in taking
+her by surprise with his greeting. This put her on her mettle with the
+quickness of a summons to fence. She was as nonchalant as he.
+
+"And you are doing well, I learn," she answered.
+
+"Oh, come in and hear it, Miss Ewold! It's the best one yet!" cried
+Belvedere Smith. "And--and--"
+
+"And--and--" began the chorus.
+
+Mary went to the hedge. She dropped the glass of jelly on the thick
+carpet of the privet.
+
+"I have just brought my gift. I'll leave it here. Belvy will bring it
+when the story is over. I am glad you are recovering so rapidly."
+
+"And--and--" insisted the chorus.
+
+"You oughtn't to miss this story. It's a regular Jim dandy!"
+Belvedere shouted.
+
+"Yes, won't you come in?" Jack begged in serious urgency. "I pride
+myself that it is almost intellectual toward the close."
+
+"I have no doubt," she said, looking fairly at him from under her hand,
+which she held up to shade her face, so he saw only the snap of her eyes
+in the shadow. "But I am in a hurry."
+
+And he was looking at a shoulder and a quarter profile as she
+turned away.
+
+"Did you make the jelly yourself?" he called.
+
+"Yes, I am not afraid of the truth--I did!" she answered with a backward
+glance and not stopping.
+
+"Oh, bully!" he exclaimed with great enthusiasm, in which she detected a
+strain of what she classified as impudence.
+
+"But all the time the giant was fumbling in his pocket for his green
+handkerchief. You know the dwarf did not like green. It fussed him just
+as much as yellow fussed the giant. But it was a narrow pocket, so narrow
+that he could only get his big thumb in, and very deep. So, you see--"
+and she heard the tale proceeding as she walked on to the end of the
+street, where she turned around and came back across the desert and
+through the garden.
+
+On the way she found it amusing to consider Jack judicially as a human
+exhibit, stripped of all the chimera of romance with which Little Rivers
+had clothed his personality. If he had not happened to meet her on the
+pass, the townspeople would have regarded this stranger as an invasion of
+real life by a character out of a comic opera. She viewed the specimen
+under a magnifying glass in all angles, turning it around as if it were a
+bronze or an ivory statuette.
+
+1. In his favor: Firstly, children were fond of him; but his extravagance
+of phrase and love of applause accounted for that. Secondly, Firio was
+devoted to him. Such worshipful attachment on the part of a native Indian
+to any Saxon was remarkable. Yet this was explained by his love of color,
+his foible for the picturesque, his vagabond irresponsibility, and,
+mostly, by his latent savagery--which she would hardly have been willing
+to apply to Ignacio's worshipful attachment to herself.
+
+2. Against him: Everything of any importance, except in the eyes of
+children and savages; everything in logic. He would not stand analysis at
+all. He was without definite character. He was posing, affected, pleased
+with himself, superficial, and theatrical, and interested in people only
+so long as they amused him or gratified his personal vanity.
+
+"I had the best of the argument in leaving the jelly on the hedge, and
+that is the last I shall hear of it," she concluded.
+
+Not so. Mrs. Galway came that evening, a bearer of messages.
+
+"He says it is the most wonderful jelly that ever was," said Mrs. Galway.
+"He ate half the glass for dinner and is saving the rest for
+breakfast--I'm using his own words and you know what a killing way he has
+of putting things--saving it for breakfast so that he will have something
+to live through the night for and in the morning the joy of it will not
+be all a memory. He wants to know if you have any more of the same kind."
+
+"Yes, a dozen glasses," Mary returned. "Tell him we are glad of the
+opportunity of finishing last year's stock, and I send it provided he
+eats half a glass with every meal."
+
+"I don't know what his answer will be to that," said Mrs. Galway,
+contracting her brow studiously at Mary. "But he would have one quick. He
+always has. He's so poetic and all that, we're planning to go to the
+station to see him off and pelt him with flowers; and Dr. Patterson is
+going to fashion a white cat out of white carnations, with deep red ones
+for the black stripes, for the children to present."
+
+"Hurrah!" exclaimed Mary blithely, and went for the jelly.
+
+She was spared further bulletins on the state of health of the wounded
+until her father returned from his daily call the next morning. She was
+in the living-room and she knew by his step on the porch, vigorous yet
+light, that he was uplifted by good news or by the anticipation of the
+exploitation of some new idea--a pleasure second only to that of the
+idea's birth. Such was his elation that he broke one of his own rules by
+tossing some of the books loaned to Jack onto the broad top of the table
+of the living-room, which was sacred to the isolation of the ivory
+paper-knife.
+
+"He has named the date!" shouted the Doge. "He goes by to-morrow's train!
+It will be a gala affair, almost an historical moment in the early
+history of this community. I am to make a speech presenting him with the
+freedom of the whole world. Between us we have hit on a proper modern
+symbol of the gift. He slips me his Pullman ticket and I formally offer
+it to him as the key to the hospitality of the seven seas, the two
+hemispheres, and the teeming cities that lie beyond the range. It will be
+great fun, with plenty of persiflage. And, Mary, they suggest that you
+write some verses--ridiculous verses, in keeping with the whole
+nonsensical business."
+
+"You mean that I am to stand on the platform and read poetry dedicated to
+him?" she demanded.
+
+"Poetry, Mary? You grow ambitious. Not poetry--foolish doggerel. Or
+someone will read it for you."
+
+He had not failed to watch the play of her expression. She had received
+all his nonsense, announced in his best style of simulated forensic
+grandeur, with a certain unchanging serenity which was unamused: which
+was, indeed, barely interested.
+
+"And someone else shall write it, for I don't think of any verses,"
+she said, with a slight shrug of the shoulder. "Besides, I shall not
+be there."
+
+"Not be there! People will remark your absence!"
+
+"Will they?" she asked, thoughtfully, as if that had not occurred to her.
+"No, they will be too occupied with the persiflage. I am going to ride
+out to the pass in the morning very early--before daybreak."
+
+"But"--he was positively frolicsome as he caught her hands and waved
+them back and forth, while he rocked his shoulders--"when you are
+stubborn, Mary, have your way. I will make your excuses. And I to work
+now. It is the hour of the hoe," as he called all hours except those of
+darkness and the hot midday.
+
+For Jasper Ewold was no idler in the affairs of his ranch or of the town.
+Few city men were so busy. His everlasting talk was incidental, like the
+babbling of a brook which, however, keeps steadily flowing on; and the
+stored scholarship of his mind was supplemented by long evenings with no
+other relaxation but reading. Now as he went down the path he broke into
+song; and when the Doge sang it was something awful, excusable only by
+the sheer happiness that brought on the attack.
+
+Mary had important sewing, which this morning she chose to do in her room
+rather than in her favorite spot in the garden. She closed the shutters
+on the sunny side and sat down by the window nearest the garden,
+peculiarly sensible of the soft light and cool spaciousness of an inner
+world. The occasional buzz of a bee, the flutter of the leaves of the
+poplar, might have been the voice of the outer world in Southern Spain or
+Southern Italy, or anywhere else where the air is balmy.
+
+And to-morrow! Out to Galeria in the fervor of a pilgrim to some shrine,
+with the easy movement of her pony and the rigid lines of the pass
+gradually drawing nearer and the sky ever distant! She would be mistress
+of her thoughts in all the silent glamour of morning on the desert. She
+would hear the train stop at the station, its heavy effort as it pulled
+out, and watch it winding over the flashing steel threads in a clamor of
+stridency and harshness, which grew fainter and fainter. And she would
+smile as it disappeared around a bend in the range. She would smile at
+him, at the incident, just as carelessly as he had smiled when he told of
+the dinosaur.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+A JOURNEY ON CRUTCHES
+
+
+The sun became benign in its afternoon slant. Little Rivers was beginning
+to move after its siesta, with the stretching of muscles that would grow
+more vigorous as evening approached and freshened life came into the air
+with the sprinkle of sunset brilliance.
+
+To Jack the hour palpably brought a reminder of the misery of the moment
+when a thing long postponed must at last be performed. The softness of
+speculative fancy faded from his face. His lips tightened in a way that
+seemed to bring his chin into prominence in mastery of his being. As he
+called Firio, his voice unusually high-pitched, he did not look out at
+P.D. and Wrath of God and Jag Ear.
+
+Firio came with the eagerness of one who is restless for action. He
+leaned on the windowsill, his elbows spread, his chin cupped in his
+hands, his Indian blankness of countenance enlivened by the glow of his
+eyes, as jewels enliven dull brown velvet.
+
+"Firio, I have something to tell you."
+
+"_Si_!"
+
+There was a laboring of Jack's throat muscles, and then he forced out the
+truth in a few words.
+
+"Firio," he said, "this is my trail end. I am going back to New York
+to-morrow."
+
+"_Si_!" answered Firio, without a tremor of emotion; but his eyes glowed
+confidently, fixedly, into Jack's.
+
+"There will be money for you, and--"
+
+"_Si_!" said Firio mechanically, as if repeating the lines of a lesson.
+
+Was this Indian boy prepared for the news? Or did he not care? Was he
+simply clay that served without feeling? The thought made Jack wince. He
+paused, and the dark eyes, as in a spell, kept staring into his.
+
+"And you get P.D. and Wrath of God and Jag Ear and, yes, the big spurs
+and the chaps, too, to keep to remember me by."
+
+Firio did not answer.
+
+"You are not pleased? You--"
+
+"_Si_! I will keep them for you. You will want them; you will come back
+to all this;" and suddenly Firio was galvanized into the life of a single
+gesture. He swept his arm toward the sky, indicating infinite distance.
+
+"No, I shall never come back! I can't!" Jack said; and his face had set
+hard, as if it were a wall about to be driven at a wall. "I must go and I
+must stay."
+
+"_Si_!" said Firio, resuming his impassiveness, and slipped around the
+corner of the house.
+
+"He does care!" Jack cried with a smile, which, however, was not the
+smile of gardens, of running brooks, and of song. "I am glad--glad!"
+
+He picked up his crutches and went out to the three steeds of
+trail memory:
+
+"And _you_ care--_you_ care!" he repeated to them.
+
+He drew a lugubrious grimace in mockery at Wrath of God. He tickled the
+sliver of the donkey's ear, whereat Jag Ear wiggled the sliver in
+blissful unconsciousness that he had lost any of the ornamental equipment
+of his tribe.
+
+"You are like most of us; we don't see our deformities, Jag Ear," Jack
+told him. "And if others were also blind to them, why, we should all be
+good-looking!"
+
+His arm slipped around P.D.'s neck and he ran a finger up and down P.D.'s
+nose with a tickling caress.
+
+"You old plodder!" he said. "You know a lot. It's good to have the love
+of any living thing that has been near me as long as you have."
+
+This preposterous being was preposterously sentimental over a pair of
+ponies and an earless donkey. When Mrs. Galway, who had watched him from
+the window, came out on the porch she saw that he was on his way through
+the gate in the hedge to the street.
+
+"Look here! Did the doctor say you might?" she called.
+
+"No, my leg says it!" Jack answered, gaily. "Just a little walk!
+Back soon."
+
+It was his first enterprise in locomotion outside the limits of Jim
+Galway's yard since he had been wounded. He turned blissful traveller
+again. Having come to know the faces of the citizens, now he was to look
+into the faces of their habitations. The broad main street, with its rows
+of trees, narrowed with perspective until it became a gray spot of desert
+sand. Under the trees leisurely flowed those arteries of ranch and
+garden-life, the irrigation ditches. Continuity of line in the
+hedge-fences was evidently a municipal requirement; but over the hedges
+individualism expressed itself freely, yet with a harmony which had been
+set by public fashion.
+
+The houses were of cement in simple design. They had no architectural
+message except that of a background for ornamentation by the genius of
+the soil's productivity. They waited on vines to cover their sides and
+trees to cast shade across their doorways. One need not remain long to
+know the old families in this community, where the criterion of local
+aristocracy was the size of your plums or the number of crops of alfalfa
+you could grow in a year.
+
+Already Jack felt at home. It was as if he were friends with a whole
+world, lacking the social distinctions which only begin when someone
+acquires sufficient worldly possessions to give exclusive, formal
+dinners. He knew every passer-by well enough to address him or her by the
+Christian name. Women called to him from porches with a dozen invitations
+to visit gardens.
+
+"Just a saunter, just a try-out before I take the train. Not going far,"
+he always answered; yet there was something in his bearing that suggested
+a definite mission.
+
+"We hate to lose you!" called Mrs. Smith.
+
+"I hate to be lost!" Jack called back; "but that is just my
+natural luck."
+
+"I suppose you've got your work cut out for you back East, same's
+everybody else, somewhere or other, 'less they're millionaires, who all
+stay in the city and try to run from microbes in their automobiles."
+
+"Yes, I have work--lots of it," said Jack, ruefully. He shifted his
+weight on the crutches, paused and looked at the sky. The Eternal Painter
+was dipping his brush lightly and sweeping soft, silvery films, as a kind
+of glorified finger-exercise, over an intangible blue.
+
+"Why care? Why care?" His Majesty was asking. "Why not leave all the
+problems of earthly existence to your lungs? Why not lie back and look on
+at things and breathe my air? That is enough to keep your whole being in
+tune with the Infinite."
+
+It was his afternoon mood. At sunset he would have another. Then he would
+be crying out against the folly of wasting one precious moment in the
+eons, because that moment could never return to be lived over.
+
+Jack kept on until he recognized the cement bridge where he had stopped
+when he came from the post-office with Mary. Left bare of its
+surroundings, the first habitation in Little Rivers, with the ell which
+had been added later, would have appeared a barracks. But Jasper Ewold
+had the oldest trees and the most luxuriant hedge and vines as the reward
+of his pioneerdom.
+
+When Jack crossed the bridge and stood in the opening of the hedge there
+was no one on the porch in the inviting shade of the prodigal
+bougainvillea vines. So he hitched his way up the steps. Feeling that it
+was a formal occasion, he searched for the door-bell. There was none. He
+rapped on the casing and waited, while he looked at the cool, quiet
+interior, with the portrait of David facing him from the wall.
+
+"David, you seem to be the only one at home," he remarked, for there had
+been no answer to his raps; "and you are too busy getting a bead on
+Goliath to answer the immaterial questions of a wayfarer."
+
+Accepting the freedom of the Little Rivers custom on such occasions, he
+followed the path to the rear. His head knocked off the dead petals of a
+rambler rose blossom, scattering them at his feet. Rounding the corner of
+the house, he saw the arbor where he had dined the night of his arrival,
+and beyond this an old-fashioned flower garden separated by a path from
+a garden of roses. There was a sound of activity from the kitchen behind
+a trellis screen, but he did not call out for guidance. He would trust to
+finding his own way.
+
+When he came to the broad path, its stretch lay under a crochet-work of
+shadows from the ragged leaves of two rows of palms which ran to the edge
+of an orange grove, and the centre of this path was in a straight line
+with the bottom of the V of Galeria.
+
+Jasper Ewold had laid out his little domain according to a set plan
+before the water was first let go in laughing triumph over the parched
+earth, and this plan, as one might see on every hand, was expressive of
+the training of older civilizations in landscape gardening, which ages of
+men striving for harmonious forms of beauty in green and growing things
+had tested, and which the Doge, in all his unconventionalism of
+personality, was as little inclined to amend as he was to amend the
+classic authors. An avenue of palms is the epic of the desert; a
+bougainvillea vine its sonnet.
+
+Between the palms to the right and left Jack had glimpses of a vegetable
+garden; of rows of berry bushes; of a grove of young fig-trees; of rows
+of the sword-bundles of pineapple tops. Everything except the
+old-fashioned flower-bed, with its border of mignonette, and the generous
+beds of roses and other flowers of the bountiful sisterhood of petals of
+artificial cultivation, spoke of utility which must make the ground pay
+as well as please.
+
+Jack took each step as if he were apprehensive of disturbing the quiet
+Midway of the avenue of palms ran a cross avenue, and at the
+meeting-point was a circle, which evidently waited till the oranges and
+the olives should pay for a statue and surrounding benches. Over the
+breadth of the cross avenue lay the glossy canopy of the outstretched
+branches of umbrella-trees. A table of roughly planed boards painted
+green and green rattan chairs were in keeping with the restful effect,
+while the world without was aglare with light.
+
+Here Mary had brought her sewing for the afternoon. She was working so
+intently that she had not heard his approach. He had paused just as his
+line of vision came flush with the trunks of the umbrella-trees. For the
+first time he saw his companion in adventure in repose, her head bent,
+leaving clear the line of her neck from the roots of her hair to the
+collar, and the soft light bringing out the delicate brown of her skin.
+
+There seemed no movement anywhere in the world at the moment, except the
+flash of her needle in and out.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+"HOW FAST YOU SEW!"
+
+
+And she had not seen him! He was touched with a sense of guilt for
+having looked so long; for not having at once called to her; and rather
+than give her the shock of calling now, he moved toward her, the scuff
+of his limp, pendent foot attracting her attention. Her start at the
+sound was followed, when she saw him, with amazement and a flush and a
+movement as if she would rise. But she controlled the movement, if not
+the flush, and fell back into her chair, picking up her sewing, which
+had dropped on the table.
+
+It was like him, she might well think, to come unexpectedly, without
+invitation or announcement. She was alert, ready to take the offensive as
+the best means of defence, and wishing, in devout futility, that he had
+stayed away. He was smiling happily at everything in cosmos and at her as
+a part of it.
+
+"Good afternoon!"
+
+"Good afternoon!"
+
+"That last lot of jelly was better than the first," he said softly.
+
+"Was it? You must favor vintage jelly!"
+
+"I came to call--my p.p.c. call--and to see your garden," he added.
+
+"Is there any particular feature that interests you?" she asked. "The
+date-trees? The aviary? The nursery?"
+
+"No," he answered, "not just yet. It is very cool here under the
+umbrella-trees, isn't it? I have walked all the way from the Galways and
+I'll rest a while, if I may."
+
+He was no longer the play cavalier in overornamented _chaparejos_ and
+cart-wheel spurs, but a lame fellow in overalls, who was hitching toward
+her on crutches, his cowpuncher hat held by the brim and flopping with
+every step. But he wore the silk shirt and the string tie, and somehow he
+made even the overalls seem "dressy."
+
+"Pray sit down," she said politely.
+
+Standing his crutches against the table, he accepted the invitation. She
+resumed her sewing, eyes on the needle, lips pressed into a straight line
+and head bending low. He might have been a stranger on a bench in a
+public park for all the attention she was paying to him. She realized
+that she was rude and took satisfaction in it as the only way of
+expressing her determination not to reopen a closed incident.
+
+"It's wonderful--wonderful!" he observed, in a voice of contemplative
+awe.
+
+"What is?" she asked.
+
+"Why, how fast you sew!"
+
+"Yes?" she said, as automatically as she stitched. "Your wound is quite
+all right? No danger of infection?"
+
+"I don't blame you!" he burst out. His tone had turned sad and urgent.
+
+She looked up quickly, with the flare of a frown. His remark had brought
+her out of her pose and she became vivid and real.
+
+"Blame me!" she demanded, sharply, as one who flies to arms.
+
+But she met a new phase--neither banter, nor fancy, nor unvarying
+coolness in the face of fire. He was all contrition and apology. Must she
+be the audience to some fresh exhibition of his versatility?
+
+"I do not blame you for feeling the way that you do," he said.
+
+"How do you know how I feel?" she asked; and as far as he could see into
+her eyes there was nothing but the flash of sword-points.
+
+"I don't. I only know how I think you feel--how you might well feel," he
+answered delicately. "After Pete let his gun drop in the store I should
+not have named terms for an encounter. I should have turned to the law
+for protection for the few hours that I had to remain in town."
+
+"But to you that would have been avoiding battle!" she exclaimed.
+
+"Which may take courage," he rejoined. "What I did was selfish. It was
+bravado, with no thought of your position."
+
+"It is late to worry about that now. What does it matter? I did not want
+anyone killed on my account, and no one was," she insisted. "Besides, you
+should not be blue," this with a ripple of satire; "it is not quite all
+bravado to face Pete Leddy's gun at twenty yards."
+
+"And it is not courage. Courage is a force of will driving you into
+danger for some high purpose. I want you to realize that I am not such a
+barbarian that I do not know that I could have kept you out of it all if
+I had had proper self-control. Though probably, on the impulse, I would
+do the fool thing over again! Yes, that's the worst of it!"
+
+"There is a devil in him!" Ignacio's words were sounding in her ears. To
+how many men had he said, "I am going to kill you?" What other quarrels
+had he known in his wanderings from Colorado to Chihuahua?
+
+"If you really want my opinion, I am glad, so far as I am concerned, that
+you did fight," she said lightly. "Aren't you a hero? Isn't the town free
+of Leddy? And you take the train in the morning!"
+
+"Yes."
+
+The monosyllable was drawn out rather faintly. For the first time since
+they had met on the pass she felt she was mistress of the situation.
+This time she had not to plead with him in fear for his life. She could
+regard him without any sense of obligation, this invader of her garden
+retreat who had to put in one more afternoon in a dull desert town
+before he was away to that outside world which she might know only
+through books and memory.
+
+She rose exultantly, disregarding any formality that she would owe to the
+average guest; for an average guest he was not. Her attitude meant that
+she was having the last word; that she was showing her mettle.
+
+He did not rise. He was staring into the sunlight, as if it were darkness
+alive with flitting spectres which baffled identification.
+
+"Yes, back--back to armies of Leddys!" he said slowly.
+
+But this she saw as still another pose. It did not make her pause in
+gathering up her sewing. She was convinced that there was nothing more
+for her to say, except to give their parting an appearance of ease and
+unconcern.
+
+"Is it work you mean? You are not used to that, I take it?" she inquired
+a little sarcastically.
+
+"Yes, call it work," he answered, looking away from the spectres and
+back to her.
+
+"And you have never done any work!" she added.
+
+"Not much," he admitted, with his old, airy carelessness. He was smiling
+at the spectres now, as he had at the dinosaur.
+
+"As there is nothing particular about the garden that I can show you--"
+she was moving away.
+
+"No, I will be walking back to the house," he said after she had taken a
+few steps. "Will you wait on my slow pace?"
+
+He reached for his crutches, lifted himself to his feet and swung to
+her side. She who wished that the interview were over saw that it must
+be prolonged. Then suddenly she realized the weakness as well as the
+brusqueness of her attitude. She had been about to fly from him as
+from something that she feared. It was not necessary. It was foolish,
+even cowardly.
+
+"I thought perhaps you preferred to be alone, you seemed so abstracted,"
+she said, lamely; and then, as they came out into the sunlight in the
+circle, she began talking of the garden as she would to any visitor; of
+its beginnings, its growth, and its future, when her father's plans
+should have been fulfilled.
+
+"And in all these years you have never been back East?" he asked.
+
+"No. We are always planning a trip, but the money which we save for it
+goes into more plantings."
+
+They had been moving slowly toward the house, but now he stopped and his
+glance swept the sky and rested on Galeria.
+
+"It is the best valley of all! I knew it as soon as I saw it from the
+pass!" and the rapture of the scene was sounding in every syllable like
+chimes out of the distance. She knew that he was far away from the
+garden, and delaying, still delaying. If she spoke she felt that he would
+not hear what she said. If she went on it seemed certain that she would
+leave him standing there like a statue.
+
+"And there is more land here to make gardens like this?" he asked
+slowly, absorbed.
+
+"Yes, with water and labor and time."
+
+Though his face was in the full light of the sun, it seemed at times in
+shadow; then it glowed, as if between two passions. For an instant it was
+grim, the chin coming forward, the brows contracting; then it was
+transformed with something that was as a complete surrender to the
+transport of irresistible temptation. He looked down at her quickly and
+she saw him in the mood of story-telling to the children, suffused with
+the radiance of a decision.
+
+"I prefer the Leddys of Little Rivers to the Leddys of New York," he
+said. "I am not going to-morrow! I am going to have land and a home under
+the aegis of the Eternal Painter and in sight of Galeria, and worship at
+the shrine of fecund peace. Will you and the Doge help me?" he asked with
+an enthusiasm that was infectious. "May I go to his school of
+agriculture, horticulture, and floriculture?"
+
+Dumfounded, she bent her head and stared at the ground to hide her
+astonishment.
+
+"You want citizens, industrious young citizens, don't you?" he persisted.
+
+"Yes, yes!" she said hastily and confusedly.
+
+"Do you know a good piece of land?" he continued.
+
+"Yes, several parcels," she answered, recovering her poise and smiling
+in mockery.
+
+"Come on!" he cried.
+
+He was taking long, jumping steps on his crutches as they went up the
+path.
+
+"You will take me to look at the land, won't you, please--now? I want to
+get acquainted with my future estate. I mean to beat the Smiths at plums,
+Jim Galway at alfalfa, even rival Bob Worther at pumpkins and peonies.
+And you will help me lay out the flower garden, won't you? You see, I
+shall have to call in the experts in every line to start with, before I
+begin to improve on them and make them all jealous. I may find a kind of
+plum that will grow on alfalfa stalks," he hazarded. "What a
+horticultural sensation!"
+
+"And a spineless cactus called the Leddy!"
+
+His eyes were laughing into hers and hers irresistibly laughed back. She
+guessed that he was only joking. He had acted so well in the latest role
+that she had actually believed in his sincerity for a moment. He meant to
+take the train, of course, but his resourceful capriciousness had
+supplied him with a less awkward exit from the garden than she had
+provided. He would yet have the last word if she did not watch out--a
+last mischievous word at her expense.
+
+"First, you will have to plow the ground, in the broiling hot sun," she
+said tauntingly, when they had passed around to the porch. She was
+starting into the house with nervous, precipitate triumph. The last word
+was hers, after all.
+
+"But you are going to show me the land now!"
+
+His tone was so serious and so hurt that she paused.
+
+"And"--with the seriousness electrified by a glance that sought for
+mutual understanding--"and we are to forget about that duel and the whole
+hero-desperado business. I am a prospective settler who just arrived this
+afternoon. I came direct to headquarters to inquire about property. The
+Doge not being at home, won't you show me around?"
+
+Again he had said the right thing at the right time, with a delightful
+impersonality precluding sentiment.
+
+"I couldn't be unaccommodating," she admitted. "It is against all Little
+Rivers ethics."
+
+"I feel like a butterfly about to come out of his miserable chrysalis!
+Haven't you a walking-stick? I am going to shed the crutches!"
+
+She became femininely solicitous at once.
+
+"Are you sure you ought? Did the doctor say you might? Is the
+wound healed?"
+
+"There isn't any wound!" he answered. "That is one of the things which we
+are to forget."
+
+She brought a stick and he laid the crutches on the porch.
+
+He favored the lame leg, yet he kept up a clipping pace, talking the
+while as fast as the Doge himself as they passed through one of the side
+streets out onto the cactus-spotted, baking, cracked levels.
+
+"This is it!" she said finally. "This is all that father and I had to
+begin with."
+
+"Enough!" he answered, and held out his hands, palms open. "With
+callouses I will win luxuriance!"
+
+She showed him the irrigation ditch from which he should draw his water;
+she told him of the first steps; She painted all the difficulties in the
+darkest colors, without once lessening the glow of his optimism. He was
+so overwhelmingly, boyishly happy that she had to be happy with him in
+making believe that he was about to be a real rancher. But he should not
+have the sport all on his side. He must not think that she accepted this
+latest departure of his imagination incarnated by his Thespian gift in
+anything but his own spirit.
+
+"You plowing! You spraying trees for the scale! You digging up weeds! You
+stacking alfalfa! You settling down in one place as a unit of co-ordinate
+industry! You earning bread by the sweat of your brow! You with
+callouses!" Thus she laughed at him.
+
+Very seriously he held out his hands and ran a finger around a palm and
+across the finger-joints:
+
+"That is where I shall get them," he said. "But not on the thumb. I
+believe you get them on the thumb only by playing golf."
+
+He asked about carpenters and laborers; he chose the site for his house;
+he plotted the walks and orchards. She could not refuse her advice. Who
+can about the planning of new houses and gardens? He had everything
+quite settled except the land grant from the Doge when they started
+back; while the sun, with the swift passage of time in such fascinating
+diversion, had swung low in its ellipse. When they reached the main
+street the Doge was on the porch passing his opinion on the Eternal
+Painter's evening work.
+
+"Some very remarkable purples to-night, I admit, Your Majesty, without
+any intention of giving you too good an opinion of yourself; but
+otherwise, you are not up to your mark. There must have been a downpour
+in the rainy world on the other side of the Sierras that moistened your
+pigments. Next thing we know you will be turning water-colorist!" he was
+saying, when he heard Jack's voice.
+
+"Here's a new settler!" Jack called. "I am going to stay in Little Rivers
+and win all the prizes."
+
+"You are joking!" gasped the Doge.
+
+"Not joking," said Jack. "I want to close the bargain to-night."
+
+"You bring color and adventure--yes! I did not expect the honor--the
+town will be delighted! I am overwhelmed! Will you plow with Pete
+Leddy's gun drawn by Wrath of God, sir, and harrow with your spurs drawn
+by Jag Ear? Shall you make a specialty of olives? Do you dare to aspire
+as high as dates?"
+
+The Doge's speech had begun incoherently, but steadied into rallying
+humor at the close.
+
+"I haven't seen the date-tree yet," said Jack. "Not until I have can I
+judge whether or not I shall dare to rival the lord of the manor in his
+own specialty. And there are business details which I must settle with
+you, O Doge of this city of slender canals!"
+
+"O youth, will you tarry with peace between wars?" answered the Doge, in
+quick response to the spirit of nonsense as a basis for their new
+relations. "Come, and I will show you our noblest product of peace, the
+Date-Tree Wonderful!" he said, leading the way to the garden, while Mary
+hurried rather precipitately into the house.
+
+Jasper Ewold was at his best, a glowing husbandman, when he pointed aloft
+to the clusters of fruit pendent from the crotches of the stiff
+branches, enclosed in cloth bags to keep them free of insects.
+
+"Do you see strange lettering on the cloth?" he asked.
+
+"Yes, it looks like Arabic."
+
+"So it is! Among other futile diversions in a past incarnation I studied
+Arabic a little, and I still have my lexicon. Perhaps my construction
+might not please the grammarians of classic Bagdad, but the sentiment is
+there safe enough in the language of the mother romance world of the
+date: 'All hail, first-born of our Western desert fecundity!' It is
+calling out to the pass and the range from the wastes where the
+sagebrush has had its own way since the great stir that there was in the
+world at genesis."
+
+"With the unlimited authority I have in bestowing titles," said Jack, "I
+have a mind to make you an Emir. But it's a pity that you haven't a camel
+squatting under your date-tree and placidly chewing his cud."
+
+"A tempting thought!" declared the Doge unctuously.
+
+"Bob Worther could ride him on the tours of inspection. I think the
+jounce would be almost as good a flesh-reducer as pedestrianism."
+
+"There you go! You would have the camel wearing bells, with reins of red
+leather and a purple saddle-cloth hung with spangles, and Bob--our
+excellent Bob--in a turban! Persiflage, sir! A very demoralization of
+the faculties with cataracts of verbiage, sir!" declared the Doge as he
+started back to the house. "Little Rivers is a practical town," he
+proceeded seriously. "We indulge in nonsense only after sunset and when a
+stranger appears riding a horse with a profane name. Yes, a practical
+town; and I am surprised at your disloyalty to your own burro by
+mentioning camels."
+
+"It rests with you, I believe, to let me have the land and also the
+water," said Jack.
+
+"We grow businesslike!" returned the Doge with a change of manner.
+
+"Very!" declared Jack.
+
+"The requirement is that you become a member of the water users'
+association and pay your quota of taxes per acre foot; and the price you
+pay for your land also goes to the association. But I decide on the
+eligibility of the applicant."
+
+They were in front of the house by this time, and again the Doge gave
+Jack that sharp, quick, knowing glance of scrutiny through his heavy,
+tufted eyebrows, before he proceeded:
+
+"The concession for the use of the river for irrigation is mine,
+administered by the water users' association as if it were theirs, under
+the condition that no one who has not my approval can have membership.
+That is, it is practically mine, owing to my arrangement with old Mr.
+Lefferts, who lives upstream. He is an eccentric, a hermit. He came here
+many years ago to get as far away from civilization as he could, I judge.
+That gives him an underlying right. Originally he had two partners, squaw
+men. Both are dead. He had made no improvements beyond drawing enough
+water for a garden and for his horse and cow. When I came to make a
+bargain with him he named an annual sum which should keep him for the
+rest of his life; and thus he waived his rights. First, Jim Galway, then
+other settlers drifted in. I formed the water users' association. All
+taxes and sums for the sale of land go into keeping the dam and ditches
+in condition."
+
+"You take nothing for yourself!"
+
+"A great deal. The working out of an idea--an idea in moulding a little
+community in my old age in a fashion that pleases me; while my own
+property, of course, increases in value. At my death the rights go to the
+community. But no Utopia; Sir Chaps! Just hard-working, cheerful men and
+women in a safe refuge!"
+
+"And I am young!" exclaimed Jack, with a hopeful smile. "I have good
+health. I mean to work. I try to be cheerful. Am I eligible?"
+
+"Sir Chaps, you--you have done us a great favor. Everybody likes you. Sir
+Chaps"--the Doge hesitated for an instant, with a baffling, unspoken
+inquiry in his eyes--"Sir Chaps, I like your companionship and your
+mastery of persiflage. Jim Galway, who is secretary of the association,
+will look after details of the permit and Bob Worther will turn the water
+on your land, and the whole town will assist you with advice! Luck, Sir
+Chaps, in your new vocation!"
+
+That evening, while the Doge took down the David and set a fragment from
+the frieze of the Parthenon in its place, Little Rivers talked of the
+delightful news that it was not to lose its strange story-teller and
+duelist. Little Rivers was puzzled. Not once had Jack intimated a thought
+of staying. By his own account, so far as he had given any, his wound had
+merely delayed his departure to New York, where he had pressing business.
+He had his reservation on the Pullman made for the morning express; he
+had paid a farewell call at the Ewolds, and apparently then had changed
+his mind and his career. These were the only clues to work on, except the
+one suggested by Mrs. Galway, who was the wise woman of the community,
+while Mrs. Smith was the propagandist.
+
+"I guess he likes the way Mary Ewold snubs him!" said Mrs. Galway.
+
+But there was one person in town who was not surprised at Jack's
+decision. When Jack sang out as he entered the Galway yard on returning
+from the Doge's, "We stay, Firio, we stay!" Firio said: "_Si_, Senor
+Jack!" with no change of expression except a brighter gleam than usual in
+his velvety eyes.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+WHEN THE DESERT BLOOMS
+
+
+Perhaps we may best describe this as a chapter of Incidents; or, to use a
+simile, a broad, eddying bend in a river on a plateau, with cataracts and
+canyons awaiting it on its route to the sea. Or, discarding the simile
+and speaking in literal terms, in a search for a theme on which to hang
+the incidents, we revert to Mary's raillery at the announcement of an
+easy traveller that he was going to turn sober rancher.
+
+"You plowing! You blistering your hands! You earning your bread by the
+sweat of your brow!"
+
+But there he was in blue overalls, sinking his spade deep for settings,
+digging ditches and driving furrows through the virgin soil, while the
+masons and carpenters built his ranch house.
+
+"They are straight furrows, too!" Jack declared.
+
+"Passably so!" answered Mary.
+
+"And look at the blisters!" he continued, exhibiting his puffy palms.
+
+"You seem to think blisters a remarkable human phenomenon, a sensational
+novelty to a laboring population!"
+
+"Now, would you advise pricking?" he asked, with deference to her
+judgment.
+
+"It is so critical in your case that you ought to consult a doctor rather
+than take lay advice."
+
+"Jim Galway says that the thorough way, I mulched my soil before
+putting in my first crop of alfalfa is a model for all future settlers,"
+he ventured.
+
+She remarked that Jim was always encouraging to new-comers, and remarked
+this in a way that implied that some new-comers possibly needed hazing.
+
+"And I am up at dawn and hard at it for six hours before midday."
+
+"Yes, it is wonderful!" she admitted, with a mock show of being
+overwhelmingly impressed. "Nobody in the world ever worked ten hours a
+day before!"
+
+"I'm doing more than any man that I pay two-fifty. I do perspire, and if
+you don't call that earning your bread with the sweat of your brow, why
+this is an astoundingly illogical world!"
+
+"There is a great difference between sporadic display and that continuity
+which is the final proof of efficiency," she corrected him.
+
+"Long, involved sentences often indicate the loss of an argument!"
+declared Jack.
+
+"There isn't any argument!" said Mary with superior disinterestedness.
+
+By common inspiration they had established a truce of nonsense. She still
+called him Jack; he still called her Mary. It was the only point of tacit
+admission that they had ever met before he asked her to show a
+prospective settler a parcel of land.
+
+Their new relations were as the house of cards of fellowship: cards of
+glass, iridescent and brittle, mocking the idea that there could be
+oblivion of the scene in Lang's store, the crack of Leddy's pistol in the
+_arroyo_, or the pulse of Jack's artery under her thumb! She was sure
+that he could forget these experiences, even if she could not. That was
+his character, as she saw it, free of clinging roots of yesterday's
+events, living some new part every day.
+
+In the house of cards she set up a barrier, which he saw as a veil over
+her eyes. Not once had he a glimpse of their depths. There was only the
+surface gleam of sunbeams and sometimes of rapier-points, merry but
+significant. She frequently rode out to the pass and occasionally, when
+his day's work was done, he would ride to the foot of the range to meet
+her, and as they came back he often sang, but never whistled. Indeed, he
+had ceased to whistle altogether. Perhaps he regarded the omission as an
+insurance against duels.
+
+Aside from nonsense they had common interests in cultural and daily life,
+from the Eternal Painter's brushwork to how to dress a salad. She did
+extend her approval for the generous space which he was allowing for
+flower-beds, and advised him in the practical construction of his
+kitchen; while the Doge decorated the living-room with Delia Robbias,
+which, however, never arrived at the express office. He was a neighbor
+always at home in the Ewold house. The Doge revelled in their
+disputations, yet never was really intimate or affectionate as he was
+with Jim Galway, who knew not the Pitti, the Prado, nor the Louvre, and
+could not understand the intoning of Dante in the original as Jack could,
+thanks to his having been brought up in libraries and galleries.
+
+The town, which was not supposed to ask about pasts, could not help
+puzzling about his. What was the story of this teller of stories? The
+secluded little community was in a poor way to find out, even if the
+conscientious feeling about a custom had not been a restraint that kept
+wonder free from inquiring hints. They took him for what he was in all
+their personal relations; that was the delightful way of Little Rivers,
+which inner curiosity might not alloy. His broader experience of that
+world over the pass which stretched around the globe and back to the
+other range-wall of the valley, seemed only to make him fall more easily
+into the simple ways of the fellow-ranchers of the Doge's selection, who
+were genuine, hall-marked people, whatever the origin from which the
+individual sprang. He knew the fatigue of productive labor as something
+far sweeter than the fatigue that comes from mere exercise, and the
+neophyte's enthusiasm was his.
+
+"I'm sitting at the outer edge of the circle," he told Jim Galway.
+"But when my first crop is harvested I shall be on the inside--a
+real rancher!"
+
+"You've already got one foot over the circle," said Jim.
+
+"And with my first crop of dates I'll be in the holy of holies of
+pastoral bliss!"
+
+"Yes, I should say so!" Jim responded, but in a way that indicated
+surprise at the thought of Jack's remaining in Little Rivers long enough
+for such a consummation.
+
+When his alfalfa covered the earth with a green carpet Jack was under a
+spell of something more than the never-ending marvel of dry seeds
+springing into succulent abundance without the waving of any magic wand.
+
+"I made it out of the desert!" he cried. "It laughs in triumph at the
+bare stretches around it, waiting on water!"
+
+"That is it," said Jim; "waiting on water!"
+
+"The promise of what might come!"
+
+"It will come! Some day, Jack, you and I will ride up into the river
+canyon and I will show you a place where you can see the blue sky between
+precipitous walls two hundred feet high. The abyss is so narrow you can
+throw a stone across it."
+
+"What lies beyond?" asked Jack, his eyes lighting vividly.
+
+"A great basin which was the bed of an ancient lake before the water wore
+its way through."
+
+"A dam between those walls--and you have another lake!"
+
+"Yes, and the spring freshets from the northern water-shed all held in a
+reservoir--none going to waste! And, Jack, as population spreads the dam
+must come."
+
+"Why, the Doge has a kingdom!"
+
+"Yes, that's the best of it, the rights being in his hands. He shares
+up with everybody and we get it when he dies. That's why we are ready
+to accept the Doge's sentiments as kind of gospel. If ornamental hedges
+waste water and bring bugs and are contrary to practical ranching
+ideas, why--well, why not? It's our Little Rivers to enjoy as we
+please. We aren't growing so fast, but we're growing in a clean,
+beautiful way, as Jasper Ewold says. What if that river was owned by
+one man! What if we had to pay the price he set for what takes the
+place of rain, as they do in some places in California? We're going to
+say who shall build that dam!"
+
+"Think of it! Think of it!" Jack half whispered, his imagination in play.
+"Plot after plot being added to this little oasis until it extends from
+range to range, one sea of green! Many little towns, with Little Rivers
+the mother town, spreading its ideas! Yes, think of being in at the
+making of a new world, seeing visions develop into reality as, stone by
+stone, an edifice rises! I--I--" Jack paused, a cloud sweeping over his
+features, his eyes seeming to stare at a wall. His body alone seemed in
+Little Rivers, his mind on the other side of the pass. He was in one of
+those moods of abstraction that ever made his fellow-ranchers feel that
+he would not be with them permanently.
+
+Indeed, he had whole days when his smile had a sad turn; when, though he
+spoke pleasantly, the inspiration of talk was not in him and when Belvy
+Smith could not rouse any action in the cat with two black stripes down
+its back. But many Little Riversites, including the Doge, had their sad
+days, when they looked away at the pass oftener than usual, as if seeing
+a life-story framed in the V. His came usually, as Mrs. Smith observed,
+when he had a letter from the East. And it was then that he would pretend
+to cough to Firio. These mock coughing spells were one of the few
+manifestations that made the impassive Firio laugh.
+
+"Now you know I am not well, don't you, Firio?" he would ask, waggishly,
+the very thought seeming to take him out of the doldrums. "I could never
+live out of this climate. Why, even now I have a cough, kuh-er!"
+
+Firio had turned a stove cook. He accepted the humiliation in a spirit of
+loyalty. But often he would go out among the sagebrush and return with a
+feathery tribute, which he would broil on a spit in a fire made in the
+yard. Always when Jack rode out to meet Mary at the foot of the range,
+Firio would follow; and always he had his rifle. For it was part of
+Jack's seeming inconsistency, emphasizing his inscrutability, that he
+would never wear his revolver. It hung beside Pete's on the wall of the
+living-room as a second relic. Far from being a quarrel-maker, he was
+peaceful to the point of Quakerish predilection.
+
+"Nobody ever hears anything of Leddy," said Jim; "but he will never
+forget or forgive, and one day he will show up unexpectedly."
+
+"Not armed!" said Jack.
+
+"Do you think he will keep his word?"
+
+"I know he will. I asked him and he said he would."
+
+"You're very simple, Jack. But mind, he can keep his word and still use
+a gun outside the town!"
+
+"So he might!" admitted Jack, laughing in a way that indicated that the
+subject was distasteful to him; for he would never talk of the duel.
+
+Now we come to that little affair of Pedro Nogales. Pedro was a
+half-breed, whose God among men was Pete Leddy no less than Jack was
+Firio's and the Doge was Ignacio's. In his shanty back of Bill Lang's the
+Mexicans and Indians lost their remaining wages in gambling after he had
+filled them with _mescal_. It happened that Gonzalez, head man of the
+laborers under Bob Worther, who had saved quite a sum, came away
+penniless after taking but one drink. Every ounce of Bob's avoirdupois
+was in a rage.
+
+"It's time we cleaned out Pedro's place, seh!" he told Jack; "and you and
+Jim Galway have got to help me do it!"
+
+"I don't like to get into a row," said Jack very soberly.
+
+"Then I'll undertake the job alone," Bob retorted. "That will be a good
+deal worse, for when I get going I lose my temper and I tell you, seh,
+I've got a lot to lose! And, Jack, are you going to stand by and see
+robbery done by the meanest, most worthless greaser in the valley--and a
+good Indian the victim?"
+
+"Yes, Jack," said Jim, "you've got such a formidable reputation since
+your set-to with Leddy that the Indians think you are a regular master of
+magic. You're just the one to make Pedro come to terms."
+
+"A formidable reputation without firing a shot!" admitted Jack
+quizzically, and consented.
+
+"You'll surely want your gun this time!" Bob warned him.
+
+"No," said Jack.
+
+"But--"
+
+"I have hung up my gun!" Jack said decisively. "We'll try to handle this
+peacefully. Come on!"
+
+"Well, we've got our guns, anyway!" Jim put in.
+
+It was mid-afternoon, a slack hour for Pedro's kind of trade, and the
+shanty was empty of customers when the impromptu vigilance committee
+entered. Pedro himself was half dozing in the faro dealer's chair. His
+small, ferret eyes flashed a spark at the visitors as he rose, but he was
+politeness itself.
+
+"Senores! It is great honor! Be seated, senores!" he said with eloquent
+deference.
+
+The very sight of him set all the ounces in Bob quivering in an outburst:
+
+"No chairs for us! You fork over Gonzalez's money that you tricked
+out of him!"
+
+"I take Gonzalez's money! I? Senores?"
+
+"It's a hundred and twenty dollars that he earned honestly, and the
+quicker you lay your hands on it the better for you!" Bob roared back.
+
+Pedro was quite impassive.
+
+"Senores, if Gonzalez need money--senores, I honest man! Senores, sit
+down! We talk!" Pedro dropped back into his chair and his hand, with
+cat-like quickness, shot under the faro table.
+
+Jack had come through the door after Jim and Bob. He was standing a
+little behind them, and while they had been watching Pedro's face he had
+watched Pedro's movements.
+
+"Pedro, take your hand out from under the table and without your gun!"
+said Jack; and Jim Galway caught a thrill in Jack's voice that he had
+heard in the _arroyo_.
+
+Pedro looked into Senor Don't Care's eyes and saw a bead, though they
+were not looking along the glint of a revolver barrel.
+
+"_Si_, senor!" said Pedro, settling back in the chair with palms out in
+intimation of his pacific intentions.
+
+"Now, Pedro, you have Gonzalez's money, haven't you?" Jack went on, in
+the reasoning fashion that he had adopted to Leddy in the store. "And
+you aren't going to make yourself or Bob trouble. You are going to
+give it back!"
+
+"_Si_, senor!" said Pedro wincing.
+
+While he was producing the money and counting it, his furtive glance kept
+watch of Jack. Then, as the committee turned to go, he suddenly exclaimed
+with angry surprise and disillusion:
+
+"You got no gun!"
+
+While Jim and Bob waited for Jack to precede them out of the door Jim had
+time to note Pedro's baleful, piercing look at Jack's back.
+
+"Just as I told you, Jack--and I reckon you saved a big row. You just
+put a scare into that hellion with a word, like you had a thousand devils
+in you!" said Jim.
+
+"It's all over!" Jack answered, looking more hurt than pleased over the
+congratulations. "Very fortunately over."
+
+"But," Jim observed, tensely, "Pedro is not only Leddy's bitter
+partisan and ready to do his bidding, Pedro's a bit loco, besides--the
+kind that hesitates at nothing when he gets a grudge. You've got to
+look out for him."
+
+"Oh, no!" said Jack, in the full swing of a Senor Don't Care mood.
+
+Jim and Bob began to entertain the feelings of Mary on the pass, when she
+thought of Jack as walking over precipices regardless of danger signs.
+After all, did he really know how to shoot? If he would not look after
+himself, it was their duty to look after him. Jim suggested that the rule
+which Jack had made for Leddy should have universal application. No one
+whosoever should wear arms in Little Rivers without a permit. The new
+ordinance had the Doge's approval; and Jim and Bob, both of whom had
+permits, kept watch that it was enforced, particularly in the case of
+Pedro Nogales.
+
+Meanwhile, Jack kept the ten-hour-a-day law. His alfalfa was growing
+with prolific rapidity, but Firio had the air of one who waits
+between journeys.
+
+"Never the trail again?" he asked temptingly, one day.
+
+"Never the trail again!" Jack declared firmly.
+
+"_Si, si, si_--the trail again!"
+
+"You think so? Then why do you ask?"
+
+"To make a question," answered Firio. "The big sadness will be too
+strong. It will make you move--_si_!"
+
+"The big sadness!" Jack exclaimed. He seized Firio by the shoulders and
+looked narrowly at him, and Firio met the gaze with soft, puzzling lights
+in his eyes. "Ho! ho! A big sadness! How do you know?" he laughed.
+
+"I learn on the trail when I watch you look at the stars. And Senorita
+Ewold, she know; but she think the big sadness a devil. She--" and he
+paused.
+
+"She--yes?" Jack asked.
+
+"She--" Firio started again.
+
+Jack suddenly raised his hands from Firio's shoulders in a gesture of
+interruption. It was not exactly Firio's place to hazard opinions about
+Mary Ewold.
+
+"Never mind!" he said, rather sharply.
+
+But Firio proceeded fixedly to finish what he had to say.
+
+"She has a big sadness, which makes her ride to the pass. She rides out
+so she can ride back smiling."
+
+"Firio, don't mistake your imagination for divination!" Jack warned him.
+
+As Firio did not understand the meaning of this he said nothing. Probably
+he would have said nothing even if he had understood.
+
+"I'll show you the nature of the big sadness and that the devil is a joy
+devil when we harvest our first crop of alfalfa," Jack concluded. "Then I
+shall make a holiday! Then I shall be a real rancher and something is
+going to happen!"
+
+"The trail!" exclaimed Firio, and the soft light in his eyes flashed.
+"_Si_! The trail and the big spurs and the revolver in the holster!"
+
+"No!"
+
+But Firio said "_Si_"! with the supreme confidence of one who holds that
+belief in fulfilment will make any wish come true.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+A CHANGE OF MIND
+
+
+It was Sunday afternoon; or, to date it by an epochal event, the day
+after Jack's alfalfa crop had fallen before the mower. Mary was seated on
+the bench under the avenue of umbrella-trees reading a thin edition of
+Marcus Aurelius bound in flexible leather. Of late she had developed a
+fondness for the more austere philosophers. Jack, whose mood was entirely
+to the sonneteers, came softly singing down the avenue of palms and
+presented himself before her in a romping spirit of interruption.
+
+"O expert in floriculture!" he said, "the humble pupil acting as a
+Committee of One has failed utterly to agree with himself as to the form
+of his new flowerbed. There must be a Committee of Two. Will you come?"
+
+"Good! I am weary of Marcus. I can't help thinking that he too far
+antedates the Bordeaux mixture!" she answered, springing to her feet with
+positive enthusiasm.
+
+He rarely met positive enthusiasm in her and everything in him called for
+it at the moment. He found it so inspiring that the problem of the bed
+was settled easily by his consent to all her suggestions--a too-ready
+consent, she told herself.
+
+"After all, it is your flower garden," she reminded him.
+
+"No, every flower garden in Little Rivers is yours!" he declared.
+
+The way he said this made her frown. She saw him taking a step on the
+other side of that barrier over which she mounted guard.
+
+"Never make your hyperboles felonious!" she warned him. "Besides, if
+you are going to be a real Little Riversite you should have opinions of
+your own."
+
+"I haven't any to-day--none except victory!" and he held out his palms,
+exhibiting their yellowish plates. "Look! Even corns on the joints!"
+
+"Yes, they look quite real," she admitted, censoriously.
+
+"Haven't I made good? Do you remember how you stood here on the very site
+of my house and lectured me? I would not work! I would not--"
+
+"You have worked a little--a little!" she said grudgingly, and showed him
+as much of the wondrous sparkle in her eyes as he could see out of the
+corners between the lashes. She never allowed him to look into her eyes
+if she apprehended any attempt to cross the barrier. But she could see
+well enough out of the corners to know that his glances had a kind of
+hungry joy and a promise of some new demonstration in his attitude toward
+her. She must watch that barrier very shrewdly.
+
+"Look at my hedge!" he went on. "It is knee-high already, and my
+umbrella-trees cast enough shade for anybody, if he will wrap himself
+around the trunk. But such things are ornamental. I have a more practical
+appeal. Come on!"
+
+His elation was insistent, superior to any prickling gibes of banter, as
+they walked on the mealy earth between rows of young orange settings,
+and the sweet odor of drying alfalfa came to their nostrils, borne by a
+vagrant breeze. He swept his hand toward the field in a gesture of pride,
+his shoulders thrown back in a deep breath of exultation.
+
+"The callouses win!" And he exhibited them again.
+
+But she refused even to glance at them this time.
+
+"You seem to think callouses phenomenal. Most people in Little Rivers
+accept them as they do the noses on their faces."
+
+"They certainly are phenomenal on me. So is my first crop! My first crop!
+I'll be up at dawn to stack it--and then I'm no longer a neophyte. I am
+an initiate! I'm a real rancher! A holiday is due! I celebrate!"
+
+He was rhapsodic and he was serious, too. She was provokingly flippant as
+an antidote for Marcus Aurelius, whom she was still carrying in the
+little flexible leather volume.
+
+"How celebrate?" she inquired. "By walking through the town with a wisp
+of alfalfa in one hand and exhibiting the callouses on the other? or will
+you be drawn on a float by Jag Ear--a float labeled, 'The Idler Enjoying
+His Own Reform?' We'll all turn out and cheer."
+
+"Amusing, but not dignified and not to my taste. No! I shall celebrate by
+a terrific spree--a ride to the pass!"
+
+He turned his face toward the range, earnest in its transfixion and
+suffused with the spirit of restlessness and the call of the mighty rock
+masses, gray in their great ribs and purple in their abysses. She felt
+that same call as something fluid and electric running through the air
+from sky to earth, and set her lips in readiness for whatever folly he
+was about to suggest.
+
+"A ride to the pass and a view of the sunset from the very top!" he
+cried. He looked down at her quickly, and all the force of the call he
+had transformed into a sunny, personal appeal, which made her avert her
+glance. "My day in the country--my holiday, if you will go with me! Will
+you, and gaze out over that spot of green in the glare of the desert,
+knowing that a little of it is mine?"
+
+"Your orange-trees are too young. It's so far away they will hardly
+show," she ventured, surveying the distance to the pass judicially.
+
+"Will you?"
+
+"Why, to me a ride to the pass is not a thing to be planned a day
+beforehand," she said deliberately, still studiously observing Galeria.
+"It is a matter of momentary inspiration. Make it a set engagement and it
+is but a plodding journey. I can best tell in the morning," she
+concluded. "And, by the way, I see you haven't yet tried grafting plums
+on the alfalfa stalks."
+
+"No. I have learned better. It is not consistent. You see, you mow
+alfalfa and you pick plums."
+
+This return to drollery, in keeping with the prescribed order of their
+relations, made her look up in candid amusement over the barrier which
+for a moment he had been endangering.
+
+"Honestly, Jack, you do improve," she said, with mock encouragement. "You
+seem to have mastered a number of the simple truths of age-old
+agricultural experience."
+
+"But will you? Will you ride to the pass?"
+
+He had the question launched fairly into her eyes. She could not escape
+it. He saw one bright flash, whether of real anger or simply vexation at
+his reversion to the theme he could not tell, and her lashes dropped;
+she ran the leaf edges of the austere Marcus back and forth in her
+fingers, thip-thip-thip. That was the only sound for some seconds, very
+long seconds.
+
+"As I've already tried to make clear to you, it's such a businesslike
+thing to ride to the pass unless you have the inspiration," she remarked
+thoughtfully to Marcus. "Perhaps I shall get the inspiration on the way
+back to the house;" which was a signal that she was going. "And, by the
+way, Jack, to return to the object of my coming, if you have ideas of
+your own about flowers incorporate them; that is the way to develop your
+floricultural talent."
+
+She turned away, but he followed. He was at her side and proceeding with
+her, his head bent toward her, boyishly, eagerly.
+
+"You see, I have never been out to the pass," he remarked urgently.
+
+"What! You--" she started in surprise and checked herself.
+
+"Didn't I come by train?" he asked reprovingly.
+
+"No!" she answered. Her eyes were level with the road, her voice was a
+little unnatural. "No! You came over the pass, Jack."
+
+It was the first time in the months of his citizenship of Little Rivers
+that she had ever hinted anything but belief in the fiction that they had
+first met when he asked her to show him a parcel of land. She seemed to
+be calling a truth out of the past and grappling with it, while her lips
+tightened and she drew in her chin.
+
+"Then I did come over the pass," he agreed; and after a pause added:
+"But there was no Pete Leddy."
+
+"Yes, oh, yes--there was a Pete Leddy!"
+
+"But he will not be there this time!"
+
+And now his voice, in a transport that seemed to touch the cloud heights,
+was neither like the voice of the easy traveller on the pass, nor the
+voice of his sharp call to Leddy to disarm, nor the voice of the
+storyteller. It had a new note, a note startling to her.
+
+"We shall be on the pass without Leddy and smiling over Leddy and
+thanking him for his unwitting service in making me stop in Little
+Rivers," he concluded.
+
+"Yes, he did that," she admitted stoically, as if it were some oppressive
+fact for which she could offer no thanks.
+
+"I want to see our ponies with their bridles hanging loose! I want the
+great silence! I want company, with imagination speaking from the sky
+and reality speaking from the patch of green out on the sea of gray!
+Will you?"
+
+Their steps ran rhythmically together. His look was eager in
+anticipation, while she kept on running the leaves of the austere Marcus
+through her fingers. Her lips were half open, as if about to speak, but
+were without words; the thin, delicate nostrils trembled.
+
+"Will you? Will you, because I kept the faith of callouses? Will you go
+forth and dream for a day? We'll tell fairy stories! We'll get a pole and
+prod the dinosaur through the narrow part of the pass and hear him roar
+his awfullest. Will you?"
+
+Her fingers paused in the pages as if they had found a helpful passage.
+The chin tilted upward resolutely and he had a full view of her eyes,
+dancing with challenging lights. She was augustly, gloriously
+mischievous.
+
+"Will you go in costume? Will you wear your spurs and the chaps and the
+silk shirt?"
+
+The question said that it was not a time to be serious. It sprinkled the
+crest of the barrier with gleaming slivers of glass, which might give
+zest to words spoken across it, but would be most sharp to the touch.
+
+"I will wear my spurs around my wrists, if you say, tie roses in the
+fringe of my chaps, bind my hat with a big red silk bandanna, and put
+streamers on P.D.'s bits!"
+
+"That is too enticing for refusal," she answered, playfully. "I
+particularly want to hear the dinosaur roar."
+
+They had come to the opening of the Ewold hedge, and they paused to
+consider arrangements. There was no one in sight on the street except Jim
+Galway, who was approaching at some distance.
+
+"Shall we start in the morning and have luncheon at the foot of the
+range?" suggested Jack.
+
+She favored an early afternoon start; he argued for his point of view,
+and in their preoccupation with the passage of arms they did not notice
+Pedro Nogales slipping along beside the hedge with soft steps, his hand
+under his jacket. A gleam out of the bosom of Pedro's jacket, a cry from
+Mary, and a knife flashed upward and drove toward Jack's neck.
+
+Jack had seemed oblivious of his surroundings, his gaze centered on Mary.
+Yet he was able to duck backward so that the blade only slit open his
+shirt as Pedro, with the misdirected force of his blow, lunged past its
+object. Mary saw that face which had been laughing into hers, which had
+been so close to hers in its persistent smile of persuasion, struck white
+and rigid and a glint like that of the blade itself in the eyes. In a
+breath Jack had become another being of incarnate, unthinking physical
+power and swiftness. One hand seized Pedro's wrist, the other his upper
+arm, and Mary heard the metallic click of the knife as it struck the
+earth and the sickening sound of the bone of Pedro's forearm cracking.
+She saw Pedro's eyes bursting from their sockets in pain and fear; she
+saw Jack's still profile of unyielding will and the set muscles of his
+neck and the knitting muscles of his forearm driving Pedro over against
+the hedge, as if bent on breaking the Mexican's back in two, and she
+waited in frozen apprehension to hear another bone crack, even expecting
+Pedro's death cry.
+
+"The devil is out of Senor Don't Care!" It was the voice of Ignacio, who
+had come around the house in time to witness the scene.
+
+"What fearful strength! You will kill him!" It was the voice of the Doge,
+from the porch.
+
+"Yes, please stop!" Mary pleaded.
+
+Suddenly, at the sound of her cry, Jack released his hold. The strong
+column of his neck became apparently too weak to hold the weight of his
+head. Inert, he fell against the hedge for support, his hands hanging
+limp at his side, while he stared dazedly into space. It seemed then that
+Pedro might have picked up the knife and carried out his plan of murder
+without defence by the victim.
+
+"Yes, yes, yes!" Jack repeated.
+
+Pedro had not moved from the hollow in the hedge which the impress of his
+body had made. He was trembling, his lips had fallen away from his
+teeth, and he watched Jack in stricken horror, a beaten creature waiting
+on some judgment from which there was no appeal.
+
+"We'll tell fairy stories"--Jack's soft tones of persuasion repeated
+themselves in Mary's ears in contrast to the effect of what she had just
+witnessed. Her hand slipped along the crest of the hedge, as if to
+steady herself.
+
+"I'll change my mind about going to the pass, Jack," she said.
+
+"Yes, Mary," he answered in a faint tone.
+
+He looked around to see her back as she turned away from him; then, with
+an effort, he stepped free of the hedge.
+
+"Come, we will go to the doctor!" he said to the Mexican.
+
+He touched Pedro's shoulder softly and softly ran his hand down the
+sleeve in which the arm hung limp. Pedro had not moved; he still leaned
+against the hedge inanimate as a mannikin.
+
+"Come! Your legs are not broken! You can walk!" said Jim Galway, who had
+come up in a hurry when he saw what was happening.
+
+"Pedro, you will learn not to play with the devil in Senor Don't Care!"
+whispered Ignacio, while Mary had disappeared in the house and the Doge
+stood watching.
+
+Jack had stroked Pedro's head while the bone was being set. He had
+arranged for Pedro's care. And now he was in his own yard with Jag Ear
+and the ponies, rubbing their muzzles alternately in silent
+impartiality, his head bowed reflectively as Firio came around the
+corner of the house. At first he half stared at Firio, then he surveyed
+the steeds of his long journeyings in questioning uncertainty, and then
+looked back at Firio, smiling wanly.
+
+"Firio," he said, "I feel that I am a pretty big coward. Firio, I am full
+up--full to overflowing. My mind is stuffed with cobwebs. I--I must think
+things out. I must have the solitudes."
+
+"The trail!" prescribed Doctor Firio.
+
+After Jack had given his ranch in charge to Galway, he rode away in
+the dusk, not by the main street, but straight across the levels
+toward the pass.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+THE DOGE SNAPS A RUBBER BAND
+
+
+Jasper Ewold was a disciple of an old-fashioned custom that has fallen
+into disuse since the multiplicity of typewriters made writing for one's
+own pleasure too arduous; or, if you will have another reason, since our
+existence and feelings have become so complex that we can no longer
+express them with the simple directness of our ancestors. He kept a
+diary with what he called a perfect regularity of intermittency. A week
+might pass without his writing a single word, and again he might indulge
+freely for a dozen nights running. He wrote as much or as little as he
+pleased. He wrote when he had something to tell and when he was in the
+mood to tell it.
+
+"It is facing yourself in your own ink," he said. "It is confessing that
+you are an egoist and providing an antidote for your egoism. Firstly, you
+will never be bored by your own past if you can appreciate your errors
+and inconsistencies. Secondly, you will never be tempted to bore others
+with your past as long as you wish to pose as a wise man."
+
+He must have found, as you would find if you had left youth behind and
+could see yourself in your own ink, that the first tracery of any
+controlling factor in your life was faint and inconsequential to you at
+the time, without presage of its importance until you saw other lines,
+also faint and inconsequential in their beginnings, drawing in toward it
+to form a powerful current.
+
+On the evening that Jack took to the trail again, Jasper Ewold had a
+number of thick notebooks out of the box in the library which he always
+kept locked, and placed them on the living-room table beside his easy
+chair, in which he settled himself. Mary was sewing while he pored over
+his life in review as written by his own hand. Her knowledge of the
+secrets of that chronicle from wandering student days to desert exile was
+limited to glimpses of the close lines of fine-written pages across the
+breadth of the circle of the lamp's reflection. He surrounded his diary
+with a line of mystery which she never attempted to cross. On occasions
+he would read to her certain portions which struck his recollection
+happily; but these were invariably limited to his impressions of some
+city or some work of art that he was seeing for the first time in the
+geniality of the unadulterated joy of living in what she guessed was the
+period of youth before she was born; and never did they throw any light
+on his story except that of his views as a traveller and a personality.
+But he did not break out into a single quotation to-night. It seemed as
+if he were following the thread of some reference from year to year; for
+he ran his fingers through the leaves of certain parts hastily and became
+studiously intense at other parts as he gloomily pondered over them.
+
+Neither she nor her father had mentioned Jack since the scene by the
+hedge. This was entirely in keeping with custom. It seemed a matter of
+instinct with both that they never talked to each other of him. Yet she
+was conscious that he had been in her father's mind all through the
+evening meal, and she was equally certain that her father realized that
+he was in her mind.
+
+It was late when the Doge finished his reading, and he finished it with
+the page of the last book, where the fine handwriting stopped at the edge
+of the blank white space of the future. An old desire, ever strong with
+Mary, which she had never quite had the temerity to express, had become
+impelling under the influence of her father's unusually long and silent
+preoccupation.
+
+"Am I never to have a glimpse of that treasure? Am I never, never to read
+your diary?" she asked.
+
+The Doge drew his tufted eyebrows together in utter astonishment.
+
+"What! What, Mary! Why, Mary, I might preach a lesson on the folly of
+feminine curiosity. Do you think I would ask to see your diary?"
+
+"But I don't keep one."
+
+"Hoo-hoo-hoo!" The Doge was blowing out his lips in an ado of deprecatory
+nonsense. "Don't keep one? Have you lost your memory?"
+
+"I had it a minute ago--yes," after an instant's playful consideration,
+"I am sure that I have it now."
+
+"Then, everybody with a memory certainly keeps a diary. Would you want
+me to read all the foolish things you had ever thought? Do you think I
+would want to?"
+
+"No," she answered.
+
+"There you are, then!" declared the Doge victoriously, as he rose,
+slipping a rubber band with a forbidding snap over the last book. "And
+this is all stupid personal stuff--but mine own!"
+
+There was an unconscious sigh of weariness as he took up the thumbed
+leather volumes. He was haggard. "Mine own" had given him no pleasure
+that evening. All the years of his life seemed to rest heavily upon him
+for a silent moment. Mary feared that she had hurt him by her request.
+
+"You have read so much you will scarcely do any writing to-night,"
+she ventured.
+
+"Yes, I will add a few more lines--the spirit is in me--a few more days
+to the long record," he said, absently, then, after a pause, suddenly,
+with a kind of suppressed force vibrating in his voice: "Well, our Sir
+Chaps has gone."
+
+"As unceremoniously as he came," she answered.
+
+"It was terrible the way he broke Nogales's wrist!" remarked the
+Doge narrowly.
+
+"Terrible!" she assented as she folded her work, her head bent.
+
+"Gone, and doubtless for good!" he continued, still watching her sharply.
+
+"Very likely!" she answered carelessly without looking up. "His vagarious
+playtime for this section is over."
+
+"Just it! Just it!" the Doge exclaimed happily.
+
+"And if Leddy overtakes him now, it's his own affair!"
+
+"Yes, yes! He and his Wrath of God and Jag Ear are away to other worlds!"
+
+"And other Leddys!"
+
+"No doubt! No doubt!" concluded the Doge, in high good humor, all the
+vexation of his diary seemingly forgotten as he left the room.
+
+But, as the Doge and Mary were to find, they were alone among Little
+Riversites in thinking that the breaking of Pedro Nogales's wrist was
+horrible. Jim Galway, who had witnessed the affair, took a radically
+contrary view, which everyone else not of the Leddy partisanship readily
+accepted. Despite the frequency of Jack's visits to the Ewold garden and
+all the happy exchange of pleasantries with his hosts, the community
+could not escape the thought of a certain latent hostility toward Jack on
+the part of the Doge, the more noticeable because it was so out of
+keeping with his nature.
+
+"Doge, sometimes I think you are almost prejudiced against Jack Wingfield
+because he didn't let Leddy have his way," said Jim, with an outright
+frankness that was unprecedented in speaking to Jasper Ewold. "You're
+such a regular old Quaker!"
+
+"But that little Mexican panting in abject fear against the hedge!"
+persisted the Doge.
+
+"A nice, peaceful little Mexican with a knife, sneaking up to plant it in
+Jack's neck!"
+
+"But Jack is so powerful! And his look! I was so near I could see it well
+as he towered over Nogales!"
+
+"Yes, no mistaking the look. I saw it in the _arroyo_. It made me think
+of what the look of one of those old sea-fighters might have been like
+when they lashed alongside and boarded the enemy."
+
+"And the crack of the bone!" continued the Doge.
+
+"Would you have a man turn cherub when he has escaped having his
+jugular slashed by a margin of two or three inches? Would you have him
+say, 'Please, naughty boy, give me your knife? You mustn't play with
+such things!'"
+
+"No! That's hyperbole!" the Doge returned with a lame attempt at a laugh.
+
+"Mebbe it is, whatever hyperbole is," said Jim; "but if so, hyperbole is
+a darned poor means of self-defence. Yes, the trouble is you are against
+Jack Wingfield!"
+
+"Yes, I am!" said the Doge suddenly, as if inward anger had got the
+better of him.
+
+"And the rest of us are for him!" Jim declared sturdily.
+
+"Naturally! naturally!" said the Doge, passing his hand over his brow.
+"Yes, youth and color and bravery!" He shook his head moodily, as if
+Jim's statement brought up some vital, unpleasant, but inevitable fact
+to his mind.
+
+"It's beyond me how anybody can help liking him!" concluded Galway
+stubbornly.
+
+"I like him--yes, I do like him! I cannot help it!" the Doge admitted
+rather grudgingly as he turned away.
+
+"So we weren't so far apart, after all!" Galway hastened to call after
+the Doge in apology for his testiness. "We like him for what he has been
+to us and will always be to us. That's the only criterion of character in
+Little Rivers according to your own code, isn't it, Jasper Ewold?"
+
+"Exactly!" answered the Doge over his shoulder.
+
+The community entered into a committee of the whole on Jack Wingfield.
+With every citizen contributing a quota of personal experience, his story
+was rehearsed from the day of his arrival to the day of his departure.
+Argument fluctuated on the question of whether or not he would ever
+return, with now the noes and now the ayes having it. On this point Jim
+had the only first-hand evidence.
+
+"He said to let things grow until he showed up or I heard from
+him," said Jim.
+
+"Not what I would call enlightening," said Bob Worther.
+
+"That was his way of expressing it; but to do him justice, he showed what
+a good rancher he was by his attention to the details that had to be
+cared for," Jim added.
+
+"He's like the spirit of the winds, I guess," put in Mrs. Galway.
+"Something comes a-calling him or a-driving him, I don't know which.
+Indeed, I'm not altogether certain that it isn't a case of Mary Ewold
+this time!"
+
+"Yes," agreed Jim. "The fighting look went out of his face when she
+spoke, and when he saw how horrified she was, why, I never saw such a
+change come over a man! It was just like a piece of steel wilting."
+
+However, the children, who had no part in the august discussions of the
+committee of the whole, were certain that their story-teller would come
+back. Their ideas about Jack were based on a simple, self-convincing
+faith of the same order as Firio's. Lonely as they were, they were hardly
+more lonely than their elders, who were supposed to have the philosophy
+of adults.
+
+No Jack singing out "Hello!" on the main street! No Jack looking up from
+work to ask boyishly: "Am I learning? Oh, I'll be the boss rancher yet!"
+No Jack springing all sorts of conceits, not of broad humor, but the kind
+that sort of set a "twinkling in your insides," as Bob Worther expressed
+it! No Jack inspiring a feeling deeper than twinkles on his sad days! He
+had been an improvement in town life that became indispensable once it
+was absent. Little Rivers was fairly homesick for him.
+
+"How did we ever get along without him before he came, anyway?" Bob
+Worther demanded.
+
+Then another new-comer, as distinctive from the average settler as Jack
+was, diverted talk into another channel, without, however, reconciling
+the people to their loss.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+ANOTHER STRANGER ARRIVES
+
+
+If the history of Little Rivers were to be written in chapter headings
+the first would be, "Jasper Ewold Founded the Town"; the second, "Jack
+Wingfield Arrived"; and the third, "John Prather Arrived."
+
+While Jack came in chaps and spurs, bearing an argosy of fancy, Prather
+came by rail, carrying a suitcase in a conventional and businesslike
+fashion. Bill Deering, as the representative of a spring wagon that did
+the local omnibus and express business, was on the platform of the
+station when the 11:15 rolled in, and sang out, in a burst of joy, as the
+stranger, a man in the early twenties, stepped off the Pullman:
+
+"What's this, Jack? Back by train--and in store clothes? Well, of
+all--" and saw his mistake when the stranger's full face was turned
+toward him.
+
+"Yes, I am sometimes called Jack," said the stranger pleasantly. "Now,
+where have we met before? Perhaps in Goldfield? No matter. It is time we
+got acquainted. My name is Prather, and yours?"
+
+As he surveyed the man before him, Bill was as fussed as the giant of the
+fairy story had been by a display of yellow. He was uncertain whether he
+was giving his own baptismal name or somebody's else.
+
+"By Jing! No, I don't know you, but you sure are the dead spit of a
+fellow I do know!" said Bill.
+
+"Well, he has done me the favor of introducing me to you, anyway," said
+Prather, who had a remarkably ingratiating smile. "I would like a place
+to stop while I take a look around. Is there a hotel?"
+
+"Rooms over the store and grub at Mrs. Smith's--none better!"
+
+"That will do."
+
+As they rode into town more than one passer-by called out a ringing
+"Hello, Jack!" or, "Back, eh, Jack? Hurrah for you!" and then uttered an
+exclamation of disillusion when Prather turned his head.
+
+"The others see it, too," said Bill.
+
+"They seem to. Who is this double of mine?"
+
+"Jack Wingfield."
+
+"Jack Wingfield? It seems that our first names are the same, too. He
+lives here, I take it."
+
+"Yes. But he's away now."
+
+"Well, when he comes back"--with a pause of slight irritation--"there
+will be no difficulty in telling us apart."
+
+He put his finger to a triangular patch of mole on his cheek. His
+irritation passed and a sense of appreciative amusement at the
+distinction took its place.
+
+"Now, where shall I find Jasper Ewold?" he asked, as Bill drew up before
+the Smiths.
+
+A few minutes later the Doge, busy among his orange-trees, hearing a
+step, looked up with a signal of recognition which changed to blank
+inquiry when the cheek with the mole was turned toward him.
+
+"Upon my word, sir, I--I thought that you were--" he began.
+
+"Mr. Wingfield! Yes, everybody in town seems to think so at first glance,
+so I am quite used to the comparison by this time," Prather put in,
+easily. "It is very interesting to meet the founder of a town, and I
+have come to you to find out about conditions here."
+
+Prather did not appear as if he had ever done manual labor. He was too
+young to have turned from ill health or failure in the city to the refuge
+of the land. Indeed, his quiet gray suit of good material indicated
+unostentatious prosperity. Evidently he was well-bred and evidently he
+was not an agent for a new style of seeding harrow or weed killer.
+
+"You think of settling?" asked the Doge.
+
+"Yes. From all I have heard of Little Rivers, it's a community where I
+should feel at home."
+
+"Then, sir, we will talk of it at luncheon; it is knocking-off time for
+the morning. Yes, I'll talk as much as you please. Come on, Mr. Prather!"
+They started along the avenue of palms, the Doge still studying the face
+at his side. "Pardon me for staring at you, but the resemblance to Jack
+Wingfield at first sight is most striking," he added.
+
+"Has he travelled much in the West?" asked Prather.
+
+"Yes, much--leading an aimless life."
+
+"Then he must be the one that I was taken for in Salt Lake City one day.
+The man who called out to me saw his mistake, just as you did, when he
+saw my full face;" and again Prather made a gesture of understanding
+amusement to the mole.
+
+"When you consider what confusion there must be in the workrooms, with
+the storks flapping and screeching like newsboys outside the delivery
+room," mused the Doge, "and when you consider the multitudinous
+population of the earth, it's surprising that the good Lord is able to
+furnish such a variety of faces as he does. But they do say that every
+one of us has a few doubles. In the case of famous public men they get
+their pictures in the papers."
+
+"Yes, very few of us but have been mistaken for a friend by a stranger
+passing in the street!" Prather suggested.
+
+"Only to have the stranger see his mistake at a second glance; and on
+second glance you do not look very much like Jack Wingfield," the Doge
+concluded. "Just a coincidence in physiognomy!"
+
+And Prather was very frank about his past.
+
+"I have led rather a hard life," he said. "Though I was well brought up
+my father left mother and me quite penniless. I had to fend for myself at
+the age of sixteen. A friend gave me an opportunity to go to Goldfield at
+the outbreak of the excitement there. The rough experience of a
+mining-camp was not exactly to my taste, but it meant a livelihood. My
+real interest has always been in irrigation farming. I would rather grow
+a good crop than mine for gold. Well, I saved a little money at
+Goldfield--saved it to buy land. But land is not the only consideration.
+The surroundings, the people with whom you have to live count for a great
+deal when you mean to settle permanently."
+
+"Excellent!" declared the Doge. "A good citizen in full fellowship with
+your neighbors! Exactly what we want in Little Rivers."
+
+Prather had a complexion of that velvety whiteness that never tans.
+His eyes were calm, yet attractive, with a peculiar insinuating charm
+when he talked that made it seem easy and natural to respond to his
+wishes. In listening he had an ingratiating manner that was
+flattering to the speaker.
+
+"A practical man!" the Doge said to Mary that evening. "The kind we need
+here. He and I had a grand afternoon of it together. Every one of his
+questions about soils and cultivation was to the point."
+
+"Not one argument?" she asked.
+
+"No, Mary; no time for argument."
+
+"You do like people to agree with you, after all!" she hazarded. For she
+did not like Prather.
+
+"Pooh! Not a matter of agreement! No persiflage! No altitudinous
+conversation of the kind that grows no crops. Prather wants to learn, and
+he's got good, clean ideas, with a trained and accurate mind--the best
+possible combination. I hope he will stay for the very reason that he is
+not the kind that takes up a plot of land for life on an impulse, which
+usually results in turning on the water and getting discouraged because
+nature will not do the rest. But he is very favorably impressed. He said
+that after Goldfield Little Rivers was like Paradise--practical Paradise.
+Good phrase, practical Paradise!"
+
+In two or three days the new-comer knew everyone in town; but though he
+addressed the men by their first names they always addressed him as "Mr.
+Prather." In another respect besides his features he was like Jack: he
+was much given to smiling.
+
+"The difference between his smile and Jack's," said Mrs. Galway, who was
+at one with Mary in not liking him, "is that his is sort of a drawing-in
+kind of smile and Jack's sort of radiates."
+
+The children developed no interest in him. It was evident that he could
+not tell stories, except with an effort. In his goings and comings, ever
+asking pleasant questions and passing compliments, he was usually
+accompanied by the Doge, and his attitude toward the old man was the
+admiring deference of disciple for master.
+
+"I am sorry I don't understand that," he would say when the Doge fell
+into a scholastic allusion to explain a point. "I was hard at work when
+lots of my friends were in college."
+
+"Learning may be ruination," responded the Doge, "though it wouldn't have
+been in your case. It's the man that counts. See what you have made of
+yourself!"
+
+"Ah, yes, but I feel that I have missed something. When I am settled here
+I shall be able to make up for lost time, with your help, sir."
+
+"Every pigeonhole in my mind will be open at your call!" said the Doge,
+glowing at the prospect.
+
+The favor that Prather found in the eyes of Jasper Ewold partly accounted
+for what favor he found in Little Rivers' eyes.
+
+"Prather has certainly made a hit with the Doge!" quoth Bob Worther.
+"As the Doge gets older I reckon he will like compliments better than
+persiflage. But Jack could pay a compliment, too--only he never used
+the ladle."
+
+It was Bob, as inspector of ditches and dams, who provided a horse for
+Prather to inspect the source of the water supply. In keeping with a
+characteristic thoroughness, Prather wanted to go up the river into the
+canyon. He made himself a very enjoyable companion on the way, drawing
+out all of Bob's best stories. When they stopped in sight of the streak
+of blue sky through the breach in the mighty wall that had once
+imprisoned the ancient lake, he was silent for some time, while he
+surveyed this grandeur of the heights with smiling contemplation, at
+intervals rubbing the palms of his hands together in a manner habitual
+with him when he was particularly pleased.
+
+"I guess the same idea has struck you that strikes everybody at sight of
+that, seh!" said Bob.
+
+"Yes, a dam might be practical," Prather answered. "But it would take a
+lot of capital--a lot of capital!"
+
+On the way back they stopped before a dilapidated shanty near the
+foothills. In the midst of a littered yard old man Lefferts, half dozing,
+occupied a broken chair.
+
+"Since the Doge came old man Lefferts has had to do no work at all. A
+Mexican looks after him. But it hasn't made him any happier," Bob
+explained as they approached.
+
+"Howdy yourself?" growled Lefferts in answer to Bob's greeting.
+
+"He seems to be a character!" whispered Prather to Bob, as he smiled at
+the prospect. "To confess the truth, I am a little saddle sore and tired.
+I didn't get much riding in Goldfield. I think I'll stop and rest and get
+acquainted."
+
+"You won't get much satisfaction but growls."
+
+"That will be all the more fun for me," rejoined Prather. "But don't let
+me keep you."
+
+"No. I must be going on. I've got some things to look after before
+nightfall," said Bob, while Prather, in a humor proof against any hermit
+cantankerousness, rode into the yard.
+
+When he returned after dark he said, laughingly, that he had enjoyed
+himself, though the conversation was all on one side. The next morning he
+decided to take up the plot of land adjoining Jack's.
+
+"But I shall not be able to begin work for a few weeks," he said. "I must
+go to Goldfield to settle up my affairs before I begin my new career."
+
+"If Jack ever comes back I wonder what he will say to his new neighbor!"
+Little Rivers wondered.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+LOOKING OVER PRECIPICES
+
+
+To Mary Ewold the pass was a dividing line between two appeals. The
+Little Rivers side, with the green patch of oasis in the distance, had a
+message of peaceful enjoyment of what fortune had provided for her. Under
+its spell she saw herself content to live within garden walls forever in
+the land that had given her life, grateful for the trickles of
+intelligence that came by mail from the outside world.
+
+The other side aroused a mighty restlessness. Therefore, she rarely made
+that short journey which spread another panorama of space before her. But
+this was one of the afternoons when she welcomed a tumult of any kind as
+a relief from her depression; and she went on through the V as soon as
+she reached the summit.
+
+Seated on a flat-topped rock, oblivious of the passage of time, of the
+dream cities of the Eternal Painter, she was staring far away where the
+narrowing gray line between the mountain rims met the sky. She was seeing
+beyond the horizon. She was seeing cities of memory and reality. A great
+yearning was in her heart. All the monotonous level lap of the heights
+which seemed without end was a symbol that separated her from her desire.
+
+She imagined herself in a Pullman, flashing by farms and villages; in a
+shop selecting gowns; viewing from a high window the human stream of
+Fifth Avenue; taking passage on a steamer; hearing again foreign tongues
+long ago familiar to her ears; sensing the rustle of great audiences
+before a curtain rose; glimpsing the Mediterranean from a car window;
+feeling herself a unit in the throbbing promenade of the life of many
+streets while her hunger took its fill of a busy world.
+
+"It is hard to do it all in imagination!" she said to herself. "Even
+imagination needs an occasional nest-egg of reality by way of
+encouragement."
+
+An hour on the far side of the pass played the emotional part for her of
+a storm of tears for many another woman. She rejoiced in being utterly
+alone; rejoiced in the grandeur of the very wastes around her as mounting
+guard over the freedom of her thoughts. There was no living speck on the
+trail, which she knew lay across the expanse of parched earth to the edge
+of the blue dome; there was not even a bird in the air. Undisturbed, she
+might think anything, pray for anything; she might feed the flame of
+revolt till the fuel of many weeks' accumulation had burned itself out
+and left her calm in the wisdom and understanding that reconciled her to
+her portion and freshened to return through Galeria to the quiet routine
+of her daily existence.
+
+Her mind paused in its travels from capital to capital and she was
+conscious solely of the stark majesty of her surroundings. She listened.
+There was no sound. The spacious stillness was soothing to her nerves; a
+specific when all the Eternal Painter's art failed. She closed her eyes,
+trying to realize that great silence as one would try to realize the
+Infinite. Then faintly she heard a man's voice singing. It seemed at
+first a trick of the imagination. But nearer and nearer it came, in the
+fellowship of life joyfully invading the solitude; and with a
+readjustment of her faculties to the expected event, she watched the
+point where the trail dipped on a sharp turn of grade.
+
+Above it rose a cowpuncher hat, then a silk shirt with a string tie, and
+after that a sage baggage burro with clipped ears, a solemn-faced pony,
+and an Indian. Jack was watching his steps in the uneven path, and not
+until the full length of him had appeared and he was flush on the level
+with her did he look up.
+
+She was leaning back, her weight partly poised on the flat of her hand
+on the rock, revealing the full curve of throat and the soft sweep of
+the lines of her slim figure, erect, her head thrown back, her face in
+shadow with the sun behind playing in her hair, in half-defiant
+readiness. She saw him as the spirit of travel--its ease, mystery,
+unattachedness--which had spanned the distances between her and the
+horizon, in the freedom of his wandering choice. His low-pitched
+exclamation of surprise was vibrant with appreciation of the picture she
+made, and he stood quite still in a second's wistful silence, waiting on
+her first word after the lapse of the many days since he had brought a
+look of horror into her eyes.
+
+"Hello, Jack!" she said in the old tone of comradeship. It struck a spark
+electrifying him with all his old, happy manner.
+
+He swept off his hat with a grand bow, blinking in the blaze of the sun
+which turned his tan to a bronze and touched the smile, which was born as
+an inspiration from her greeting, with radiance.
+
+"Hello to you, Mary, guarding the pass to Little Rivers!" he said
+exultantly. "You are just the person I wanted to see. I have been in
+a hurry to tell you about a certain thing ever since it came to me
+this morning."
+
+She guessed that he was about to make up a new story. He must have had
+time for many inventions in the ten days of his absence. But she welcomed
+any tangent of nonsense that set the right key for the coincidence of
+their meeting. She had refused to ride to the pass with him and here they
+were alone together on the pass. Three or four steps, so light that they
+seemed to be irresistibly winning permission from her, and he had sat
+down on another flat-topped rock close by. Firio and the baggage train
+moved on up the trail methodically and stopped well in the background.
+
+"You know how when you meet a person you are sometimes haunted by a
+conviction that you have met him before!" he began. "How exasperated you
+are not to be able to recall the time and place!"
+
+"Had you forgotten where you met the dinosaur?" she asked. "He must have
+thought you very impolite after all the trouble he had taken to make you
+remember him the last time you went through the pass."
+
+"Oh, the dinosaur and I have patched up a truce, because it seems, after
+all, that I had mistaken his identity and he was a pleosaur. But"--he did
+not take the pains to parry her interruption with more foolery, and
+proceeded as if she had not spoken--"it has never been out of my mind
+that your father gave me a glance at our first meeting which asked the
+question that has kept recurring to me: Where had he and I seen each
+other before?"
+
+"Well?" she said curiously, recalling her father's repeated allusions to
+"this Wingfield," his strange depression after Jack had left the night
+before the duel, his reticence and animadversions.
+
+"I said nothing about it, nor did he. I wonder if it has not been a kind
+of contest between us as to which should be the first to say 'Tag!'"
+
+She smiled at this and leaned farther back, but with the curtain of her
+eyelashes widening in tremulous intensity.
+
+"I knew it would come!" he went on, with dramatic fervor. "Such things do
+come unexpectedly in a flash when there is a sudden electric connection
+with some dusty pigeonhole in the mind. It was in Florence that he and I
+met! In Florence, on the road to Fiesole!"
+
+"Florence! The road to Fiesole!" Mary repeated; and the names seemed to
+rouse in her a rapturous recollection. She leaned forward now, her lips
+apart, her eyes glowing. In place of wastes she was seeing brown roofs
+and the sweep of the Tuscan Valley.
+
+"And _we_ met--_you_ and _I_!"
+
+"We?" Her glance came sharply back from the distances in the astonishment
+of dilating pupils that drew together in inquiry as she saw that he was
+in earnest.
+
+"Yes. I was at the extremely mature age of six and you must have been
+about a year younger. Do you remember it at all?"
+
+"No!" She was silent, concentrated, groping. "No, no!" she repeated.
+"Five is very immature compared to six!"
+
+"Your father had a beard then, a great blond beard that excited my
+emulation. When I grew up I was going to have one like it and just such
+bushy eyebrows. You came up the Fiesole road at his side, holding fast
+to his thumb. I was playing at our villa gate. You went up the path with
+him to see my mother--I can see just how you looked holding so fast to
+that thumb! After a while you came straying out alone. Now don't you
+remember? Don't you? Something quite sensational happened."
+
+"No!"
+
+"Well, I showed off what a great boy I was. I walked on the parapet of
+the villa wall. I bowed to my audience aged five with the grandeur of a
+tight-rope performer who has just done his best thriller as a climax to
+his turn."
+
+"Yes--yes!" she breathed, with quick-running emphasis. Out of the mists
+of fifteen years had come a signal. She bent nearer to him in the wonder
+of a thing found in the darkness of memory, which always has the
+fascination of a communication from another world. "You wanted me to come
+up on the wall," she said, taking up the thread of the story. "You said
+it was so easy, and you helped me up, and when I looked down at the road
+I was overcome and fell down all in a heap on the parapet."
+
+"And heavens!" he gasped, living the scene over again, "wasn't I
+frightened for fear you would tumble off!"
+
+"But I remember that you helped me down very nicely--and--and that is all
+I do remember. What then?"
+
+She had come to a blind alley and perplexity was in her face, though she
+tried to put the question nonchalantly. What then? How deep ran the
+current of this past association?
+
+"Why, there wasn't much else. Your father came down the path and his big
+thumb took you in tow. I did not see you again. A week later mother and I
+had gone to Switzerland--we were always on the move."
+
+The candor of his glance told her that this was all. As boy and girl they
+had met under an Italian sky. As man and woman they had met under an
+Arizona sky.
+
+Now the charm of the Florence of their affections held them with a magic
+touch. They were not in a savage setting, looking out over savage
+distances, but on the Piazzale Michelangelo, looking out over the city of
+Renaissance genius which slumbers on the refulgent bosom of its past;
+they were oblivious of the Eternal Painter's canvasses and enjoying
+Raphael's, Botticelli's, and Andrea del Sarto's. Possibly the Eternal
+Painter, in the leniency of philosophic appreciation of their oblivion to
+his art, hazarded a guess about the destiny of this pair. He could not
+really have known their destiny. No, it is impossible to grant him the
+power of divination; for if he had it he might not be so young of heart.
+
+Their talk flitted here and there in exclamations, each bringing an
+entail of recollection of some familiar, enjoyed thing; and when at last
+it returned to their immediate surroundings the shadow of the range was
+creeping out onto the plain, cut by the brilliance of the sun through the
+V. Mary rose with a quick, self-accusing cry about the lateness of the
+hour. To him it was a call on his resources to delay their departure.
+
+"Do you see where that shelf breaks abruptly?" he asked. "It must be the
+side of a canyon. Have you ever looked down?"
+
+"I started to once."
+
+"I should not like to go over the pass again without seeing if this
+is really a canyon of any account. I feel myself quite an authority
+on canyons."
+
+"It will be dark before we reach Little Rivers!" she protested.
+
+"Ten minutes--only a step!" and he was appealing in his boyish fashion to
+have his way.
+
+"Nonsense! Besides, I do not care for canyons."
+
+"You still fear, then, to look down from walls? You--"
+
+And this decided her. On another occasion she had gone to the precipice
+edge and faltered. She would master her dizziness for once and all; he
+should not know from her any confession of a weakness which was purely of
+the imagination.
+
+The point to which he had alluded was an immense overhanging slab of
+granite stratum deep set in the mountain side. As they approached, a
+thrill of lightness and uncertainty was setting her limbs a-quiver. Her
+elbow was touching his, her will driving her feet forward desperately.
+Suddenly she was gazing down, down, down, into black depths which
+seemed calling irresistibly and melting her power of muscular volition,
+while he with another step was on the very edge, leaning over and
+smiling. She dropped back convulsively. He was all happy absorption in
+the face of that abyss. How easy for him to topple over and go hurtling
+into the chasm!
+
+"Don't!" she gasped, and blindly tugged at his arm to draw him back.
+
+As he looked around in surprise and inquiry, she withdrew her hand in a
+reaction against her familiarity, yet did not lower it, holding it out
+with fingers spread in expression of her horror. Serenely he regarded
+her for a moment in her confusion and distress, and then, smiling, while
+the still light of confidence was in his eyes, he locked his arm in hers.
+Before she could protest or resist he had drawn her to his side.
+
+"It is just as safe as looking off the roof of a porch on to a flower
+garden," he said.
+
+And why she knew not, but the fact had come as something definite and
+settled: she was no longer dizzy or uncertain. Calmly, in the triumph of
+mind over fear, in the glory of a new sensation of power, she looked down
+into that gulf of shadows--looked down for a thousand feet, where the
+narrowing, sheer walls merged into darkness.
+
+From this pit to the blue above there was only infinite silence, with no
+movement but his pulse-beat which she could feel in his wrist
+distinctly. He had her fast, a pawn of one of his impulses. A shiver of
+revolt ran through her. He had taken this liberty because she had shown
+weakness. And she was not weak. She had come to the precipice to prove
+that she was not.
+
+"Thank you. My little tremor of horror has passed," she told him. "I can
+stand without help, now."
+
+He released his hold and she stood quite free of him, a glance flashing
+her independence. Smilingly she looked down and smilingly and
+triumphantly back at him.
+
+"You need not keep your arm up in that fashion ready to assist me. It
+is tiring," she said, with a touch of her old fire of banter over the
+barrier. "I am all right, now. I don't know what gave me that giddy
+turn--probably sitting still so long and looking out at the blaze of
+the desert."
+
+He swept her with a look of admiration; and their eyes meeting, she
+looked back into the abyss.
+
+"I wish I had such courage," he said with sudden, tense earnestness;
+"courage to master my revulsion against shadows."
+
+"Perhaps it will come like an inspiration," she answered
+uncomprehendingly.
+
+Then both were silent until she spoke of a stunted little pine three or
+four hundred feet down, in the crotch of an outcropping. Its sinking
+roots had split a rock, over which the other roots sprawled in gnarly
+persistence. Some passing bird had dropped the seed which had found a bed
+in a pocket of dust from the erosions of time. So it had grown and set up
+housekeeping in its isolation, even as the community of Little Rivers had
+in a desert basin beside a water-course.
+
+"The little pine has courage--the courage of the dwarf," she said. "It is
+worth more than a whole forest of its majestic cousins in Maine. How
+green it is--greener than they!"
+
+"But they rise straight to heaven in their majesty!" he returned, to make
+controversy.
+
+"Yes, out of the ease of their rich beds!"
+
+"In a crowd and waiting for the axe!"
+
+"And this one, in its isolation, creating something where there was
+nothing! Every one of its needles is counted in its cost of birth out of
+the stubborn soil! And waiting all its life down there for the reward of
+a look and a word of praise!"
+
+"But," he went on, in the delight of hearing her voice in rebuttal, "the
+big pines give us the masts of ships and they build houses and furnish
+the kindling for the hardwood logs of the hearth!"
+
+"The little pine makes no pretensions. It has done more. It has given us
+something without which houses are empty: It has given us a thought!"
+
+"True!" he exclaimed soberly, yielding. And now all the lively signals of
+the impulse of action played on his face. "For your glance and your word
+of praise it shall pay you tribute!" he cried. "I am going down to bring
+you one of its clusters of spines."
+
+"But, Jack, it is a dangerous climb--it is late! No! no!"
+
+"No climb at all. It is easy if I work my way around by that ledge
+yonder. I see stepping-places all the way."
+
+How like him! While she thought only of the pine, he had been thinking
+how to make a descent; how to conquer some physical difficulty. Already
+he had started despite her protest.
+
+"I don't want to rob the little pine!" she called, testily.
+
+"I'll bring a needle, then!"
+
+"Even every needle is precious!"
+
+"I'll bring a dead one, then!"
+
+There was no combatting him, she knew, when he was headstrong; and when
+he was particularly headstrong he would laugh in his soft way. He was
+laughing now as he took off his spurs and tossed them aside.
+
+"No climbing in these cart-wheels, and I shall have to roll up my chaps!"
+
+She went back to the precipice edge to prove to him, to prove to herself,
+that she could stand there alone, without the moral support of anyone at
+her side, and found that she could. She had mastered her weakness. It was
+as if a new force had been born in her. She felt its stiffening in every
+fibre as she saw him pass around the ledge and start down toward the
+little pine; felt it as something which could build barriers and mount
+them with an invulnerable guard.
+
+How would he get past that steep shoulder? The worst obstacle confronted
+him at the very beginning of the descent. He was hugging a rock face,
+feeling his way, with nothing but a few inches of a projecting seam
+between him and the darkness far below. His foot slipped, his body turned
+half around, and she had a second of the horror that she had felt when
+waiting for the sound of Leddy's shot in Bill Lang's store. She saw his
+outspread hands clutching the seam above; watched for them to let go. But
+they held; the foot groped and got its footing again, and he worked his
+way out on a shelf.
+
+He was safe and she dropped on her knees weakly, still looking down at
+him. It was the old story of their relations. Was this man ever to be
+subjecting her to spasms of fear on his account? And there he was beaming
+up at her reassuringly, while she felt the blood which had gone from her
+face return in a hot flood. It brought with it anger in place of fear.
+
+"I don't want it! I don't want it!" she cried down.
+
+"And I want to get it for you! I want to get it for you--for you!" His
+voice was a tumult of emotion in the abandon of passionate declaration.
+So long had she held him back that now when the flood came it had the
+power of conserved strength bursting a dam in wild havoc. "There is
+nothing I would not like to do for you, Mary!" he cried. "I'd like to
+pull that pine up for you, even if it bled and suffered! I'd like to go
+on doing things for you forever!"
+
+There was not even a movement of her lips in answer. It seemed to her
+now that there on the precipice edge, while he held her arm in his,
+the iridescent house of glass had fallen about them in a confused,
+dazzling shower of wreckage. He had found an opening. He had broken
+through the barrier.
+
+Half unconscious of his progress, of the chasm itself, she waited in a
+daze and came out of it to see him sweeping his hat upward from beside
+the pine before he reached as far as he could among the branches and,
+with what seemed to her the refinement of effrontery and disregard of her
+wishes, broke off a tawny young branch. He waved it to her--this garland
+of conquest won out of the jaws of danger, which he was ready to throw at
+her feet from the lists.
+
+"No, no, no!" she said, half aloud.
+
+She saw him start back with his sure steps, his shoulders swinging with
+the lithe, adaptable movement of his body; and every step was drawing him
+nearer to a meeting which would be like no other between them. Soon he
+would be crunching the glass of the house under that confident tread; in
+the ecstasy of a new part he would be before the opening he had broken in
+the barrier with the jauntiness of one who expected admission. His
+pulse-beat under the touch of her fingers at the precipice edge, his
+artery-beat in the _arroyo_, was hammering in her temples, hammering out
+a decision which, when it came, brought her to her feet.
+
+Now the shadows were deep; all the glory of the sunset in the Eternal
+Painter's chaotic last moments of his day's work overspread the western
+sky, and from the furnace in which he dipped his brush came a blade of
+rich, blazing gold through the pass and lay across the trail. It
+enveloped her as, half running, mindless of her footing, slipping as she
+went, she hurried toward the other side of Galeria.
+
+When Jack Wingfield came up over the ledge, a pine tassel in his hand,
+his languor of other days transformed into high-strung, triumphant
+intensity, the sparkle of a splendid hope in his eyes, only Firio was
+there to welcome him.
+
+"Senorita Ewold said she no could wait," Firio explained. "It was very
+late, she said."
+
+Jack stopped as if struck and his features became a lifeless mask, as
+lifeless as the walls of the canyon. He looked down at the trophy of his
+climb and ran his fingers over the needles slowly, again and again, in
+abstraction.
+
+"I understand!" he said, half to himself; and then aloud: "Firio, we will
+not go into town to-night. We will camp on the other side by the river."
+
+"_Si_! I shot enough quail this afternoon for dinner."
+
+But Jack did not have much appetite, and after dinner he did not amuse
+Firio with inventions of his fancy. He lay long awake, his head on his
+clasped hands, looking at the stars.
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+A PUZZLED AMBASSADOR
+
+
+A faint aureole of light crept up back of the pass.
+
+"Dawn at last!" Jack breathed, in relief. "Firio! Firio! Up with you!"
+
+"Oh-yuh!" yawned Firio. "_Si, si_!" he said, rising numbly to his feet
+and rubbing his eyes with his fists, while he tried to comprehend an
+astonishing reversal of custom. Usually he awakened his camp-mate; but
+this morning his camp-mate had awakened him. A half shadow in the
+semi-darkness, Jack was already throwing the saddle over P.D.'s back.
+
+"We will get away at once," he said.
+
+Firio knew that something strange had come over Senor Jack after he had
+met Senorita Ewold on the pass, and now he was convinced that this thing
+had been working in Senor Jack's mind all night.
+
+"Coffee before we start?" he inquired ingratiatingly.
+
+"Coffee at the ranch," Jack answered.
+
+In their expeditious preparations for departure he hummed no snatches of
+song as a paean of stretching muscles and the expansion of his being with
+the full tide of the conscious life of day; and this, too, was contrary
+to custom.
+
+Before it was fairly light they were on the road, with Jack urging P.D.
+forward at a trot. The silence was soft with the shimmer of dawn; all
+glistening and still the roofs and trees of Little Rivers took form. The
+moist sweetness of its gardens perfumed the fresh morning air in greeting
+to the easy traveller, while the makers of gardens were yet asleep.
+
+It was the same hour that Mary had hurried forth after her wakeful night
+to stop the duel in the _arroyo_. As Jack approached the Ewold home he
+had a glimpse of something white, a woman's gown he thought, that
+disappeared behind the vines. He concluded that Mary must have risen
+early to watch the sunrise, and drew rein opposite the porch; but through
+the lace-work of the vines he saw that it was empty. Yet he was positive
+that he had seen her and that she must have seen him coming. She was
+missing the very glorious moment which she had risen to see. A rim of
+molten gold was showing in the defile and all the summits of the range
+were topped with flowing fire.
+
+"Mary!" he called.
+
+There was no answer. Had he been mistaken? Had mental suggestion played
+him a trick? Had his eyes personified a wish when they saw a figure on
+the steps?
+
+"Mary!" he called again, and his voice was loud enough for her to have
+heard if she were awake and near. Still there was no answer.
+
+The pass had now become a flaming vortex which bathed him in its
+far-spreading radiance. But he had lost interest in sunrises. A last
+backward, hungry glance over his shoulder as he started gave him a
+glimpse through the open door of the living-room, and he saw Mary leaning
+against the table looking down at her hands, which were half clasped in
+her lap, as if she were waiting for him to get out of the way.
+
+Thus he understood that he had ended their comradeship when he had broken
+through the barrier on the previous afternoon, and the only thing that
+could bring it back was the birth of a feeling in her greater than
+comradeship. His shoulders fell together, the reins loosened, while P.D.,
+masterless if not riderless, proceeded homeward.
+
+"Hello, Jack!"
+
+It was the greeting of Bob Worther, the inspector of ditches, who was the
+only man abroad at that hour. Jack looked up with an effort to be genial
+and found Bob closely studying his features in a stare.
+
+"What's the matter, Bob?" he asked. "Has my complexion turned green over
+night or my nose slipped around to my ear?"
+
+"I was trying to make out if you do look like him!" Bob declared.
+
+"Like whom? What the deuce is the mystery?"
+
+"What--why, of course you're the most interested party and the only
+Little Riversite that don't know about it, seh!"
+
+After all, there was some compensation for early rising. Bob expanded
+with the privilege of being the first to break the news.
+
+"If you'd come yesterday you'd have seen him. He went by the noon train,"
+he said, and proceeded with the story of Prather.
+
+Jack had never heard of the man before and was obviously uninterested. He
+did not seem to care if a dozen doubles came to town.
+
+"Oh, yes, there's another thing concerning you," Bob continued. "I was so
+interested in telling you about Prather that I near forgot it. A
+swell-looking fellow--says he's a doctor and he's got New York written
+all over him--came in yesterday particularly to see you."
+
+Though it was a saying in Little Rivers that nobody ever found Jack at a
+loss, he started perceptibly now. His fingers worked nervously on the
+reins and he bit his lips in irritation.
+
+"He was asking a lot of questions about you," Bob added.
+
+By this time Jack had summoned back his smile. He did not seem to mind if
+a dozen doctors came to town at the same time as a dozen doubles.
+
+"Did you tell him that I had a cough--kuh-er?" he asked, casually.
+
+"Why, no! I said you could thrash your weight in wildcats and he says,
+'Well, he'll have to, yet!' and then shut up as if he'd overspoke
+himself--and I judge that he ain't the kind that does that often. But
+say, Jack," Bob demanded, in the alarm of local partisanship which
+apprehends that it may unwittingly have served an outside interest, "did
+you want us to dope it out that you were an invalid? We ain't been
+getting you in wrong, I hope?"
+
+"Not a bit!" answered Jack with a reassuring slap on Bob's shoulder. "Was
+his name Bennington?"
+
+"Yes, that's it."
+
+"Well," said Jack thoughtfully and with a return of his annoyance, "he
+will find me at home when he calls." And P.D. knew that the reins were
+still held in listless hands as he turned down the side street toward the
+new ranch.
+
+Firio was feeling like an astrologer who had lost faith in his crystal
+ball. An interrogation had taken the place of his confident "_Si, si_"
+of desert understanding of the mind of his patron. Jack had broken camp
+with the precipitancy of one who was eager to be quit of the trail and
+back at the ranch; yet he gave his young trees only a passing glance
+before entering the house. He had not wanted coffee on the road, yet
+coffee served with the crisp odor of bacon accompanying its aroma, after
+his bath and return to ranch clothes, found no appetite. He was as a man
+whose mind cannot hold fast to anything that he is doing. Firio,
+restless, worried, his eyes flicking covert glances, was frequently in
+and out of the living-room on one excuse or another.
+
+"What work to-day?" he asked, as he cleared away the breakfast dishes.
+"What has Senor Jack planned for us to do?"
+
+"The work to-day? The work to-day?" Jack repeated absently. "First the
+mail." He nodded toward a pile on the table.
+
+"And I shall make ready to stay a long time?" Firio insinuated softly.
+
+"No!" Jack answered to space.
+
+The pyramid of mail might have been a week's batch for the Doge himself.
+At the bottom were a number of books and above them magazines which Jack
+had subscribed for when he found that they were not on the Doge's list.
+There was only one letter as a first-class postage symbol of the exile's
+intimacy with the outside world, and out of this tumbled a check and a
+blank receipt to be filled in. He tore off the wrappers of the magazines
+as a means of some sort of physical occupation and rolled them into
+balls, which he cast at the waste-basket; but neither the contents of the
+magazines nor those of the newspapers seemed to interest him. His
+aspect was that of one waiting in a lobby to keep an appointment.
+
+When he heard steps on the porch he sang out cheerily, "Come in!" but,
+contrary to the habit of Little Rivers hospitality, he did not hasten to
+meet his caller, and any keenness of anticipation which he may have felt
+was well masked.
+
+There entered a man of middle age, with close-cropped gray beard, clad in
+soft flannels, the trousers bottoms turned up in New York fashion for
+negligee business suits for that spring. To the simple interior of a
+western ranch house he brought the atmosphere of complex civilization as
+a thing ineradicably bred into his being. It was evident, too, that he
+had been used to having his arrival in any room a moment of importance
+which summoned the rapt attention of everybody, whether nurses, fellow
+physicians, or the members of the patient's family. But this time that
+was lacking. The young man leaning against the table was not visibly
+impressed.
+
+"Hello, doctor!" said Jack, as unconcernedly as he would have passed the
+time of day with Jim Galway in the street.
+
+"Hello, Jack!" said the doctor.
+
+Jack went just half-way across the room to shake hands. Then he dropped
+back to his easy position, with the table as a rest, after he had set a
+chair for the visitor.
+
+"How do you like Little Rivers?" Jack asked.
+
+"I have been here only thirty-six hours," answered the doctor, avoiding a
+direct answer. He was pulling off his silk summer gloves, making the
+operation a trifle elaborate, one which seemed to require much
+attention. "I came pretty near mistaking another man for you, but his
+mole patch saved me. I didn't think you could have grown one out here.
+Wonderfully like you! Have you met him?"
+
+He glanced up as he asked this question, which seemed the first to occur
+to him as a warming-up topic of conversation before he came to the
+business in hand.
+
+"No. I have just heard of him," Jack answered.
+
+The doctor smiled at his gloves, which he now folded and put in his
+pocket. Don't the lecturers to young medical students say, "Divert your
+patient's mind to some topic other than himself as you get your first
+impression"? Now Dr. Bennington drew forward in his chair, rested the
+tips of the long fingers of a soft, capable hand on the edge of the
+table, and looked up to Jack in professional candor, sweeping him with
+the knowing eye of the modern confessor of the secrets of all manner of
+mankind. With the other hand he drew a stethoscope from his side
+coat-pocket.
+
+"Well, Jack, you can guess what brought me all the way from New
+York--just five minutes' work!" and he gave the symbol of examination a
+flourish in emphasis.
+
+"I don't think I have forgotten the etiquette of the patient on
+such occasions," Jack returned. "It is an easy function in this
+Arizona climate."
+
+He drew his shirt up from a compact loin and lean middle, revealing the
+arch of his deep chest, the flesh of which was healthy pink under neck
+and face plated with Indian tan. The doctor's eyes lighted with the bliss
+of a critic used to searching for flaws at sight of a masterpiece. While
+he conducted the initial plottings with the rubber cup which carried
+sounds to one of the most expensive senses of hearing in America, Jack
+was gazing out of the window, as if his mind were far away across the
+cactus-spotted levels.
+
+"Breathe deep!" commanded the doctor.
+
+Jack's nostrils quivered with the indrawing of a great gust of air and
+his diaphragm swelled until his ribs were like taut bowstrings.
+
+"And you were the pasty-faced weakling that left my office five years
+ago--and you, you husky giant, have brought me two thousand miles to see
+if you were really convalescent!"
+
+"I hope the trip will do you good!" said Jack, sweetly.
+
+"But it is great news that I take back, great news!" said the doctor, as
+he put the stethoscope in his pocket.
+
+"Yes?" returned Jack, slipping his head through his shirt. "You don't
+find even a speck?"
+
+"Not a speck! No sign of the lesion! There is no reason why you should
+not have gone home long ago."
+
+"No?" Jack was fastening his string tie and doing this with something of
+the urban nicety with which the doctor had folded his gloves. That tie
+was one of the few inheritances from complex civilization which still had
+Jack's favor.
+
+"What have you found to do all these years?"
+
+Jack was surprised at the question.
+
+"I have just wandered about and read and thought," he explained.
+
+"Without developing any sense of responsibility?" demanded the doctor in
+exasperation.
+
+"I have tried to be good to my horses, and of late I have taken to
+ranching. There is a lot of responsibility in that and care, too. Take
+the scale, for instance!"
+
+"A confounded little ranch out in this God-forsaken place, that a Swede
+immigrant might run!"
+
+"No, the Swedes aren't particularly good at irrigation, though better
+than the Dutch. You see, the Hollanders are used to having so much
+water that--"
+
+Jack was leaning idly against the table again. The fashionable
+practitioner, accustomed to having his words accepted at their cost price
+in gold, broke in hotly:
+
+"It is past all understanding! You, the heir to twenty millions!"
+
+"Is it twenty now?" Jack asked softly and sadly.
+
+"Nearer thirty, probably! And shirking your duty! Shirking and for
+what--for what?"
+
+Jack faced around. The doctor, meeting a calm eye that was quizzically
+challenging, paused abruptly, feeling that in some way he had been caught
+at a professional disadvantage in his outburst of emotion.
+
+"Don't you like Little Rivers?" asked Jack.
+
+"I should be bored to death!" the doctor admitted, honestly.
+
+"Well, you see this air never healed a lesion for you! You never
+uttered a prayer to it for strength with every breath! And, doctor,"
+Jack hesitated, while his lips were half open, showing his even teeth
+slightly apart in the manner of a break in a story to the children
+where he expected them to be very attentive to what was coming, "you
+can take a piece of tissue and analyze it, yes, a piece of brain tissue
+and find all the blood-vessels, but not what a man was thinking, can
+you? Until you can take a precipitate of his thoughts--the very
+thoughts he is unconscious of himself--and put them under a microscope,
+why, there must be a lot of guesswork about the source of all
+unconventional human actions."
+
+Jack laughed over his invasion of psychology; and when he laughed in a
+certain way the impulse to join him was strong, as Mary first found on
+the pass. So the doctor laughed, partly in relief, perhaps, that this
+uncertain element which he was finding in Jack had not yet proved
+explosive.
+
+"That would make a capital excuse for a student flunking in
+examinations!" he said.
+
+"It might be a worthy one--not that I say it ought to pass him."
+
+"Now, Jack," the doctor began afresh, the reassuring force of his
+personality again in play.
+
+He took a step and raised his hands as if he would put them on Jack's
+shoulders. One could imagine him driving hypochondria out of many a
+patient's mind by thus making his own vigorous optimism flow down from
+his fingertips, while he looked into the patient's eye. But his hands
+remained in the air, though Jack had been only smiling at him. This was
+not the way to handle this patient, something told his trained, sensitive
+instinct in time, and he let his hands fall in semblance of a gesture of
+protest, gave a shrug and came directly to the point very genuinely.
+
+"Well, Jack--your father!"
+
+"Yes." And Jack's face was still and blank, while shadows played over
+it in a war among themselves. "He did not even tell me you were
+coming," he added.
+
+"Perhaps he feared that it would give you time to develop a cough or you
+would start overland to Chihuahua so I should miss you. Jack, he needs
+you! All that fortune waits for you!"
+
+"Now that I am strong, yes! He did not come out to see me even during
+the first year when I had not the health to go to him, nor did he think
+to come with you."
+
+"He--he is a very busy man!" explained the doctor, in ready championship.
+And yet he looked away from Jack, and when he looked back it was with an
+appeal to conscience rather than to filial affection. "Is it right to
+remain, however much you like this desert life? Have you any excuse?"
+
+"Yes, an overwhelming one!" exclaimed Jack in a voice that was
+high-pitched and determined, while his eyes burned and no trace of humor
+remained on lips that were as firm as the outline of his chin. "Yes, one
+that thrills me from head to foot with the steady ardor of the soldier
+who makes a siege!"
+
+"I--I--you are beyond me! Then you will stay? You are not coming home?"
+
+"Yes," Jack answered, in another mood, but one equally rigid. "I am
+coming at once. That was all settled last night under the stars. I have
+found the courage!"
+
+"The courage to go to twenty millions!" gasped the doctor. "But--good!
+You will go! That is enough! Why shouldn't we take the same train back?"
+he went on enthusiastically. "I shall be coming through here in less than
+a week. You see, I am so near California that I simply had to steal a few
+days with my sister, who can't come East on account of her health. I have
+been so tied down to practice that I have not seen her for fifteen years.
+That will give you time to arrange your affairs. How about it?"
+
+"It would be delightful, but--" Jack was hesitating. "No, I will refuse.
+You see, I rode horseback when I entered this valley for the first time
+and I should like to ride out in the way I came. Just sentiment!"
+
+"Jack!" exclaimed the doctor.
+
+He was casting about how to express his suspicion when something electric
+checked him--a current that began in Jack's measured glance. Jack was not
+mentioning that his word was being questioned, but something still and
+effective that came from far away out on the untrod desert was in the
+room. It fell on the nerves of the ambassador from the court of complex
+civilization like a sudden hush on a city's traffic. Jack broke the
+silence by asking, in a tone of lively hospitality:
+
+"You will join me at luncheon?"
+
+"I should like to," answered the doctor, "but I can catch a train on the
+other trunk line that will give me a few more hours with my sister. And
+what shall I wire your father? Have you any suggestion?"
+
+"Why, that he will be able to judge for himself in a few days how near
+cured I am."
+
+"You will wire him the date of your arrival?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Jack," said the doctor at the door, "that remark of yours about the
+analysis of brain tissue and of thought put a truth very happily. Come
+and see me and let me know how you get on. Good-by!"
+
+He took his departure thoughtfully, rather than with a sense of
+triumph over the success of a two-thousand-mile mission in the name of
+twenty millions.
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+"GOOD-BY, LITTLE RIVERS!"
+
+
+It was the thing thrilling him with the ardor of a soldier preparing for
+a siege that sent Jack to the Ewolds' later in the morning. He had come
+determined to finish the speech that he had called up to Mary from the
+canyon. As he crossed the cement bridge, Ignacio appeared on the path and
+took his position there obdurately, instead of standing to one side with
+a nod, as usual, to let the caller pass.
+
+"Senorita Ewold is not at home!" he announced, before Jack had spoken.
+
+"Not even in the garden?"
+
+"No, senor."
+
+"But she will be back soon?"
+
+"I do not think so."
+
+Ignacio's face was as blank as a wall, but knowingly, authoritatively
+blank. His brown eyes glistened with cold assurance. He seemed to have
+become the interpreter of a message in keeping with Mary's flight from
+the pass and her withdrawal from the porch when she had seen Jack
+approaching. Here was a new barrier which did not permit even banter
+across the crest. She must know that he was going, for the news of his
+approaching departure had already spread through the town. She had chosen
+not to see him again, even for a farewell.
+
+For a little time he stood in thought, while Ignacio remained steadfast
+on the path, watchful, perhaps, for the devil in Senor Don't Care to
+appear. Suddenly Jack's features glowed with action; he took a step as if
+he would sweep by Ignacio on into the garden. But the impulse instantly
+passed. He stopped, his face drawn as it had been when he fell limp
+against the hedge stricken by the horror of his seeming brutality to
+Pedro Nogales, and turned away into the street with a mask of smiles for
+the greetings and regrets of the friends whom he met.
+
+Worth twenty millions or twenty cents, he was still Jack to Little
+Rivers; still the knight who had come over the range to vanquish Pete
+Leddy; still a fellow-rancher in the full freemasonry of calloused
+hands; still the joyous teller of stories. The thought of losing him set
+tendrils in the ranchers' hearts twitching in sympathy with tendrils in
+his own, which he found rooted very deep now that he must tear them out.
+
+That afternoon at the appointed hour for his departure every man, woman,
+and child had assembled at the end of the main street, where it broke
+into the desert trail. The principal found an excuse for dismissing
+school an hour earlier than usual. That is, everyone was present except
+Mary. The Doge came, if a little late, to fulfil his function as chosen
+spokesman for all in bidding Jack Godspeed on his journey.
+
+"Senor Don't Care, you are a part of the history of Little Rivers!" he
+said, airily. "You have brought us something which we lacked in our
+singularly peaceful beginning. Without romance, sir, no community is
+complete. I have found you a felicitous disputant whom I shall miss; for
+you leave me to provide the arguments on both sides of a subject on the
+same evening. Our people have found you a neighbor of infinite resources
+of humor and cheer. We wish you a pleasant trail. We wish you warm
+sunshine when the weather is chill and shade when the weather is hot, and
+that you shall ever travel with a singing heart, while old age never
+overtakes the fancy of youth."
+
+Every one of the familiar faces grouped around the fine, cultured old
+face of the Doge expressed the thoughts to which he had given form.
+
+"May your arguments be as thick as fireflies, O Doge!" Jack answered,
+"everyone bearing a torch to illumine the outer darkness of ignorance!
+May every happy thought I have for Little Rivers spring up in a
+date-tree wonderful! Then, before the year is out, you will have a
+forest of date-trees stretching from foothills to foothills, across the
+whole valley."
+
+"And one more about the giant with the little voice and the dwarf with
+the big voice and the cat with the stripes down her back!" cried Belvy
+Smith, spokeswoman for the children. "Are they just going on forever
+having adventures and us never knowing about them?"
+
+"No. I have been holding back the last story," Jack said. "Both the giant
+and the dwarf were getting old, as you all know, and they were pretty
+badly battered up from their continual warfare. Why, the scar which the
+giant got on his forehead in their last battle was so big that if the
+dwarf had had it there would have been no top left to his head. After the
+cat had lost that precious black tip to her tail she became more and more
+thoughtful. She made up her mind to retire and reform and have a
+permanent home. And you know what a gift she had for planning out things
+and how clever she was about getting her own way. Now she sat in a hedge
+corner thinking and thinking and looking at the stubby end of her tail,
+and suddenly she cried, 'Eureka!' And what do you think she did? She went
+to a paint shop and had her left ear painted yellow and her right ear
+painted green. So, now you can see her any day sunning herself on the
+steps of the cottage where the giant and the dwarf live in peace.
+Whenever they have an inclination to quarrel she jumps between them and
+wiggles the yellow ear at the giant and the green ear at the dwarf, which
+fusses them both so that they promise to be good and rush off to get her
+a saucer of milk."
+
+"A green ear and a yellow ear! What a funny looking cat she must be!"
+exclaimed Belvy.
+
+"So she says to herself between purrs," concluded Jack. "But she is a
+philosopher and knows that she would look still funnier if she had lost
+her ears as Jag Ear has. Good-by, children! Good-by, everybody! Good-by,
+Little Rivers!"
+
+Jack gave P.D. a signal and the crowd broke into a cheer, which was
+punctuated by the music of Jag Ear's bells as his burrohood got in
+motion. The Doge, who had brought his horse, mounted.
+
+"I will ride a little distance with you," he said.
+
+He appeared like a man who had a great deal on his mind and yet was at a
+loss for words. There was the unprecedented situation of silence between
+the two exponents of persiflage in Little Rivers.
+
+"I--" he began, and paused as if the subject were too big for him and it
+were better not to begin at all. Then he drew rein.
+
+"Luck, Jack!" he said, simply, and there was something like pity
+in his tone.
+
+"And Mary--you will say good-by to her and thank her!" said Jack.
+
+"I think you may meet her," answered the Doge. "She went away early
+taking her luncheon, before she knew that you were going."
+
+So Ignacio had been acting on his own authority! The thrill of the news
+singing in Jack's veins was too overwhelming for him to notice the
+challenge and apprehension in the Doge's glance. The Doge saw the glow of
+a thousand happy, eager thoughts in Jack's face. He hesitated again on
+the brink of speech, before, with a toss of his leonine head as if he
+were veritably leaving fate's affairs to fate, he turned to go; and Jack
+mechanically touched P.D.'s rein, while he gazed toward the pass. P.D.
+had not gone many steps when Jack heard the same sonorous call that had
+greeted him that first night when he stopped before the door of the
+Ewolds; the call of a great, infectious fellowship between men:
+
+"Luck, Sir Chaps! I defy you to wear your spurs up the Avenue! Give my
+love to that new Campanile in Babylon, the Metropolitan tower! Get it in
+the mist! Get it under the sun! Kiss your hand to golden Diana, huntress
+of Manhattan's winds! Say ahoy to old Farragut! And on gray days have a
+look for me at the new Sorollas in the Museum! Luck, Sir Chaps!"
+
+"Good crops and a generous mail, O Doge!"
+
+Jack rode fast, in the gladness of a hope this side of the pass and in
+the face of shadows on the other side which he did not attempt to define.
+To Firio he seemed to have grown taller and older.
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+"LUCK, JACK, LUCK!"
+
+
+Apprehensively he watched the end of the ribbon running under P.D.'s
+hoofs for the sight of a horsewoman breaking free of the foothills. The
+momentary fear which rode with him was that Mary might be returning
+earlier than usual. If they met on the road--why, the road was without
+imagination and, in keeping with her new attitude toward him, she might
+pass him by with a nod. But at the top of the pass imagination would be
+supreme. There they had first met; there they had found their first
+thought in common in the ozone which had meant life to them both.
+
+He did not look up at the sky changes. As he climbed the winding path
+worn by moccasined feet before the Persians marched to Thermopylae, his
+mind was too occupied making pictures of its own in glowing anticipation
+to have any interest in outside pictures. This path was narrow. Here, at
+least, she must pause; and she must listen. Every turn which showed
+another empty stretch ahead sent his spirits soaring. Then he saw a pony
+with an empty side-saddle on the shelf. A few steps more and he saw Mary.
+
+She was seated with the defile at her back, her hands clasped over her
+knee. In this position, as in every position which she naturally took,
+she had a pliant and personal grace. The welter of light of the low sun
+was ablaze in her face. Her profile had a luminous wistfulness. Her
+lashes were half closed, at once retaining the vision of the panorama at
+her feet as a thing of atmospheric enjoyment and shutting it out from the
+intimacy of her thoughts. And more enveloping than the light was the
+silence which held her in a spell as still as the rocks themselves,
+waiting on time's dispensation where time was nothing. Yet the soft
+movement of her bosom with her even breaths triumphed in a life supreme
+and palpitant over all that dead world.
+
+Thus he drank her in before the crunch of a stone under his heel warned
+her of his presence and set her breaths going and coming in quick gusts
+as she wheeled around, half rising and then dropping back to a position
+as still as before, with a trace of new dignity in her grace, while her
+starkness of inquiry gradually changed to stoicism.
+
+"Mary, I came upon you very suddenly," he said.
+
+"Yes"--a bare, echoing monosyllable.
+
+He stepped to one side to let Firio and his little cavalcade pass. All
+the while she continued to look at him through the screen of her
+half-closed lashes in a way that set her repose and charm apart as
+something precious and cold and baffling. Now he realized that he had
+made a breach in the barrier of their old relations only to find himself
+in a garden whose flowers fell to ashes at his touch. He saw the light
+that enveloped her as an armor far less vulnerable than any wall, and the
+splendor of her was growing in his eyes.
+
+Jag Ear's bells with their warm and merry notes became a faint tinkle
+that was lost in the depths of the defile. The two were alone on the spot
+where the Eternal Painter had introduced them so simply as Jack and
+Mary, and where he, as the easy traveller, had listened to her plead for
+his own life. It was his turn to plead. She was not to be won by fighting
+Leddys or tearing up pine-trees by their roots. That armor was without a
+joint; a lance would bend like so much tin against its plates, and yet
+there must be some alchemy that would make it melt as a mist before the
+sun. It was tenanted by a being all sentiency, which saw him through her
+visor as a passer-by in a gallery. But one in armor does not fly from
+passers-by as she had flown while he was climbing up the canyon wall with
+his pine-tree branch.
+
+"I have learned now to look over any kind of a precipice without getting
+dizzy," she announced, quietly.
+
+He was not the Jack who had come over the ledge in the energy of his
+passion yesterday to find her gone. He had turned gentle and was smiling
+with craved permission for a respite from her evident severity as he
+dropped to a half-lying posture near her. Overhead, the Eternal Painter
+was throwing in the smoky purple of a false thunderhead, sweeping it away
+with the promise of a downpour, rolling in piles of silver clouds and
+drawing them out into filmy fingers melting into a luminous blue.
+
+"One can never tire of this," he said, tentatively.
+
+"To me it is all!" she answered, in an absorption with the scene that
+made him as inconsequential as the rocks around her.
+
+"And you never long for cities, with their swift currents and busy
+eddies?" he asked.
+
+"Cities are life, the life of humanity, and I am human. I--" The
+unfinished sentence sank into the silence of things inexpressible or
+which it was purposeless to express.
+
+Her voice suggested the tinkle of Jag Ear's bells floating away into
+space. If a precipitate were taken from her forehead, in keeping with
+Jack's suggestion to Dr. Bennington, it would have been mercury, which is
+so tangible to the eye and intangible to the touch. Press it and it
+breaks into little globules, only to be shaken together in a coherent
+whole. If there is joy or pain in the breaking, either one must be
+glittering and immeasurable.
+
+"But Little Rivers is best," she added after a time, speaking not to him,
+but devoutly to the oasis of green.
+
+In the crystal air Little Rivers seemed so near that one could touch the
+roofs of the houses with the fingertips of an extended arm, and yet so
+diminutive in the spacious bosom of the plateau that it might be set in
+the palm of the hand.
+
+Jack was as one afraid of his own power of speech. A misplaced word might
+send her away as oblivious of him as a globule of mercury rolling free
+from the grasp. Here was a Mary unfathomed of all his hazards of study,
+undreamed of in all his flights of fancy.
+
+"It is my last view," he began. "I have said all my good-bys in town. I
+am going."
+
+Covertly, fearfully, he watched the effect of the news. At least now
+she would look around at him. He would no longer have to talk to a
+profile and to the golden mist of the horizon about the greatest thing
+of his life. But there was no sign of surprise; not even an inclination
+of her head.
+
+"Yes," she told the horizon; and after a little silence added: "The time
+has come to play another part?"
+
+She asked the question of the horizon, without any trace of the old
+banter over the wall. She asked it in confirmation of a commonplace.
+
+"I know that you have always thought of me as playing a part. But I am
+not my own master. I must go. I--"
+
+"Back to your millions!" She finished the sentence for him.
+
+"Then you--you knew! You knew!" But his exclamation of astonishment did
+not move her to a glance in his direction or even a tremor.
+
+"Yes," she went on. "Father told me about your millions last night. He
+has known from the first who you were."
+
+"And he told no one else in Little Rivers? He never mentioned it to me or
+even to you before!"
+
+"Why should he when you did not mention it yourself? His omission was
+natural delicacy, in keeping with your own attitude. Isn't it part of the
+custom of Little Rivers that pasts melt into the desert? There is no
+standard except the conduct of the present!"
+
+And all this speech was in a monotone of quiet explanation.
+
+"He did not even tell you until last night! Until after our meeting on
+the other side of the pass! It is strange! strange!" he repeated in the
+insistence of wonder.
+
+He saw the lashes part a little, then quiver and close as she lifted
+her gaze from the horizon rim to the vortex of the sun. Then she
+smiled wearily.
+
+"He likes a joke," she said. "Probably he enjoyed his knowledge of your
+secret and wanted to see if I would guess the truth before you were
+through playing your part."
+
+"But the part was not a part!" he said, with the emphasis of fire
+creeping along a fuse. "It was real. I do not want to leave Little
+Rivers!"
+
+"Not in your present enthusiasm," she returned with a warning inflection
+of literalness, when he would have welcomed satire, anger, or any
+reprisal of words as something live and warm; something on which his mind
+could lay definite hold.
+
+In her impersonal calm she was subjecting him to an exquisite torture. He
+was a man flayed past all endurance, flayed by a love that fed on the
+revelation of a mystery in her being superbly in control. The riot of all
+the colors of the sky spoke from his eyes as he sprang to his feet. He
+became as intense as in the supreme moment in the _arroyo_; as reckless
+as when he walked across the store toward a gun-muzzle. Only hers were
+this time the set, still features. His were lighted with all the strength
+of him and all the faith of him.
+
+"A part!" he cried. "Yes, a part--a sovereign and true part which I shall
+ever play! I was going that day we first met, going before the legate of
+the millions came to me. Why did I stay? Because I could not go when I
+saw that you wanted to turn me out of the garden!"
+
+His quivering words were spoken to a profile of bronze, over which
+flickered a smile as she answered with a prompting and disinterested
+analysis.
+
+"You said it was to make callouses on your hands. But that must have been
+persiflage. The truth is that you imagined a challenger. You wanted to
+win a victory!" she answered.
+
+"It was for you that I calloused my hands!"
+
+"Time will make them soft!"
+
+She was half teasing now, but teasing through the visor, not over the
+wall.
+
+"And if I sought victory I saw that I was being beaten while I made a
+profession of you, not of gardening! Yes, of you! I could confess it to
+all the world and its ridicule!"
+
+"Jack, you are dramatic!"
+
+If she would only once look at him! If he could only speak into her eyes!
+If her breaths did not come and go so regularly!
+
+"Why did I take to the trail after Pedro Nogales struck at me with his
+knife? Because I saw the look on your face when you saw that I had broken
+his arm. I had not meant to break his arm--yet I know that I might have
+done worse but for you! I did not mean to kill Leddy--yet there was
+something in me which might have killed him but for you!"
+
+"I am glad to have prevented murder!" she answered almost harshly.
+
+A shadow of horror, as if in recollection of the scene in the _arroyo_
+and beside the hedge, passed over her face.
+
+"Yes, I understand! I understand!" he said. "And you must hear why this
+terrible impulse rose in me."
+
+"I know."
+
+"You know? You know?" he repeated.
+
+"About the millions," she corrected herself, hastily. "Go on, Jack, if
+you wish!" Urgency crept into her tone, the urgency of wishing to have
+done with a scene which she was bearing with the fortitude of
+tightened nerves.
+
+"It was the millions that sent me out here with a message, when I did
+not much care about anything, and their message was: 'We do not want to
+see you again if you are to be forever a weakling. Get strong, for our
+power is to the strong! Get strong, or do not come back!'"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+For the first time since he had begun his story she looked fairly at him.
+It was as if the armor had melted with sympathy and pity and she, in the
+pride of the poverty of Little Rivers, was armed with a Samaritan
+kindliness. For a second only he saw her thus, before she looked away to
+the horizon and he saw that she was again in armor.
+
+"And I craved strength! It was my one way to make good. I rode the
+solitudes, following the seasons, getting strength. I rejoiced in the tan
+of my arm and the movement of my own muscles. I learned to love the feel
+of a rifle-stock against my shoulder, the touch of the trigger to my
+finger's end. I would shoot at the cactus in the moonlight--oh, that is
+difficult, shooting by moonlight!--and I gloried in my increasing
+accuracy--I, the weakling of libraries and galleries and sunny verandas
+of tourist resorts! Afraid at first of a precipice's edge, I came to
+enjoy looking over into abysses and in spending a whole day climbing down
+into their depths, while Firio waited in camp. And at times I would cry
+out: 'Millions, I am strong! I am not afraid of you! I am not afraid of
+anything!' In the days when I knew I could never be acceptable as their
+master I knew I was in no danger of ever having to face them. When I had
+grown strong, less than ever did I want to face them. I know not why, but
+I saw shadows; I looked into another kind of depths--mental
+depths--which held a message that I feared. So I procrastinated, staying
+on in the air which had given me red blood. But that was cowardly, and
+that day I came over the pass I was making my last ride in the kingdom of
+irresponsibility. I was going home!
+
+"When you asked me not to face Leddy I simply had to refuse. I had just
+as soon as not that Leddy would shoot at me, because I wanted to see if
+he would. Yes, I was strong. I had conquered. And if Leddy hit me, why, I
+did not have to go back to battle with the shadows--the obsession of
+shadows which had grown in my mind as my strength grew. When I was
+smiling in Leddy's muzzle, as they say I did, I was just smiling
+exultantly at the millions that had called me a weakling, and saying,
+like some boaster, 'Could you do this, millions?' I--I--well, Mary, I--I
+have told you what I never was quite able to tell myself before."
+
+"Thank you, Jack!" she answered, and all the particles of sunlight that
+bathed her seemed to reflect her quiet gladness as something detached,
+permeating, and transcendent.
+
+"When Leddy challenged me I wanted to fight," he went on. "I wanted to
+see how cool I, the weakling whom the millions scorned, could be in
+battle. After Leddy's shot in the _arroyo_ I found that strength had
+discovered something else in me--something that had lain dormant in
+boyhood and had not awakened to any consciousness of itself in the five
+years on the desert--something of which all my boyhood training made me
+no less afraid than of the shadows, born of the blood, born of the very
+strength I had won. It seemed to run counter to books and gardens and
+peace itself--a lawless, devil-like creature! Yes, I gloried in the fact
+that I could kill Leddy. It was an intoxication to hold a steady bead on
+him. And you saw and felt that in me--yes, I tell you everything as a man
+must when he comes to a woman offering himself, his all, with his angels,
+his devils, and his dreams!"
+
+He paused trembling, as before a judge. She turned quickly, with a
+sudden, winsome vivacity, the glow of a great satisfaction in her eyes
+and smiling a comradeship which made her old attitude over the wall a
+thing of dross and yet far more intimate. Her hand went out to meet his.
+
+"Jack, we have had good times together," she said. "We were never
+mawkish; we were just good citizens of Little Rivers, weren't we? And,
+Jack, every mortal of us is partly what he is born and the rest is what
+he can do to bend inheritance to his will. But we can never quite
+transform our inheritance and if we stifle it, some day it will break
+loose. The first thing is to face what seems born in us, and you have
+made a good beginning."
+
+She gave his hands a nervous, earnest clasp and withdrew hers as she
+rose. So they stood facing each other, she in the panoply of good will,
+he with his heart on his sleeve. The swiftly changing pictures of the
+Eternal Painter in his evening orgy seemed to fill the air with the music
+of a symphony in its last measures, and her very breaths and smiles to be
+keeping time with its irresistible movement toward the finale.
+
+"I must be starting back, Jack," she said.
+
+"And, Mary, I must learn how to master the millions. Oh, I have not the
+courage of the little dwarf pine in the canyon! Mary, Mary, I calloused
+my hands for you! I want to master the millions for you! I would give you
+the freedom of Little Rivers and all the cities of the world!"
+
+"No, Jack! This is my side of the pass. I shall be very happy here."
+
+"Then I will stay in Little Rivers! I will leave the millions to the
+shadows! I will stay on ranch-making, fortune-making. Mary, I love you! I
+love you!"
+
+There was no staying the flame of his feeling. He seized her hands; he
+drew her to him. But her hands were cold; they were shivering.
+
+"Jack! No, no! It is not in the blood!" she cried in the face of some
+mocking phantom, her calmness gone and her words rocking with the tumult
+of emotion.
+
+"In the blood, Mary? What do you mean? What do you know that I don't
+know? Do you know those shadows that I cannot understand better than
+I?" he pleaded; and he was thinking of the Doge's look of pity and
+challenge and of the meeting long ago in Florence as the hazy filaments
+of a mystery.
+
+"No, I should not have said that. What do I know? Little--nothing that
+will help! I know what is in me, as I know what is in you. I am afraid of
+myself--afraid of you!"
+
+"Mary, I will fight all the shadows!" He drew her close to him
+resistlessly in his might.
+
+"Jack, you will not use your strength against me! Jack!"
+
+He saw her eyes in a mist of pain and reproach as he released her. And
+now she threw back her head; she was smiling in the philosophy of garden
+nonsense as she cried:
+
+"Good-by, Jack! Luck against the dinosaur! Don't press him too hard
+when he is turning a sharp corner. Remember he has a long reach with
+his old paleozoic tail. Luck!" with a laugh through her tears; a laugh
+with tremulous cheer in it and yet with the ring of a key in the lock
+of a gate.
+
+Unsteadily he bent over and taking her hands in his pressed his
+lips to them.
+
+"Yes, luck!" he repeated, and half staggering turned toward the defile.
+
+"Luck!" she called after him when he was out of sight. "Luck!" she called
+to the silence of the pass.
+
+Three days with the trail and the Eternal Painter mocking him, when the
+singing of Spanish verses that go click with the beat of horse-hoofs in
+the sand sounded hollow as the refrain of vain memories, and from the
+steps of a Pullman he had a final glimpse of Firio's mournful face, with
+its dark eyes shining in the light of the station lamp. Firio had in his
+hand a paper, a sort of will and testament given him at the last minute,
+which made him master in fee simple of the ranch where he had been
+servant, with the provision that the Doge of Little Rivers might store
+his overflow of books there forever.
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+HE FINDS HIMSELF
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+LABELLED AND SHIPPED
+
+
+Behold Jack clad in the habiliments of conventional civilization taken
+from the stock of ready-made suitings in an El Paso store! They were of
+the Moscowitz and Guggenheim type, the very latest and nattiest, as
+advertised in popular prints. The dealer said that no gentleman could be
+well dressed without them. He wanted to complete the transformation with
+a cream-colored Fedora or a brown derby.
+
+"I'll wait on the thirty-third degree a little longer," said Jack,
+fondling the flat-brimmed cowpuncher model of affectionate predilection.
+Swinging on a hook on the sleeper with the sway of the train, its company
+was soothing to him all the way across the continent.
+
+The time was March, that season of the northern year when winter growing
+stale has a gritty, sticky taste and the relief of spring seems yet far
+away. After the desert air the steam heat was stifling and nauseating.
+Jack's head was a barrel about to burst its hoops; his skin drying like a
+mummy's; his muscles in a starchy misery from lack of exercise. He felt
+boxed up, an express package labelled and shipped. When he crawled into
+his berth at night it was with a sense of giving himself up to
+asphyxiation at the whim of strange gods.
+
+If you have ever come back to town after six months in the woods, six
+months far from the hysteria of tittering electric bells, the brassy
+honk-honk of automobiles, the clang of surface cars and the screech of
+their wheels on the rails, multiply your period of absence by ten, add a
+certain amount of desert temperament, and you will vaguely understand how
+the red corpuscles were raising rebellion in Jack's artery walls on the
+morning of his journey's end. From the ferryboat on the dull-green bosom
+of the river he first renewed his memory of the spectral and forbidding
+abysses and pinnacles of New York. Here time is everything; here man has
+done his mightiest in contriving masses to imitate the architectural
+chaos of genesis. A mantle of chill, smoky mist formed the dome of
+heaven, in which a pale, suffused, yellowish spot alone bespoke the
+existence of a sun in the universe.
+
+In keeping with his promise to Dr. Bennington he had wired to his father,
+naming his train; and in a few minutes Wingfield, Sr. and Wingfield, Jr.
+would meet for the first time in five years. Jack was conscious of a
+faster beating of his heart and a feeling of awesome expectancy as the
+crowd debouched from the ferryboat. At the exit to the street a big
+limousine was waiting. The gilt initials on the door left no doubt for
+whom it had been sent. But there was no one to meet him, no one after his
+long absence except a chauffeur and a footman, who glanced at Jack
+sharply. After the exchange of a corroborative nod between them the
+footman advanced.
+
+"If you please, Mr. Wingfield," he said, taking Jack's suit case.
+
+"What would Jim Galway think of me now!" thought Jack. He put his head
+inside the car cautiously. "Another box!" he thought, this time aloud.
+
+"You have the check for it, sir?" asked the footman, thinking that Jack
+was using the English of the mother island for trunk.
+
+"No. That's all my baggage."
+
+In the tapering, cut-glass vase between the two front window-panels of
+the "box" was a rose--a symbol of the luxury of the twenty millions,
+evidently put there regularly every morning by direction of their master.
+Its freshness and color appealed to Jack. He took it out and pressed it
+to his nostrils.
+
+"Just needs the morning sun and the dew to be perfect," he said to the
+amazed attendants; "and I will walk if you will take the suit case to
+the house."
+
+He kept the rose, which he twirled in his fingers as he sauntered across
+town, now pausing at curb corners to glance back in thoughtful survey,
+now looking aloft at the peaks of Broadway which lay beyond the foothills
+of the river-front avenues.
+
+"All to me what the desert is to other folks!" he mused; "desert, without
+any cacti or mesquite! All the trails cross one another in a maze. A
+boxed-up desert--boxes and boxes piled on top of one another! Everybody
+in harness and attached by an invisible, unbreakable, inelastic leash to
+a box, whither he bears his honey or goes to nurse his broken wings!--so
+it seems to me and very headachy!"
+
+At Madison Square he was at the base of the range itself; and halting on
+the corner of Twenty-third Street and the Avenue he was a statue as aloof
+as the statue of Farragut from his surroundings. Salt sea spray ever
+whispers in the atmosphere around the old sailor. How St. Gaudens
+created it and keeps it there in the heart of New York is his secret.
+Possibly the sculptor put some of his soul into it as young Michael
+Angelo did into his young David.
+
+It is a great thing to put some of your soul into a thing, whether it is
+driving a nail or moulding a piece of clay into life. There are men who
+pause before the old Admiral and see the cutwater of men-of-war's bows
+and hear the singing of the signal halyards as they rise with the command
+to close in. Perhaps the Eternal Painter had put a little of his soul
+into the heart of Jack; for some busy marchers of the Avenue trail as
+they glanced at him saw the free desert and heard hoof-beats in the sand.
+Others seeing a tanned Westerner kissing his hand to Diana of Madison
+Square Garden probably thought him mad. Next, performing another
+sentimental errand for the Doge of Little Rivers, his gaze rose along the
+column of the Metropolitan tower. Its heights were half shrouded in mist,
+through which glowed the gold of the lantern.
+
+"Oh, bully! bully!" he thought. "The only sun in sight a manufactured
+one, shining on top of a manufactured mountain! It is a big business
+building a mountain; only, when God Almighty scattered so many ready-made
+ones about, why take the trouble?" he concluded. "Or so it seems to me,"
+he added, sadly, in due appreciation of the utterly reactionary mood of a
+man who has been boxed up for a week.
+
+Now he turned toward a quarter which he had, thus far, kept out of the
+compass of observation. He looked up the jagged range of Broadway where,
+over a terra-cotta pile, floated a crimson flag with "John Wingfield" in
+big, white letters.
+
+"My mountain! My box! My millions!" he breathed half audibly.
+
+How the people whom he passed, their faces speaking city keenness of
+ambition, must envy his position! How little reason they had to envy him,
+he thought, as he walked around the great building and saw his name
+glaring at him in gilt letters over the plate-glass windows and on all
+the delivery wagons, open-mouthed for the packages being wheeled out
+under the long glass awning.
+
+"A whole block now! Yes, the doctor was right. It must be thirty instead
+of twenty millions!" he concluded, as his vision swept the straight-line,
+window-checkered mass of the twelve stories. "And I do wish we had a
+tower! If one could go up on top of a tower and look out over the range
+now and then and breathe deep, it would help."
+
+When he entered the main door he paused in a maze, gazing at the acreage
+of counters manned by clerks and the aisles swarming with shoppers under
+the glare of the big, electric globes, and listening to the babble of
+shrill talk, the calls of the elevator boys, the coughing of the
+pneumatic tubes and the clang of the elevator doors. It was all like some
+devilishly complicated dream from which he would never awake. He must
+have a little time in order to orient himself before he could think
+rationally. The roar of the train still obsessed him; the air in the
+store seemed more stifling than that of the sleeper.
+
+So he decided that, rather than be shot up into The Presence by the
+elevator, he would gradually scale the heights. Ascending stairway after
+stairway, he ranged back and forth over the floors, a stranger in his
+own wonderland. When he reached the eleventh floor, with only one more to
+the offices, the whole atmosphere seemed suddenly to turn rare with
+expectancy; a rustle to run through all the goods on the counters; the
+very Paris gowns among which he was standing to be called to martial
+attention.
+
+"The boss!" he heard one of the model girls say.
+
+Turning to follow her nod toward the stairway, Jack saw, two-thirds of
+the way up the broad flight, a man past middle age, in dark gray suit and
+neutral tie, rubbing his palms together as he surveyed a stratum of his
+principality. The sight of him to Jack was like the touch of a myriad
+electric needles that pricked sharply, without exhilaration.
+
+"The boss is likely to run up that way any time of the day," said the
+model girl to a customer; "and what he don't see don't count!"
+
+"Not much older; not much changed!" thought Jack; and his realization of
+the disinterestedness of his observation tipped the needles with acid.
+
+In the sharpness of the master's button-counting survey there was swift
+finality; and his impressions completed, analyzed, docketed for
+reference, he ran on up the flight with light step, still rubbing the
+palms of his hands in the unctuously well-contained and appreciative
+sense of his power. To Jack he was a fascinating, grand, distant figure,
+this of his own father, yet mortally near.
+
+If the model girl had had the same keenness of observation for what is
+borne in the face as for what is worn on the back, she could not have
+failed to note the strong family resemblance between the young man
+standing near her and the man who had paused on the stairway. This
+glimpse of his father's mastery of every detail of that organization
+which he had built, this glimpse of cool, self-centered authority, only
+reminded Jack of his own ignorance and flightiness in view of all that
+would be expected of him. He knew less than one of the cash girls about
+how to run the store. A duel with Leddy was a simple matter beside this
+battle he had to wage.
+
+He mounted the last flight of stairs into an area of glass-paneled doors,
+behind which the creative business of the great concern was conducted.
+Out of one marked "Private," closing it softly and stepping softly, came
+a round-shouldered, stooping man of middle age, with the apprehensive and
+palliating manner of a long-service private secretary who has many things
+to remember and many persons to appease with explanations. It was evident
+that Peter Mortimer had just come from The Presence. At sight of Jack he
+drew back in a surprise that broke into a beaming delight which played
+over his tired and wrinkled features in ecstasy.
+
+"Jack! Jack! You did it! You did it!" he cried.
+
+"Peter!" Jack seized the secretary's hands and swung them back and forth.
+
+"You've got a grip of iron! And tanned--my, how you're tanned! You did
+it, Jack, you did it! It hardly seems credible, when I think of the last
+time I saw you."
+
+It was then that the secretary had seen a Jack with his eyes moist; a
+Jack pasty-faced, hollow-cheeked; and, in what was a revolutionary
+outburst for a unit in the offices, Peter Mortimer had put his arm around
+the boy in a cry for the success of the Odyssey for health which the
+heir was about to begin. And Mortimer's words were sweet, while the words
+of the farewell from the other side of the glass-paneled door marked
+"Private" were acrid with the disappointed hopes of the speaker.
+
+"You have always been a weakling, Jack, and I have had little to say
+about your rearing. Go out to the desert and stay--stay till you are
+strong!" declared the voice of strength, as if glad to be freed of the
+sight of weakness in its own image.
+
+"Father did not come to meet me?" Jack observed questioningly now
+to Mortimer.
+
+"He was very busy--he did not feel certain about the nature of your
+telegram--he--" and Mortimer's impulses withdrew into the shell of the
+professional private secretary.
+
+"I wired that he should see for himself if I were well. So he shall!"
+said Jack, turning toward the door.
+
+"Yes--that will be all right--yes, there is no one with him!"
+
+Mortimer, in the very instinct of long practice, was about to go in to
+announce the visitor, but paused. As Jack entered, whatever else may have
+been in his eyes, there was no moisture.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+IN THE CITADEL OF THE MILLIONS
+
+
+John Wingfield, Sr. sat at a mahogany table without a single drawer, in
+the centre of a large room with bare, green-tinted walls. His oculist had
+said that green was the best color for the eyes. Beside the green
+blotting-pad in front of him was a pile of papers. These would either be
+disposed of in the course of the day or, if any waited on the morrow's
+decision, would be taken away by Peter Mortimer overnight. When he rose
+to go home it was always with a clear desk; a habit, a belief of his
+singularly well-ordered mind in the mastery of the teeming detail that
+throbbed under the thin soles of his soft kid shoes. On the other side of
+the pad was the telephone, and beyond it the supreme implements of his
+will, a row of pearl-topped push-buttons.
+
+The story of John Wingfield, Sr.'s rise and career, as the lieutenants of
+the offices and the battalions of the shopping floors knew it, was not
+the story, perhaps, as Dr. Bennington or Peter Mortimer knew it; but,
+then, doctors and private secretaries are supposed to hold their secrets.
+There was little out of the commonplace in the world's accepted version.
+You may hear its like from the moneyed host at his dinner table in New
+York or as he shows you over the acres of his country estate, enthusing
+with a personal narrative of conquest which is to him unique. John
+Wingfield, Sr. makes history for us in the type of woman whom he
+married and the type of son she bore him.
+
+He was the son of a New England country clergyman, to whom working his
+way through college in order to practise a profession made no appeal.
+Birth and boyhood in poverty had taught him, from want of money, the
+power of money. He sought the centre of the market-place. At sixteen he
+was a clerk, marked by his industry not less than by his engaging
+manners, on six dollars a week in the little store that was the site of
+his present triumph. Of course he became a partner and then owner. It was
+his frequent remark, when he turned reminiscent, that if he could only
+get as good clerks as he was in his day he would soon have a monopoly of
+supplying New York and its environs with all it ate and wore and needed
+to furnish its houses; which raises the point that possibly such an
+equality of high standards in efficiency might make all clerks employers.
+
+The steady flame of his egoism was fanned with his Successes. Without
+real intimates or friends, he had an effective magnetism in making others
+do his bidding. It had hardly occurred to him that his discovery of the
+principle of never doing anything yourself that you can win others to do
+for you and never failing, when you have a minute to spare, to do a thing
+yourself when you can do it better than any assistant, was already a
+practice with leaders in trade and industry before the Pharaohs.
+
+Life had been to him a ladder which he ascended without any glances to
+right or left or at the rung that he had left behind. The adaptable
+processes of his mind kept pace with his rise. He made himself at home
+in each higher stratum of atmosphere. His marriage, delayed until he was
+forty and already a man of power, was still another upward step. Alice
+Jamison brought him capital and position. The world was puzzled why she
+should have accepted him; but this stroke of success he now considered as
+the vital error of a career which, otherwise, had been flawlessly
+planned. Yet he could flatter his egoism with the thought that it was
+less a fault of judgment than of the uncertainty of feminine temperament,
+which could not be measured by logic.
+
+New York saw little of Mrs. Wingfield after Jack's birth. Her friends
+knew her as a creature all life and light before her marriage; they
+realized that the life and light had passed out of her soon after the boy
+came; and thenceforth they saw and heard little of her. She had given
+herself up to the insistent possessorship and company of her son. Those
+who met her when travelling reported how frail she was and how
+constrained.
+
+Jack was fourteen when his mother died. He was brought home and sent to
+school in America; and two-years later Dr. Bennington announced that the
+slender youngster, who had been so completely estranged from the affairs
+of the store, must matriculate in the ozone of high altitudes instead of
+in college, if his life were to be saved. Whether Jack were riding over
+the _mesas_ of Arizona or playing in a villa garden in Florence, John
+Wingfield, Sr.'s outlook on life was the same. It was the obsession of
+self in his affairs. After the eclipse of his egoism the deluge. The very
+thought that anyone should succeed him was a shock reminding him of
+growing age in the midst of the full possession of his faculties, while
+he felt no diminution of his ambition.
+
+"I am getting better," came the occasional message from that stranger
+son. And the father kept on playing the tune of accruing millions on the
+push-buttons. His decision to send Dr. Bennington to Arizona came
+suddenly, just after he had turned sixty-three. He had had an attack of
+grip at the same time that his attention had been acutely called to the
+demoralization of another great business institution whose head had died
+without issue, leaving his affairs in the hands of trustees.
+
+Two days of confinement in his room with a high pulse had brought
+reflection and the development of atavism. What if the institution built
+as a monument to himself should also pass! What if the name of Wingfield,
+his name, should no longer float twelve stories high over his building!
+He foresaw the promise of companionship of a restless and ghastly
+apparition in the future.
+
+But he recovered rapidly from his illness and his mental processes were
+as keen and prehensile as ever. Checking off one against the other, with
+customary shrewdness, he had a number of doctors go over him, and all
+agreed that he was good for twenty years yet. Twenty years! Why, Jack
+would be middle-aged by that time! Twenty years was the difference
+between forty-three and sixty-three. Since he was forty-three he had
+quintupled his fortune. He would at least double it again. He was not
+old; he was young; he was an exceptional man who had taken good care of
+himself. The threescore and ten heresy could not apply to him.
+
+Bennington's telegram irritated him with its lack of precision. Fifteen
+hundred dollars and expenses to send an expert to Arizona and in
+return this unbusinesslike report: "You will see Jack for yourself. He
+is coming."
+
+In the full enjoyment of health, observing every nice rule for
+longevity, his slumber sweet, his appetite good, John Wingfield, Sr.
+had less interest in John Wingfield, Jr. than he had when his bones
+were aching with the grip. Jack's telegram from Chicago announcing the
+train by which he would arrive aroused an old resentment, which dated
+far back to Jack's childhood and to a frail woman who had been proof
+against her husband's will.
+
+Did this home-coming mean a son who could learn the business; a strong,
+shrewd, cool-headed son? A son who could be such an adjutant as only one
+who is of your own flesh and blood can be in the full pursuit of the same
+family interest as yourself? If Jack were well, would not Bennington have
+said so? Would he not have emphasized it? This was human nature as John
+Wingfield, Sr. knew it; human nature which never missed a chance to
+ingratiate itself by announcing success in the service of a man of power.
+
+The spirit of his farewell message to Jack, which said that strength
+might return but bade weakness to remain away, and the injured pride of
+seeing a presentment of wounded egoism in the features of a sickly boy,
+which had kept him from going to Arizona, were again dominant. Yet that
+morning he had a pressing sense of distraction. Even Mortimer noticed it
+as something unusual and amazing. He kept reverting to Jack's history
+between flashes of apprehension and he was angry with himself over his
+inability to concentrate his mind. Concentration was his god. He could
+turn from lace-buyer to floor-walker with the quickness of the swing of
+an electric switch. Concentrate and he was oblivious to everything but
+the subject in hand. He was in one of the moments of apprehension, half
+staring at the buttons on the desk rather than at the papers, when he
+heard the door open without warning and looked up to see a lean, sturdy
+height filling the doorway and the light from the window full on a
+bronzed and serene face.
+
+More than ever was Jack like David come over the hills in his incarnation
+of sleeping energy. Instead of a sling he carried the rose. Into the
+abode of the nicely governed rules of longevity came the atmosphere of
+some invasive spirit that would make the stake of life the foam on the
+crest of a charge in a splendid moment; the spirit of Senor Don't Care
+pausing inquiringly, almost apologetically, as some soldier in dusty
+khaki might if he had marched into a study unawares.
+
+Jack was waiting, waiting and smiling, for his father to speak. In a
+swift survey, his features transfixed at first with astonishment, then
+glowing with pride, the father half rose from his chair, as if in an
+impulse to embrace the prodigal. But he paused. He felt that something
+under his control was getting out of his control. He felt that he had
+been tricked. The boy must have been well for a long time. Yes! But he
+was well! That was the vital point. He was well, and magnificent in
+his vigor.
+
+The father made another movement; and still Jack was waiting, inquiring
+yet not advancing. And John Wingfield, Sr. wished that he had gone to
+the station; he wished that he had paid a visit to Arizona. This thought
+working in his mind supplied Jack's attitude with an aspect which made
+the father hesitate and then drop back into his chair, confused and
+uncertain for the first time in his own office.
+
+"Well, Jack, you--you surely do look cured!" he said awkwardly. "You see,
+I--I was a little surprised to see you at the office. I sent the
+limousine for you, thinking you would want to go straight to the house
+and wash off the dust of travel. Didn't you connect?"
+
+"Yes, thank you, father--and when you didn't meet me--"
+
+"I--I was very busy. I meant to, but something interrupted--I--" The
+father stopped, confounded by his own hesitation.
+
+"Of course," said Jack. He spoke deferentially, understandingly. "I know
+how busy you always are."
+
+Yet the tone was such to John Wingfield, Sr.'s ears that he eyed Jack
+cautiously, sharply, in the expectancy that almost any kind of
+undisciplined force might break loose from this muscular giant whom he
+was trying to reconcile with the Jack whom he had last seen.
+
+"I thought I'd stretch my legs, so I came over to the store to see how it
+had grown," said Jack. "I don't interrupt--for a moment?"
+
+He sat down on the chair opposite his father's and laid his faded
+cowpuncher hat and the rose on the desk. They looked odd in the company
+of the pushbuttons and the pile of papers in that neutral-toned room
+which was chilling in its monotony of color. And though Jack was almost
+boyishly penitent, in the manner of one who comes before parental
+authority after he has been in mischief, still John Wingfield, Sr.
+could not escape the dead weight of an impression that he was speaking to
+a stranger and not to his own flesh and blood. He wished now that he had
+shown affection on Jack's entrance. He had a desire to grip the brown
+hand that was on the edge of the desk fingering the rose stem; but the
+lateness of the demonstration, its futility in making up for his previous
+neglect, and some subtle influence radiating from Jack's person,
+restrained him. It was apparent that Jack might sit on in silence
+indefinitely; in a desert silence.
+
+"Well, Jack, I hear you had a ranch," said the father, with a faint
+effort at jocularity.
+
+"Yes, and a great crop of alfalfa," answered Jack, happily.
+
+"And it seems that all the time you were away you have never used your
+allowance, so it has just been piling up for you."
+
+"I didn't need it. I had quite sufficient from the income of my
+mother's estate."
+
+"Yes--your mother--I had forgotten!"
+
+"Naturally, I preferred to use that, when I was of so little service to
+you unless I got strong, as you said," Jack said, very quietly.
+
+Now came another silence, the silence of luminous, unsounded depths
+concealing that in the mind which has never been spoken or even taken
+form. Jack's garden of words had dried up, as his ranch would dry up for
+want of water. He rose to go, groping for something that should express
+proper contrition for wasted years, but it refused to come. He picked up
+the rose and the hat, while the father regarded him with stony wonder
+which said: "Are you mine, or are you not? What is the nature of this
+new strength? On what will it turn?"
+
+For Jack's features had set with a strange firmness and his eyes, looking
+into his father's, had a steady light. It seemed as if he might stalk out
+of the office forever, and nothing could stop him. But suddenly he
+flashed his smile; he had looked about searching for a talisman and found
+it in the rose, which set his garden of words abloom again.
+
+"This room is so bare it must be lonely for you," he said. "Wouldn't it
+be a good idea to cheer it up a bit? To have this rose in a vase on your
+table where you could see it, instead of riding about in an empty
+automobile box?"
+
+"Why, there is a whole cold storage booth full of them down on the first
+floor!" said the father.
+
+"Yes, I saw them in their icy prison under the electric light bulbs. The
+beads of water on them were like tears of longing to get out for the joy
+of their swan song under a woman's smiles or beside a sick bed," said
+Jack, in the glow of real enthusiasm.
+
+"Good line for the ad writer!" his father exclaimed, instinctively. "You
+always did have fanciful ideas, Jack."
+
+"Yes, I suppose I have!" he said, with some surprise and very
+thoughtfully. "I suppose that I was born with them and never weeded
+them out."
+
+"No doubt!" and the father frowned.
+
+Surveying the broad shoulders before him, he was thinking how nothing but
+aimlessness and fantasies and everything out of harmony with the career
+to come had been encouraged in the son. But he saw soberness coming into
+Jack's eyes and with it the pressure of a certain resoluteness of
+purpose. And now Jack spoke again, a trifle sadly, as if guessing his
+father's thoughts.
+
+"It will be a case of weeding for me in the future, won't it?" he asked
+wanly, as he rose. "I am full of foolish ideas that are just bound to run
+away with me."
+
+"Jack! Jack!" John Wingfield, Sr. put his hands out to the shoulders
+of his son and gripped them strongly, and for a second let his own
+weight half rest on that sturdy column which he sensed under the grip.
+His pale face, the paleness of the type that never tans, flushed.
+"Jack, come!" he said.
+
+He permitted himself something like real dramatic feeling as he signalled
+his son to follow him out of the office and led the way to a corner of
+one of the balconies where, under the light from the glass roof of the
+great central court, he could see down the tiers of floors to the jewelry
+counter which sparkled at the bottom of the well.
+
+"Look! look!" he exclaimed, rubbing his palms together with a peculiar
+crisp sound. "All selling my goods! All built from the little store where
+I began as a clerk!"
+
+"It's--it's immense!" gasped Jack; and he felt a dizziness and confusion
+in gazing at this kind of an abyss.
+
+"And it's only beginning! It's to go on growing and growing! You see why
+I wanted you to be strong, Jack; why it would not do to be weak if you
+had all this responsibility."
+
+This was a form of apology for his farewell to Jack, but the message was
+the same: He had not wanted a son who should be of his life and heart and
+ever his in faults and illnesses. This was the recognizable one of the
+shadows between them now recalled. He had wanted a fresh physical machine
+into which he could blow the breath of his own masterful being and instil
+the cunning of his experience. He saw in this straight, clean-limbed
+youth at his side the hope of Jack's babyhood fulfilled, in the
+projection of his own ego as a living thing after he himself was gone.
+
+"And it is to go on growing and growing, in my name and your name--John
+Wingfield!"
+
+Jack was swallowing spasmodically; he moistened his lips; he grasped the
+balcony railing so tight that his knuckles were white knobs on the bronze
+back of his hand. The father in his enthusiasm hardly noticed this.
+
+"What couldn't I have done," he added, "if I had had all this to begin
+with! All that you will have to begin with!"
+
+Jack managed a smile, rather thin and wavering.
+
+"Yes, I am going to try my best."
+
+"All I ask! You have me for a teacher and I know one or two little
+things!" said the father, fairly grinning in the transmission of his
+joke. "Now, you must be short on clothes," he added; "so you can get
+something ready-made downstairs while you have some making at
+Thompson's."
+
+"Don't you buy your clothes, your best clothes, I mean, in your own
+store?" Jack asked. It was his first question in getting acquainted with
+his future property.
+
+"No. We cater to a little bigger class of trade--one of the many twists
+of the business," was the answer. "And now we'll meet at dinner, shall
+we, and have a good long talk," he concluded, closing the interview and
+turning to the door, his mind snapping back to the matter he was about to
+take up when he had been interrupted with more eagerness than ever, now
+that his egoism thrilled with a still greater purpose.
+
+"I--I left my hat on your desk," Jack explained, as he followed his
+father into the office.
+
+"Well, you don't want to be carrying packages about," said John
+Wingfield, Sr. "That is hardly the fashion in New York, though John
+Wingfield's son can make it so if he wants to. I'll have that
+flat-brimmed western one sent up to the house and you can fit out with
+another when you go downstairs for clothes. That is, I suppose you will
+want to keep this as a memento, eh?" and he held out the cowpuncher,
+sweeping it with a sardonic glance.
+
+"No," Jack answered decisively, out of the impulse that came with the
+sight of the veteran companion that had shielded him from the sun on
+the trail. It was good to have any kind of an impulse after his
+giddiness on the balcony at sight of all the phantasmagoria of detail
+that he must master.
+
+If he were to be equal to this future there must be an end of temptation.
+He must shake himself free of the last clinging bit of chrysalis of the
+old life. His amazed father saw the child of the desert, where convention
+is made by your fancy and the supply of water in your canteen, go to the
+window and raise the sash. Leaning out, he let the hat drop into
+Broadway, with his eyes just over the line of the ledge while he watched
+it fall, dipping and gliding, to the feet of a messenger boy, who picked
+it up, waved it gleefully aloft before putting it over his cap, and with
+mock strides of grandeur went his way.
+
+"That gave him a lot of pleasure--and a remarkably quick system for
+delivering goods, wasn't it?" said Jack, cheerfully.
+
+"Yes, I should say so!" assented his father, returning to his seat.
+"Dinner at seven!" he called before the door closed; and as his finger
+sought one of the push-buttons it rested for a moment on the metal edge
+of the socket, his head bowed, while an indefinable emotion, mixed of
+prophecy and recollection, must have fluttered through the routine
+channels of his vigorous mind.
+
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+"BUT WITH YOU, 'YES, SIR'"
+
+
+As Jack came out of the office, Mortimer appeared from an adjoining room
+in furtive, mouselike curiosity.
+
+"Not much damage done!" said Jack, in happy relief from the ordeal. "I am
+without a hat, but I have the rose." He held it up before Mortimer's
+worn, kindly face that had been so genuine in welcome. "Yes, I must have
+kept it to decorate you, Peter!"
+
+Ineffectually, in timorous confusion, the old secretary protested while
+Jack fastened it in his buttonhole.
+
+"And you are going to help me, aren't you, Peter?" Jack went on,
+seriously. "You are going to hold up a finger of warning when I get off
+the course. I am to be practical, matter-of-fact; there's to be an end to
+all fantastic ideas."
+
+An end to all fantastic ideas! But it was hardly according to the gospel
+of the matter-of-fact to take Burleigh, the fitter, out to luncheon. Jack
+might excuse himself on the ground that he had not yet begun his
+apprenticeship and had several hours of freedom before his first lesson
+at dinner. This ecstasy of a recess, perhaps, made him lay aside the
+derby, which the clerk said was very becoming, and choose a softer
+head-covering with a bit of feather in the band, which the clerk, with
+positive enthusiasm, said was still more becoming. At all events, it was
+easy on his temples, while the derby was stiff and binding and conducive
+to a certain depression of spirits.
+
+Burleigh, the fitter, was almost as old as Mortimer. He rose to the
+exceptional situation, his eyes lighting as he surveyed the form to be
+clothed with a professional gratification unsurpassed by that of Dr.
+Bennington in plotting Jack's chest with a stethoscope.
+
+"Yes, sir, we will have that dinner-jacket ready to-night, sir, depend
+upon it--and couldn't I show you something in cheviots?"
+
+Jack broke another precedent. A Wingfield, he decided to patronize
+the Wingfield store, because he saw how supremely happy every order
+made Burleigh.
+
+"You can do it as well as Thompson's?" he asked.
+
+"With you, yes, sir--though Thompson is a great expert on round
+shoulders. But with you, yes, sir!"
+
+When the business of measuring was over, while Burleigh peered triumphant
+over the pile of cloths from which the masterpieces were to be fashioned,
+Jack said that he had a ripping appetite and he did not see why he and
+Burleigh should not appease their hunger in company. Burleigh gasped;
+then he grinned in abandoned delight and slipped off his shiny coat and
+little tailor's apron that bristled with pins.
+
+They went to a restaurant of reputation, which Jack said was in keeping
+with the occasion when a man changed his habits from Arizona simplicity
+to urban multiplicity of courses. And what did Burleigh like? Burleigh
+admitted that if he were a plutocrat he would have caviar at least once a
+day; and caviar appeared in a little glass cup set in the midst of
+cracked ice, flanked by crisp toast. After caviar came other things to
+Burleigh's taste. He was having such an awesomely grand feast that he
+was tongue-tied; but Jack could never eat in silence until he had
+forgotten how to tell stories. So he told Burleigh stories of the trail
+and of life in Little Rivers in a way that reflected the desert sunshine
+in Burleigh's eyes. Burleigh thought that he would like to live in Little
+Rivers. Almost anyone might after hearing Jack's description, in the joy
+of its call to himself.
+
+"Now, if you would trust me," said Burleigh, when they left the
+restaurant, "I should like to send out for some cloths not in stock for a
+couple of suits. And couldn't I make you up three or four fancy
+waistcoats, with a little color in them--the right color to go with the
+cloth? You can carry a little color--decidedly, yes."
+
+"Yes, I rather like color," said Jack, succumbing to temptation, though
+he felt that the heir to great responsibilities ought to dress in the
+most neutral of tones.
+
+"And I should like to select the ties to go with the suits and a few
+shirts, just to carry out my scheme--a kind of professional triumph for
+me, you see. May I?"
+
+"Go ahead!" said Jack.
+
+"And you can depend on your evening suit to be up in time. But I am going
+to rush a little broader braid on those ready-made trousers--you can
+carry that, too," Burleigh concluded.
+
+When they parted Jack turned into Fifth Avenue. Before he had gone a
+block the bulky eminence of a Fifth Avenue stage awakened his
+imagination. How could anybody think of confinement in a taxicab when he
+might ride in the elephant's howdah of that top platform, enjoying mortal
+superiority over surrounding humanity? Jack hung the howdah with silken
+streamers and set a mahout's turban on the head of the man on the seat in
+front of him, while the glistening semi-oval tops of the limousines
+floating in the mist of the rising grade from Madison Square to
+Forty-second Street, swarmed and halted in a kind of blind, cramped _pas
+de quatre_ from cross street to cross street, amid the breaking surge of
+pedestrians.
+
+"Such a throbbing of machine motion," he thought, "that I don't see
+how anybody can have an emotion of his own without bumping into
+somebody else's."
+
+It was a scene of another age and world to him, puzzling, overpowering,
+dismal, mocking him with a sense of loneliness that he had never felt on
+the desert. Could he ever catch up with this procession which had all the
+time been moving on in the five years of his absence? Could he learn to
+talk and think in the regulated manner of the traffic rules of
+convention? The few chums of his brief home school-days were long away
+from the fellowship of academies; they had settled in their grooves, with
+established intimacies. If he found his own flock he could claim
+admission to the fold only with the golden key of his millions, rather
+than by the password of kindred understanding.
+
+The tripping, finely-clad women, human flower of all the maelstrom of
+urban toil, in their detachment seemed only to bring up a visualized
+picture of Mary. What would he not like to do for her! He wished that he
+could pick up the Waldorf and set it on the other side of the street as
+a proof of the overmastering desire that possessed him whenever she was
+in his mind.
+
+And the Doge! He was the wisest man in the world. With a nod of
+well-considered and easy generosity Jack presented him with the new
+Public Library. And then all the people on the sidewalks vanished and
+the buildings melted away into sunswept levels, and the Avenue was a
+trail down which Mary came on her pony in the resplendent sufficiency of
+his dreams.
+
+"Great heavens!" he warned himself. "And I am to take my first lesson in
+running the business this evening! What perfect lunacy comes from
+mistaking the top of a Fifth Avenue stage for a howdah!"
+
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY
+
+
+How thankful he was that the old brick corner mansion in Madison Avenue,
+with age alone to recommend its architecture of the seventies--let it
+stand for what it was--had not been replaced by one of stone freshly
+polished each year! The butler who opened the door was new and stiffer
+than the one of the old days; but he saw that the broad hall, with the
+stairs running across the rear in their second flight, was little more
+changed than the exterior.
+
+Five years since he had left that hall! He was in the thrall of
+anticipation incident to seeing old associations with the eyes of
+manhood. The butler made to take his hat, but Jack, oblivious of the
+attention, went on to the doorway of the drawing-room, his look centering
+on a portrait that faced the door. In this place of honor he saw a
+Gainsborough. He uttered a note of pained surprise.
+
+"There used to be another portrait here. Where is it?" he demanded.
+
+The butler, who had heard that the son of the house was an invalid, had
+not recovered from his astonishment at the appearance of health of the
+returned prodigal.
+
+"Upstairs, sir," he answered. "When Mr. Wingfield got this prize last
+year, sir--"
+
+Though the butler had spoken hardly a dozen words, he became conscious
+of something atmospheric that made him stop in the confusion of one
+who finds that he has been garrulous with an explanation that does
+not explain.
+
+"Please take this upstairs and bring back the other," said Jack.
+
+"Yes, sir. You will be going to your room, sir, and while--" The butler
+had a feeling of a troublesome future between two masters.
+
+"Now, please!" said Jack, settling into a chair to wait.
+
+The Gainsborough countess, with her sweeping plumes, her rich, fleshy,
+soft tones, her charming affectation, which gave you, after the art
+interest, no more human interest in her than in a draped model, was
+carried upstairs and back came the picture that it had displaced. The
+frame still bore at the bottom the title "Portrait of a Lady," under
+which it had been exhibited at the Salon many years ago. It was by a
+young artist, young then, named Sargent. He had the courage of his
+method, this youngster, no less than Hals, who also worked his wonders
+with little paint when this suited his genius best. The gauze of the gown
+where it blended with the background at the edge of the line of arm was
+so thin, seemingly made by a single brush-stroke, that it almost showed
+the canvas.
+
+A purpose in that gauze: The thinness of transparency of character! The
+eyes of the portrait alone seemed deep. They were lambent and dark,
+looking straight ahead inquiringly, yet in the knowledge that no answer
+to the Great Riddle could change the course of her steps in the blind
+alley of a life whose tenement walls were lighted with her radiance. You
+could see through the gown, through the flesh of that frail figure, so
+lacking in sensuousness yet so glowing with a quiet fire, to the soul
+itself. She seemed of such a delicate, chaste fragility that she could be
+shattered by a single harsh touch. There would be no outcry except the
+tinkle of the fragments. The feelings of anyone who witnessed the
+breaking and heard the tinkle would be a criterion of his place in the
+wide margin between nerveless barbarism and sensitive gentility.
+
+"I give! I give! I give!" was her message.
+
+For a long time, he had no measure of it, Jack sat studying the portrait,
+set clear in many scenes of memory in review. It had been a face as
+changeful as the travels, ever full of quick lights and quick shadows. He
+had had flashes of it as it was in the portrait in its very triumph of
+resignation. He had known it laughing with stories of fancy which she
+told him; sympathetic in tutorial illumination as she gave him lessons
+and brought out the meaning of a line of poetry or a painting; beset by
+the restlessness which meant another period of travel; intense as fire
+itself, gripping his hands in hers in a defiance of possession; in moods
+when both its sadness and its playfulness said, "I don't care!" and
+again, fleeing from his presence to hide her tears.
+
+It was with the new sight of man's maturity and soberness that he now saw
+his mother, feeling the intangible and indestructible feminine majesty of
+her; feeling her fragility which had brought forth her living soul in its
+beauty and impressionableness as a link with the cause of his Odyssey;
+believing that she was rejoicing in his strength and understanding
+gloriously that it had only brought him nearer to her.
+
+After he had been to his room to dress he returned to the same chair and
+settled into the same reverie that was sounding depths of his being that
+he had never suspected. He was mutely asking her help, asking the support
+of her frail, feminine courage for his masculine courage in the battle
+before him; and little tremors of nervous determination were running
+through him, when he heard his father's footstep and became conscious of
+his father's presence in the doorway.
+
+There was a moment, not of hesitation but of completing a thought, before
+he looked up and rose to his feet. In that moment, John Wingfield, Sr.
+had his own shock over the change in the room. The muscles of his face
+twitched in irritation, as if his wife's very frailty were baffling
+invulnerability. Straightening his features into a mask, his eyes still
+spoke his emotion in a kind of stare of resentment at the picture.
+
+Then he saw his son's shoulders rising above his own and looked into
+his son's eyes to see them smiling. Long isolated by his power from
+clashes of will under the roof of his store or his house, the father
+had a sense of the rippling flash of steel blades. A word might start a
+havoc of whirling, burning sentences, confusing and stifling as a
+desert sandstorm; or it might bring a single killing flash out of
+gathering clouds.
+
+Thus the two were facing each other in a silence oppressive to both,
+which neither knew how to break, when relief came in the butler's
+announcement of dinner. Indeed, by such small, objective interruptions do
+dynamic inner impulses hang that this little thing may have suppressed
+the lightnings.
+
+The father was the first to speak. He hoped that a first day in New York
+had brought Jack a good appetite; certainly, he could see that the store
+had given him a wonderful fit for a rush order.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+BY RIGHT OF ANCESTRY
+
+
+There were to be no stories of Little Rivers at dinner; no questions
+asked about desert life. This chapter of Jack's career was a past rung of
+the ladder to John Wingfield, Sr. who was ever looking up to the rungs
+above. The magnetism and charm with which he won men to his service now
+turned to the immediate problem of his son, whom he was to refashion
+according to his ideas.
+
+"Are you ready to settle down?" he asked, half fearful lest that scene in
+the drawing-room might have wrought a change of purpose.
+
+In answer he was seeing another Jack; a Jack relaxed, amiable,
+even amenable.
+
+"If you have the patience," said Jack. "You know, father, I haven't a
+cash-register mind. I'm starting out on a new trail and I am likely to go
+lame at times. But I mean to be game."
+
+He looked very frankly and earnestly into his father's eyes.
+
+"Wild oats sown! My boy, after all!" thought the father. "Respected his
+mother! Well, didn't I respect mine? Of course--and let him! It is good
+principles. It is right. He has health; that is better than schooling."
+
+In place of the shock of the son's will against his, he was feeling it as
+a force which might yet act in unison with his. He expanded with the
+pride of the fortune-builder. He told how a city within a city is created
+and run; of tentacles of investment and enterprise stretching beyond the
+store in illimitable ambition; how the ball of success, once it was set
+rolling, gathered bulk of its own momentum and ever needed closer
+watching to keep it clear of obstacles.
+
+"And I am to stand on top like a gymnast on a sphere or be rolled under,"
+thought Jack. "And I'll have cloth of gold breeches and a balancing pole
+tipped with jewels; but--but--"
+
+"A good listener, and that is a lot!" thought the father, happily.
+
+Jack had interrupted neither with questions nor vagaries. He was gravely
+attentive, marveling over this story of a man's labor and triumph.
+
+"And the way to learn the business is not from talks by me," said his
+father, finally. "You cannot begin at the top."
+
+"No! no!" said Jack, aghast. "The top would be quite too insecure, too
+dizzy to start with."
+
+"Right!" the father exclaimed, decidedly. "You must learn each department
+of itself, and then how it works in with the others. It will be drudgery,
+but it is best--right at the bottom!"
+
+"Yes, father, where there is no danger of a fall."
+
+"You will be put on an apprentice salary of ten dollars a week."
+
+"And I'll try to earn it."
+
+"Of course, you understand that the ten is a charge against the store.
+That's business. But as for a private allowance, you are John Wingfield's
+son and--"
+
+"I think I have enough of my own for the present," Jack put in.
+
+"As you wish. But if you need more, say the word. And you shall name the
+department where you are to begin. Did you get any idea of which you'd
+choose from looking the store over to-day?"
+
+"That's very considerate of you!" Jack answered. He was relieved and
+pleased and made his choice quickly, though he mentioned it half timidly
+as if he feared that it might be ridiculous, so uncertain was he about
+the rules of apprenticeship.
+
+"You see I have been used to the open air and I'd like a little time in
+which to acclimatize myself in New York. Now, all those big wagons that
+bring the goods in and the little wagons that take them out--there is an
+out-of-door aspect to the delivery service. Is that an important branch
+to learn?"
+
+"Very--getting the goods to the customer--very!"
+
+"Then I'll start with that and sort of a roving commission to look over
+the other departments."
+
+"Good! We will consider it settled. And, Jack, every man's labor that you
+can save and retain efficiency--that is the trick! Organization and
+ideas, that's what makes the employer and so makes success. Why, Jack, if
+you could cut down the working costs in the delivery department or
+improve the service at the present cost, why--" John Wingfield, Sr.
+rubbed the palms of his hands together delightedly.
+
+Everything was going finely--so far. He added that proviso of _so far_
+instinctively.
+
+"Besides, Jack," he went on, changing to another subject that was equally
+vital to his ego, "this name of Wingfield is something to work for. I was
+the son of a poor New England clergyman, but there is family back of it;
+good blood, good blood! I was not the first John Wingfield and you shall
+not be the last!"
+
+He rose from the table, bidding the servant to bring the coffee to the
+drawing-room. With the same light, quick step that he ascended the
+flights in the store, he led the way downstairs, his face alive with the
+dramatic anticipation that it had worn when he took Jack out of the
+office to look down from the balcony of the court.
+
+"Ah, we have something besides the store, Jack!" he was saying, in the
+very exultation of the pride of possession, as he went to the opposite
+side of the mantel from the mother's portrait and turned on the reflector
+over a picture.
+
+Jack saw a buccaneer under the brush of the gold and the shadows of
+Spain; a robust, ready figure on fighting edge, who seemed to say, "After
+you, sir; and, then, pardon me, but it's your finish, sir!"
+
+"It's a Velasquez!" Jack exclaimed.
+
+"And you knew that at a glance!" said his father.
+
+"Why, yes!"
+
+"Not many Velasquezes in America," said the father, thinking,
+incidentally, that his son would not have to pay the dealers a heavy toll
+for an art education, while he revelled in a surprise that he was
+evidently holding back.
+
+"Or many better Velasquezes than this, anywhere," added Jack. "What
+mastery! What a gift from heaven that was vouchsafed to a human being to
+paint like that!"
+
+He was in a spell, held no less by the painter's art than by the subject.
+
+"Absolutely a certified Velasquez, bought from the estate of Count
+Galting," continued his father. "I paid a cool two hundred and fifty
+thousand for it. And that isn't all, Jack, that isn't all that you are
+going to drudge for as an apprentice in the delivery department. I know
+what I am talking about. I wasn't fooled by any of the genealogists who
+manufacture ancestors. I had it all looked up by four experts, checking
+one off against another."
+
+"Yes," answered Jack, absently. He had hardly heard his father's words.
+In fervent scrutiny he was leaning forward, his weight on the ball of the
+foot, the attitude of the man in the picture.
+
+"And who do you think he is--who?" pursued John Wingfield, Sr.
+
+"A man who fought face to face with the enemy; a man whom men followed!
+Velasquez caught all that!" answered Jack.
+
+"That old fellow was a great man in his day--a great Englishman--and his
+name was John Wingfield! He was your ancestor and mine!"
+
+After a quick breath of awakening comprehension Jack took a step nearer
+the portrait, all his faculties in the throe of beaming inquiry of Senor
+Don't Care and desert freedom, in the self-same, alert readiness of pose
+as the figure he was facing.
+
+"They say I resemble him!" The father repeated that phrase which he had
+used in benignant satisfaction to many a guest, but now seeing with
+greedy eyes a likeness between his son and the ancestor deeper than mere
+resemblance of feature, he added: "But you--you, Jack, you're the dead
+spit of him!"
+
+"Yes," said Jack, as if he either were not surprised or were too
+engrossed to be interested. To the buccaneer's "After you, sir; and,
+then, your finish, sir!" he seemed to be saying, in the fully-lived
+spirit of imagination: "A good epitaph, sir! I'll see that it is written
+on your tombstone!"
+
+The father, singularly affected by the mutual and enjoyed challenge that
+he was witnessing, half expected to see a sword leap out of the scabbard
+of the canvas and another from Jack's side.
+
+"If he had lived in our day," said the father, "he would have built
+himself a great place; he would have been the head of a great
+institution, just as I am."
+
+"Two centuries is a long way to fetch a comparison," answered Jack,
+hazily, out of a corner of his brain still reserved for conversation,
+while all the rest of it was centered elsewhere. "He might have been a
+cow-puncher, a revolutionist, or an aviator. Certainly, he would never
+have been a camp-follower."
+
+"At all events, a man of power. It's in the blood!"
+
+"It's in the blood!" Jack repeated, with a sort of staring, lingering
+emphasis. He was hearing Mary's protest on the pass; her final,
+mysterious reason for sending him away; her "It's not in the blood!"
+There could be no connection between this and the ancestor; yet, in the
+stirred depths of his nature, probing the inheritance in his veins, her
+hurt cry had come echoing to his ears.
+
+"Why, I would have paid double the price rather than not have got that
+picture!" the father went on. "There is a good deal of talk about family
+trees in this town and a strong tendency in some quarters for second
+generations of wealth to feel a little superiority over the first
+generation. Here I come along with an ancestor eight generations back,
+painted by Velasquez. I tell you it was something of a sensation when I
+exhibited him in the store!"
+
+"You--you--" and Jack glanced at his father perplexedly; "you exhibited
+him in the store!" he said.
+
+"Why, yes, as a great Velasquez I had just bought. I didn't advertise him
+as my ancestor, of course. Still, the fact got around; yes, the fact got
+around, Jack."
+
+While Jack studied the picture, his father studied Jack, whose face and
+whose manner of blissful challenge to all comers in the unconcern of easy
+fatality and ready blade seemed to grow more and more like that of the
+first John Wingfield. At length, Jack passed over to the other side of
+the mantel and turned on the reflector over the portrait of his mother;
+and, in turn, standing silently before her all his militancy was gone and
+in its place came the dreamy softness with which he would watch the
+Eternal Painter cloud-rolling on the horizon. And he was like her not in
+features, not in the color of hair or eyes, but in a peculiar
+sensitiveness, distinguished no less by a fatalism of its own kind than
+was the cheery aggressiveness of the buccaneer.
+
+"Yes, father," he said, "that old ruffian forebear of ours could swear
+and could kill. But he had the virtue of truth. He could not act or live
+a lie. And I guess something else--how supremely gentle he could be
+before a woman like her. Velasquez brought out a joyous devil and Sargent
+brought out a soul!"
+
+John Wingfield, Sr., who stood by the grate, was drumming nervously on
+the mantel. The drumming ceased. The fingers rested rigid and white on
+the dark wood. Alive to another manifestation of the lurking force in
+his son, he hastened to change the subject.
+
+"I had almost forgotten that you always had a taste for art, Jack."
+
+"Yes, from her;" which was hardly changing the subject.
+
+"As for the first John Wingfield, you may be sure that I wanted to know
+everything there was to know about the old fellow," said the father. "So
+I set a lot of bookworms looking up the archives of the English and
+Spanish governments and digging around in the libraries after material.
+Then I had it all put together in proper shape by a literary sharp."
+
+"You have that!" cried Jack. "You have the framework from which you can
+build the whole story of him--the story of how he fought and how
+Velasquez came to paint him? Oh, I want to read it!" With an unexplored
+land between gilt-tooled covers under his arm he went upstairs early, in
+the transport of wanderlust that had sent him away over the sand from
+Little Rivers. _Si, si_, Firio, outward bound, camp under the stars! If
+Senor Don't Care's desert journeys were over--and he had no thought but
+that they were--there was no ban on travelling in fancy over sea trails
+in the ancestor's company.
+
+Jack was with the buccaneer when he boarded the enemy at the head of his
+men; with him before the Board of Admiralty when, a young captain of
+twenty-two, he refused to lie to save his skin; with him when, in answer
+to the scolding of Elizabeth, then an old woman, he said: "It is glorious
+for one who fought so hard for Your Majesty to have the recognition even
+of Your Majesty's chiding in answer to the protest of the Spanish
+ambassador," which won Elizabeth's reversal of the Admiralty's decision;
+with him when, in a later change of fortune, he went to the court of
+Spain for once on a mission which required a sheathed blade; with him
+when the dark eye of Velasquez, who painted men and women of his time
+while his colleagues were painting Madonnas, glowed with a discoverer's
+joy at sight of this fair-haired type of the enemy, whom he led away to
+his studio.
+
+More than once was there mention of the fact that this terrible fighter
+was gentle with women and fonder of the company of children than of
+statesmen or courtiers. He had married the daughter of a great merchant,
+a delicate type of beauty; the last to fascinate a buccaneer, according
+to the gossips of the time. Rumor had it that he had taken her for the
+wherewithal to pay the enormous debts contracted in his latest exploit.
+To disprove this he went to sea in a temper with a frigate and came back
+laden with the treasure of half a dozen galleons, to find that his wife
+had died at the birth of a son. He promised himself to settle down for
+good; but the fog of London choked lungs used to soft airs; he heard the
+call of the sun and was away again to seek adventure in the broiling
+reaches of the Caribbean. A man of restless, wild spirit, breathing
+inconsistencies incomprehensible to the conventions of Whitehall! And his
+son had turned a Cromwellian, who, in poverty, sought refuge in America
+when Charles II. came to the throne; and from him, in the vicissitudes of
+five generations, the poor clergyman was descended.
+
+Thus ran the tale in its completeness. The end of the ancestor's career
+had been in keeping with its character and course. He had been spared
+the slow decay of faculties in armchair reminiscence. He had gone down in
+his ship without striking his colors, fighting the Spaniards one to
+three. When Jack closed the cover on the last page tenderly and in
+enraptured understanding, it was past midnight.
+
+The spaciousness of the sea under clouds of battle smoke had melted into
+the spaciousness of the desert under the Eternal Painter's canopy. Then
+four walls of a bedroom in Madison Avenue materialized, shutting out the
+horizon; a carpet in place of sand formed the floor; and in place of a
+blanket roll was a canopied bed upon which a servant had laid out a suit
+of pajamas. In the impulse of a desire to look into the face of the first
+John Wingfield in the light of all he now knew, Jack went downstairs, and
+in the silence of the house drank in the portrait again.
+
+"You splendid old devil, you!" he breathed, understandingly. "How should
+you like to start out delivering goods with me in the morning?"
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII
+
+JACK GETS A RAISE
+
+
+The next morning Jack went down town with his father in the limousine.
+About an hour later, after he had been introduced to the head of the
+delivery division, he was on his way up town beside a driver of one of
+the wagons on the Harlem route. He was in the uniform of the Wingfield
+light cavalry, having obtained a cap with embroidered initials on the
+front. The driver was like to burst from inward mirth, and Jack was
+regarding the prospect with veritable juvenile zest.
+
+At dinner that evening John Wingfield, Jr. narrated his experiences of
+the day to John Wingfield, Sr. with the simplicity and verisimilitude
+that always make for both realism and true comedy.
+
+"But, Jack, you took me too literally! It is hardly in keeping with your
+position! You--"
+
+"Why, I thought that the only way to know the whole business was to
+play every part. Didn't you ever deliver packages in person in your
+early days?"
+
+"I can't say that I did!" the father admitted wryly.
+
+"Then it seems to me that you missed one of the most entertaining and
+instructive features," Jack continued. "You cannot imagine the majestic
+feminine disdain with which you may be informed that a five-cent bar of
+soap should be delivered at the back door instead of the front door. The
+most indignant example was a red-haired woman who was doing her own work
+in a flat. She fairly blazed. She wanted to know if I didn't know what
+dumb-waiters were for."
+
+"And what did you say?" the father asked wearily; for the ninth John
+Wingfield had a limited sense of humor.
+
+"Oh, I try, however irritating the circumstances, to be most courtly, for
+the honor of the store," said Jack. "I told her that I was very sorry and
+I would speak to you in person about the mistake."
+
+"You mean that you admitted who you were?"
+
+"Oh, no! The red-haired woman laughed and took the package in at the
+front door," Jack responded. Anybody in Little Rivers would have
+understood just how he looked and smiled and why it was that the
+red-haired woman laughed.
+
+"Jack--now, really, Jack, this is not quite dignified!" expostulated the
+father. "What do you think your ancestor would say to it?"
+
+"I suspect that he would have made an even more ingratiating bow to the
+lady than I could," said Jack, thoughtfully. "They had the grand manner
+better developed in his day than in ours."
+
+In the ensuing weeks John Wingfield, Sr. dwelt in a kind of infernal
+wonder about his son. He was cheered when some friend of his world who
+had met Jack in the garb of his caste, as fitted by Burleigh, would say:
+"Fine, strapping son you have there, Wingfield!" He was abashed and
+dumfounded when Jack announced that he had taken Mamie Devore, who sold
+culinary utensils in the basement, out to luncheon with her "steady
+company," Joe Mathewson, driver of one of the warehouse trucks.
+
+"They were a little awed at first," Jack explained, "but they soon
+became natural. I don't know anything pleasanter than making people feel
+perfectly natural, do you? You see, Joe and Mamie are very real, father,
+and most businesslike; an ambitious, upstanding pair. They're going to
+have two thousand dollars saved before they marry.
+
+"'I don't believe that a woman ought to work out after she's married,'
+was the way Joe put it. And Mamie, with her eyes fairly devouring him,
+snapped back: 'No, she'd have enough to do looking after you, you big
+old bluff!'
+
+"Mamie is a wiry little thing and Joe is a heavyweight, with a hand
+almost as big as a baseball mit. That's partly why their practical
+romance is so fascinating. Why, it's wonderful the stories that are
+playing themselves out in that big store, father! Well, you see Joe is on
+a stint--two thousand before he gets Mamie. He had been making money on
+the side nights in boxing bouts. But Mamie stopped the fighting. She said
+she was not going to have a husband with the tip of his nose driven up
+between his eyes like a bull-dog's. And what do you imagine they are
+going to do with the two thousand? Buy a farm! Isn't that corking!"
+
+John Wingfield, Sr. shrugged his shoulders, but did not express his
+feelings with any remark. It seemed to him that Jack must have been born
+without a sense of proportion.
+
+With the breaking of spring, when gardens were beginning to sprout, Jack
+broadened his study to the trails of Westchester, Long Island, and New
+Jersey, coursed by the big automobile vans of the suburban delivery. To
+the people of the store, whose streets he traversed at will in
+unremitting wonder over its varied activities, he had brought something
+of the same sensation that he had to an Arizona town. He came to know the
+employees by name, even as he had his neighbors in Little Rivers. He
+nodded to the clerks as he passed down an aisle. They watched for his
+coming and brightened with his approach and met his smile with their
+smiles. In their idle moments he would stop and talk of the desert.
+
+Although he was learning to like the store as a community of human beings
+its business was as the works of a watch, when all he knew was how to
+tell the time by the face. But he tried hard to learn; tried until his
+head was dizzy with a whirl of dissociated facts, which he knew ought to
+be associated, and under the call of his utter restlessness would
+disappear altogether for two or three days.
+
+"Relieving the pressure! It's a safety-valve so I shan't blow up," he
+explained to his father, sadly.
+
+"Take your time," said John Wingfield, Sr., having in mind a recent talk
+with Dr. Bennington.
+
+Jack listened faithfully to his father's clear-cut lessons. He asked
+questions which only made his father sigh; for they had little to do with
+the economy of working costs. All his suggestions were extravagant; they
+would contribute to the joy of the employees, but not to profit. And
+other questions made his father frown in devising answers which were in
+the nature of explanations. Born of his rambling and humanly observant
+relations with every department, they led into the very heart of things
+in that mighty organization. There were times when it was hard for him
+to control his indignation. There were trails leading to the room with
+the glass-paneled door marked "Private" which he half feared to pursue.
+
+Thus, between father and son remained that indefinable chasm of thought
+and habit which filial duty or politeness could not bridge. No stories of
+the desert were ever told at home, though it was so easy to tell them to
+Burleigh or Mathewson, those contrasts in a pale fitter of clothes and a
+herculean rustler of dry-goods boxes. But echoes of the tales came to the
+father through his assistants. He had the feeling of some stranger spirit
+in his own likeness moving there in the streets of his city under the
+talisman of a consanguinity that was nominal. One day he put an inquiry
+to the general manager concretely, though in a way to avoid the
+appearance of asking another's opinion about his own son.
+
+"He has your gift of winning men to him. There is no denying his
+popularity with the force," said the general manager, who was a diplomat.
+
+The same question was put to Peter Mortimer.
+
+"We all love him. I think a lot of people in the store would march out to
+the desert after him," said Mortimer, with real rejoicing in his candor
+and courage. Indeed, of late he had been developing cheer as well as
+courage, imbibing both, perhaps, from the roses in the vase on his
+employer's desk. Jack had ordered a fresh bunch put there every day; and
+when employees were sick packages of grapes and bunches of flowers came
+to them, in Little Rivers fashion, with J.W. on the card, as if they had
+come from the head of the firm himself.
+
+"Maybe Jack will soften the old man a little," ran a whisper from
+basement to roof. For the battalions called him "Jack," rather than "Mr.
+Wingfield," just as Little Rivers had.
+
+"The boy's good nature isn't making him too familiar with the employees?"
+was a second question which the father had asked both the general manager
+and Mortimer.
+
+"No. That is the surprising thing--the gift of being friendly without
+being familiar," answered the manager.
+
+"He's got a kind of self-respect that induces respect in others,"
+said Peter.
+
+John Wingfield, Sr. was the proprietor of the store, but the human world
+of the store began to feel a kind of proprietorship in Jack, while its
+guardian interest in helping him in his mistakes was common enough to be
+a conspiracy.
+
+And the callouses were gone from his hands. There was no longer a
+dividing line between tan and white on his forehead. No outward symbol of
+the desert clung to his person except the moments of the far vision of
+distances in his eyes. Superficially, on the Avenue he would have been
+taken for one of his caste.
+
+But tossing a cowpuncher hat out of a window into Broadway was easier
+than tossing a thing out of mind. He sat up nights to write to Mary.
+Letter after letter he poured out as a diary of his experiences in his
+new world, letters breathing a pupil's hope of learning and all that
+pupil's sorry vagaries. No answer ever came, not even to the most
+appealing ones about his most adventurous conflicts with the dinosaur.
+He felt the chagrin of the army of unpublished novelists who lay their
+hearts bare on the stone slab of the dissectors in a publisher's
+office. He might as well have thrown all he wrote into the
+waste-basket so far as any result was concerned; yet he kept on
+writing as if it were his glorious duty to report to her as his
+superior. But he found a more responsive correspondent in Jim Galway;
+and this was the letter he received:
+
+"DEAR JACK:
+
+"The whole valley is not yet sprouting with dates as you said it would
+from your thinking of us. Maybe we didn't use the right seed. Your ranch
+is still called Jack's ranch, and Firio is doing his best and about the
+best I ever knew in an Indian. But as you always said, Indians are mostly
+human, like the rest of us, barring a sort of born twist in their
+intellect for which they aren't responsible. You see, Jack, a lot of your
+sayings still live with us, though you are gone.
+
+"Well, Firio keeps your P.D. exercised and won't let anybody but himself
+ride him. He says you will need him. For you can't budge the stubborn
+little cuss. He declares you're coming back. When we tell him you're
+worth twenty millions and he's plumb full of primitive foolishness and
+general ignorance of the outside world, he says, '_Si_, he will come
+back!' like some heathen oracle that's strong on repetition and weak on
+vocabulary.
+
+"Of course you know about the new addition to our citizenship, John
+Prather, that double of yours that you didn't happen to meet. And I
+might mention that by this time, after we've seen so much of him, we
+agree with the Doge that he doesn't look a bit like you. Well, he's
+making a fine ranch across the road from you, but hiring all his work
+done, which ain't exactly according to Little Rivers custom, as you
+will remember. The Doge sets a lot by him, though I can't see how
+there's much in common between them. This fellow's not full of all that
+kind of scholastic persiflage that you are, Jack. He's so all-fired
+practical his joints would crack if he wasn't so oily; and he's up to
+old man Lefferts' pretty often.
+
+"He goes to Phoenix a good deal. When I was there the other day I heard
+he was circulating around among the politicians in his quiet way, and I
+saw him and Pete Leddy hobnobbing together. I didn't like that. But when
+I told the Doge of it he said he guessed there wasn't much real
+hobnobbing. The Doge is certainly strong for Prather. Another thing I
+heard was that, after all, old man Lefferts' two partners aren't dead,
+and Prather's been hunting them up.
+
+"Come to think of it, I didn't tell you that Pete Leddy and some of the
+gang have been back in town. Of course we have every confidence in the
+Doge, he's been so fair to this community. Still, some of us can't help
+having our private suspicions, considering what a lot we have at stake.
+And four or five of us was talking the other night, when suddenly we all
+agreed how you'd shine in any trouble, and if there was going to be
+any--not that there is--we wished you were here.
+
+"Well, Jack, the pass hasn't changed and the sunsets are just as grand as
+ever and the air just as free. The pass won't have changed and the
+sunsets will be doing business at the old stand when the antiquaries are
+digging up the remote civilization of Little Rivers and putting it in a
+high scale because they ran across a pot of Mrs. Galway's jam in the
+ruins--the same hifalutin compliment being your own when you were
+nursing your wound, as you will remember.
+
+"Here's wishing you luck from the whole town, way out here in nowhere.
+
+"As ever yours,
+
+"James R. Galway.
+
+"P.S. Belvy Smith wants to know if you won't write just one story. I told
+her you were too busy for such nonsense now. But she refuses to believe
+it. She says being busy doesn't matter to you. She says the stories just
+pop out. So I transmit her request. J.R.G."
+
+"P.D. waiting!" breathed Jack. "No changing Firio! He is like the pass. I
+wonder how Wrath of God and Jag Ear are!"
+
+He wrote a story for Belvy. He wrote to Firio in resolute assertion that
+he would never require the services of P.D. again, when he knew that
+Firio, despite the protests, would still keep P.D. fit for the trail. He
+wrote to Jim Galway how immersed he was in his new career, but that he
+might come for a while--for a little while, with emphasis--if ever Jim
+wired that he was needed.
+
+"That was a good holiday--a regular week-end debauch away from the shop!"
+he thought, when the letters were finished.
+
+Soon after this came an event which, for the first time, gave John
+Wingfield, Sr. a revelation of the side of his son that had won Little
+Rivers and the interest of the rank and file of the store. Among Jack's
+many suggestions, in his aim to carry out his father's talk about the
+creative business sense the first night they were together, had been one
+for a suburban clubbing delivery system. It had been dismissed as
+fantastic, but Jack had asked that it be given a trial and his father had
+consented. Its basis was a certain confidence in human nature. Jack and
+his father had dined together the evening after the master of the
+push-buttons had gone through the final reports of the experiment.
+
+"Well, Jack, I am going to raise your salary to a hundred a week," the
+father announced.
+
+"On the ground that if you pay me more I might make myself worth more?"
+Jack asked respectfully.
+
+"No, as a matter of business. Whenever any man makes two dollars for the
+store, he gets one dollar and I keep the other. That is the basis of my
+success--others earning money for me. Your club scheme is a go. As the
+accountant works it out, it has brought a profit of two hundred a week."
+
+"Then I have done something worth while, really?" Jack asked, eagerly,
+but half sceptical of such good fortune.
+
+"Yes. You have created a value. You have used your powers of observation
+and your brain. That's the thing that makes a few men employers while the
+multitude remains employees."
+
+"Father! Then I am not quite hopeless?"
+
+"Hopeless! My son hopeless! No, no! I didn't expect you to learn the
+business in a week, or a month, or even a year. Time! time!"
+
+Nor did John Wingfield, Sr. wish his son to develop too rapidly. Now
+that he was so sure of beating threescore and ten, while retaining the
+full possession of his faculties, if he followed the rules of longevity,
+he would not have welcomed a son who could spring into the saddle at
+once. He wanted to ride alone. He who had never shared his power with
+anyone! He who had never admitted anyone into even a few shares of
+company partnership in his concern! Time! time! The boy would never fall
+heir to undivided responsibility before he was forty. John Wingfield,
+Sr. was pleased with himself; pleased over a good sign; and he could not
+deny that he was pleased at the sudden change in Jack. For he saw Jack's
+eyes sparkling into his own; sparkling with comradeship and spontaneous
+gratification. Was the boy to be his in thought and purpose, after all?
+Yes, of course; yes, inevitably, with the approach of maturity. Gradually
+the flightiness of his upbringing would wear off down to the steel, the
+hard-tempered, paternal steel.
+
+"You can scarcely realize what a fight it has been for me until you know
+the life I led out in Arizona, getting strong for you and the store,"
+Jack began.
+
+"Strong for me! For the store! Yes, Jack!" There was an emphasis on the
+subjective personal pronoun--for _him_; for the store!
+
+The father's face beamed a serene delight. This Jack accepted as the
+expression of sympathy and understanding which he had craved. It was to
+him an inspiration of fellowship that set the well of his inner being in
+overflow and the force of his personality, which the father had felt
+uncannily before the mother's picture, became something persuasive in its
+radiance rather than something held in leash as a threatening and
+volcanic element. Now he could talk as freely and happily of the desert
+to his father as to Burleigh and Mathewson. He told of the long rides;
+of Firio and Wrath of God. He made the tinkle of Jag Ear's bells heard in
+the silence of the dining-room as it was heard in the silences of the
+trail. He mentioned how he was afraid to come back after he was strong.
+
+"Afraid?" queried his father.
+
+"Yes. But I was coming--coming when, at the top of the pass, I saw Little
+Rivers for the first time."
+
+He sketched his meeting with Mary Ewold; the story of the town and the
+story of Jasper Ewold as he knew it, now glancing at his father, now
+seeming to see nothing except visualization of the pictures of his story.
+The father, looking at the table-cloth, at times playing with his
+coffee-spoon, made no comment.
+
+"And that first night I saw that Jasper Ewold had met me somewhere
+before. But--" he went on after going back to the incident of the villa
+in his childhood--"that hardly explained. How could he remember the face
+of a grown man from the face of a boy? Jasper Ewold! Do you recall ever
+having met him? He must have known my mother. Perhaps he knew you, though
+why he should not have told me I don't know."
+
+"Yes, yes--Jasper Ewold," said the father. "I knew him in his younger
+days. His was an old family up in Burbridge, the New England town where I
+came from. Too much college, too much travel, as I remember,
+characterized Jasper Ewold. No settled point of view; and I judge from
+what you say that he must have run through his patrimony. One of the ups
+and downs of the world, Jack. And he never mentioned that he had met me?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Probably a part of that desert notion of freemasonry in keeping pasts a
+secret. But why did you stay on after you had recovered from your wound?"
+he asked penetratingly, though he was looking again at the bottom of his
+coffee-cup.
+
+"For a reason that comes to a man but once in his life!" Jack answered.
+
+Had the father looked up--it was a habit of his in listening to any
+report to lower his eyes, his face a mask--he might have seen Jack's
+face in the supremacy of emotion, as it was when he had called up to
+Mary from the canyon and when he had pleaded with her on the pass. But
+John Wingfield, Sr. could not mistake the message of a voice vibrating
+with all the force of a being let free living over the scene. With the
+shadows settling over his eyes, Jack came to her answer and to the
+finality of her cry:
+
+"It's not in the blood!"
+
+The only sound was a slight tinkle of a spoon against the coffee-cup.
+Looking at his father he saw a nervous flutter in his cheeks, his lips
+hard set, his brow drawn down; and the rigidity of the profile was such
+that Jack was struck by the shiver of a thought that it must have been
+like his own as others said it was when he had gripped Pedro Nogales's
+arm. But this passed quickly, leaving, however, in its trail an
+expression of shock and displeasure.
+
+"So it was the girl, that kept you--you were in love!" John Wingfield,
+Sr. exclaimed, tensely.
+
+"Yes, I was--I am! You have it, father, the unchangeable all of it! I
+face a wall of mystery. 'It's not in the blood!' she said, as if it were
+some bar sinister. What could she have meant?"
+
+In the fever of baffled intensity crying for light and help, he was
+sharing the secret that had beset him relentlessly and giving his father
+the supreme confidence of his heart. Leaning across the table he grasped
+his father's hand, which lay still and unresponsive and singularly cold
+for a second. Then John Wingfield, Sr. raised his other hand and patted
+the back of Jack's hesitantly, as if uncertain how to deal with this
+latest situation that had developed out of his son's old life. Finally he
+looked up good-temperedly, deprecatingly.
+
+"Well, well, Jack, I almost forgot that you are young. It's quite a bad
+case!" he said.
+
+"But what did she mean? Can you guess? I have thought of it so much that
+it has meant a thousand wild things!" Jack persisted desperately.
+
+"Come! come!" the father rallied him. "Time, time!"
+
+He gripped the hand that was gripping his and swung it free of the table
+with a kindly shake. All the effective charm of his personality which he
+never wasted, the charm that could develop out of the mask to gain an end
+when the period of listening was over, was in play.
+
+"She excited the opposition of the strength in you," he said. "You ask
+what did she mean? It is hard to tell what a woman means, but I judge
+that she meant that it was not in her blood to marry a fellow who went
+about fighting duels and breaking arms. She would like a more peaceful
+sort; and, yes, anything that came into her mind leaped out and you were
+mystified by her strange exclamation!"
+
+"Perhaps. I suppose that may be it. It was just myself, just my devil!"
+Jack assented limply.
+
+"Time! time! All this will pass."
+
+Jack could not answer that commonplace with one of his own, that it would
+not pass; he could only return the pressure when his father, rising and
+coming around the table, slipped his arm about the son in a demonstration
+of affection which was like opening the gate to a new epoch in their
+relations.
+
+"And you would have killed Leddy! You could have broken that Mexican in
+two! I should like to have seen that! So would the ancestor!" said the
+father, giving Jack a hug.
+
+"Yes, but, father, that was the horror of it!"
+
+"Not the power to do it--no! I mean, Jack, that in this world it is well
+to be strong."
+
+"And you think that I am no longer a weakling?" Jack asked strangely;
+"that I carried out your instructions when you sent me away?"
+
+"Oh, Jack, you remember my farewell remark? It was made in irritation and
+suffering. That hurt me. It hurt my pride and all that my work stands
+for. It hurt me as much as it hurt you. But if it was a whip, why, then,
+it served a purpose, as I wanted it to."
+
+"Yes, it was a whip!" said Jack, mechanically.
+
+"Then all ends well--all quits! And, Jack," he swung Jack, who was
+unresisting but unresponsive, around facing him, "if you ever have any
+doubts or any questions to ask bring them to me, won't you?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And, Jack, a hundred a week to-morrow! You're all right, Jack!" And he
+gave Jack a slap on the back as they left the dining-room.
+
+
+
+
+XXIX
+
+A MEETING ON THE AVENUE TRAIL
+
+
+Light sang in the veins and thoughts of a city. Light cleansed the
+streets of vapors. Light, the light of the sunshine of late May, made a
+far different New York from the New York under a blanket of March mist of
+the day of Jack's arrival. The lantern of the Metropolitan tower was all
+blazing gold; Diana's scarf trailed behind her in the shimmering abandon
+of her _honi soit qui mal y pense_ chases on Olympus; Admiral Farragut
+grew urbane, sailing on a smooth sea with victory won; General Sherman in
+his over-brightness, guided by his guardian lady, still gallantly pursued
+the tone of time in the direction of the old City Hall and Trinity; and
+the marble facade of the new library seemed no less at home than under an
+Agean sky. An ecstasy, blinding eyes to blemishes, set critical faculties
+to rejoicing over perfections. They graciously overlooked the blotch of
+red brick hiding the body of St. Patrick's on the way up town in
+gratitude for twin spires against the sky.
+
+Enveloping radiance gilded the sharp lines of skyscrapers and swept away
+the shadows in the chasms between them. It pointed the bows of busy tugs
+with sprays of diamonds falling on the molten surface of rivers and bays.
+It called up paeans of childish trebles from tenement alleys; slipped
+into the sickrooms of private houses, delaying the advent of crape on
+the door; and played across the rows of beds in the public wards of
+hospitals in the primal democracy of the gift of ozone to the earth.
+
+The milky glass roof of the central court of the Wingfield store acted as
+a screen to the omnipotent visitor, but he set unfiltered patches of
+delight in the aisles and on the counters near the walls. Mamie Devore
+and Burleigh and Peter Mortimer and many other clerks and employees asked
+if this were like a desert day and Jack said that it was. He longed to be
+free of all roofs and feel the geniality of the hearth-fire of the
+planetary system penetrating through his coat, his skin, his flesh, into
+his very being. Why not close the store and make a holiday for everybody?
+he asked himself; only to be amazed, on second thought, at such a
+preposterous suggestion from a hundred-dollar-a-week author of created
+profits in the business. He was almost on the point of acting on another
+impulse, which was that he and his father break away into the country in
+a touring car, not knowing where they were going to stop until hunger
+overtook an inn. This, too, he dismissed as a milder form of the same
+demoralizing order of heresy, bound to be disturbing to the new filial
+relations springing from the night when he had told his desert story over
+the coffee, which, contrary to the conventional idea of an exchange of
+confidences clearing the mind of a burden, had only provoked more
+restlessness.
+
+At least, he would fare forth for a while on the broad asphalt trail that
+begins under the arch of the little park and runs to the entrance of the
+great park. Even as the desert has its spell of overawing stillness in an
+uninhabited land, so this trail had its spell of congested human
+movement in the heart of habitations. A broad, luminous blade lay across
+the west side of the street and left the other in shade; and all the
+world that loved sunshine and had no errands on the east side kept to the
+west side. There was a communism of inspiration abroad. It was a
+conqueror's triumph just to be alive and feel the pulse-beat of the
+throng. The very over-developed sensitiveness of city nerves became
+something to be thankful for in providing the capacity for keener
+enjoyment as compensation for the capacity for keener pain.
+
+Womankind was in spring plumage. The mere consciousness of the value of
+light to their costumes, no less than the elixir in their nostrils, gave
+vivacity to their features. As usual, Jack was seeing them only to see
+Mary. The creation of no _couturier_ could bear rivalry with the garb in
+which his imagination clothed her. He found himself suddenly engrossed in
+a particular exhibit of fashion's parade a little distance ahead and
+going in the same direction as himself, a young woman in a simplicity of
+gown to which her carriage gave the final touch of art. Her steps had a
+long-limbed freedom and lightness, with which his own steps ran in a
+rhythm to the music of some past association. The thrall of a likeness,
+which more and more possessed him, made him hasten to draw near for a
+more satisfying glimpse.
+
+The young woman turned her head to glance into a shop-window and then
+there could be no mistaking that cheek and chin and the peculiar relation
+of the long lashes to the brow. It was the profile whose imprint had
+become indelible on his mind when he had come round an elbow of rock on
+Galeria. The Jack of wild, tumultuous pleading who had parted from Mary
+Ewold on the pass became a Jack elate with the glad, swimming joy of May
+sunshine at seeing and speaking to her again.
+
+"Mary! Mary!" he cried. "My, but you've become a grand swell!" he
+breathed delectably, with a fuller vision of her.
+
+"Jack!"
+
+There was a nervous twitching of her lips. He saw her eyes at first in a
+blaze of surprise and wonder; then change to the baffling sparkle, hiding
+their depths, of the slivers of glass on the old barrier. His smile and
+hers in unspoken understanding said that two comrades of another trail
+had met on the Avenue trail. There had not been any Leddy; there had not
+been any scene on the pass. They were back to the conditions of the
+protocol he had established when they started out from the porch of the
+Ewold bungalow in the airiest possible mood to look at a parcel of land.
+
+"And you also have become a grand swell!" she said. "Did you expect that
+I should be in a gray riding-habit? Certainly I didn't expect to see you
+in chaps and spurs."
+
+It was brittle business; but with a common resource in play they managed
+it well. And there they were walking together, noted by passers-by for
+their youth and beaming oblivion to everything but themselves.
+
+"How long have you been here?" Jack asked.
+
+"Two weeks," she answered.
+
+Two weeks in the same town and this his first glimpse of her! What a maze
+New York was! What a desert waste of two weeks!
+
+"Yes. Our decision to come was rather abrupt," she explained. "A sudden
+call to travel came to father; came to him like an inspiration that he
+could not resist. And how happily he has entered into the spirit of the
+city again! It has made him young."
+
+"And it has been quite like martyrdom for you!" Jack put in, teasingly.
+
+"Terrible! Sackcloth and ashes!"
+
+"I see you are wearing the sackcloth."
+
+She laughed outright, with a downward glance at her gown, at once in
+guilt and appreciation.
+
+"Another whim of father's."
+
+"The Doge a scapegoat for fashion!"
+
+"Not a scapegoat--a partisan! He insisted on going to one of the best
+places. Could I resist? I wanted to see how I felt, how I appeared."
+
+"The veritable curiosity of a Japanese woman getting her first
+foreign gown!"
+
+"Thank you! That is another excuse."
+
+"And it certainly looks very well," Jack declared.
+
+"Do you think so?" Mary flushed slightly. She could not help being
+pleased. "After six years, could I drop back into the old chrysalis
+naturally, without awkwardness? Did I still know how to wear a fine
+gown?"--and the gift for it, as anyone could see, was born in her as
+surely as certain gifts were born in Jack. "But," she added, severely, "I
+have only two--just two! And the cost of them! It will take the whole
+orange crop!"
+
+Just two, when she ought to have twenty! When he would have liked to put
+all the Paris models in the store in a wagon and, himself driving,
+deliver them at her door!
+
+"Having succumbed to temptation, I enjoy it out of sheer respect to
+the orange crop," Mary said; "and yes, because I like beautiful
+gowns; wickedly, truly like them! And I like the Avenue, just as I
+like the desert."
+
+And all that she liked he could give her! And all that he could give she
+had stubbornly refused!
+
+The liveliness of her expression, the many shades of meaning that she
+could set capering with a glance, were now as the personal reflection of
+the day and the scene. Their gait was a sauntering one. They went as far
+as the Park and started back, as if all the time of the desert were
+theirs. They stopped to look into the windows of shops of every kind,
+from antiques to millinery. When he saw a hat which he declared, after
+deliberate, critical appraisement, would surely become her, she asked
+boldly if it were better than the one she wore.
+
+"I mean an extra hat; that one more hat would have the good fortune of
+becoming you!"
+
+"Almost a real contribution to the literature of compliments!" she
+answered, unruffled.
+
+He thought, too, that she ought to have a certain necklace in a
+jeweler's window.
+
+"To wear over my riding-habit or when I am digging in the flower beds?"
+she inquired.
+
+When they passed a display of luxuries for masculine adornment, she found
+a further retort in suggesting that he ought to have a certain giddy
+fancy waistcoat. He complimented her on her taste, bought the waistcoat
+and, going to the rear of the shop, returned wearing it with a
+momentarily appreciated show of jaunty swagger.
+
+"Why be on the Avenue and not buy?" he queried, enthusing with a new
+idea.
+
+Jim Galway should have a cowpuncher hat as a present. The style of band
+was a subject of discussion calling on their discriminative views of
+Jim's personal tastes. This led to thoughts of others in Little Rivers
+who would appreciate gifts, and to the purchase of toys for the children,
+a positive revel. When they were through it was well past noon and they
+were in the region of the restaurants. The sun in majestic altitude swept
+the breadth of the Avenue.
+
+"Shall we lunch--yes, and in the Best Swell Place?" he asked, as if it
+were a matter-of-course part of the programme, while inwardly he was
+stirred with the fear of her refusal. He felt that any minute she might
+leave him, with no alternative but another farewell. She hesitated a
+moment seriously, then accepted blithely and naturally.
+
+"Yes, the Best Swell Place--let's! Who isn't entitled to the Best Swell
+Place occasionally?"
+
+After an argument in comparison of famous names, they were convinced that
+they had really chosen the Best Swell Place by the fact of a vacant table
+at a window looking out over a box hedge. Jack told the waiter that the
+assemblage was not an autocracy, but a parliament which, with a full
+quorum present, would enjoy in discursive appreciation selections from
+the broad range of a bill of fare.
+
+A luncheon for two narrows a walk on the Avenue, where you are part of a
+crowd, into restricted intimacy. He was feeling the intoxication of her
+inscrutability, catching gleams of the wealth that lay beyond it, across
+the limited breadth of a table-cloth. He forgot about the unspoken
+conditions in a sally which was like putting his hand on top of the
+barrier for an impetuous leap across.
+
+"I wrote you stacks of letters," he said, "and you never sent me one
+little line; not even 'Yours received and contents noted!'"
+
+In a flash all intimacy vanished. She might have been at the other end of
+the dining-room in somebody else's party nodding to him as to an
+acquaintance. Her answer was delayed about as long as it takes to lift an
+arrow from a quiver and notch it in a bowstring.
+
+"A novel may be very interesting, but that does not mean that I write to
+the author!"
+
+He imagined her going through the meal in polite silence or in measured
+commonplaces, turning the happy parliament into a frigid Gothic ceremony.
+Why had he not kept in mind that sufficient to the hour is the pleasure
+of it? Famished for her companionship, a foolhardy impulse of temptation
+had risked its loss. The waiter set something before them and softly
+withdrew. Jack signaled the unspoken humility of being a disciplined
+soldier at attention on his side of the barrier and Mary signaled a
+trifle superior but good-natured acceptance of his apology and promise of
+better conduct.
+
+They were back to the truce of nonsense, apostrophizing the cooking of
+the Best Swell Place, setting exclamations to their glimpses of people
+passing in the street. For they had never wanted for words when talking
+across the barrier; there was paucity of conversation only when he
+threatened an invasion.
+
+While a New Yorker meeting a former New Yorker on the desert might have
+little to tell not already chronicled in the press, a Little Riversite
+meeting a former Little Riversite in New York had a family budget of
+news. How high were Jack's hedges? How were the Doge's date-trees? How
+was this and that person coming on? Listening to all the details, Jack
+felt homesickness creeping over him, and he clung fondly to every one of
+the swiftly-passing moments. By no reference and by no inference had she
+suggested that there was ever any likelihood of his meeting or hearing
+from her again. A thread of old relations had been spun only to be
+snapped. She was, indeed, as a visitation developed out of the sunshine
+of the Avenue, into which she would dissolve.
+
+"I was to meet father at a bookstore at three," she said, finally,
+as she rose.
+
+"Inevitably he would be there or in a gallery," said Jack.
+
+"He has done the galleries. This is the day for buying books--still
+more books! I suppose he is spending the orange crop again. If you keep
+on spending the same orange crop, just where do you arrive in the maze
+of finance?"
+
+"I should not like to say without consulting the head book-keeper or, at
+least, Peter Mortimer!"
+
+They were coming out of the door of the Best Swell Place, now. A word and
+she would be going in one direction and he in another. How easily she
+might speak that word, with an electric and final glance of good-will!
+
+"But I must say howdy do to the Doge!" he urged. "I should like to
+see him buying books. What a prodigal debauch of learning! I cannot
+miss that!"
+
+"It is not far," she said, prolonging Paradise for him.
+
+A few blocks below Forty-second Street they turned into a cross street
+which was the same that led to the Wingfield house; and halfway to
+Madison Avenue they entered a bookstore. The light from low windows
+spreading across the counters blended with the light from high windows at
+the back, and here, on a platform at the head of the stairs, before a big
+table sat the Doge, in the majesty of a great patron of literature, with
+a clerk standing by in deftly-urging attentiveness. Mary and Jack paused
+at the foot of the stairs watching him. Gently he was fingering an old
+octavo; fingering it as one would who was between the hyperionic desire
+of possession and a fear that a bank account owed its solvency to keeping
+the amounts of deposits somewhere in proportion to the amount of
+withdrawals.
+
+"No, sir! No more, you tempter!" he declared. "No more, you unctuous
+ambassador from the court of Gutenberg! Why, this one would take enough
+alfalfa at the present price a ton to bury your store under a haycock as
+high as the Roman Pantheon!"
+
+The Doge rose and picked up his broad-brimmed hat, prepared to fly from
+danger. He would not expose himself a moment longer to the wiles of
+that clerk.
+
+"I'll wait for my daughter down there in the safe and economical environs
+of the popular novels fresh from the press!" he said.
+
+Turning to descend the stairs he saw the waiting pair. He stopped stock
+still and threw up his hand in a gesture of astonishment. His glance
+hovered back and forth between Jack's face and Mary's, and then met
+Jack's look with something of the same challenge and confidence of his
+farewell on the road out of Little Rivers, and in an outburst of genial
+raillery he began the conversation where he had left off with the final
+call of his personal good wishes and his salutations to certain landmarks
+of New York.
+
+"Well, well, Sir Chaps! I saw Sorolla in his new style; very different
+from the academics of the young Sorolla. He has found his mission and let
+himself go. No wonder people flocked to his exhibitions on misty days!
+The trouble with our artists is that they are afraid to let themselves
+go, afraid to be popular. They think technique is the thing, when it is
+only the tool. Why, confound it all! all the great masters were popular
+in their day--Venetian, Florentine, Flemish! Confound it, yes! And not
+one Velasquez"--evidently he was talking partly to get his bearings after
+his shock at seeing Jack--"no, not one Velasquez in the Metropolitan! I
+go home without seeing a Velasquez. They have the Catherine Lorillard
+Wolfe collection, thousands of square yards of it, and yes, cheer up!
+Thank heaven, they have some great Americans, Inness and Martin and Homer
+and our exile Whistler, who annexed Japan, and our Sargent, born in
+Florence. And I did see the Metropolitan tower. I take off my hat, my
+broad-brimmed hat, wishing that it were as big as a carter's umbrella, to
+that tower. I hate to think it an accident of chaos like the Grand
+Canyon. I rather like to think of it as majestic promise."
+
+The Doge had talked so fast that he was almost out of breath. He was
+ready to yield the floor to Jack.
+
+"I kissed my hand to Diana for you!" said Jack. "And what do you think?
+The lady in answer shook out her scarf and something white and small
+fluttered down. I picked it up. It was a note."
+
+"Did you open that note?" asked the Doge in haughty suspicion.
+
+"Naturally."
+
+"Wasn't it marked personal for me?"--this in fine simulation of
+indignation.
+
+"Without address!"
+
+"I am chagrined and surprised at Diana," said the Doge ruefully. "It's
+the effect of city association. As a matter of course, she ought to have
+given it to Mercury, or at least to one of the Centaurs, considering all
+the horseshows that have been held under her skipping toes! Well, what
+did she say? Being a woman of action she was brief. What did she say?"
+
+"It was in the nature of a general personal complaint. Her costume is in
+need of repair; it is flaking disgracefully. She said that if you had not
+forsaken your love of the plastic for love of the graphic arts you would
+long ago have stolen a little gold off the Eternal Painter's palette,
+just to clothe her decently for the sake of her own self-respect--the
+town having set her so high that its sense of propriety was quite safe."
+
+"I stand convicted of neglect," said the Doge, coming down to the floor
+of the store. "I will shoot her a bundle of gold leaf from the top of the
+pass on a ray of evening sunshine."
+
+There, he gave Jack a pat on the shoulder; a hasty, playful, almost
+affectionate demonstration, and broke off with a shout of:
+
+"Persiflage, sir, persiflage!"
+
+"It is manna to me!" declared Jack, in the fulness and sweetness of the
+sensation of the atmosphere of Little Rivers reproduced in New York.
+
+"And not a Velasquez in the Metropolitan!" mused the Doge, bustling along
+the aisle hurriedly. "Well, Mary, we have errands to do. There is no time
+to spare."
+
+They were at the door, Jack in wistful insistence, hungry for their
+companionship, and the Doge and Mary in common hesitancy for a phrase
+before parting from him. He was ahead of the phrase.
+
+"But there is a Velasquez, one of the greatest of Velasquezes, just a few
+steps from here! It would take only a minute to see it."
+
+"A Velasquez a few steps from here!" cried the Doge. "Where? Be exact,
+before I let my hopes rise too high."
+
+"The subject is an ancestor of mine. My father has it."
+
+Jack had looked in the direction of the Wingfield house on the Madison
+Avenue corner as he spoke, and the Doge had followed his glance. The
+eagerness passed from the Doge's face, but not its intensity. That was
+transmuted into something staring and hard.
+
+"A very great Velasquez!" Jack repeated.
+
+"My _amour propre_!" the Doge said, in whispered abstraction, using the
+French which so exactly expresses the rightness of an inner feeling that
+will not let one do a thing however much he may wish to. Then a wave of
+confusion passed over his face, evidently at the echo of his thoughts in
+the form of words come unwittingly from his lips. He tried to retrieve
+his exclamation in an effort at the forensic: "The _amour propre_ of any
+American is hurt by the thought that he must go to a private gallery to
+see a Velasquez in the greatest city of the land!"
+
+But it was a lame explanation. Clearly, some old antipathy had been
+aroused in Jasper Ewold; and it made him hesitate to enter the big red
+brick house on the corner.
+
+"And we have a wonderful Sargent, too, a Sargent of my mother!" Jack
+proceeded.
+
+"Yes, yes!" said the Doge, and eagerness returned; a strange, moving
+eagerness that seemed to come from the same depths as the exclamation
+that had arrested his acceptance of the invitation at the outset. It held
+the monosyllables like drops of water trembling before they fell.
+
+"I should like you to see them both," said Jack.
+
+"Yes," said the Doge, the word an echo rather than consent.
+
+"There is no one at home at this hour; you will have all the time you can
+spare for the pictures."
+
+In the ascendency of his ardor to retain the joy of their company and in
+the perplexity of mystery injected afresh into his relations with Mary,
+Jack was hardly conscious that his urging was only another way of saying
+that his father was absent. And Mary had not thrown her influence either
+for or against going. She was watching her father, curiously and
+penetratingly, as if trying to understand the source of the emotion that
+he was seeking to control.
+
+"Why, in that case," exclaimed the Doge, "why, you see," he went on to
+explain, "we desert folk, though we are used to galleries, are a little
+diffident about meeting people who live in big mansions. I mean, people
+who have not had the desert training that you have had, Sir Chaps. If it
+is only a matter of looking at a picture without any social
+responsibilities, and that picture a Velasquez, why, we must take the
+time, mustn't we, Mary?"
+
+"Yes," Mary assented.
+
+With Mary on one side of him and Jack on the other, the Doge was walking
+heavily and slowly.
+
+"At what period of Velasquez's career?" he asked, vacantly.
+
+"When he was young and the subject was middle-aged, a Northerner, with
+fair hair and lean muscles under a skin bronzed by the tropics, and the
+unquenchable fire of youth in his eyes."
+
+"That ought to be a good Velasquez," said the Doge.
+
+At the bottom step of the flight up to the entrance to the house he
+hesitated. He appeared to be very old and very tired. His face had gone
+quite pale. The lids hung heavily over his eyes. Jack dropped back in
+alarm to assist him; but his color quickly returned and the old challenge
+was in his glance as it met Jack's.
+
+"Now for your Velasquez!" he exclaimed, with calm vigor.
+
+Once in the hall, Jack stood to one side of the door of the drawing-room
+to let the Doge enter first. As the old man crossed the threshold his
+hands were clasped behind him; his shoulders had fallen together, not in
+weariness now, but in a kind of dazed, studious expectancy; and he faced
+the "Portrait of a Lady."
+
+"This is the Sargent," he said slowly, his lips barely opening in
+mechanical and absent comment. "A good Sargent!"
+
+He was as still as the picture in his bowed and earnest gaze into her
+eyes, except for an occasional nervous movement of the fingers. All the
+surroundings seemed to melt into a neutral background for the two; there
+was nothing else in the room but the scholar in his age and the "Portrait
+of a Lady" in her youth. Jack saw the Doge's face, its many lines
+expressive as through a mist of time, its hills and valleys in the sun
+and the shadow of emotions as variable as the mother's in life, speaking
+personal resentment and wrong, admiration and tenderness, grievous
+inquiry and philosophy, while the only answer was the radiant, "I give! I
+give!" Finally, the Doge tightened the clasp of his hands, with a quiver
+of his frame, as he turned toward Jack.
+
+"Yes, a really great Sargent--a Sargent of supreme inspiration!" he said.
+"Now for your Velasquez!"
+
+Before the portrait of the first John Wingfield, Jasper Ewold's head and
+shoulders recovered their sturdiness of outline and his features lighted
+with the veritable touch of the brush of genius itself. He was the
+connoisseur who understands, whose joy of possession is in the very
+tingling depths of born instinct, rich with training and ripened by time.
+It was superior to any bought title of ownership. In the presence of a
+supreme standard, every shade of discriminative criticism and appraisal
+became threads woven into a fabric of rapture.
+
+"Mary," he said, his voice having the mellowness of age in its deep
+appreciation, "Mary, wherever you saw this--skied or put in a corner
+among a thousand other pictures, in a warehouse, a Quaker meetinghouse,
+anywhere, whatever its surroundings--should you feel its compelling
+power? Should you pause, incapable of analysis, in a spell of tribute?"
+
+"Yes, I don't think I am quite so insensible as not to realize the
+greatness of this portrait, or that of the Sargent, either," she
+answered.
+
+"Good! I am glad, Mary, very glad. You do me credit!"
+
+Now he turned from the artist to the subject. He divined the kind of man
+the first John Wingfield was; divined it almost as written in the
+chronicle which Jack kept in his room in hallowed fraternity. Only he
+bore hard on the unremitting, callous, impulsive aggressiveness of a
+fierce past age, with its survival of the fittest swordsmen and
+buccaneers, which had no heroes for him except the painters, poets, and
+thinkers it gave to posterity.
+
+"Fire-eating old devil! And the best thing he ever did, the best luck he
+ever had, was attracting the attention of a young artist. It's
+immortality just to be painted by Velasquez; the only immortality many a
+famous man of the time will ever know!"
+
+He looked away from the picture to Jack's face keenly and back at the
+picture and back at Jack and back at the picture once more.
+
+"Yes, yes!" he mused, corroboratively; and Jack realized that at the same
+time Mary had been making the same comparison.
+
+"Very like!" she said, with that impersonal exactness which to him was
+always the most exasperating of her phases.
+
+Then the Doge returned to the Sargent. He was standing nearer the
+picture, but in the same position as before, while Jack and Mary waited
+silently on his pleasure; and all three were as motionless as the
+furniture, had it not been for the nervous twitching of the Doge's
+fingers. He seemed unconscious of the passing of time; a man in a maze of
+absorption with his thoughts. Jack was strangely affected. His brain was
+marking time at the double-quick of fruitless energy. He felt the
+atmosphere of the room surcharged with the hostility of the unknown. He
+was gathering a multitude of impressions which only contributed more
+chaos to chaos. His sensibilities abnormally alive to every sound, he
+heard the outside door opened with a latch-key; he heard steps in the
+hall, and saw his father's figure in the doorway of the drawing-room.
+
+John Wingfield, Sr. appeared with a smile that was gone in a flash.
+His face went stark and gray as stone under a frown from the Doge to
+Jack; and with an exclamation of the half-articulate "Oh!" of
+confusion, he withdrew.
+
+Jack looked around to see the Doge half turned in the direction of the
+door, gripping the back of a chair to steady himself, while Mary was
+regarding this sudden change in him in answer to the stricken change in
+the intruder with some of Jack's own paralysis of wonder. The Doge was
+the first to speak. He fairly rocked the chair as he jerked his hand free
+of its support, while he shook with a palsy which was not that of fear,
+for there was raging color in his cheeks. The physical power of his great
+figure was revealed. For the first time Jack was able to think of him as
+capable of towering militancy. His anger gradually yielded to the
+pressure of will and the situation. At length he said faintly, with a
+kind of abyssmal courtesy:
+
+"Thank you, Sir Chaps! Now I shall not go back to the desert without
+having seen a Velasquez. Thank you! And we must be going."
+
+Jack had an impulse, worthy of the tempestuous buccaneer of the picture,
+to call to his father to come down; and then to bar the front door until
+his burning questions were heard. The still light in Mary's eyes would
+have checked him, if not his own proper second thought and the fear of
+precipitating an ungovernable crisis. There had been shadows, real
+shadows, he was thinking wildly; they were not born of desert imaginings;
+and out of the quandary of his anguish came only the desire not to part
+from the Doge and Mary in this fashion! No, not until in some way
+equilibrium of mind was restored.
+
+Though he knew that they did not expect or want his company, he went
+out into the street with them. He would go as far as their hotel, he
+remarked, in the bravery of simulated ease. The three were walking in
+the same relative positions that they had before, with the Doge's bulk
+hiding Mary from Jack's sight. The Doge set a rapid pace, as if under
+the impetus of a desire to escape from the neighborhood of the
+Wingfield house.
+
+"Well, Sir Chaps," he said, after a while, "it will be a long time before
+the provincials come to New York again. Why, in this New York you can
+spend a patrimony in two weeks"--this with an affected amusement at his
+own extravagance--"and I've pretty nearly done it. So we fly from
+temptation. Yes, Mary, we will take the morning train."
+
+"The morning train!" Mary exclaimed; and her surprise left no doubt that
+her father's decision was new to her. Was it due to an exchange of
+glances between a stark face and a face crimson with indignation which
+Jack had already connected with the working out of his own destiny?
+
+"Yes, that is better than spending our orange crop again!" she hastened
+to add, with reassuring humor. "I'm fairly homesick for our oasis."
+
+"We've had our fill of the big city," said the Doge, feelingly, "and we
+are away to our little city of peace where we turned our pasts under with
+the first furrows in the virgin soil."
+
+Then silence. The truce of nonsense was dead. Persiflage was dead. Jack
+was as a mute stranger keeping at their side unasked, while the only
+glimpse he had of Mary was the edge of her hat and her fingertips on her
+father's sleeve. Silence, which he felt was as hard for them as for him,
+lasted until they were at the entrance to the quiet little hotel on a
+cross-town street where the Ewolds were staying; and having the first
+glimpse of Mary's eyes since they had started, he found nothing
+fathomable in them except unmistakable relief that the walk was over.
+
+"Thank you for showing me the Velasquez," said the Doge.
+
+"Thank you, Jack," Mary added.
+
+Both spoke in a manner that signaled to him the end of all things, but an
+end which he could not accept.
+
+"I--I--oh, there are a thousand questions I--" he broke out, desperately.
+
+The muscles of his face tightened. Unconsciously he had leaned forward
+toward the Doge in his intensity, and his attitude had become that of the
+Wingfield of the portrait. A lower note of command ran through the
+misery of his tone.
+
+Jasper Ewold stared at him in a second of scrutiny, at once burningly
+analytic and reflective. Then he flushed as he had at sight of the figure
+in the drawing-room doorway. His look plainly said: "How much longer do
+you mean to harass me?" as if Jack's features were now no less the image
+of a hard and bitter memory than those of John Wingfield, Sr. Jack drew
+back hurt and dumb, in face of this anger turned on himself. At length,
+the Doge mustered his rallying smile, which was that of a man who carries
+into his declining years a burden of disappointments which he fears may,
+in his bad moments, get the better of his personal system of philosophy.
+
+"Come, Mary!" he said, drawing his arm through hers. He became, in an
+evident effort, a grand, old-fashioned gentleman, making a bow of
+farewell. "Come, Mary, it's an early train and we have our packing
+yet to do."
+
+This time it was, indeed, dismissal; such a dismissal with polite urgency
+as a venerable cabinet minister might give an importunate caller who is
+slow to go. He and Mary started into the hotel. But he halted in the
+doorway to say over his shoulder, with something of his old-time cheer,
+which had the same element of pity as his leave-taking on the trail
+outside of Little Rivers:
+
+"Luck, Sir Chaps!"
+
+"Luck!" Mary called in the same strained tone that she had called to Jack
+when he went over the pass on his way to New York, the tone that was like
+the click of a key in the lock of a gate.
+
+
+
+
+XXX
+
+WITH THE PHANTOMS
+
+
+As Jack left the hotel entrance he was walking in the treadmill mechanics
+of a prisoner pacing a cell, without note of his surroundings, except of
+dim, moving figures with which he must avoid collision. The phantoms of
+his boyhood, bulky and stiflingly near, had a monstrous reality, yet the
+ghostly intangibility that mocked his sword-thrusts of tortured inquiry.
+At length his distraction centered on the fact that he and his father
+were to dine alone that evening.
+
+They dined alone regularly every Wednesday, when Jack made a report of
+his progress and received a lesson in business. It was at the last
+council of this kind that John Wingfield, Sr. had bidden his son to
+bring all questions and doubts to him. Now Jack hailed the weekly
+function as having all the promise of relief of a surgeon's knife. Fully
+and candidly he would unburden himself of every question beating in his
+brain and every doubt assailing his spirit.
+
+By the time that he was mounting the steps of the house his growing
+impatience could no longer bear even the delay of waiting on dinner. When
+he entered the hall he was the driven creature of an impelling desire
+that must be satisfied immediately.
+
+"Will you ask my father if he will see me at once?" he said to the
+butler.
+
+"Mr. Wingfield left word that he had to go into the country for the
+night," answered the butler. "I am sorry, sir," he added confusedly, in
+view of the blank disappointment with which the information was received.
+
+In dreary state Jack dined by himself in the big dining-room, leaving the
+food almost untouched. At intervals he was roused to a sense of his
+presence at table by the servant's question if he should bring another
+course. Without waiting for the last one, he went downstairs to the
+drawing-room, and standing near the "Portrait of a Lady," again poured
+out his questions, receiving the old answer of "I give! I give!" which
+meant, he knew, that she had given all of herself to him. Saying after
+saying of hers raced through his mind without throwing light on the
+mystery, which had the uncanniness of a conspiracy against him.
+
+And after his mother, Mary had influenced him more than any other person.
+She had brought life to the seeds which his mother had planted in his
+nature. That new life could not die, but without her it could not
+flourish. Her cry of "It's not in the blood!" again came echoing to his
+ears. What had she meant? The question sent him to the Ewolds' hotel; it
+sent this note up to her room:
+
+"MARY:
+
+"In behalf of old desert comradeship, if I were in trouble wouldn't you
+help me all you could? If I were in darkness and you could give me light,
+would you refuse? Won't you see me for a few moments, if I promise to
+keep to my side of the barrier which you have raised between us? I will
+wait here in the lobby a long time, hoping that you will.
+
+"JACK."
+
+"All the light I have to give. I also am in darkness," came the answer in
+a nervous, impulsive hand across a sheet of paper; and soon Mary herself
+appeared from the elevator, not in the fashion of the Avenue, but in
+simple gray coat and skirt, such as she wore at home. She greeted him in
+a startled, half-fearful manner, as if her presence were due to the
+impulsion of duty rather than choice.
+
+"Shall we walk?" she asked, turning toward the door in the welcome of
+movement as a steadying influence in her evident emotion.
+
+There they were in the old rhythm of step of Little Rivers companionship
+on a cross-town street. He saw that the costly hat that he had selected
+for her in the display of a shop-window after all was not the equal of
+the plain model with a fetching turn to the brim and a single militant
+feather, which she wore that evening. The light feather boa around her
+neck on account of the cool night air seemed particularly becoming. He
+was near, very near, her, so near that their elbows touched; but the
+nearness was like that of a picture out of a frame which has come to life
+and may step back into cold canvas at any moment. Oh, it was hard, in the
+might of his love for her, not to forget everything else and cry out
+another declaration, as he had from the canyon! But her face was very
+still. She was waiting for him to begin, while her fingers were playing
+nervously with the tip of her boa.
+
+"I must be frank, very frank," he said.
+
+"Yes, Jack, or why speak at all?"
+
+"From the night of my arrival in Little Rivers, when the Doge at once
+recognized who I was without telling me, I saw that, under his politeness
+and his kindness, he was hostile to my presence in Little Rivers."
+
+"Yes, I think that in a way he was," she answered.
+
+"I was conscious that something out of the past was between him and me,
+and that it included you in a subtle influence that nothing could change.
+And this afternoon, while you were at the house and my father came to the
+drawing-room door, I could not help noticing how the Doge was overcome.
+You noticed it, too?"
+
+"Yes, I never saw my father in such anger before. It seemed to me that
+he could have struck down that man in the doorway!" There was a
+perceptible shudder, but she did not look up, her glance remaining level
+with the flags.
+
+"And on the pass you said, 'It's not in the blood!'" he continued. "Yes,
+almost in terror you said it, as if it spelled an impassable gulf between
+us. Why? why? Mary, haven't I a right to know?"
+
+As he broke off passionately with this appeal, which was as the focus of
+all the fears that had tormented him, they were immediately under the
+light of a street lamp. She turned her head toward him resolutely, in the
+mustering of her forces for an ordeal. Her face was pale, but there was
+an effort at the old smile of comradeship.
+
+"Yes, as I said, the little light that I have is yours, Jack," she began.
+"But there is not much. It is, perhaps, more what I feel than what I
+know that has influenced me. All that my father has ever said about you
+and your father and your relations to us was the night after I returned
+from the pass ahead of you, when you had descended into the canyon to
+frighten me with the risk you were taking."
+
+"I did not mean to frighten you!" he interjected. "I only followed
+an impulse."
+
+"Yes, one of your impulses, Jack," she remarked, comprehendingly. "Father
+and I have been so much together--indeed, we have never been apart--that
+there is more than filial sympathy of feeling between us. There is
+something akin to telepathy. We often divine each other's thoughts. I
+think that he understood what had taken place between us on the pass;
+that you had brought on some sort of a crisis in our relations. It was
+then that he told me who you were, as you know. Then he talked of you and
+your father--you still wish to hear?"
+
+"Yes!"
+
+"And you will listen in silence?"
+
+"Yes!"
+
+"I will grant your defence of your father, but you will not argue? I am
+giving what you ask, in justice to myself; I am giving my reasons, my
+feelings."
+
+"No, I will not argue."
+
+Their tones were so low that a passer-by would have hardly been conscious
+that they were talking; but had the passer-by caught the pitch he might
+have hazarded many guesses, every one serious.
+
+"Then, I will try to make clear all that father said. You were the image
+of your father--a smile and a square chin. The smile could charm and the
+chin could kill. He liked you for some things that seemed to spring from
+another source, as he called it; but these would vanish and in the end
+you would be like your father, as he knew when he saw you break Pedro
+Nogales's arm. And you gloried in your strength; as you told me on the
+pass and as I saw for myself in the duel. And to you, father said,
+victory was the supreme guerdon of life. It ran triumphant and
+inextinguishable in your veins."
+
+"I--" he said, chokingly; but remembered his promise not to argue.
+
+"Any opposition, any refusal excited your will to overcome it in the
+sheer joy of the exercise of your strength. This had been your father's
+story in everything, even in his marriage."
+
+She paused.
+
+"There is nothing more? No further light on his old relations with my
+father and mother?" he asked.
+
+"Only a single exclamation, 'It's not in the blood for you to believe in
+Jack Wingfield, Mary!' And after that he turned silent and moody. I
+pressed him for reasons. He answered that he had told me enough. I had to
+live my own life; the rest I must decide for myself. I knew that I was
+hurting him sorely. I was striking home into that past about which he
+would never speak, though I know it still causes him many days of
+suffering."
+
+"But on the desert there is no past!" Jack exclaimed.
+
+"Yes, there is, Jack. There is your own heart. On the desert your past is
+not shared with others. But to-night, after I received your note, I did
+try, for the second time in my life, to share father's. I told him your
+request; I spoke of the scene in your drawing-room; I asked him what it
+meant. He answered that you must learn from one nearer you than he was,
+and that he never wanted to think of that scene again."
+
+It was she who had chosen the direction at the street corners. They were
+returning now toward the hotel. The fingers which had been playing with
+the boa had crumpled the end of it into a ball, which they were gripping
+so tightly that the knuckles were little white spots set in a blood-red
+background. She was suffering, but determined to leave nothing unsaid.
+
+"Jack, when I said 'It's not in the blood' I was more than repeating my
+father's words. They expressed a truth for me. I meant not only rebellion
+against what was in you, but against the thing that was in me. Why, Jack,
+I do not even remember my own mother! I have only heard father speak of
+her sadly when I was much younger. Of late years he has not mentioned
+her. He and the desert and the garden are all I have and all I know; and
+probably, yes--probably I'm a strange sort of being. But what I am, I am;
+and to that I will be true. Father went to the desert to save my life;
+and broken-hearted, old, he is greater to me than the sum of any worldly
+success. And, Jack, you forget--riding over the pass so grandly with your
+impulses, as if to want a thing is to get it--you--but we have had good
+times together; and, as I said, you belong on one side of the pass and I
+on the other. This and much else, which one cannot see or define, is
+between us. From the day you came, some forbidding influence seemed at
+work in my father's life and mine; and when you had gone another man,
+with your features and your smile, came to Little Rivers; one that I
+understand even less than you!"
+
+Jack recalled the references to the new rancher by Bob Worther on the day
+of his departure for the East and, later, in Jim Galway's letter. But he
+did not speak. Something more compelling than his promise was keeping him
+silent: her own apprehension, with its story of phantoms of her own.
+
+"And yesterday I saw your father's face," she went on, "as it appeared in
+the doorway for a second before he saw my father and was struck with
+fear, and how like yours it was--but more like John Prather's. And the
+high-sounding preachments about the poverty that might go with fine gowns
+became real to me. They were not banal at all. They were simple truth,
+free of rhetoric and pretence. I knew that my cry of 'It's not in the
+blood' was as true in me as any impulse of yours ever could be in you!"
+
+To the end, under the dominance of her will, she had not faltered; and
+with the end she looked up with a faint smile of stoicism and an
+invincible flame in her eyes. Anything that he might be able to say would
+be as flashing a blade in and out of a blaze. She had become superior to
+the resources of barrier or armor, confident of a self whose richness he
+realized anew. He saw and felt the tempered fineness of her as something
+that would mind neither siege nor prayer.
+
+"I am not afraid," she said, "and I know that you are not. It is all
+right!" Then she added, with a desperate coolness, but still clasping the
+boa rigidly: "The hotel is only a block away, and to-morrow you will be
+back in the store and I shall soon be on my side of the pass."
+
+This was her right word for a situation when his temples were throbbing,
+harking back, with time's reversal of conditions, to a situation after
+the duel in the _arroyo_ was over and he had used the right word when her
+temples were throbbing and her hands splashed. If retribution were her
+object, she had repaid in nerve-twitch of torture for nerve-twitch of
+torture. The picture that had been alive and out of its frame was back on
+cold canvas. Even the girl he had known across the barrier, even the girl
+in armor, seemed more kindly. But one can talk, even to a picture in a
+frame; at least, Jack could, with wistful persistence.
+
+"You don't mind if I tell you again--if I speak my one continuous thought
+aloud again?" he asked. "Mary, I love you! I love you in such a way that
+I"--with a faint bravery of humor as he saw danger signals--"I would
+build mud-houses all day for you to knock to pieces!"
+
+"Foolish business, Jack!" she answered.
+
+"Or drag a plow."
+
+"Very hard work!"
+
+"Or set out to tunnel a mountain single-handed, with hammer and chisel."
+
+"I think you would find it dreadfully monotonous at the end of the
+first week."
+
+He had spoken his extravagances without winning a glance from her. She
+had answered with a precision that was more trying than silence.
+
+"_I_ shouldn't find it so if you were in the neighborhood to welcome
+me when I knocked off for the day," he declared. "You see, I can't
+help it. I can't help what is in me, just as surely as the breath of
+life is in me."
+
+"Jack!" she flashed back, with arresting sharpness, but without looking
+around, while her step quickened perceptibly, "suppose I say that I am
+sorry and I, too, cannot help it; that I, too, have temperament, as well
+as you;" her tone was almost harsh; "that even you cannot have everything
+you command; that for you to want a thing does not mean that I want it;
+that I cannot help the fact that I do not--"
+
+With a quick interruption he stayed the end of the sentence, as if it
+were a descending blade.
+
+"Don't say that!" he implored. "It is too much like taking a vow that
+might make you fearfully stubborn in order to live up to it. Perhaps the
+thing will come some day. It's wonderful how such a thing does come. You
+see, I speak from experience," he went on, in wan insistence, with the
+entrance to the hotel in sight. "Why, it is there before you realize it,
+like the morning sunshine in a room while you are yet asleep. And you
+open your eyes and there is the joyous wonder, settling itself all
+through you and making itself at home forever. You know for the first
+time that you are alive. You know for the first time that you were born
+into this world merely because one other person was born into it."
+
+"Very well said," she conceded, in hasty approval, without vouchsafing
+him a glance. "I begin to think you get more inspiration for compliments
+on this side of the pass than on the other,"--and they were at the hotel
+door. Precipitately she hastened through it, as if with her last display
+of strength after the exhaustion of that walk.
+
+
+
+
+XXXI
+
+PRATHER WOULD NOT WAIT
+
+
+When he returned to the house, Jack found a letter that had come in the
+late mail from Jim Galway:
+
+"First off, that story you sent for Belvy," Jim wrote. "We've heard it
+read and reread, and the more it's worn with reading the fresher it gets
+in our minds. As I size up the effect on the population, we folks in the
+forties and fifties got more fun out of it than anybody except the folks
+in the seventies and the five-to-twelve-year-olds. Some of the thirteen
+and fourteen-year-olds were inclined to think at first that it wasn't
+quite grown up enough for them, until they saw what fashionable
+literature it was becoming. Then their dignified maturity limbered up a
+little. Jack, it certainly did us a world of good. It seemed as if you
+were back home again."
+
+"Back home again!" Jack repeated, joyously; and then shook his head at
+himself in solemn warning.
+
+"And those of us that don't take our meat without salt sort of needed
+cheering up," Jim went on. "Only a few days after I wrote you, the Doge
+and Mary suddenly started for New York. Maybe he has looked you up." (The
+"maybe" followed an "of course," which had been scratched through.) "And
+maybe if he has you know more about what is going on here than we do. We
+practically don't know anything; but I've sure got a feeling of that
+uncertainty in the atmosphere that I used to have before a cyclone when I
+lived in Kansas. This Prather, that so many thought at first looked like
+you, has also gone to New York.
+
+"He left only two days ago. Maybe you will run across him. I don't know,
+but it seems to me he's gone to get the powder for some kind of a blow-up
+here. Jack, you know what would happen if we lost our water rights and
+you know what I wrote you in my last letter. Leddy and Ropey Smith are
+hanging around all the time, and since the Doge went a whole lot of
+fellows that don't belong to the honey-bee class have been turning up and
+putting up their tents out on the outskirts, like they expected something
+to happen. If things get worse and I've got something to go on and we
+need you, I'm going to telegraph just as I said I would; because, Jack,
+though you're worth a lot of millions, someway we feel you're one of us.
+
+"Very truly yours for Little Rivers,
+
+"JAMES R. GALWAY.
+
+"P.S.--Belvy said to put in P.S. because P.S.'s are always the most
+important part of a letter. She wants to know if you won't write
+another story."
+
+"I will!" said Jack. "I will, immediately!"
+
+He made it a long story. He took a deal of pains with it in the very
+relief of something to do when sleep was impossible and he must count the
+moments in wretched impatience until his interview with the one person
+who could answer his questions.
+
+As he went down town in the morning the very freshness of the air
+inspired him with the hope that he should come out of his father's office
+with every phantom reduced to a figment of imagination springing from the
+abnormality of his life-story; with a message that should allay Mary's
+fears and soften her harshness toward him; with the certainty that the
+next time he and his father sat together at dinner it would be in a
+permanent understanding, craved of affection. Mary might come to New
+York; the Doge might spend his declining years in leisurely patronage of
+bookshops and galleries; and he would learn how to run the business,
+though his head split, as became a simple, normal son.
+
+These eddying thoughts on the surface of his mind, however, could not
+free him of a consciousness of a deep, unsounded current that seemed to
+be the irresistible, moving power of Mary's future, the store's, his
+fathers, Jasper Ewold's and his own. With it he was going into a gorge,
+over a cataract, or out into pleasant valleys, he knew not which. He knew
+nothing except that there was no stopping the flood of the current which
+had its source in streams already flowing before he was born. When the
+last question had been asked his future would be clear. Relief was ahead,
+and after relief would come the end of introspection and the beginning of
+his real career.
+
+But another question was waiting for him in the store. It was walking the
+streets of his father's city in the freedom of a spectator who comes to
+observe and not to buy. Crossing the first floor as he came to the
+court, Jack saw, with sudden distinctness among the many faces coming and
+going, a profile which, in its first association, developed on his vision
+as that of his own when he shaved in front of the ear in the morning. He
+had only a glimpse before it was turned away and its owner, a young man
+in a quiet gray suit, started up the stairs.
+
+Jack studied the young man's back half amusedly to see if this, too, were
+like his own, and laughed at himself because he was sure that he would
+not know his own back if it were preceding him in a promenade up the
+Avenue. In peculiar suspense he was hoping that the young man would pause
+and look around, as his father always did and shoppers often did, in a
+survey of the busy, moving picture of the whole floor. But the young man
+went on to the top of the flight. There he proceeded along the railing of
+the court. His profile was again in view under a strong light, and Jack
+realized that his first recognition of a resemblance was the recognition
+of an indisputable fact.
+
+"Have I a double out West and another in New York?" he thought. "It gives
+a man a kind of secondhand feeling!"
+
+Then he recalled Jim's letter saying that John Prather had gone to New
+York. Was this John Prather? He had no doubt that it was when the object
+of his scrutiny, with full face in view, stopped and leaned over the
+balcony just above the diamond counter. There was a mole patch on the
+cheek such as Jack remembered that the accounts of John Prather had
+mentioned.
+
+"I am as much fussed as the giant was at the sight of yellow!"
+Jack mused.
+
+But for the mole patch the features were his own, as he knew them,
+though no one not given to more frequent personal councils with mirrors
+than Senor Don't Care of desert trails knows quite the lights and shadows
+of his own countenance, which give it its character even more than does
+its form. John Prather was regarding the jewelry display, where the
+diamonds were scintillating under the light from the milk glass roof,
+with a smile of amused contemplation. His expression was unpleasant to
+Jack. It had a quality of satire and of covetousness as its owner leaned
+farther over the rail and rubbed the palms of his hands together as
+gleefully as if the diamonds were about to fly into his pockets by
+enchantment.
+
+All the time Jack had stood motionless in fixed and amazed observation.
+He wondered that his stare had not drawn the other's attention. But John
+Prather seemed too preoccupied with the dazzle of wealth to be
+susceptible to any telepathic influence.
+
+"Great heavens! I am gaping at him as if he were climbing hand over hand
+up the face of a sky-scraper!" Jack thought. It was time something
+happened. Why should he get so wrought up over the fact that another man
+looked like him? "I'll get acquainted!" he declared, shaking himself free
+of his antipathy. "We are both from Little Rivers and that's a ready
+excuse for introducing myself."
+
+As he started across the floor toward the stairs, Prather straightened
+from his leaning posture. For an instant his glance seemed to rest on
+Jack. Indeed, eye met eye for a flash; and then Prather moved away. His
+decision to go might easily have been the electric result of Jack's own
+decision to join him. Jack ran up the stairs. At the head of the flight
+he saw, at half the distance across the floor, Prather's back entering an
+elevator on the down trip. He hurried forward, his desire to meet and
+speak with the man whose influence Jim Galway and Mary feared now
+overwhelming.
+
+"Hello!" Jack sang out; and this to Prather's face after he had turned
+around in the elevator.
+
+In the second while the elevator man was swinging to the door, Jack
+and Prather were fairly looking at each other. Prather had seen that
+Jack wanted to speak to him, even if he had not heard the call. His
+answer was a smile of mixed recognition and satire. He made a
+gesture of appreciative understanding of the distinction in their
+likeness by touching the mole on his cheek with his finger, which
+was Jack's last glimpse of him before he was shot down into the
+lower regions of the store.
+
+"He did it neatly!" Jack gasped, with a sense of defeat and chagrin. "And
+it is plain that he does not care to get acquainted. Perhaps he takes it
+for granted that I am not friendly and foresaw that I would ask him a lot
+of questions about Little Rivers that he would not care to answer." At
+all events, the only way to accept the situation was lightly, his reason
+insisted. "Having heard about the likeness, possibly he came to the store
+to have a look at me, and after seeing me felt that he had been libeled!"
+
+But his feelings refused to follow his reason in an amused view.
+
+"I do not like John Prather!" he concluded, as he took the next elevator
+to the top floor. "Yes, I liked Pete Leddy better at our first meeting. I
+had rather a man would swear at me than smile in that fashion. It is
+much more simple."
+
+The incident had had such a besetting and disagreeable effect that Jack
+would have found it difficult to rid his mind of it if he had not had a
+more centering and pressing object in prospect in the citadel of the
+push-buttons behind the glass marked "Private."
+
+John Wingfield, Sr. looked up from his desk in covert watchfulness to
+detect his son's mood, and he was conscious of a quality of manner that
+recalled the returning exile's entry into the same room upon his arrival
+from the West.
+
+"Well, Jack," the father said, with marked cheeriness, "I hear you have
+been taking a holiday. It's all right, and you will find motoring beats
+pony riding."
+
+"In some ways," Jack answered; and then he came a step nearer, his hand
+resting on the edge of the desk, as he looked into his father's eyes with
+glowing candor.
+
+John Wingfield, Sr.'s eyes shifted to the pushbuttons and later to a
+paper on the desk, with which his fingers played gently. He realized
+instantly that something unusual was on Jack's mind.
+
+"Father," Jack went on, "I want a long talk quite alone with you. When it
+is over I feel that we shall both know each other better; we can work
+together in a fuller understanding."
+
+"Yes, Jack," answered the father, cautiously feeling his way with a
+swift upward glance, which fell again to the paper. "Well, what is it
+now? Come on!"
+
+"There are a lot of questions I want to ask--family questions."
+
+"Family questions?" The fingers paused in playing with the paper for an
+instant and went on playing again. The soft hands were as white as the
+paper. "Family questions, eh? Well, there isn't much to our family except
+you and I and that old ancestor--and a long talk, you say?"
+
+"Yes. I thought that probably this would be a good time; you could give
+me an hour now. It might not take that long."
+
+Jack's voice was even and engaging and respectful. But it seemed to fill
+the room with many echoing whispers.
+
+"I have a very busy day before me," the father said, still without
+looking up. He was talking to a little pad at one corner of the green
+blotter which had a list of his appointments. "Your questions are not so
+imperative that they cannot wait?"
+
+"Then shall it be at dinner?" Jack asked.
+
+"At dinner? No. I have an engagement for dinner."
+
+"Shall you be home early? Shall I wait up for you?" Jack persisted.
+
+"Yes, that's it! Say at nine. I'll make a point of it--in the library at
+nine!" John Wingfield, Sr.'s hand slipped away from the papers and
+patted the back of Jack's hand. "And come on with your questions. I will
+answer every one that I can." He was looking up at Jack now, smilingly
+and attractively in his frankness. "Every one that I can, from the first
+John Wingfield right down to the present!"
+
+But the hand that lay on Jack's was cold and its movement nervous and
+spasmodic.
+
+"Thank you, father. I knew you would. I haven't forgotten your wish that
+I should bring all my doubts and questions to you," said Jack, happily.
+And in an impulse which had the devoutness of a rising hope he took that
+cold, soft hand in both of his and gave it a shake; and the feel of the
+son's grip, firm and warm, remained with John Wingfield, Sr. while he
+stared at the door through which Jack had passed out. When he had pulled
+himself together he asked Mortimer to connect him with Dr. Bennington.
+
+"Doctor, I want a little talk with you to-night before nine," he said.
+"Could you dine with me--not at the house--say at the club?
+Yes--excellent--and make it at seven. Yes. Good-by!"
+
+
+
+
+XXXII
+
+A CRISIS IN THE WINGFIELD LIBRARY
+
+
+A library atmosphere was missing from the Wingfield library, with its
+heavy panelling and rows of red and blue morocco backs. Rather the
+suggestion was of a bastion of privacy, where a man of action might make
+his plans or take counsel at leisure amid rich and mellow surroundings.
+Here, John Wingfield, Sr. had gained points through post-prandial
+geniality which he could never have won in the presence of the battery of
+push-buttons; here, his most successful conceptions had come to him;
+here, he had known the greatest moments of his life. He was right in
+saying that he loved his library; but he hardly loved it for its books.
+
+When he returned to the house shortly before nine from his session with
+Dr. Bennington, it was with the knowledge that another great moment was
+in prospect. He took a few turns up and down the room before he rang for
+the butler to tell Jack that he had come in. Then he placed a chair near
+the desk, where its occupant would sit facing him. After he sat down he
+moved the desk lamp, which was the only light in the room, so that its
+rays fell on the back of the chair and left his own face in shadow--a
+precaution which he had taken on many other occasions in adroitness of
+stage management. He drew from the humidor drawer of his desk a box of
+the long cigars with blunt ends which need no encircling gilt band in
+praise of their quality.
+
+As Jack entered, the father welcomed him with a warm, paternal smile. And
+be it remembered that John Wingfield, Sr. could smile most pleasantly,
+and he knew the value of his smile. Jack answered the smile with one of
+his own, a little wan, a little subdued, yet enlivening under the glow of
+his father's evident happiness at seeing him. The father, who had
+transgressed the rules of longevity by taking a second cigar after
+dinner, now pushed the box across the desk to his son. Jack said that he
+would "roll one"; he did not care to smoke much. He produced a small
+package of flake tobacco and a packet of rice paper and with a deftness
+that was like sleight of hand made a cigarette without spilling a single
+flake. He had not always chosen the "makings" in place of private stock
+Havanas, but it seemed to suit his mood to-night.
+
+"That is one of the things you learned in the West," the father observed
+affably, to break the ice.
+
+"I can do them with one hand," Jack answered. "But you are likely to
+have an overflow--which is all right when you have the whole desert for
+the litter. Besides, in a library it would have the effect of gallery
+play, I fear."
+
+He was seated in a way that revealed all the supple lines of his figure.
+However relaxed his attitude before his father, it was always suggestive
+of latent strength, appealing at once to paternal pride and paternal
+uncertainty as to what course the strength would take. His face under the
+light of the lamp was boyish and singularly without trace of guile.
+
+The father struck a match and held it to light his son's cigarette;
+another habit of his which he had found flattering to men who were
+brought into the library for conference. Jack took a puff slowly and,
+after a time, another puff, and then dropped the cigarette on the ash
+receiver as much as to say that he had smoked enough. Something told John
+Wingfield, Sr. that this was to be a long interview and in no way
+hurried, as he saw the smile dying on the son's lips and misery coming
+into the son's eyes.
+
+"These last two days have been pretty poignant for me," Jack began, in a
+simple, outright fashion; "and only half an hour ago I got this. It was
+hard to resist taking the first train West." He drew a telegram from his
+pocket and handed it to his father.
+
+"We want you and though we don't suppose you can come, we simply had to
+let you know.
+
+"JAMES R. GALWAY."
+
+"It is Greek to me," said the father. "From your Little Rivers
+friends, I judge."
+
+"Yes. I suppose that we may as well begin with it, as it drove everything
+else out of my mind for the moment."
+
+John Wingfield, Sr. swung around in his chair, with his face in the
+shadow. His attitude was that of a companionable listener who is prepared
+for any kind of news.
+
+"As you will, Jack," he said. "Everything that pertains to you is my
+interest. Go ahead in your own way."
+
+"It concerns John Prather. I don't know that I have ever told you about
+him in my talks of Little Rivers."
+
+"John Prather?" The father reflectively sounded the name, the while he
+studied the spiral of smoke rising from his cigar. "No, I don't think you
+have mentioned him."
+
+It was Jack's purpose to take his father entirely into his confidence; to
+reveal his own mind so that there should be nothing of its perplexities
+which his father did not understand. He might not choose a logical
+sequence of thought or event, but in the end nothing should be left
+untold. Indeed, he had not studied how to begin his inquiries. That he
+had left to take care of itself. His chief solicitude was to keep his
+mind open and free of bitterness whatever transpired, and it was evident
+that he was under a great strain.
+
+He told of the coming of John Prather to Little Rivers while he was
+absent; of the mention of the likeness by his fellow-ranchers; and of the
+fears entertained by Jim Galway and Mary. When he came to the scene in
+the store that afternoon it was given in a transparent fulness of detail;
+while all his changing emotions, from his first glimpse of Prather's
+profile to the effort to speak with him and the ultimatum of Prather's
+satirical gesture, were reflected in his features. He was the
+story-teller, putting his gift to an unpleasant task in illumination of
+sober fact and not the uses of imagination; and his audience was his
+father's cheek and ear in the shadow.
+
+"Extraordinary!" John Wingfield, Sr. exclaimed when Jack had finished,
+glancing around with a shrug. "Naturally, you were irritated. I like to
+think that only two men have the Wingfield features--the features of the
+ancestor--yes, only two: you and I!"
+
+"It was more than irritation; it was something profound and disturbing,
+almost revolting!" Jack exclaimed, under the disagreeable spell of his
+vivid recollection of the incident. "The resemblance to you was so
+striking, father, especially in the profile!" Jack was leaning forward,
+the better to see his father's profile, dim in the half light. "Yes,
+recognizable instantly--the nose and the lines about the mouth! You have
+never met anyone who has seen this man? You have never heard of him?" he
+asked, almost morbidly.
+
+John Wingfield, Sr. broke into a laugh, which was deprecatory and
+metallic. He looked fairly into Jack's eyes with a kind of inquiring
+amazement at the boy's overwrought intensity.
+
+"Why, no, Jack," he said, reassuringly. "If I had I shouldn't have
+forgotten it, you may be sure. And, well, Jack, there is no use of being
+sensitive about it, though I understand your indignation--especially
+after he flaunted the fact of the resemblance in such a manner and
+refused to meet you. From what I have heard about that fight with
+Leddy--Dr. Bennington told me--I can appreciate why he did not care to
+meet you." He laughed, more genially this time, in the survey of his
+son's broad shoulders. "I fear there is something of the old ancestor's
+devil in you when you get going!" he added.
+
+So his father had seen this, too--what Mary had seen--this thing born in
+him with the coming of his strength!
+
+"Yes, I suppose there is," he admitted, ruefully. "Yes, I have reason to
+know that there is."
+
+His face went moody. Any malice toward John Prather passed. He was
+penitent for a feeling against a stranger that seemed akin to the dormant
+instinct that had made him glory in holding a bead on Pete Leddy.
+
+"And I am glad of it!" said John Wingfield, Sr., with a flash of stronger
+emotion than he had yet shown in the interview.
+
+"I am not. It makes me almost afraid of myself," Jack answered.
+
+"Oh, I don't mean firing six-shooters--hardly! I mean backbone," he
+hastened to add, almost ingratiatingly. "It is a thing to control, Jack,
+not to worry about."
+
+"Yes, to control!" said Jack, dismally.
+
+He was hearing Ignacio's cry of "The devil is out of Senor Don't Care!"
+and seeing for the thousandth time Mary's horrified face as he pressed
+Pedro Nogales against the hedge. Now poise was all on the side of the
+father, who glanced away from Jack at the glint of the library cases in
+the semi-darkness in satisfaction. But only a moment did the son's absent
+mood last. He leaned forward quivering, free from his spell of
+reflection, and his words came pelting like hail. He was at grip with the
+phantoms and nothing should loosen his hold till the truth was out.
+
+"Father, I could not fail to see the look on your face and the look on
+Jasper Ewold's when you found him in the drawing-room!"
+
+At the sudden reversal of his son's attitude, John Wingfield, Sr. had
+drawn back into the shadow, as, if in defensive instinct before the force
+that was beating in Jack's voice.
+
+"Yes, I was startled; yes, very startled! But, go on! Speak everything
+that you have in mind; for it is evident that you have much to say. Go
+on!" he repeated more calmly, and turned his face farther into the
+shadow, while he inclined his head toward Jack as if to hear better. One
+leg had drawn up under him and was pressing against the chair.
+
+Jack waited a moment to gather his thoughts. When he spoke his
+passion was gone.
+
+"We have always been as strangers, father," he began. "I have no
+recollection of you in childhood until that day you came as a stranger to
+the house at Versailles. I was seven, then. My mother was away, as you
+will recall. I remember that you did not kiss me or show any affection.
+You did not even say who you were. You looked me over, and I was very
+frail. I saw that I did not please you; and I did not like you. In my
+childish perversity I would speak only French to you, which you did not
+understand. When my mother came home, do you remember her look? I do. She
+went white as chalk and trembled. I was frightened with the thought that
+she was going to die. It was a little while before she spoke and when she
+did speak she was like stone. She asked you what you wanted, as if you
+were an intruder. You said: 'I have been looking at the boy!' Your
+expression told me again that you were not pleased with me. Without
+another word you departed. I can still hear your steps on the walk as you
+went away; they were so very firm."
+
+"Yes, Jack, I can never forget." The tone was that of a man racked. "What
+else?" he asked. "Go on, Jack!"
+
+"You know the life my mother and I led, study and play together. And
+that was the only time you saw me until I was fourteen. I was mortally in
+awe of you then and in awe of you the day I went West with your message
+to get strong. But I got strong; yes, strong, father!"
+
+"Yes, Jack," said the father. "Yes, Jack, leave nothing unsaid--nothing!"
+
+Now Jack swept back to the villa garden in Florence, the day of the
+Doge's call; and from there to the Doge's glance of recognition that
+first night in Little Rivers; then to the scene in front of the
+bookstore, when the Doge hesitated about going to see the Velasquez. He
+pictured the Doge's absorption over the mother's portrait; he repeated
+Mary's story on the previous evening.
+
+All the while the profile, so dimly outlined in the outer darkness beyond
+the lamp's circle of light, to which he had been speaking, had not
+stirred. The father's cigar had gone out. It lay idly in his fingers,
+which rested on the arm of the chair, above a tiny pile of ashes on the
+rug. But there was no other sign of emotion, except his half affirmative
+interjections, with a confessional's encouragement to empty the mind of
+its every affliction.
+
+"Why were my mother and myself always in exile? What was this barrier
+between you and her? Why was it that I never saw you? Why this bitterness
+of Jasper Ewold against you? Why should that bitterness be turned against
+me? I want to know, father, so that we can start afresh and right. I no
+longer want to be in the dark, with its mystery, but in the light, where
+I can grapple with the truth!"
+
+There was no rancor, no crashing of sentences; only high tension in the
+finality of an inquiry in which hope and fear rose together.
+
+"Yes, Jack!" exclaimed John Wingfield, Sr., after a silence in which he
+seemed to be passing all that Jack had said in review. "I am glad you
+have told me this; that you have come to the one to whom you should come
+in trouble. You have made it possible for me to speak of something that I
+never found a way to speak about, myself. For, Jack, you truly have been
+a stranger to me and I to you, thanks to the chain of influences which
+you have mentioned."
+
+Very slowly John Wingfield, Sr. had turned in his chair. Distress was
+rising in his tone as he leaned toward Jack. His face under the rim of
+light of the lamp had a new charm, which was not that of the indulgent or
+flattering or winning smile, or the masterful set of his chin on an
+object. He seemed pallid and old, struggling against a phantom himself;
+almost pitiful, this man of strength, while his eyes looked into Jack's
+with limpid candor.
+
+"Jack, I will tell you all I can," he said. "I want to. It is duty. It is
+relief. But first, will you tell me what your mother told you? What her
+reasons were? I have a right to know that, haven't I, in my effort to
+make my side clear?" He spoke in direct, intimate appeal.
+
+Jack's lips were trembling and his whole nature was throbbing in a
+new-found sympathy. For the first time he saw his father as a man of
+sensitive feeling, capable of deep suffering. And he was to have the
+truth, all the truth, in kindness and affection.
+
+"After you had left the house at Versailles," said Jack, "she took me in
+her arms and said that you were my father. 'Did you like him?' she asked;
+and I said no, realizing nothing but the childish impression of the
+interview. At that she was wildly, almost hysterically, triumphant. I was
+glad to have made her so happy. 'You are mine alone! You have only me!'
+she declared over and over again. 'And you must never ask me any
+questions, for that is best.' She never mentioned you afterward; and in
+all my life, until I was fourteen, I was never away from her."
+
+Again the palm of John Wingfield, Sr.'s hand ran back and forth over his
+knee and the foot that was against the chair leg beat a nervous tattoo;
+while he drew a longer breath than usual, which might have been either of
+surprise or relief. His face fell back behind the rim of the lamp's rays,
+but he did not turn it away as he had when Jack was talking.
+
+"You know only the Jasper Ewold who has been mellowed by time," he began.
+"His scholarship was a bond of companionship for you in the isolation of
+a small community. I know him as boy and young man. He was very
+precocious. At the age of eight, as I remember, he could read his Caesar.
+You will appreciate what that meant in a New England town--that he was
+somewhat spoiled by admiration. And, naturally, his character and mine
+were very different, thanks to the difference in our situations; for the
+Ewolds had a good deal of money in those days. I was the type of boy who
+was ready to work at any kind of odd job in order to get dimes and
+quarters for my little bank.
+
+"Well, it is quite absurd to go back to that as the beginning of Jasper
+Ewold's feelings toward me; but one day young Wingfield felt that young
+Ewold was patronizing him. We had a turn at fisticuffs which resulted in
+my favor. Jasper was a proud boy, and he never quite forgave me. In fact,
+he was not used to being crossed. Learning was easy for him; he was
+good-looking; he had an attractive manner, and it seemed only his right
+that all doors should open when he knocked. Soon after our battle he went
+away to school. Not until we were well past thirty did our paths cross
+again. He was something of a painter, but he really had had no set
+purpose in life except the pleasures of his intellectual diversions. I
+will not say that he was wild, but at least he had lived in the abundant
+freedom of his opportunities. He fell in love at the same time that I did
+with Alice Jamison. You have seen your mother's picture, but that gives
+you little idea of her beauty in girlhood."
+
+"I have always thought her beautiful!" Jack exclaimed spontaneously.
+
+"Yes. I am glad. She always was beautiful to me; but I like best to think
+of her before she turned against me. I like to think of her as she was in
+the days of our courtship. Fortune favored me instead of Jasper Ewold. I
+can well understand the blow it was to him, that she should take the
+storekeeper, the man without learning, the man without family, as people
+supposed then, when he thought that she belonged entirely to his world.
+But his enmity thereafter I can only explain by his wounded pride; by a
+mortal defeat for one used to having his way, for one who had never known
+discipline. Your mother and I were very happy for a time. I thought that
+she loved me and had chosen me because I was a man of purpose, while
+Jasper Ewold was not."
+
+John Wingfield, Sr. spoke deliberately, measuring his thought before he
+put it into words, as if he were trying to set himself apart as one
+figure in a drama while he aimed to do exact justice to the others.
+
+"It was soon after you were born that your mother's attitude changed. She
+was, as you know, supersensitive, and whatever her grievances were she
+kept them to herself. My immersion in my affairs was such that I could
+not be as attentive to her as I ought to have been. Sometimes I thought
+that the advertisement with our name in big letters in every morning
+paper might be offensive to her; again, that she missed in me the
+education I had had to forfeit in youth, and that my affection could
+hardly take its place. I know that Jasper Ewold saw her occasionally, and
+in his impulse I know that he said things about me that were untrue. But
+that I pass over. In his place I, too, might have been bitter.
+
+"The best explanation I can find of your mother's change toward me is one
+that belongs in the domain of psychology and pathology. She suffered a
+great deal at your birth and she never regained her former strength. When
+she rose from her bed it was with a shadow over her mind. I saw that she
+was unhappy and nervous in my presence. Indeed, I had at times to face
+the awful sensation of feeling that I was actually repugnant to her. She
+was especially irritable if I kissed or fondled you. She dropped all her
+friends; she never made calls; she refused to see callers. I consulted
+specialists and all the satisfaction I had was that she was of a
+peculiarly high-strung nature and that in certain phases of melancholia,
+where there is no complete mental and physical breakdown, the patient
+turns on the one whom she would hold nearest and dearest if she were
+normal. The child that had taken her strength became the virtual passion
+of her worship, which she would share with no one.
+
+"When she proposed to go to Europe for a rest, taking you with her, I
+welcomed the idea. I rejoiced in the hope that the doctors held out that
+she would come back well, and I ventured to believe in a happy future,
+with you as our common object of love and care. But she never returned,
+as you know; and she only wrote me once, a wild sort of letter about what
+a beautiful boy you were and that she had you and I had the store and I
+was never to send her any more remittances.
+
+"I made a number of trips to Europe. I could not go frequently, because
+in those days, Jack, I was a heavy borrower of money in the expansion of
+my business, and only one who has built up a great business can
+understand how, in the earlier and more uncertain period of our banking
+credits, the absence of personal attention in any sudden crisis might
+throw you on the rocks. Naturally, when I went I wrote to Alice that I
+was coming; but I always found that she had gone and left no address for
+forwarding mail from the Credit Lyonnais. Once when I went without
+writing she eluded me, and the second time I found that she had a cottage
+at Versailles. That, as you know, was the only occasion when I ever saw
+you or her until I came to bring you home after her sudden death."
+
+"Yes," Jack whispered starkly. "That day I had left her as well as
+usual and came home to find her lying still and white on a couch, her
+book fallen out of her hand onto the floor and--" the words choked in
+his throat.
+
+"And the stranger, your father, who came for you seemed very hard and
+forbidding to you!"
+
+"Yes," Jack managed to say.
+
+"But, Jack, when my steps sounded so firm the day I left you at
+Versailles it was the firmness of force of will fighting to accept the
+inevitable. For I had seen your face. It was like mine, and yet I had to
+give you up! I had to give you up knowing that I might not see you again;
+knowing that this tragic, incomprehensible fatality had set you against
+me; knowing that any further efforts to see you meant only pain for Alice
+and for me. Whatever happiness she knew came from you, and that she
+should have. And remember, Jack, that out of all this tragedy I, too, had
+my point of view. I had my moments of reproach against fate; my moments
+of bitterness and anger; my moments when I set all my mind with, volcanic
+energy into my affairs in order to forget my misfortune. I had to build
+for the sake of building. Perhaps that hardened me.
+
+"When you came home I saw that you were mine in blood but not mine in
+heart. All your training had been foreign, all of estrangement from the
+business and the ways of the home-country; which you could not help, I
+could not help, nothing now could help. But, after all, I had been
+building for you; that was my new solace. I wanted you to be equal to
+what was coming to you, and that change meant discipline. To be frank
+with you, as you have been with me, you were sickly, hectic, dreamy; and
+when word came that you must go to the desert if your life were to be
+saved--well, Jack, I had to put affection aside and consider this blow
+for what it was, and think not of kind words but of what was best for you
+and your future. I knew that my duty to you and your duty to yourself was
+to see you become strong, and for your sake you must not return until you
+were strong.
+
+"Now, as for the scene in the drawing-room the other day: I could not
+forget what Jasper Ewold had said of me. That was one thing. Another was
+that I had detected his influence over you; an influence against the
+purpose and steadiness that I was trying to inculcate in you; and
+suddenly coming upon him in my own house, in view of his enmity and the
+way in which he had spoken about me, I was naturally startled and
+indignant and withdrew to avoid a scene. That is all, Jack. I have
+answered your questions to the best of my knowledge. If others occur to
+you I will try my best to answer them, too;" and the father seemed ready
+to submit every recess of his mind to the son's inquisition.
+
+"You have answered everything," said Jack; "everything--fairly,
+considerately, generously."
+
+There was a flash of triumph in the father's eyes. Slowly he rose and
+stood with his finger-ends caressing the blotting-pad. Jack rose at
+the same time, his movement automatic, instinctively in sympathy with
+his father's. His head was bowed under stress of the emotion,
+incapable of translation into language, which transfixed him. It had
+all been made clear, this thing that no one could help. His feeling
+toward his mother could never change; but penetrating to the depths in
+which it had been held sacred was a new feeling. The pain that had
+brought him into the world had brought misery to the authors of his
+being. There was no phantom except the breath of life in his nostrils
+which they had given him.
+
+Watchfully, respecting the son's silence, the father's lips tightened,
+his chin went out slightly and his brows drew together in a way that
+indicated that he did not consider the battle over. At length, Jack's
+head came up and his face had the strength of a youthful replica of the
+ancestor's, radiant in gratitude, and in his eyes for the first time, in
+looking into his father's, were trust and affection. There was no word,
+no other demonstration except the steady, liquid look that spoke the
+birth of a great, understanding comradeship. The father fed his hunger
+for possession, which had been irresistibly growing in him for the last
+two months, on that look. He saw his son's strength as something that had
+at last become malleable; and this was the moment when the metal was at
+white heat, ready for knowing turns with the pincers and knowing blows of
+the hammer.
+
+The message from Jim Galway was still on the table where the father had
+laid it after reading. Now he pressed his fingers on it so hard that the
+nails became a row of red spots.
+
+"And the telegram, Jack?" he asked.
+
+Jack stared at the yellow slip of paper as the symbol of problems that
+reappeared with burning acuteness in his mind. It smiled at him in the
+satire of John Prather triumphing in Little Rivers. It visualized
+pictures of lean ranchers who had brought him flowers in the days of his
+convalescence; of children gathered around him on the steps of his
+bungalow; of all the friendly faces brimming good-will into his own on
+the day of his departure; of a patch of green in desert loneliness, with
+a summons to arms to defend its arteries of life.
+
+"They want me to help--I half promised!" he said.
+
+"Yes. And just how can you help?" asked his father, gently.
+
+"Why, that is not quite clear yet. But a stranger, they made me one of
+themselves. They say that they need me. And, father, that thrilled me. It
+thrilled the idler to find that there was some place where he could be of
+service; that there was some one definite thing that others thought he
+could do well!"
+
+The father proceeded cautiously, reasonably, with his questions, as one
+who seeks for light for its own sake. Jack's answers were luminously
+frank. For there was always to be truth between them in their new
+fellowship, unfettered by hopes or vagaries.
+
+"You could help with your knowledge of law? With political influence?
+Help these men seasoned by experience in land disputes in that region?"
+
+"No!"
+
+"And would Jasper Ewold, whom I understand is the head and founder of the
+community, want you to come? Has he asked you?" the father continued,
+drawing in the web of logic.
+
+"On the contrary, he would not want me."
+
+"And Miss Ewold? Would she want you?"
+
+There Jack hesitated. When he spoke, however, it was to admit the fact
+that was stabbing him.
+
+"No, she would not. She has dismissed me. But--but I half promised," he
+added, his features setting firmly as they had after Leddy had fired at
+him. "It seems like duty, unavoidable."
+
+The metal was cooling, losing its malleability, and the father proceeded
+to thrust it back into the furnace.
+
+"Then, I take it that your value to Little Rivers is your cool hand
+with a gun," he said, "and the summons is to uncertainties which may
+lead to something worse than a duel. You are asked to come because you
+can fight. Do you want to go for that? To go to let the devil, as you
+call it, out of you?"
+
+Now the metal was soft with the heat of the shame of the moment when Jack
+had called to Leddy, "I am going to kill you!" and of the moment when he
+saw Pedro Nogales's limp, broken arm and ghastly face.
+
+"No, no!" Jack gasped. "I want no fight! I never want to draw a bead on a
+man again! I never want to have a revolver in my hand again!"
+
+He was shuddering, half leaning against the desk for support. His
+father waited in observant comprehension. Convulsively, Jack
+straightened with desperation and all the impassioned pleading to Mary
+on the pass was in his eyes.
+
+"But the thing that I cannot help--the transcendent thing, not of logic,
+not of Little Rivers' difficulties--how am I to give that up?" he cried.
+
+"Miss Ewold, you mean?"
+
+"Yes!"
+
+"Jack, I know! I understand! Who should understand if not I?" The father
+drew Jack's hand into his own, and the fluid force of his desire for
+mastery was flowing out from his finger-ends into the son's fibres, which
+were receptively sensitive to the caress. "I know what it is when the
+woman you love dismisses you! You have her to think of as well as
+yourself. Your own wish may not be lord. You may not win that which will
+not be won"--how well he knew that!--"either by protest, by persistence,
+or by labor. You are dealing with the tender and intangible; with
+feminine temperament, Jack. And, Jack, it is wise for you, isn't it, to
+bear in mind that your life has not been normal? With the switch from
+desert to city life homesickness has crept over you. From to-night things
+will not be so strange, will they? But if you wish a change, go to
+Europe--yes, go, though I cannot bear to think of losing you the very
+moment that we have come to know each other; when the past is clear and
+amends are at hand.
+
+"And, Jack, if your mother were here with us and were herself, would she
+want you to go back to take up a rifle instead of your work at my side? I
+do not pretend to understand Jasper Ewold's or Mary Ewold's thoughts. She
+has preferred to make another generation's ill-feeling her own in a thing
+that concerns her life alone. She has seen enough of you to know her
+mind. For, from all I hear, you have not been a faint-hearted lover. Is
+it fair to her to follow her back to the desert? Is it the courage of
+self-denial, of control of impulse on your part? Would your mother want
+you to persist in a veritable conquest by force of your will, whose
+strength you hardly realize, against Mary Ewold's sensibilities? And if
+you broke down her will, if you won, would there be happiness for you and
+for her? Jack, wait! If she cares for you, if there is any germ of love
+for you in her, it will grow of itself. You cannot force it into blossom.
+Come, Jack, am I not right?"
+
+Jack's hands lay cold and limp in his father's; so limp that it seemed
+only a case of leading, now. Yet there was always the uncertain in the
+boy; the uncertain hovering under that face of ashes that the father was
+so keenly watching; a face so clearly revealing the throes of a struggle
+that sent cold little shivers into his father's warm grasp. Jack's eyes
+were looking into the distance through a mist. He dropped the lids as if
+he wanted darkness in which to think. When he raised them it was to look
+in his father's eyes firmly. There was a half sob, as if this
+sentimentalist, this Senor Don't Care, had wrung determination from a
+precipice edge, even as Mary Ewold had. He gripped his father's hands
+strongly and lifted them on a level with his breast.
+
+"You have been very fine, father! I want you to be patient and go on
+helping me. The trail is a rough one, but straight, now. I--I'm too
+brimming full to talk!" And blindly he left the library.
+
+When the door closed, John Wingfield, Sr. seized the telegram, rolled it
+up with a glad, fierce energy and threw it into the waste-basket. His
+head went up; his eyes became points of sharp flame; his lips parted in a
+smile of relief and triumph and came together in a straight line before
+he sank down in his chair in a collapse of exhaustion. After a while he
+had the decanter brought in; he gulped a glass of brandy, lighted another
+cigar, and, swinging around, fell back at ease, his mind a blank except
+for one glowing thought:
+
+"He will not go! He will give up the girl! He is to be all mine!"
+
+It is said that the best actors never go on the stage. They play real
+parts in private life, making their own lines as they watch the other
+players. One of this company, surveying the glint of his bookcases, was
+satisfied with the greatest effort of his life in his library.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIII
+
+PRATHER SEES THE PORTRAIT
+
+
+It did not occur to Jack to question a word of the narrative that had
+reduced a dismal enigma to luminous, connected facts. With the swift
+processes of reason and the promptness of decision of which he was
+capable on occasion, he had made up his mind as to his future even as he
+ascended the stairs to his room. The poignancy of his father's appeal had
+struck to the bed-rock of his affection and his conscience, revealing
+duty not as a thing that you set for yourself, but which circumstances
+set for you.
+
+Never before had he realized how hopelessly he had been a dreamer. Firio,
+P.D., Wrath of God, and Jag Ear became the fantastic memory of another
+incarnation. His devil should never again rejoice in having his finger on
+a trigger or send him off an easy traveller in search of gorgeous
+sunrises. His devil should be transformed into a backbone of unremitting
+apprenticeship in loving service for the father who had built for him in
+love. Though his head split, he would master every detail of the
+business. And when Jack stepped into the Rubicon he did not splash around
+or look back. He went right over to the new country on the other bank.
+
+But there were certain persons whom he must inform of the crossing.
+First, he wrote a telegram to Jim Galway: "Sorry, but overwhelming duty
+here will not permit. Luck and my prayers with you." Then to Firio a
+letter, which did not come quite so easily: "You see by now that you are
+mistaken, Firio. I am not coming back. Make the most of the ranch--your
+ranch--that you can." The brevity, he told himself, was in keeping with
+Firio's own style. Besides, anything more at length would have opened up
+an avenue of recollections which properly belonged to oblivion.
+
+And Mary? Yes, he would write to her, too. He would cut the last strand
+with the West. That was best. That was the part of his new courage of
+self-denial stripping itself of every trammeling association of
+sentiment. Other men had given up the women of their choice; and he could
+never be the man of this woman's choice. Somehow, his father's talk had
+made him realize an inevitable outcome which had better be met and
+mastered in present fortitude, rather than after prolonged years of
+fruitless hope centering two thousand miles away. He started a dozen
+letters to Mary, meaning each to be a fitting _envoi_ to their
+comradeship and a song of good wishes. Each one he wrote in the haste of
+having the task quickly over, only to throw away what he had written when
+he read it. The touch that he wanted would not come. He was simply
+flashing out a few of a thousand disconnected thoughts that ran away
+incoherently with his pen.
+
+But wasn't any letter, any communication of any kind, superfluous? Wasn't
+it the folly of weak and stupid stubbornness? She had spoken her final
+word in their relations at the hotel door. There was no Little Rivers;
+there was no Mary; there was nothing but the store. To enforce this fiat
+he had only to send the wire to Jim and post the letter to Firio. This he
+would do himself. A stroll would give him fresh air. It was just what he
+needed after all he had been through that evening; and he would see the
+streets not with any memory of the old restlessness when he and his
+father were strangers, but kindly, as the symbol of the future.
+
+His room was on the second floor. As he left it, he heard the door-bell
+ring, its electric titter very clear in the silence of the house. No
+doubt it meant a telegram for his father. At the turn of the stairs on
+the first floor he saw the back of the butler before the open door.
+Evidently it was not a matter of a telegram, but of some late caller.
+Jack paused in the darkness of the landing, partly to avoid the bother of
+having to meet anyone and partly arrested by the manner of the butler,
+who seemed to be startled and in doubt about admitting a stranger at that
+hour. Indistinctly, Jack could hear the caller's voice. The tone was
+familiar in a peculiar quality, which he tried to associate with a voice
+that he had heard frequently. The butler, apparently satisfied with the
+caller's appearance, or, at least, with his own ability to take care of a
+single intruder, stepped back, with a word to come in. Then, out of the
+obscurity of the vestibule, appeared the pale face of John Prather. Jack
+withdrew farther into the shadows instinctively, as if he had seen a
+ghost; as if, indeed, he were in fear of ghosts.
+
+"I will take your card to Mr. Wingfield," said the butler.
+
+Prather made a perfunctory movement as if for a card-case, but
+apparently changed his mind under the prompting suggestion that it was
+superfluous.
+
+"My name is John Prather," he announced. "Mr. Wingfield knows who I am
+and I am quite sure that he will see me."
+
+While the butler, after rapping cautiously, went into the library with
+the message, John Prather stood half smiling to himself as he looked
+around the hall. The effect seemed to please him in a contemplative
+fashion, for he rubbed the palms of his hands together, as he had in his
+survey of the diamond counters. He was serenity itself as John Wingfield,
+Sr. burst out of the library, his face hard-set.
+
+"I thought you were going this evening!" he exclaimed. "By what right do
+you come here?"
+
+He placed himself directly in front of Prather, thus hiding Prather's
+figure, but not his face, which Jack could see was not in the least
+disturbed by the other's temper.
+
+"Oh, no! The early morning train has the connections I want for Arizona,"
+he answered casually, as if he were far from being in any hurry. "I was
+taking a walk, and happening to turn into Madison Avenue I found myself
+in front of the house. It occurred to me what a lot I had heard about
+that ancestor, and seeing a light in the library, and considering how
+late it was, I thought I might have a glimpse of him without
+inconveniencing any other member of the family. Do you mind?"
+
+He put the question with an inflection that was at once engaging and
+confident.
+
+"Mind!" gasped John Wingfield, Sr.
+
+"I am sure you do not!" Prather returned. Now a certain deference and a
+certain pungency of satire ran together in his tone, the mixture being
+nicely and pleasurably controlled. "Is it in there, in the drawing-room?"
+
+"And then what else? Where do you mean to end? I thought that--"
+
+"Nothing else," Prather interrupted reassuringly. "Everything is settled,
+of course. This is sort of a farewell privilege."
+
+"Yes, in there!" snapped John Wingfield, Sr. "It's the picture on the
+other side of the mantel. I will wait here--and be quick, quick, I tell
+you! I want you out of this house! I've done enough! I--"
+
+"Thanks! It is very good-natured of you!"
+
+John Prather passed leisurely into the drawing-room and John Wingfield,
+Sr. stood guard by the door, his hand gripping the heavy portieres for
+support, while his gaze was steadily fixed at a point in the turn of the
+stairs just below where Jack was obscured in the shadow. His face was
+drawn and ashen against the deep red of the hangings, and torment and
+fear and defiance, now one and then the other, were in ascendency over
+the features which Jack had always associated with composed and
+unchanging mastery until he had seen them illumined with affection only
+an hour before. And the father had said that he had never met or heard of
+John Prather! The father had said so quietly, decidedly, without
+hesitation! This one thought kept repeating itself to Jack's stunned
+brain as he leaned against the wall limp from a blow that admits of no
+aggressive return.
+
+"The ancestor certainly must have been a snappy member of society in his
+time! It has been delightful to have a look at him," said John Prather,
+as he came out of the drawing-room.
+
+He paused as he spoke. He was still smiling. The mole on his cheek was
+toward the stairway; and it seemed to heighten the satire of his smile.
+The faces of the young man and the old man were close together and they
+were standing in much the same attitude, giving an effect of likeness in
+more than physiognomy. That note of John Prather's voice that had sounded
+so familiar to Jack was a note in the father's voice when he was
+particularly suave.
+
+"This is the end--that is the understanding--the end?" demanded John
+Wingfield, Sr.
+
+"Oh, quite!" John Prather answered easily, moving toward the door. He
+did not offer his hand, nor did John Wingfield, Sr. offer to take it.
+But as he went out he said, his smile broadening: "I hope that Jack
+makes a success with the store, though he never could run it as well as
+I could. Good-by!"
+
+"Good-by!" gasped John Wingfield, Sr.
+
+He wheeled around distractedly and stood still, his head bowed, his
+fingers working nervously before his hands parted in a shrugging,
+outspread gesture of relief; then, his head rising, his body stiffening,
+once more his arbitrary self, he started up the stairs with the firm yet
+elastic step with which he mounted the flights of the store.
+
+If Jack remained where he was they would meet. What purpose in questions
+now? The answer to all might be as false as to one. He was no more in a
+mood to trust himself with a word to his father than he had been to trust
+himself with a word to John Prather. He dropped back into the darkness
+of the dining-room and sank into a chair. When a bedroom door upstairs
+had closed softly he was sequestered in silence with his thoughts.
+
+His own father had lied to him! Lied blandly! Lied with eyes limpid with
+appeal! And the supreme commandment on which his mother had ever insisted
+was truth. The least infraction of it she would not forgive; it was the
+only thing for which she had ever punished him. He recalled the one
+occasion when she had seemed harsh and merciless, as she said:
+
+"A lie fouls the mouth of the one who utters it, Jack. A lie may torture
+and kill. It may ruin a life. It is the weapon of the coward--and never
+be a coward, Jack, never be afraid!"
+
+At the New England preparatory school which he had attended after he came
+home, a lie was the abomination on which the discipline of student
+comradeship laid a scourge. Out on the desert, where the trails run
+straight and the battle of life is waged straight against thirst and
+fatigue and distance, men spoke straight.
+
+And nothing had been explained, after all! The phantom was back,
+definite of form and smiling in irony. For it had a face, now, the face
+of John Prather! How was he connected with the story of the mother? the
+father? the Doge?
+
+Then, like a shaft of light across memory, came the recollection of a
+thing that had been so negligible to Jack at the time. It was Dr.
+Bennington's first question in Jack's living-room; a question so
+carelessly put and so dissociated from the object of his visit! Jack
+remembered Dr. Bennington's curious glance through his eyebrows as he
+asked him if he had met John Prather. And Dr. Bennington had brought Jack
+into the world! He knew the family history! The Jack that now rose from
+the chair was a Jack of action, driven by the scourge of John Prather's
+smile into obsession with the one idea which was crying: "I will know! I
+will know!"
+
+Downstairs in the hall he learned over the telephone that Dr. Bennington
+had just gone out on a call. It would be possible to see him yet
+to-night! An hour later, as the doctor entered his reception-room he was
+startled by a pacing figure in the throes of impatience, who turned on
+him without formality in an outburst:
+
+"Dr. Bennington, you asked me in Little Rivers if I had ever met John
+Prather. I have met him! Who is he? What is he to me?"
+
+The doctor's suavity was thrown off its balance, but he did not lose
+his presence of mind. He was too old a hand at his profession, too
+capable, for that.
+
+"I refuse to answer!" he said quickly and decisively.
+
+"Then you do know!" Jack took a step toward the doctor. His weight was on
+the ball of his foot; his eyes had the fire of a command that was not to
+be resisted.
+
+"Heavens! How like the ancestor!" the doctor exclaimed involuntarily.
+
+"Then you do know! Who is he? What is he to me?"
+
+It seemed as if the ceiling were about to crack. The doctor looked away
+to avoid the bore of Jack's unrelenting scrutiny. He took a turn up and
+down, rapidly, nervously, his fingers pressed in against the palms and
+the muscles of his forearms moving in the way of one who is trying to
+hold himself in control by an outward expression of force against inward
+rebellion.
+
+"I dined with your father to-night!" he exclaimed. "I counseled him to
+tell you the truth! I said that if he did not want to tell it for its own
+sake, as policy it was the only thing to you! I--I--" he stopped, facing
+Jack with a sort of grisly defiance. "Jack, a doctor is a confessor of
+men! He keeps their secrets! Good-night!" And he strode through the
+office door, which he closed behind him sharply, in reminder that the
+interview was at an end.
+
+As Jack went down the steps into the night, the face of John Prather,
+with a satirical turn to the lips, was preceding him. Now he walked madly
+up and down and back and forth across town to the river fronts, with
+panting energy of stride, as he fastened the leash of will on quivering
+nerves. When dawn came it was the dawn of the desert calling to a brain
+that had fought its way to a lucid purpose. It started him to the store
+in the fervor of a grateful mission, while a familiar greeting kept
+repeating itself in his ears on the way:
+
+"You won't forget, Jack, about giving me a chance to come along if you
+ever go out West again, will you?"
+
+The question was one in answer to a promise; a reminder from certain
+employees into whom he had fused his own spirit of enthusiasm about dry
+wastes yielding abundance.
+
+"But you must work very hard," he had told them. "Not until you have
+callouses on your hands can you succeed or really know how to enjoy a
+desert sunrise or sunset. After that, you will be able to stand erect and
+look destiny in the face."
+
+"No February slush!" Burleigh, the fitter, had said. "No depending on
+one man to hold your job!"
+
+"Your own boss! You own some land and you just naturally get what you
+earn!" according to Joe Mathewson.
+
+"And from what I can make out," observed one of the automobile van
+drivers whom Jack had accompanied on the suburban rounds, "it requires
+about as much brains as running an automobile to be what you'd call a
+first-class, a number one desert Rube, Jack!"
+
+"Yes," Jack told him. "The process that makes the earth fruitful is not
+less complicated than a motor, simply because it is one of the earliest
+inventions. You mix in nature's carbureter light and moisture with the
+chemical elements of the soil."
+
+"I'm on!" the chauffeur rejoined. "If a man works with a plow instead of
+a screwdriver, it doesn't follow that his mind is as vacant as a cow that
+stands stockstill in the middle of the road to show you that you can't
+fool her into thinking that radiators are good to eat."
+
+In explaining the labor and pains of orange-growing, which ended only
+with the careful picking and packing, Jack would talk as earnestly as his
+father would about the tedious detail which went into the purchase and
+sale of the articles in any department of the store. He might not be able
+to choose the best expert for the ribbon counter, but he had a certain
+confidence that he could tell the man or the woman who would make good in
+Little Rivers. No manager was more thorough in his observation of clerks
+for promotion than Jack in observing would-be ranchers. He had given his
+promise to one after another of a test list of disciples; and at times he
+had been surprised to find how serious both he and the disciples were
+over a matter that existed entirely on the hypothesis that he was not
+going to stay permanently in New York.
+
+This morning he was at the store for the last time, arriving even before
+the delivery division, to circulate the news that he was returning to
+Little Rivers. Trouble was brewing out there, he explained, but they
+could depend on him. He would make a place for them and send word when he
+was ready; and all whom he had marked as faithful were eager to go. Thus
+he had builded unwittingly for another future of responsibilities when he
+had paused in the midst of the store's responsibilities to tell stories
+of how a desert ranch is run.
+
+But one disciple did not even want to wait on the message. It was Peter
+Mortimer, whom Jack caught on his way to the elevator at eight, his usual
+hour, to make sure of having the letters opened and systematically
+arranged when his employer should appear.
+
+"So you are going, Jack! And--and, Jack, you know?" asked Peter
+significantly.
+
+"Yes, Peter. And I see that you know."
+
+"I do, but my word is given not to tell."
+
+Through that night's march Jack had guessed enough. He had guessed his
+fill of chill misery, which now took the place of the hunger of inquiry.
+The full truth was speeding out to the desert. It was with John Prather.
+
+"Then I will not press you, Peter," he said. "But, Peter, just one
+question, if you care to answer; was it--was it this thing that drove my
+mother into exile?"
+
+"Yes, Jack."
+
+Then a moment's silence, with Peter's eyes full of sympathy and Jack's
+dull with pain.
+
+"And, Jack," Peter went on, "well, I've been so long at it that suddenly,
+now you're going, I feel choked up, as if I were about to overflow with
+anarchy. Jack, I'm going to give notice that I will retire as soon as
+there is somebody to take my place. I want to rest and not have to keep
+trying to remember if I have forgotten anything. I've saved up a little
+money and whatever happens out there, why, there'll be some place I can
+buy where I can grow roses and salads, as you say, if nothing more
+profitable, won't there?"
+
+"Yes, Peter. I know other fertile valleys besides that of Little Rivers,
+though none that is its equal. I shall have a garden in one of them and
+you shall have a garden next to mine."
+
+"Then I feel fixed comfortable for life!" said Peter, with a perfectly
+wonderful smile enlivening the wrinkles of his old face, which made Jack
+think once more that life was worth living.
+
+Later in the morning, after he had bought tickets for Little Rivers, Jack
+returned to the house. When he stood devoutly before the portrait, whose
+"I give! I give!" he now understood in new depths, he thought:
+
+"I know that you would not want to remain here another hour. You would
+want to go with me."
+
+And before the portrait on the other side of the mantel he thought,
+challengingly and affectionately:
+
+"And you? You were an old devil, no doubt, but you would not lie! No,
+you would not lie to the Admiralty or to Elizabeth even to save your
+head! Yes, you would want to go with me, too!"
+
+Tenderly he assisted the butler to pack the portraits, which were put in
+a cab. When Jack departed in their company, this note lay on the desk in
+the library, awaiting John Wingfield, Sr.'s return that evening:
+
+"Father:
+
+"The wire to Jim Galway which I enclose tells its own story. It was
+written after our talk. When I was going out to send it I saw John
+Prather and you in the hall. You said that you knew nothing of him. I
+overheard what passed between you and him. So I am going back to Little
+Rivers. The only hope for me now is out there.
+
+"I am taking the portrait of my mother, because it is mine. I am taking
+the portrait of the ancestor, because I cannot help it any more than he
+could help taking a Spanish galleon. That is all I ask or ever could
+accept in the way of an inheritance.
+
+"Jack."
+
+
+
+
+XXXIV
+
+"JOHN WINGFIELD, YOU--"
+
+
+John Wingfield, Sr. had often made the boast that he never worried;
+that he never took his business to bed with him. When his head touched
+the pillow there was oblivion until he awoke refreshed to greet the
+problems left over from yesterday. Such a mind must be a reliably
+co-ordinated piece of machinery, with a pendulum in place of a heart. It
+is overawing to average mortals who have not the temerity to say
+"Nonsense!" to great egos. Yet the best adjusted clocks may have a lapse
+in a powerful magnetic storm, and in an earthquake they might even be
+tipped off the shelf, with their metal parts rendered quite as helpless
+by the fall as those of a human organism subject to the constitutional
+weaknesses of the flesh.
+
+It was also John Wingfield, Sr.'s boast to himself that he had never been
+beaten, which average mortals with the temerity to say "Nonsense!"--that
+most equilibratory of words--might have diagnosed as a bad case of
+self-esteem finding a way to forget the resented incidental reverses of
+success. Yet, even average mortals noted when John Wingfield, Sr.
+arrived late at the store the morning after Jack's departure for the West
+that he had not slept well. His haggardness suggested that for once the
+pushbutton to the switch of oblivion had failed him. The smile of
+satisfied power was lacking. In the words of the elevator boy,
+impersonal observer and swinger of doors, "I never seen the old man like
+that before!"
+
+But the upward flight through the streets of his city, if it did not
+bring back the smile, brought back the old pride of ownership and
+domination. He still had a kingdom; he was still king. Resentment rose
+against the cause of the miserable twelve hours which had thrown the
+machinery of his being out of order. He passed the word to himself that
+he should sleep to-night and that from this moment, henceforth things
+would be the same as they had been before Jack came home. Yes, there was
+just one reality for him. It was enthroned in his office. This morning
+was to be like any other business morning; like thousands of mornings to
+come in the many years of activity that stretched ahead of him.
+
+"A little late," he said, explaining his tardiness to his secretary; a
+superfluity of words in which he would not ordinarily have indulged. "I
+had some things to attend to on the outside."
+
+With customary quiet attentiveness, Mortimer went through the mail with
+his employer, who was frequently reassuring himself that his mind was as
+clear, his answers as sure, and his interest as concentrated as usual.
+This task finished, Mortimer, with his bundle of letters and notes in
+hand, instead of going out of the room when he had passed around the
+desk, turned and faced the man whom he had served for thirty years.
+
+"Mr. Wingfield--"
+
+"Well, Peter?"
+
+John Wingfield, Sr. looked up sharply, struck by Mortimer's tone, which
+seemed to come from another man. In Mortimer's eye was a placid,
+confident light and his stoop was less marked.
+
+"Mr. Wingfield, I am getting on in years, now," he said, "and I have
+concluded to retire as soon as you have someone for my place; the sooner,
+sir, the more agreeable to me."
+
+"What! What put this idea into your head?" John Wingfield, Sr. snapped.
+Often of late he had thought that it was time he got a younger man in
+Peter's place. But he did not like the initiative to come from Peter; not
+on this particular morning.
+
+"Why, just the notion that I should like to rest. Yes, rest and play a
+little, and grow roses and salads," said the old secretary, respectfully.
+
+"Roses and salads! What in--where are you going to grow them?"
+
+There was something so serene about Peter that his highly imperious,
+poised employer found it impertinent, not to say maddening. Peter had a
+look of the freedom of desert distances in his eyes already. A lieutenant
+was actually radiating happiness in that neutral-toned sanctum of power,
+particularly this morning.
+
+"I am going out to Little Rivers, or to some place that Jack finds
+for me, where I am to have a garden and work--or maybe I better call
+it potter around--out of doors in January and February, just like it
+was June."
+
+Peter spoke very genially, as if he were trying to win a disciple on his
+own account.
+
+"With Jack! Oh!" gasped John Wingfield, Sr. He struck his closed fist
+into the palm of his hand in his favorite gesture of anger, the
+antithesis of the crisp rubbing of the palms, which he so rarely used of
+late years. Rage was contrary to the rules of longevity, exciting the
+heart and exerting pressure on the artery walls.
+
+"Yes, sir," answered Peter, pleasantly.
+
+"Well--yes--well, Jack has decided to go back!" Then there rose strongly
+in John Wingfield, Sr.'s mind a suspicion that had been faintly signaled
+to his keen observation of everything that went on in the store. "Are any
+other employees going?" he demanded.
+
+"Yes, sir, I think there are; not immediately, but as soon as he finds a
+place for them."
+
+"How many?"
+
+"I don't think it is any secret. About fifty, sir."
+
+"Name some of them!"
+
+"Joe Mathewson, that big fellow who drives a warehouse truck, and
+Burleigh;" and Peter went on with those of the test proof list
+whom he knew.
+
+Every one of them had high standing. Every one represented a value. While
+at first John Wingfield, Sr. had decided savagely that Mortimer should
+remain at his pleasure, now his sense of outraged egoism took an opposite
+turn. He could get on without Mortimer; he could get on if every employee
+in the store walked out. There were more where they came from in a city
+of five millions population; and no one in the world knew so well as he
+how to train them.
+
+"Very good, Peter!" he said rigidly, as if he were making a declaration
+of war. "Fix up your papers and leave as soon as you please. I will have
+one of the clerks take your place."
+
+"Thank you. That is very kind, Mr. Wingfield!" Mortimer returned, so
+politely, even exultantly, that his aspect seemed treasonable.
+
+John Wingfield, Sr. tried to concentrate his attention on some long and
+important letters that had been left on his desk for further
+consideration; but his mind refused to stick to the lines of typewriting.
+
+"This one is a little complicated," he thought, "I will lay it aside."
+
+He tried the second and the third letters, with no better results. A
+tanned face and a pair of broad shoulders kept appearing between him and
+the paper. Again he was thinking of Jack, as he had all night, to the
+exclusion of everything else. Unquestionably, this son had a lot of
+magnetic force in him; he had command of men. Why, he had won fifty of
+the best employees out of sheer sentiment to follow him out to the
+desert, when they had no idea what they were in for!
+
+His gaze fell and rested for some time on the bunch of roses on his desk.
+Every morning there had been a fresh bunch, in keeping with the custom
+that Jack had established. The father had become so used to their
+presence that he was unconscious of it. For all the pleasure he got out
+of them, they might as well have been in the cornucopia vase in the
+limousine. His hand went out spasmodically toward the roses, as if he
+would crush them; crush this symbol of the thing drawn from the mother
+that had invaded the calm autocracy of his existence. The velvety
+richness of the petals leaning toward him above the drooping grace of
+their stems made him pause in realization of the absurdity of his anger.
+A feeling to which he had been a stranger swept over him. It was like a
+breaking instinct of dependableness; and then he called up Dr.
+Bennington.
+
+"Well, he has gone!" he told the doctor, desperately.
+
+"You did not tell him the truth!" came the answer; and he noted that the
+doctor's voice was without its usual suavity. It was as matter-of-fact to
+the man of millions as if it had been advising an operation in a
+dispensary case.
+
+"No, not exactly," John Wingfield, Sr. confessed.
+
+"I told you what his nature was; how it had drawn on the temperament of
+his mother. I told you that with candor, with a decently human humility
+appealing to his affections, everything was possible. And remember, he is
+strong, stronger than you, John Wingfield! There's a process of fate in
+him! John Wingfield, you--" The sentence ended abruptly, as if the doctor
+had dropped the receiver on the hooks with a crash.
+
+Phantoms were closing in around John Wingfield, Sr.... His memory
+ranged back over the days of ardent youth, in the full tide of growing
+success, when to want a thing, human or material, meant to have it....
+And in his time he had told a good many lies. The right lie, big and
+daring, at the right moment had won more than one victory. With John
+Prather out of the way, he had decided on an outright falsehood to his
+son. Why had he not compromised with Dr. Bennington's advice and tried
+part falsehood and part contrition? But no matter, no matter. He would
+go on; he was made of steel.
+
+Again the tanned face and broad shoulders stood between him and the
+page. Jack was strong; yes, strong; and he was worth having. All the old
+desire of possession reappeared, in company with his hatred of defeat.
+He was thinking of the bare spot on the wall in the drawing-room in place
+of the Velasquez. There would be an end of his saying: "The boy is the
+spit of the ancestor and just as good a fighter, too; only his abilities
+are turned into other channels more in keeping with the spirit of the
+age!" An end of: "Fine son you have there!" from men at the club who had
+given him only a passing nod in the old days. For he was not displeased
+that the boy was liked, where he himself was not. The men whom he admired
+were those who had faced him with "No!" across the library desk; who had
+got the better of him, even if he did not admit it to himself. And the
+strength of his son, baffling to his cosmos, had won his admiration. No,
+he would not lose Jack's strength without an effort; he wanted it for his
+own. Perhaps something else, too, there in the loneliness of the office
+in the face of that bunch of roses was pulling him: the thrill that he
+had felt when he saw the moisture in Jack's eyes and felt the warmth of
+his grasp before Jack left the library.
+
+And Jack and John Prather were speeding West to the same destination!
+They would meet! What then? There was no use of trying to work in an
+office on Broadway when the forces which he had brought into being over
+twenty years ago were in danger of being unloosed out on the desert, with
+Jack riding free and the fingers of the ancestor-devil on the reins. John
+Wingfield, Sr. called in the general manager.
+
+"You are in charge until I return," he said; and a few hours later he was
+in a private car, bound for Little Rivers.
+
+
+
+
+PART III
+
+HE FINDS HIS PLACE IN LIFE
+
+
+
+
+XXXV
+
+BACK TO LITTLE RIVERS
+
+
+As with the gentle touch of a familiar hand, the ozone of high altitudes
+gradually and sweetly awakened Jack. The engine was puffing on an
+upgrade; the car creaked and leaned in taking a curve. Raising the shade
+of his berth he looked out on spectral ranges that seemed marching and
+tumbling through dim distances. With pillows doubled under his head he
+lay back, filling sight and mind with the indistinctness and spacious
+mystery of the desert at night; recalling his thoughts with his last
+view of it over two months ago in the morning hours after leaving El
+Paso and seeing his future with it now, where then he had seen his
+future with the store.
+
+"Think of old Burleigh raising oranges! I am sure that the trees will be
+well trimmed," he whispered. "Think of Mamie Devore in the thick of the
+great jelly competition, while the weight of Joe Mathewson's shoulders
+starts a spade into the soil as if it were going right to the centre of
+the earth. Why, Joe is likely to get us into international difficulties
+by poking the ribs of a Chinese ancestor! Yes--if we don't lose our
+Little Rivers; and we must not lose it!"
+
+The silvery face of the moon grew fainter with the coming of a ruddier
+light; the shadows of the mountains were being etched definitely on the
+plateaus that stretched out like vast floors under the developing glow
+of sunrise; and the full splendor of day had come, with its majestic
+spread of vision.
+
+"When Joe sees that he will feel so strong he will want to get out and
+carry the Pullman," Jack thought. "But Mamie will not let him for fear
+that he will overdo!"
+
+How slow the train seemed to travel! It was a snail compared to Jack's
+eagerness to arrive. He was inclined to think that P.D., Wrath of God,
+and Jag Ear were faster than through expresses. He kept inquiring of the
+conductor if they were on time, and the conductor kept repeating that
+they were. How near that flash of steel at a bend around a tongue of
+chaotic rock, stretching out into the desert sea, with its command to man
+to tunnel or accept a winding path for his iron horse! How long in coming
+to it in that rare air, with its deceit of distances! Landmark after
+landmark of peak or bold ridge took the angle of some recollected view of
+his five years' wanderings. It was already noon when he saw Galeria from
+the far end of the long basin that he had crossed, with the V as the
+compass of his bearings, on the ride that brought him to the top to meet
+Mary and Pete Leddy.
+
+Then the V was lost while the train wound around the range that formed
+one side of the basin's rim. The blaze of midday had passed before it
+entered the reaches of the best valley yet in the judgment of a
+connoisseur in valleys; and under the Eternal Painter's canopy a spot of
+green quivered in the heat-rays of the horizon. His Majesty was in a
+dreamy mood. He was playing in delicate variations, tranquil and
+enchanting, of effects in gold and silver, now gossamery thin, now
+thick and rich.
+
+"What is this thing crawling along on two silken threads and so afraid of
+the hills?" he was asking, sleepily. "Eh? No! Bring the easel to me, if
+you want a painting. I am not going to rise from my easy couch. There!
+Fix that cushion so! I am a leisurely, lordly aristocrat. Palette? No, I
+will just shake my soft beard of fine mist back and forth across the sky,
+a spectrum for the sunrays. So! so! I see that this worm is a railroad
+train. Let it curl up in the shadow of a gorge and take a nap. I will
+wake it up by and by when I seize my brush and start a riot in the
+heavens that will make its rows of window-glass eyes stare."
+
+"I am on this train and in a hurry!" Jack objected.
+
+"Do I hear the faint echo of a human ego down there on the earth?"
+demanded the Eternal Painter. "Who are you? One of the art critics?"
+
+"One of Your Majesty's loving subjects, who has been away in a foreign
+kingdom and returns to your allegiance," Jack answered.
+
+"So be it. I shall know if what you say is true when I gaze into your
+eyes at sunset."
+
+"I am bringing you a Velasquez!" Jack added.
+
+"Good! Put him where he can have a view out of the window of his first
+teacher at work in the studio of the universe."
+
+The train crept on toward the hour of the Eternal Painter's riot and
+toward Little Rivers, while the patch of green was softly, impalpably
+growing, growing, until the crisscross breaks of the streets developed
+and Jack could identify the Doge's and other bungalows. He was on the
+platform of the car before the brakes ground on the wheels, leaning out
+to see a crowd at the station, which a minute later became a prospect of
+familiar, kindly, beaming faces. There was a roar of "Hello, Jack!" in
+the heavy voices of men and the treble of children. Then he did not see
+the faces at all for a second; he saw only mist.
+
+"Not tanned, Jack, but you'll brown up soon!"
+
+"Gosh! But we've been lonesome without you!"
+
+"Cure any case of sore eyes on record!"
+
+Jack was too full of the glory of this unaffected welcome in answer to
+his telegram that he was coming to find words at first; but as he fairly
+dropped off the steps into the arms of Jim Galway and Dr. Patterson he
+shouted in a shaking voice:
+
+"Hello, everybody! Hello, Little Rivers!"
+
+He noted, while all were trying to grasp his hands at once, that the men
+had their six-shooters. A half-dozen were struggling to get his suit
+case. Not one of his friends was missing except the Doge and Mary.
+
+"Let the patient have a little air!" protested Dr. Patterson, as some
+started in to shake hands a second time.
+
+"Fellow-citizens, if there's anything in the direct primary I feel sure
+of the nomination!" said Jack drily.
+
+"You're already elected!" shouted Bob Worther.
+
+Around at the other side of the station Jack found Firio waiting his turn
+in patient isolation, with P.D., Wrath of God, and Jag Ear.
+
+"_Si! si_!" called Firio triumphantly to all the sceptics who had told
+him that Jack would not return.
+
+Jack took the little Indian by the shoulders and rocked him back and
+forth in delight, while Firio's eyes were burning coals of jubilation.
+
+"You knew!" Jack exclaimed. "You were right! I have come back!"
+
+"_Si, si_! I know!" repeated Firio.
+
+"No stopping him from bringing the whole cavalcade to the station,
+either," said Jim Galway. "And he wouldn't join the rest of us out in
+front of the station. He was going to be his own reception committee and
+hold an overflow meeting all by himself!"
+
+There was no disguising the fact that the equine trio of veterans
+remembered Jack. With P.D. and Jag Ear the demonstration was
+unrestrained; but however exultant Wrath of God might be in secret, he
+was of no mind to compromise his reputation for lugubriousness by any
+public display of emotional weakness.
+
+"Wrath of God, I believe you were a cross-eyed Cromwellian soldier in
+your previous incarnation!" said Jack; "and as it is hard for a horse to
+be crosseyed, you could not retain the characteristic. Think of that!
+Wouldn't a cross-eyed Cromwellian soldier strike fear to the heart of any
+loyalist? And Jag Ear, you're getting fat!"
+
+"I keep his hoofs hard. When he fat he eat less on trail!" explained
+Firio, becoming almost voluble. "All ready for trail!" he hinted.
+
+"Not now, Firio," said Jack. "And, Firio, there's a package at the
+station, a big, flat case. It came by express on the same train with
+me--the most precious package in the world. See that it is taken to
+the house."
+
+"Si! You ride?" asked Firio, offering P.D.'s reins.
+
+"No, we'll all walk."
+
+The procession had started toward the town when Jack felt something soft
+poking him in the small of the back and looked around to find that the
+cause was P.D.'s muzzle. Wrath of God and Jag Ear might go with Firio,
+but P.D. proposed to follow Jack.
+
+"And after I have ridden you thousands of miles and you've heard all my
+songs over and over! Well, well, P.D., you are a subtle flatterer! Come
+along!" Then he turned to Jim Galway: "Has John Prather arrived?"
+
+"Yes, last night."
+
+"He is here now?" Jack put in quickly.
+
+"No; he pulled out at dawn on his way to Agua Fria."
+
+"Oh!" Jack was plainly disappointed. "He has the grant for the
+water rights?"
+
+"Yes," said Jim, "though he hasn't made the fact public. He does
+everything in his smooth, quiet fashion, with a long head, and I suppose
+he hasn't things just right yet to spring his surprise. But there is no
+disputing the fact--he has us!"
+
+One man henceforth was in control of the water. His power over the
+desert community would be equivalent to control of the rains in a
+humid locality.
+
+"You see," Jim continued, "old man Lefferts' partners had really never
+sold out to him; so his transfer to the Doge wasn't legal. He turned his
+papers over to Prather, giving Prather full power to act for him in
+securing the partners' surrender of their claims and straighten out
+everything with the Territory and get a bonafide concession. That is as I
+understand it, for the whole business has been done in an underhand way.
+Prather represented to the Doge that he was acting entirely in the
+interests of the community and his only charge would be the costs. The
+Doge quite believed in Prather's single-mindedness and public spirit.
+Well, with the use of money and all the influences he could command,
+including the kind that Pete Leddy exercises, he got the concession and
+in his name. It was very smart work. I suppose it was due to the crafty
+way he could direct the Doge to do his wishes that the Doge happened to
+be off the scene at the critical stage of the negotiations. When he went
+to New York all that remained was for him to obtain the capital for his
+scheme. Lefferts and his partners had the underlying rights and the Doge
+the later rights, thanks to his improvements, and Prather has them both.
+Well, Leddy and his crowd have been taking up plots right and left;
+that's their share in the exploitation. They're here, waiting for the
+announcement to be made and--well, the water users' association is still
+in charge; but it won't be when Prather says the word."
+
+"And you have no plans?" Jack asked.
+
+"None."
+
+"And the Doge?"
+
+"None. What can the old man do? Though nobody exactly blames him, a good
+many aren't of a mind to consult him at all. The crisis has passed beyond
+him. Three or four men, good men, too, were inclined to have it out with
+John Prather; but that would have precipitated a general fight with
+Leddy's gang. The conservatives got the hot-heads to wait till you came.
+You see, the trouble with every suggestion is that pretty much everybody
+is against it except the fellow who made it. The more we have talked,
+the more we have drifted back to you. It's a case of all we've got in the
+world and standing together, and we are ready to get behind you and take
+orders, Jack."
+
+"Yes, ready to fight at the drop of the hat, seh, or to sit still on our
+doorsteps with our tongues in our cheeks and doing the wives' mending, as
+you say!" declared Bob Worther. "It's right up to you!"
+
+"You are all of the same opinion?" asked Jack.
+
+They were, with one voice, which was not vociferous. For theirs was that
+significantly quiet mood of an American crowd when easy-going good nature
+turns to steel. Their partisanship in pioneerdom had not been with
+six-shooters, but with the ethics of the Doge; and such men when aroused
+do not precede action with threats.
+
+"All right!" said Jack.
+
+There was a rustle and an exchange of satisfied glances and a chorus of
+approval like an indrawing of breath.
+
+"First, I will see the Doge," Jack added; "and then I shall go to
+the house."
+
+Galway, Dr. Patterson, Worther, and three or four others went on with him
+toward the Ewold bungalow. They were halted on the way by Pete Leddy,
+Ropey Smith, and a dozen followers, who appeared from a side street and
+stopped across Jack's path, every one of them with a certain slouching
+aggressiveness and staring hard at him. Pete and Ropey still kept faith
+with their pledge to Jack in the _arroyo_. They were without guns, but
+their companions were armed in defiance of the local ordinance which had
+been established for Jack's protection.
+
+"Howdy do, Leddy?" said Jack, as amiably as if there had never been
+anything but the pleasantest of relations between them.
+
+"Getting polite, eh! Where's your pretty whistle?" Leddy answered.
+
+"I put it in storage in New York," Jack said laughing; then, with a
+sudden change to seriousness: "Leddy, is it true that you and John
+Prather have got the water rights to this town?"
+
+"None of your d----d business!" Leddy rapped out. "The only business I've
+got with you has been waiting for some time, and you can have it your way
+out in the _arroyo_ where we had it before, right now!"
+
+"As I said, Pete, I put the whistle in storage and I have already
+apologized for the way I used it," returned Jack. "I can't accommodate
+you in the _arroyo_ again. I have other things to attend to."
+
+"Then the first time you get outside the limits of this town you will
+have to play my way--a man's way!"
+
+"I hope not, Pete!"
+
+"Naturally you hope so, for you know I will get you, you--"
+
+"Careful!" Jack interrupted. "You'd better leave that out until we are
+both armed. Or, if you will not, why, we both have weapons that nature
+gave us. Do you prefer that way?" and Jack's weight had shifted to the
+ball of his foot.
+
+Plainly this was not to Pete's taste.
+
+"I don't want to bruise you. I mean to make a clean hole through you!"
+he answered.
+
+"That is both courteous and merciful; and you are very insistent, Leddy,"
+Jack returned, and walked on.
+
+"Just as sweet as honey, just as cool as ice, and just as sunny as
+June!" whispered Bob Worther to the man next him.
+
+Again Jack was before the opening in the Ewold hedge, with its glimpse
+of the spacious living-room. The big ivory paper-cutter lay in its
+accustomed place on the broad top of the Florentine table. In line with
+it on the wall was a photograph of Abbey's mural in the Pennsylvania
+capitol and through the open window a photograph of a Puvis de Chavannes
+was visible. Evidently the Doge had already hung some of the
+reproductions of masterpieces which he had brought from New York. But no
+one was on the porch or in the living-room; the house was silent. As
+Jack started across the cement bridge he was halted by a laugh from his
+companions. He found that P.D. was taking no risks of losing his master
+again; he was going right on into the Doge's, too. Jim took charge of
+him, receiving in return a glance from the pony that positively reeked
+of malice.
+
+Again Jack was on his way around the Doge's bungalow on the journey he
+had made so many times in the growing ardor of the love that had mastered
+his senses. The quiet of the garden seemed a part of the pervasive
+stillness that stretched away to the pass from the broad path of the
+palms under the blazonry of the sun. As he proceeded he heard the
+crunching of gravel under a heavy tread. The Doge was pacing back and
+forth in the cross path, fighting despair with the forced vigor of his
+steps, while Mary was seated watching him. As the Doge wheeled to face
+Jack at the sound of his approach, it was not in surprise, but rather in
+preparedness for the expected appearance of another character in a
+drama. This was also Mary's attitude. They had heard of his coming and
+they received his call with a trace of fatalistic curiosity. The Doge
+suddenly dropped on a bench, as if overcome by the weariness and
+depression of spirits that he had been defying; but there was something
+unyielding and indomitable in Mary's aspect.
+
+"Well, Sir Chaps, welcome!" said the Doge. "We still have a seat in the
+shade for you. Will you sit down?"
+
+But Jack remained standing, as if what he had to say would be soon said.
+
+"I have come back and come for good," he began. "Yes, I have come back to
+take all the blue ribbons at ranching," he added, with a touch of garden
+nonsense that came like a second thought to soften the abruptness of his
+announcement.
+
+"For good! For good! You!" The Doge stared at Jack in incomprehension.
+
+"Yes, my future is out here, now."
+
+"You give up the store--the millions--your inheritance!" cried the Doge,
+still amazed and sceptical as he sounded the preposterousness of this
+idea to worldly credulity.
+
+"Quite!"
+
+There was no mistaking the firmness of the word. "To make your fortune,
+your life, out here?"
+
+The Doge's voice was throbbing with the wonder of the thing.
+
+"Yes!"
+
+"Why? Why? I feel that I have a right to ask why!" demanded the Doge, in
+all the majesty of the moment when he faced John Wingfield, Sr. in the
+drawing-room.
+
+"Because of a lie and what it concealed. Because of reasons that may not
+be so vague to you as they are to me."
+
+"A lie! Yes, a lie that came home!" the Doge repeated, while he passed
+his hand back and forth over his eyes. The hand was trembling. Indeed,
+his whole body was trembling, while he sought for self-control and to
+collect his thoughts for what he had to say to that still figure awaiting
+his words. When he looked up it was with an expression wholly new to
+Jack. Its candor was not that of transparent mental processes in serene
+philosophy or forensic display, but that of a man who was about to lay
+bare things of the past which he had kept secret.
+
+"Sir Chaps, I am going to give you my story, however weak and blameworthy
+it makes me appear," he said. "Sir Chaps, you saw me in anger in the
+Wingfield drawing-room, further baffling you with a mystery which must
+have begun for you the night that you came to Little Rivers when we
+exchanged a look in which I saw that you knew that I recognized you. I
+tried to talk as if you were a welcome stranger, when I was holding in my
+rancor. There was no other face in the world that I would not rather have
+seen in this community than yours!
+
+"How glad I was to hear that you were leaving by the morning train! How I
+counted the days of your convalescence after you were wounded! How glad I
+was at the news that you were to go as soon as you were well! With what a
+revelry of suggestion I planned to speed your parting! How demoralized I
+was when you announced that you were going to stay! How amazed at your
+seriousness about ranching--but how distrustful! Yet what joy in your
+companionship! At times I wanted to get my arms around you and hug you as
+a scarred old grizzly bear would hug a cub. And, first and last, your
+success with everybody here! Your cool hand in the duel! That iron in
+your will which would triumph at any cost when you broke Nogales's arm!
+For some reason you had chosen to stop, in the play period of youth, on
+the way to the inheritance to overcome some obstacle that it pleased you
+to overcome and to amuse yourself a while in Little Rivers--you with your
+steadiness in a fight and your airy, smiling confidence in yourself!"
+
+"I--I did not know that I was like that!" said Jack, in hurt, groping
+surprise. "Was I truly?"
+
+The Doge nodded.
+
+"As I saw you," he said.
+
+Jack looked at Mary, frankly and calmly.
+
+"Was I truly?" he asked her.
+
+"As I saw you!" she repeated, as an impersonal, honest witness.
+
+"Then I must have been!" he said, with conviction. "But I hope that I
+shall not be in the future." And he smiled at Mary wistfully. But her
+gaze was bent on the ground.
+
+"And you want it all--all the story from me?" the Doge asked, hesitating.
+
+"All!" Jack answered.
+
+"It strikes hard at your father."
+
+"The truth must strike where it will, now!"
+
+"Then, your face, so like your father's, stood for the wreck of two
+lives to me, and for recollections in my own career that tinged my view
+of you, Jack. You were one newcomer to Little Rivers to whom I could not
+wholly apply the desert rule of oblivion to the past and judgment of
+every man solely by his conduct in this community. No! It was out of the
+question that I could ever look at you without thinking who you were.
+
+"You know, of course, that your father and I spent our boyhood in
+Burbridge. Once I found that he had told me an untruth and we had our
+difference out, as boys will; and, as I was in the right, he confessed
+the lie before I let him up. That defeat was a hurt to his egoism that he
+could not forget. He was that way, John Wingfield, in his egoism. It was
+like flint, and his ambition and energy were without bounds. I remember
+he would say when teased that some day he should have more money than all
+the town together, and when he had money no one would dare to tease him.
+He had a remarkable gift of ingratiation with anyone who could be of
+service to him. My uncle, who was the head of the family, was fond of
+him; he saw the possibilities of success in this smart youngster in a New
+England village. It was the Ewold money that gave John Wingfield his
+start. With it he bought the store in which he began as a clerk. He lost
+a good part of the Ewold fortune later in one of his enterprises that did
+not turn out well. But all this is trifling beside what is to come.
+
+"He went on to his great commercial career. I, poor fool, was an egoist,
+too. I tried to paint. I had taste, but no talent. In outbursts of
+despair my critical discrimination consigned my own work to the rubbish
+heap. I tried to write books, only to find that all I had was a head
+stuffed with learning, mixed with the philosophy that is death to the
+concentrated application that means positive accomplishment. But I could
+not create. I was by nature only a drinker at the fountain; only a
+student, the pitiful student who could read his Caesar at eight, learn a
+language without half trying, but with no ability to make my knowledge of
+service; with no masterful purpose of my own--a failure!"
+
+"No one is a failure who spreads kindliness and culture as he goes
+through life," Jack interrupted, earnestly; "who gives of himself
+unstintedly as you have; who teaches people to bring a tribute of flowers
+to a convalescent! Why, to found a town and make the desert bloom--that
+is better than to add another book to the weight of library shelves or to
+get a picture on the line!"
+
+"Thank you, Jack!" said the Doge, with a flash of his happy manner of
+old, while there was the play of fleeting sunshine over the hills and
+valleys of his features. "I won't call it persiflage. I am too selfish,
+too greedy of a little cheer to call it persiflage. I like the illusion
+you suggest."
+
+He was silent for a while, and when he spoke again it was with the tragic
+simplicity of one near his climax.
+
+"Your father and I loved the same girl---your mother. It seemed that in
+every sympathy of mind and heart she and I were meant to travel the long
+highway together. But your father won her with his gift for ingratiation
+with the object of his desire, which amounts to a kind of genius. He won
+her with a lie and put me in a position that seemed to prove that the
+lie was truth. She accepted him in reaction; in an impulse of heart-break
+that followed what she believed to be a revelation of my true character
+as something far worse than that of idler. I married the woman whom he
+had made the object of his well-managed calumny. My wife knew where my
+heart was and why I had married her. It is from her that Mary gets her
+dark hair and the brown of her cheeks which make her appear so at home on
+the desert. Soon after Mary's birth she chose to live apart from me--but
+I will not speak further of her. She is long ago dead. I knew that your
+mother had left your father. I saw her a few times in Europe. But she
+never gave the reason for the separation. She would talk nothing of the
+past, and with the years heavy on our shoulders and the memory of what we
+had been to each other hovering close, words came with difficulty and
+every one was painful. Her whole life was bound up in you, as mine was in
+Mary. It was you that kept her from being a bitter cynic; you that kept
+her alive.
+
+"Some of the Ewold money that John Wingfield lost was mine. You see how
+he kept on winning; how all the threads of his weaving closed in around
+me. I came to the desert to give Mary life with the fragments of my
+fortune; and here I hope that, as you say, I have done something worthier
+than live the life of a wandering, leisurely student who had lapsed into
+the observer for want of the capacity by nature or training to do
+anything else.
+
+"But sometimes I did long for the centres of civilization; to touch
+elbows with their activities; to feel the flow of the current of
+humanity in great streets. Not that I wanted to give up Little Rivers,
+but I wanted to go forth to fill the mind with argosies which I could
+enjoy here at my leisure. And Mary was young. The longing that she
+concealed must be far more powerful than mine. I saw the supreme
+selfishness of shutting her up on the desert, without any glimpse of the
+outer world. I sensed the call that sent her on her lonely rides to the
+pass. I feared that your coming had increased her restlessness.
+
+"But I wander! That is my fault, as you know, Sir Chaps. Well, we come to
+the end of the weaving; to the finality of John Wingfield's victory.
+Little Rivers was getting out of hand. I could plan a ranch, but I had
+not a business head. I had neither the gift nor the experience to deal
+with lawyers and land-grabbers. I knew that with the increase of
+population and development our position was exciting the cupidity of
+those who find quicker profit in annexing what others have built than in
+building on their own account. I knew that we ought to have a great dam;
+that there was water to irrigate ten times the present irrigated area.
+
+"Then came John Prather. I saw in him the judgment, energy, and ability
+for organization of a real man of affairs. He was young, self-made,
+engaging and convincing of manner. He liked our life and ideals in Little
+Rivers; he wanted to share our future. In his resemblance to you I saw
+nothing but a coincidence that I passed over lightly. He knew how to
+handle the difficult situation that arose with the reappearance of old
+man Lefferts' partners. He would get the water rights legalized beyond
+dispute and turn them over to the water users' association; he would
+bring in capital for the dam; the value of our property would be
+enhanced; Little Rivers would become a city in her own right, while I was
+growing old delectably in the pride of founder. So he pictured it and so
+I dreamed. I was so sure of the future that I dared the expense of a trip
+to New York.
+
+"And always to me, when I looked at you and when I thought of you, you
+were the son of John Wingfield; you incarnated the inheritance of his
+strength. But when, from the drawing-room, I saw your father, whom I had
+not seen for fifteen years, then--well, the thing came to me in a burning
+second, the while I glimpsed his face before he saw mine. He was smiling
+as if pleased with himself and his power; he was rubbing the palms of his
+hands together; and I saw that it was John Prather who was like John
+Wingfield in manner, pose, and feature. You were like the fighting man,
+your ancestor, and your airy confidence was his. And I, witless and
+unperceiving, had been won by the same methods of ingratiation with which
+John Wingfield had won the assistance of the Ewold fortune for the first
+step of his career; with which he had won Alice Jamison and kept me
+unaware of his plan while he was lying to her.
+
+"Finally, let us say, in all charity, that your father is what he is
+because of what is born in him and for the same reason that the snowball
+gathers size as it rolls; and I am what I am for the same reason that the
+wind scatter the sands of the desert--a man full of books and tangent
+inconsequence of ideas, without sense; a simpleton who knows a painting
+but does not know men; a garrulous, philosophizing, blind, old
+simpleton, whose pompous incompetency has betrayed a trust! Through me,
+men and women came here to settle and make a home! Through me they
+lose--to my shame!"
+
+The Doge buried his face in his hands and drew a deep breath more
+pitiful than a sob, which, as it went free of the lungs, seemed to leave
+an empty ruin of what had once been a splendid edifice. He was in
+striking contrast to Mary, who, throughout the story fondly regarding
+him, had remained as straight as a young pine. Now, with her rigidity
+suddenly become so pliant that it was a fluid thing mixed of
+indignation, fearlessness, and compelling sympathy, she sprang to his
+side. She knew the touchstone to her father's emotion. He did not want
+his cheek patted in that moment of agony. He wanted a stimulant; some
+justification for living.
+
+"There is no shame in believing in those who speak fairly! There is
+honor, the honor of faith in mankind!" she cried penetratingly. "There is
+no shame in being the victim of lies!"
+
+"No! No shame!" the Doge cried, rising unsteadily to his feet
+under the whip.
+
+"And we are not afraid for the future!" she continued. "And the other men
+and women in Little Rivers are not afraid for the future!"
+
+"No, not afraid under this sun, in this air. Afraid!"
+
+An unconquerable flame had come into his eyes in answer to that in
+Mary's.
+
+"The others have asked me to act for them, and I think I may yet save our
+rights," said Jack. "Will you also trust me?"
+
+"Will I trust you, Jack? Trust you who gave up your inheritance?"
+exclaimed the Doge. "I would trust you on a mission to the stars or to
+lead a regiment; and the wish of the others is mine."
+
+Jack had turned to go, but he looked back at Mary.
+
+"And you, Mary? I have your good wishes?"
+
+He could not resist that question; and though it was clear that nothing
+could stay him--as clear as it had been in the _arroyo_ that he would
+keep his word and face Leddy--he was hanging on her word and he was
+seeing her eyes moist, with a bright fire like that of sunshine on still
+water. She was swaying slightly as a young pine might in a wind. Her eyes
+darkened as with fear, then her cheeks went crimson with the stir of her
+blood; and suddenly, her eyes were sparkling in their moisture like water
+when it ripples under sunshine.
+
+"Yes, Jack," she said quietly, with the tense eagerness of a good cause
+that sends a man away to the wars.
+
+"That is everything!" he answered.
+
+So it was! Everything that he could ask now, with his story and hers so
+fresh in mind! He started up the path, but stopped at the turn to look
+back and wave his hand to the two figures in a confident gesture.
+
+"Luck with you, Sir Chaps!" called the Doge, with all the far-carrying
+force of his oldtime sonorousness.
+
+"Luck! luck!" Mary called, on her part; and her voice had a flute note
+that seemed to go singing on its own ether waves through the tender
+green foliage, through all the gardens of Little Rivers, and even away
+to the pass.
+
+"Mary! Mary!" he answered, with a ring of cheeriness. "Luck for me will
+always come at your command!"
+
+A moment later Galway and the others saw him smiling with a hope that ran
+as high as his purpose, as he passed through the gateway of the hedge.
+
+"It will all be right!" he told them.
+
+With P.D. keeping his muzzle close to the middle of Jack's back, the
+party started toward his house, which took them almost the length of the
+main street.
+
+"Prather went by the range trail, of course?" Jack asked Galway.
+
+"No, straight out across the desert," said Galway.
+
+"Straight out across the desert!" exclaimed Jack, mystified.
+
+For one had a choice of two routes to Agua Fria, which was well over the
+border in Mexico. Not a drop of water was to be had on the way across the
+trackless plateau, but halfway on the range trail was a camping-place,
+Las Cascadas, where a spring which spouted in a tiny cascade welcomed the
+traveller. Under irrigation, most of the land for the whole stretch
+between the two towns would be fertile. There was said to be a big
+underground run at Agua Fria that could be pumped at little expense.
+
+"All I can make out of Prather's taking a straight line, which really is
+slower, as you know, on account of the heavy sand in places, is to look
+over the soil," said Galway. "He may be preparing to get a concession in
+Mexico at the same time as on this side, so as to secure control of the
+whole valley. It means railroads, factories, new towns, millions--but you
+and I have talked all this before in our dreams."
+
+"Who was with him?" Jack asked.
+
+"Pedro Nogales. He seems to have taken quite a fancy to Pedro and Pedro
+is acting as guide. Leddy recommended him, I suppose."
+
+"No one else?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Good!" said Jack.
+
+As they turned into the side street where the front of Jack's bungalow
+was visible, Jim Galway observed that they had seen nothing of Leddy or
+any of his followers.
+
+"Maybe he's gone to join Prather," said Bob Worther.
+
+But Jack paid no attention to the remark. He was preoccupied with the
+first sight of his ranch in over two months.
+
+"It will be all right!" he called out to the crowd in his yard; for the
+others who had met him at the station were waiting for him there. "Bob,
+those umbrella-trees could shade a thin, short man now, even if he didn't
+hug the trunk! Firio has done well, hasn't he?" he concluded, after he
+had walked through the garden and surveyed the fields and orchards in
+fond comparison as to progress.
+
+"The best I ever knew an Indian to do!" said Jim Galway.
+
+"And everything kept right on growing while I was away! That's the joy of
+planting things. They are growing for somebody, if not for you!"
+
+Inside the house he found Firio, with the help of some of the ranchers,
+taking the pictures out of their cases. Firio surveyed the buccaneer
+for some time, squinting his eyes and finally opening them saucer-wide
+in approval.
+
+"You!" he said to Jack. And of the Sargent, after equally deliberate
+observation, he said: "A lady!"
+
+That seemed about all there was to say and expressed the thought of the
+onlookers.
+
+"And, Firio, now it's the trail!" said Jack.
+
+"_Si, si_!" said Firio, ever so softly. "We take rifles?"
+
+"Yes. Food for a week and two-days' water."
+
+It pleased Jack to hang the portraits while Firio was putting on Jag
+Ear's pack; and he made it a ceremony in which his silence was
+uninterrupted by the comments of the ranchers. They stood in wondering
+awe before John Wingfield, Knight, hung where he could watch the Eternal
+Painter at his sunset displays and looking at the "Portrait of a Lady"
+across the breadth of the living-room, whose neutral tones made a perfect
+setting for their dominant genius.
+
+"I believe they are at home," said Jack, with a fond look from one to the
+other, when Firio came to say that everything was ready.
+
+"Senor Jack," whispered Firio insinuatingly, "for the trail you wear the
+grand, glad trail clothes and the big spurs. I keep them shiny--the big
+spurs!" He was speaking with the authority of an expert in trail
+fashions, who would consider Jack in very bad form if he refused.
+
+"Why, yes, Firio, yes; it is so long since we have been on the trail!"
+And he went into the bedroom to make the change.
+
+"I've never seen him quite so dumb quiet!" said Worther.
+
+Jack certainly had been quiet, ominously quiet and self-contained. When
+he came out of the bedroom he was without the jaunty freedom of manner
+that Little Rivers always associated with his full regalia. In place of
+the dreamy distances in his eyes on such occasions were a sad
+preoccupation and determination. When they went outside to Firio and the
+waiting ponies, the Eternal Painter was in his evening orgy of splendor.
+But even Jack did not look up at the sky this time as he walked along in
+silence with his fellow-citizens to the point where the farthest furrow
+of his ranch had been drawn across the virgin desert. His foot was
+already in the stirrup when Jim Galway spoke the thought of all:
+
+"Jack, there's only two of you, and if it happened that you met
+Leddy--"
+
+"It is Prather that I want to see," Jack answered.
+
+"But Leddy's whole gang! We don't know what your plans are, but if
+there's going to be a mix-up, why, we've got to be with you!"
+
+"No!" said Jack, decidedly. "Remember, Jim, you were to trust me. This is
+a mission that requires only two; it is between Prather and me. We are
+going to get acquainted for the first time."
+
+Already Firio, riding Wrath of God, had started, and the bells of Jag Ear
+were jingling, while the rifles, their bores so clean from Firio's care,
+danced with the gleams of sunset in their movement with the burro's
+jogging trot. Jack sprang into the saddle, his face lighting as the foot
+came home in the stirrup.
+
+"It will be all right!" he called back.
+
+P.D. in the freshness of his long holiday, feeling a familiar pressure of
+a leg, hastened to overtake his companions; and the group of Little
+Riversites watched a chubby horseman and a tall, gaunt horseman, bathed
+in gold, riding away on a hazy sea of gold, with Jag Ear's bells growing
+fainter and fainter, until the moving specks were lost in the darkness.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVI
+
+AROUND THE WATER-HOLE
+
+
+Easy traveller had turned speedy traveller, on a schedule. Never had he
+and Firio ridden so fast as in pursuit of John Prather, who had eight
+hours' start of them on a two-days' journey. Jag Ear had to trot all the
+time to keep up. Ounce by ounce he was drawing on his sinking fund of fat
+in a constitutional crisis.
+
+"I keep his hoofs good. I keep his wind good. All right!" said Firio.
+
+It was after midnight before the steady jingle of Jag Ear's orchestra had
+any intermission. An hour for food and rest and the little party was off
+again in the delicious cool of the night, toward a curtain pricked with
+stars which seemed to be drawn down over the edge of the world.
+
+"What sort of horses had Prather and Nogales?" Jack asked. He must reach
+the water-hole as soon as Prather; for it was not unlikely that Prather
+might have fresh mounts waiting there to take him on to the nearest
+railroad station in Mexico.
+
+"Look good, but bad. Nogales no know horses!" Firio answered.
+
+"And they rode in the heat of the day!" said Jack, confidently.
+
+"_Si_! And we ride P.D. and Wrath of God!"
+
+There were no sign-posts on this highway of desert space except the
+many-armed giant cacti, in their furrowed armor set with clusters of
+needles, like tawny auroras gleaming faintly; no trail on the hard earth
+under foot, mottled with bunches of sagebrush and sprays of low-lying
+cacti, all as still as the figures of an inlaid flooring in the violet
+sheen, with an occasional quick, irregular, shadowy movement when a
+frightened lizard or a gopher beat a precipitate retreat from the
+invading thud of hoofs in this sanctuary of dust-dry life. And the course
+of the hoofs was set midway between the looming masses of the mountain
+walls of the valley.
+
+Firio listened for songs from Senor Jack; he waited for stories from
+Senor Jack; but none came. He, the untalkative one of the pair, the
+living embodiment of a silent and happy companionship back and forth from
+Colorado to Chihuahua, liked to hear talk. Without it he was lonesome.
+If, by the criterion of a school examination, he never understood more
+than half of what Jack said, yet, in the measure of spirit, he understood
+everything.
+
+Now Jack was going mile after mile with nothing except occasional urging
+words to P.D. His close-cut hair well brushed back from his forehead
+revealed the sweep of his brow, lengthening his profile and adding to the
+effect of his leanness. The moonlight on his face, which had lost its
+tan, gave him an aspect of subdued and patient serenity in keeping with
+the surroundings. You would have said that he could ride on forever
+without tiring, and that he could go over a precipice now without even
+seeing any danger sign. He had never been like this in all Firio's
+memory. The silence became unsupportable for once to Indian taciturnity.
+If Jack would not talk Firio would. Yes, he would ask a question, just to
+hear the sound of a voice.
+
+"We go to fight?"
+
+"No, Firio."
+
+"Not to fight Prather?"
+
+"No."
+
+"To fight Leddy?"
+
+"I hope not."
+
+"Why we go? Why so--why so--" he had not the language to express the
+strange, brooding inquiry of his mind.
+
+"I go to save Little Rivers."
+
+"_Si_!" said Firio, but as if this did not answer his question.
+
+"I go to get the end of a story, Firio--my story!" continued Jack. "I
+have travelled long for the story and now I shall have it all from
+John Prather."
+
+"_Si, si_!" said Firio, as if all the knowledge in the world had flashed
+into his head quicker than the hand of legerdemain could run the leaves
+of a pack of cards through its fingers. "And then?"
+
+At last Firio had won a smile from the untanned face which could not be
+the same to him until it was tanned.
+
+"Then I shall plant seeds and keep the ground around them soft and
+the weeds out of it; and I shall wear my heart on my sleeve and lay a
+siege--a siege in the open, without parallels or mines! A siege in
+the open!"
+
+Firio did not understand much about parallels or mines or, for that
+matter, about sieges; but he could see the smile fading from Jack's lips
+and could comprehend that the future of which Jack was speaking was very
+far from another prospect, which was immediate and vivid in his mind.
+
+"But you must fight Leddy! _Si, si_! You must fight Leddy first!"
+
+"Then I must, I suppose," said Jack, absently. "All things in their turn
+and time."
+
+"_Si_!" answered Firio. All things in their turn and time! This desert
+truth was bred in him through his ancestry, no less than in the Eternal
+Painter himself.
+
+Again the silence of the morning darkness, with all the stars twinkling
+more faintly and some slipping from their places in the curtain into the
+deeper recesses of the broad band of night on the surface of the rolling
+ball. The plodding hoofs kept up their regular beat of the march of their
+little world of action in the presence of the Infinite; plodding,
+plodding on into the dawn which sent the last of the stars in flight,
+while the curtain melted away before blue distances swimming with light.
+Still bareheaded, Jack looked into the face of the sun which heaved above
+an irregular roof of rocks. It blazed into the range on the other side of
+the valley. It slaked its thirst with the slight fall of dew as a great,
+red tongue would lick up crumbs. Sun and sky, cactus and sagebrush, rock
+and dry earth and sand, that was all. Nowhere in that stretch of basin
+that seemed without end was there a sign of any other horseman or of
+human life.
+
+But at length, as they rode, their eyes saw what only eyes used to desert
+reaches could see, that the speck in the distance was not a cactus or
+even two or three cacti in line, but something alive and moving.
+Perceptibly they were gaining on it, while it developed into two riders
+and a pack animal in single file. Now Jack and Firio were coming into a
+region of more stunted vegetation, and soon the two figures emerged into
+a stretch of gray carpet on which they were as clearly silhouetted as a
+white sail on a green sea.
+
+"Very thick sand there--five or six miles of it. It make this the
+long way," said Firio. "They call it the apron of hell to fools who
+ride at noon."
+
+"And beyond that how many miles to the water-hole?"
+
+"Five or six."
+
+But Firio knew a way around where the going was good. It made a
+difference of two or three miles in distance against them, but two or
+three times that in their favor in time and the strength taken out of
+their ponies.
+
+"How long will Prather be in getting through the sand?" Jack asked.
+
+Firio squinted at the objects of their pursuit for a while, as if he
+wanted to be exact.
+
+"Almost as many hours as miles," he said.
+
+Near the zenith now, the sun was a bulging furnace eye, piercing through
+shirts into the flesh and sucking the very moisture of the veins. A
+single catspaw was all that the Eternal Painter had to offer over that
+basin shut in between the long, jagged teeth of the ranges biting into
+the steel-blue of the sky. The savage, merciless hours of the desert day
+approached; the hours of reckoning for unknowing and unprepared
+travellers.
+
+Jag Ear's bells had a faint plaintiveness at intervals and again their
+jingling was rapid and hysterical, as he tried to make up the distance
+lost through a lapse in effort. He had ceased altogether to wiggle the
+sliver of ear--the baton with which he conducted his orchestra--because
+this was clearly a waste of energy. P.D.'s steps still retained their
+dogged persistence, but their regular beat was slower, like that of a
+clock that needs winding. His head hung low. Wrath of God was no more and
+no less melancholy than when he was rusticating in Jack's yard. It seemed
+as if his sad visage, so reliably and grandly sad, might still be
+marching on toward the indeterminate line of the horizon when his legs
+were worn off his body.
+
+"Firio, you brown son of the sun," said Jack, with a sudden display of
+his old-time trail imagery, "you prolix, garrulous Firio, you knew! You
+had the great equine trio ready, and look at the miles they have done
+since sunset to prove it! You, P.D., favorite trooper of our household
+cavalry! You, Wrath of God, don't be afraid to make an inward smile, for
+your face will never tell on you! You, Jag Ear, beat a tattoo with the
+fragment of the gothic glory of burrohood, for we rest, to go on all the
+faster when the heat of the day is past!"
+
+While Prather and Nogales were riding over hell's apron, their pursuers
+had saddles off hot, moist backs, over which knowing hands were run to
+find no sores. After they had eaten, P.D. and Wrath of God and Jag Ear
+stood in drooping relaxation which would make the most of every moment of
+respite. Jack and Firio, with a blanket fastened to the rifles as
+standards, made a patch of shade in which they lay down.
+
+"Have a nap, Firio," said Jack. "I will wake you when it is time
+to start."
+
+"And you--you no sleep?" asked Firio.
+
+"I could not sleep to-day," Jack answered. "I don't feel as if I could
+sleep until I've seen Prather and heard his story--my story--Firio!" And
+he lay with eyes half closed, staring at the steel blue overhead.
+
+It was well after midday when they mounted for the remainder of the
+journey. The Eternal Painter was shaking out the silvery cloud-mist of
+his beard across a background that had a softer, kindlier, deeper blue.
+The shadows of the ponies and their riders and Jag Ear and his pack no
+longer lay under their bellies heavily, but were stretched out to one
+side by the angle of the sun, in cheerful, jogging fraternity. Prather
+and Nogales had again become only a speck.
+
+"Do you think that they are out of the sand?" asked Jack.
+
+"Very near," Firio answered.
+
+"Their ponies had a whole night's rest--we must not forget that," said
+Jack; "and they must be in a hurry, for certainly Nogales had sense
+enough to rest over noon."
+
+"_Quien sabe_!" answered Firio. "But we catch them--_si, si_!"
+
+Leading the way, Firio turned toward the eastern range until he came to a
+narrow tongue of shale almost as hard to the hoofs as asphalt, that ran
+like a shoal across that sea of sand. Rest had given the great equine
+trio renewed life. P.D., reduced in rank to second place, could not think
+of allowing more than a foot between his muzzle and the tail of Wrath of
+God, who was bound to make up the time he had lost in pursuit of the
+horizon. Another hypothesis of Jack's as to the cause of Wrath of God's
+melancholy was that solemn Covenanter's inability to get any nearer to
+the edge of the earth. Once he could poke his nose through the blue
+curtain and see what was on the other side, the satisfaction of his
+eternal curiosity might have made him a rollicking comedian. As for Jag
+Ear, his baton was once more conducting his orchestra in spirited tempo.
+He, who was nearest of all three in heart to Firio, might well have been
+saying to himself: "I knew! I knew we were not going through the sand!
+Firio and I knew!"
+
+So rapidly were they gaining that, when past the sand and they turned
+back westward, it was only a question of half an hour or so to come up
+with Prather and Nogales. Nogales had been riding ahead; but now Prather,
+after gazing over his shoulder for some time at his pursuers, took the
+lead. He was urging his horse as if he would avoid being overtaken.
+Evidently Nogales did not share that desire, for he let Prather go on
+alone. But Prather's horse was too tired after its effort in the sand and
+he halted and waited until Nogales, at a slow walk, closed up the gap
+between them, when they proceeded at their old, weary gait.
+
+As Jack and Firio came within hailing distance, both Prather and Nogales
+glanced at them sharply; but no word was spoken on either side. The
+absence of any call between these isolated voyagers of the desert sea was
+strangely unlike the average desert meeting. Prather and Nogales did not
+look back again, not even when Jack and Firio were very near. A neigh by
+P.D., a break into a trot by him and Wrath of God, and Firio was saying
+to Nogales:
+
+"You went right through the sand!"
+
+"_Si_!" answered Pedro, with a grin.
+
+Still Prather did not so much as turn his head to get a glimpse of Jack,
+nor did he offer any sign of knowledge of Jack's presence when Jack
+reined alongside him so close that their stirrup leathers were brushing.
+Prather was gazing at the desert exactly in front of him, the reins
+hanging loose, almost out of hand. His horse was about spent, if not on
+the point of foundering. Jack was so near the mole on the cheek of the
+peculiar paleness that never tans that by half extending his arm he might
+have touched it. After all, it was only a raised patch of blue, a blemish
+removable by the slightest surgical operation which its owner must have
+preferred to retain.
+
+Firio and Nogales, also riding side by side, were also silent. There was
+no sound except Jag Ear's bells, now sunk to a faint tinkle in keeping
+with the slow progress of Prather's beaten horse. Looking at Prather's
+hands, Jack was thinking of another pair of hands amazingly like them. In
+the uncanniness of its proximity he was imagining how the profile would
+look without the birthmark, and he found himself grateful for the
+silence, which spoke so powerfully to him, in the time that it provided
+for bringing his faculties under control.
+
+"How do you do?" he said at last, pleasantly.
+
+Probably the silence had been equally welcome to Prather in charting his
+own course in the now unavoidable interview. He looked around slowly, and
+he was smiling with a trace of the satire that Jack had seen in the
+elevator, but smiling watchfully in a way that covers the apprehension of
+a keen glance. And he saw features that were calm and eyes that were
+still as the sky.
+
+"How do you do?" he answered; and paused as one who is about to slip a
+point of steel home into a scabbard. "How do you do, brother?" he
+added, as if uttering a shibboleth that could protect him from any
+physical violence.
+
+"Brother! Brother! Yes!" repeated Jack, with dry lips.
+
+This shaping of conviction into fact so nakedly, so coolly, made all the
+desert and the sky swim before him in kaleidoscopic patches of blue and
+gray, shot with zigzag flashes. He half reeled in the saddle; his hands
+gripped the pommel to hold himself in place. It was as if a long strain
+of nervous tension had come to an end with a crack. Prather's smile took
+a turn of deeper satisfaction. It was like John Wingfield, Sr.'s after
+Jack had left the library.
+
+"This is the first time we have ever met to speak," said Prather, easily.
+
+"Yes!" assented Jack, the gray settling back into desert and the blue
+into sky and the zigzag flashes becoming only the brilliance of late
+afternoon sunshine.
+
+"Certainly it is time that we got acquainted, brother," said Prather.
+
+"It is!" agreed Jack. "It is time that I knew your story!"
+
+"Which you have hardly heard from your--I mean, our father!" The pause
+between the "your" and the "our" was made with an appreciative
+significance. "Well, you see, I was the brother who had the mole on
+his cheek!"
+
+"Yes--pitifully yes!" said Jack, with a kind of horror at the expression
+of this face in his father's likeness, no less than at the words.
+
+"Why, no! I've often thought of _you_ rather pitifully!" said Prather.
+
+"You well might!" Jack answered, feelingly. "We may well share a common
+pity for each other."
+
+There was no sign that John Prather subscribed to the sentiment except in
+a certain quizzical turn of his lips, as he looked away.
+
+"Yes, the story has been kept from me. I have come for it!" said Jack.
+
+"That is raking out the skeletons. But why not rake out our skeletons
+together, you and I?" said Prather.
+
+It was clear that he enjoyed the prospect as an opportunity for
+retributive enlightenment.
+
+"To begin with, I have the rights of primogeniture in my favor," he said.
+"I was born a day before you were, in the same city of New York. My
+mother's name was not down in the telephone list as Mrs. Wingfield,
+however--I look at it all philosophically, you understand--and it was
+just that which made the difference between you and me, outside of the
+difference of our natures. But I am proud of my birth on both sides, in
+my own way. My mother was won without marriage and she was true to
+father. A woman of real ability, my mother! She was well suited to be
+John Wingfield's wife; better, I think, in the practical world of
+materialism than your mother. By a peculiar coincidence, unknown to
+father, my mother called in Dr. Bennington. So you and I have a further
+bond, in that the same doctor brought us into the world."
+
+"And my mother must have known this!" Jack exclaimed, in racking horror.
+
+At last the cause of her exile was clear in all its grisly monstrousness;
+the source of the pain in her eyes in the portrait had been traced home.
+Again he saw her white and trembling when she returned to the house in
+Versailles to find a visitor there; and now he realized the fulness of
+her relief when the frail boy said that he did not like his father. Her
+travels had spoken the restlessness of flight in search of oblivion to
+the very fact of his paternity. The "I give! I give!" of the portrait was
+the giving of the infinity of her fine, sensitive being to him to make
+him all hers. His feeling which had held him on the desert when he should
+have gone home, that feeling of literal revulsion toward his inheritance,
+was a thing born in him which had grown under her caresses and her
+training. She had been living solely for him to that last moment when the
+book dropped out of her hand; and the incarnation of that which had
+killed her was riding beside him now in the flesh. He felt a weaving of
+his muscles, a tightening of his nerves, as if waiting on the spark of
+will, and all the strength that he had built in the name of the store was
+madly tempted. But no! John Prather was not to blame, any more than
+himself. He would listen to John Prather, as justice listens to evidence,
+and endure his stare to the end.
+
+"Yes, your mother knew," continued Prather. "My mother made a point of
+having her know. That was part of my mother's own bitterness. That was
+her teaching to me from the first. She had no illusions. She knew the
+advantages and the disadvantages of her position. She was and is one of
+the few persons in the world of whom my father is a little afraid."
+
+"Then she still lives?" asked Jack sharply.
+
+"Yes, she is in California," Prather returned. "She often referred to the
+mole on my cheek as the symbol of my handicap in the world of convention.
+'But for the mole, Jack, you would have the store,' she often said. It
+delighted her that I had my father's face. As I grew older the
+resemblance became more marked. I could see that I pleased my father with
+my practical ideas of life, which I developed when quite young. He saw to
+it that my mother and I lived well and that I went to a good school. From
+my books I drew the same lesson as from my peculiar inheritance; the
+lesson that my mother was always inculcating. 'A bank account,' she would
+repeat, 'will erase even a mole patch on the cheek. It is the supreme
+power that will carry you anywhere, Jack. You must make money!'
+
+"When father came to see her he would talk with a candor with which I am
+sure he never talked to your mother. He would tell of his successes,
+revealing the strategy and system by which they were won, finding her
+both understanding and sympathetic. I became a little blade that
+delighted to get sharp against his big blade by asking him questions. He
+did not want me about the store, and this was one of the things in which
+my mother humored him. She knew just when to humor and just when to
+threaten the play of the strong card which she always held.
+
+"All the while her ambition was laying its plans. It was that I should
+have the Wingfield store one day, myself. Out of school hours I would
+range the other department stores. You see, I had not only inherited my
+father's face more strikingly than you had, but also his talents. I
+spent the summer vacations of my fourteenth and fifteenth years in a
+store. I won the attention of my superiors and promise of promotion. I
+foresaw the day when I should so prove my ability that father would take
+me into his own store, and then, gradually, I would make my place,
+secure, while you were idling about Europe. And in those days you were
+frail and I was vigorous.
+
+"There was no mistaking that father's sense of convention was the one
+thing that stood between him and my desire. He feared the world's opinion
+if the truth became known, and deep down in heart he could never get over
+the pride of having married into your mother's family. You had very good
+blood on the maternal side, as they say, while my mother had begun in the
+cloak department and was self-made, like father. Again, I was so truly
+his son in every instinct that he may have been a little jealous of me.
+Father does not like to think that any other man was ever quite as great
+as he is. I confess that is the way I feel, too. That is what life is,
+after all--it is yourself. Yes, I saw the store as mine--surely mine,
+with time!"
+
+Prather's reins lay across the pommel of the saddle drawn taut by the
+drooping head of his horse, which was barely dragging one foot after
+another. He gave Jack a glance of flashing resentment and then, in his
+first impulse of real emotion, made a fist of one hand and drove it
+angrily into the palm of the other before continuing.
+
+"Then father went to Europe to bring you home. He had decided for the
+son of convention, the son of blood! Though self-made, he was for family
+as against talent. Besides, it was a victory for him. At last you were
+his. After your return there was a scene between mother and him, a cool,
+bitter argument. He defied her to play her last card. He said that you
+knew the truth and that she could at best only make a row. And he wanted
+us out of New York; the place for me was a new country. He would make us
+a handsome allowance. So my mother agreed to his terms and we went to the
+Pacific coast. There I was to enter one of the colleges. My mother wanted
+me to have a college education, you see. The last meeting between father
+and me was very interesting, blade playing on blade. He really hated to
+let me go, for by this time he knew how hopeless you were. He embraced me
+and said that I would get on, anyway. I told him that the only trouble
+was that while I was the real son, I had a mole on my cheek.
+
+"The West was best. There we could claim the favor of convention, Mrs.
+Prather and her son. I matriculated at Stanford, but I saw nothing in it
+for me. It was all dream stuff. Greek and Latin don't help in building a
+fortune. They handicap you with the loss of time it takes to learn them,
+at least; and I meant to be worth a million before I was thirty. Now I
+know that I shall be worth two or three or four millions at thirty, if
+all goes as I plan. So I cut college and broke for Goldfield. I ran a
+store and was a secret partner in a saloon that paid better than the
+store. I was in the game morning, noon, and night; it beat marching to
+class to recite Horace and fiddle with the binomial theorem, as it must
+for every man who counts for something in the world."
+
+Throughout, Prather's tone, except for the one moment of anger, had been
+that of an even recital of facts by one who does not allow himself to
+consider anything but facts in the judgment of his position. At times he
+gave Jack covert glances out of the tail of his eye and saw Jack's face
+white and drawn and his head lowered. Now Prather became the victim--so
+he would have put it, no doubt--of another outburst of feeling.
+
+"But it was not like having the store!" he said. "No, my heart was in the
+store; and that morning when you saw me looking down from the gallery I
+was permitting myself to dream. I was thinking of what had come to you,
+the fairy prince of good fortune, who had no talent for your inheritance,
+and of what I might have done with it. I was thinking how I could win men
+to work for me"--and there he was smiling with the father's charm--"and
+of the millions to come if I could begin to build on the foundation that
+father had laid. I saw branches in Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia--a great
+chain of stores all co-ordinated under my directing hand--I the master!"
+
+He rubbed the palms of his hands together as he had over the
+scintillation of the jewelry counters. Though Jack had not looked around,
+his ear recognized that crisp sound of exultant power.
+
+"Yes," Jack murmured thoughtfully, as if inviting Prather to go on with
+anything further he might have to say.
+
+"All mine--mine!" Prather concluded, in a sort of hypnosis with his
+own picture.
+
+Jack still stared at the earth, his profile limned in gold and the side
+of his face toward Prather in shadow. They were nearing the clump of
+cotton-woods around the water-hole at the base of a tongue of the range
+which ran out into the desert, and Firio rode up to whisper in Spanish:
+
+"Senor Jack, see there! Horsemen!"
+
+Jack raised his head with a returning sense of his surroundings to see
+some mounted men, eight in all he counted, riding along the range trail a
+half mile nearer the water-hole than themselves. Their horses had the
+gait of exhaustion after a long, hard ride.
+
+"You know who it is?" Firio whispered.
+
+"Yes," Jack answered. "They had the better trail and have outridden us.
+All right, Firio!"
+
+"Leddy--Pete Leddy and some of his men!" exclaimed Prather, shading his
+eyes to watch the file of figures now passing under the cotton-woods. It
+seemed to relieve him. "I suppose he came on my account," he added,
+nodding to Nogales.
+
+"Yes," said Nogales, with a grin. He always either grinned or his face
+had a half savage impassiveness.
+
+"I wonder if Leddy thought I was in danger," and Prather gave Jack a
+knowing glance of satisfaction. "We shall all camp together," he
+added, smiling.
+
+Jack did not answer for a moment. He was intent on the cotton-woods.
+Leddy and his companions appeared on the other side, the figures of
+riders and horses bathed in the sunset glow. Then they disappeared as if
+the earth had swallowed them up.
+
+"They are going on! They are not going to stop!" said Prather
+apprehensively.
+
+"There is a basin beyond the water-hole and the seepage makes a little
+pasture," Jack explained. "You will see them back in a moment."
+
+"Oh, yes!" said Prather, with a thrill in his voice; and again the
+palms of his hands were making that refrain of delight. "But I have
+told my story," he resumed. "Now may I ask you a question? Why have you
+come back?"
+
+Jack looked around frankly and dispassionately.
+
+"To save Little Rivers from you! I understand that you have secured the
+water rights."
+
+"Well, then, I have!" declared Prather, confidently, "and I mean to have
+the rights for the whole valley!" and he struck his fist into his palm.
+"You see," he went on, with another flash of satire, "it is not exactly
+fair that you should have the store and Little Rivers, too. I had heard
+of the possibilities here from my friend Leddy, who was also at
+Goldfield. A useful man in his place! He got his sixth notch there. When
+I came and looked around and saw that here was the opportunity I wanted,
+I wired father that in any fair division of territory everything west of
+the Mississippi belonged to me"--he was showing some bravado in his sense
+of security now, when he saw that Leddy and his men were returning
+through the cotton-woods to the water-hole--"and I should like to have
+you out of my way. I told him you were the picture of health, even if you
+didn't have anything in your head, and if you were ever going to learn
+the business it was time that you began. But father is always careful.
+Naturally he wanted to check off my report with another's; for he didn't
+want you back if you were ill. So he sent Dr. Bennington out to get
+professional confirmation of my statement."
+
+"And you told Jasper Ewold that you wanted the rights only to turn them
+over to the water users' association and then bring in capital to build a
+dam, with everybody sharing alike in the prosperity that was to come."
+
+"Yes, and Jasper Ewold was so simple! Well, what I told him was
+strategy--strategy of which I think father would approve. When you have a
+big object in view the end must justify the means. Look at the situation!
+Two hundred thousand acres of land waiting on water to be the most
+fertile in the world! Why, when I rode up the valley the first time and
+saw what could be done, I was amazed to think that such an opportunity
+should be lying around loose. Little Rivers was so out of the way that
+other promoters had overlooked it, and everybody had sort of taken it for
+granted that Jasper Ewold and his water users' association really had
+legal possession. It was my chance. I thought big. That dam should be
+mine. I had the money I had made in Goldfield, but it was not enough for
+my purpose.
+
+"Where should I turn for outside capital that would not demand a
+majority interest in the project? I concluded that it was time father
+did something for me in return for giving up the store. Besides this
+call of justice I had another influence with him. I was sure that when
+he told my mother that you knew the truth he was making a statement that
+suited his purpose. I was sure that you knew nothing of my story and
+that father did not want you to know it. I was ready to tell if he did
+not meet my demands.
+
+"Well, you know how he can talk when he wants to gain a point. I fancy
+that I talked as well as father when I showed him how that dam would pay
+for itself in five years in tolls and twenty per cent on the capital
+after that; when I showed him how a population ten times that of his
+store would have to take their water from me; when I showed him all the
+side issues of profit from town sites and the increase of values of the
+big holdings which Leddy's men would take up for me. You ought to have
+seen his eyes glow. He could not withstand his pride in me. 'You have the
+gift, the one gift!' he said. I told him yes, it was in the blood; and I
+struck while the iron was hot. I got an outright sum from him; and he
+could not resist a chance to share all that profit when capital was to be
+had in New York for three or four per cent. He went in as silent partner,
+as I was in the saloon at Goldfield; as a partner with a minority
+interest."
+
+John Prather paused to laugh to himself over his victory, while the
+movement of palm on palm was rapid and prolonged.
+
+"Our arrangement amounted to the commercial division of territory for the
+family, which I had suggested," he went on with appreciative irony. "You
+and he were to have the east side of the Mississippi and I was to have
+the west, and you were never to know my story. Publicly, father and I
+were strangers and quits, and we came to this agreement in the room of a
+down-town hotel.
+
+"The day before I started West I simply had to have a look through the
+store--the store that I loved and that I had to lose. Yes, the store is
+far more to my taste than this rough western life. Naturally, as my
+existence was to be kept a secret from you, when you followed me to the
+elevator and tried to get acquainted I couldn't have it."
+
+"But as the elevator descended you pointed to the mole," said Jack.
+
+"Did I? I suppose that was an involuntary, instinctive pleasantry. The
+previous evening father and I had had a farewell visit together. We went
+into the country."
+
+"The night after the scene in the drawing-room!" Jack thought.
+
+"I knew that father was worried because he had to make an effort to show
+that he was not. Usually he can cover his worries perfectly. He said that
+he might have a fight in order to keep you and that he very much wanted
+you to stay. But he did not succeed," concluded Prather, fist driving
+into palm. "You came on the express after me."
+
+"Because, fortunately, you went to the house to have a look at the
+ancestor!"
+
+"Yes," said Prather. "But I did not see you."
+
+"However, I saw you from the landing and overheard what passed between
+you and father!"
+
+"No matter!" cried Prather harshly. "I am prepared for you!" He looked
+toward the water-hole significantly. "And the concession is mine! The dam
+will be mine!"
+
+"The dam could be built and all the valley might bloom without so much
+power passing into the hands of one man," said Jack.
+
+P.D. scenting the pasturage and feeling the pangs of thirst was starting
+forward at a smarter pace; but Jack held him back to the snail's crawl of
+Prather's pony.
+
+"Who would do it? Jasper Ewold? Jim Galway?" Prather demanded. "What
+these men need is a leader. They don't realize what I am doing for them.
+Do they think I want to put in ten years out here for nothing? For every
+dollar that they make for me they are going to make one for themselves.
+That's the rule of prosperity. I am not robbing them. I am taking only my
+fair share in return for creative business genius. The fellows in Little
+Rivers who sulk and don't get on will have only themselves to thank."
+
+"But they lose their independence," Jack was arguing quietly, as if he
+would thrash out the subject. "There are other things than money in
+this world."
+
+"There's nothing much money won't do!" said Prather.
+
+"It will not give one self-respect or courage or moral fibre; it will not
+bring the gift of poetry, music, or painting; or turn a lie into truth;
+or bring back virtue to a woman who has been defiled; or make the courage
+to face death calmly."
+
+"It will do all I want!" Prather answered. "Father not having been true
+to his agreement by keeping you in New York, why should I keep his
+secret? He breaks faith; I break faith. It seems to me as if there were
+no escaping the penalty of my birth. I no sooner arrive than I find the
+whole town knows of your return; and not only that, but a wire comes from
+father saying that we had better not meet until he comes."
+
+"Until he comes! Yes, go on!"
+
+"Well, as you say, you are here to save Little Rivers and that meant an
+interview with me, and--well," again the palms in their crisp movement,
+"before I started out I told Pete Leddy that if you came after me I
+should look to him for protection, and it seems he is on time."
+
+"Yes," said Jack, without looking at Prather. All the while he had kept
+watch on the water-hole, and he received Prather's announcement stoically
+as a confirmation of his suspicions.
+
+"So, if you will take my advice, brother, the best thing for you to do is
+to ride back before we reach the water-hole, unless you prefer Leddy's
+company. This time he will fight you in his way."
+
+"My horse is tired and there is neither water nor feed for him except
+there." Jack stated this quietly and stubbornly, as he nodded toward the
+cotton-woods. Then he looked around to Prather. Suddenly Prather found
+himself looking at a face that seemed to have only the form of that face
+by the side of which he had been riding. It was as if another man had
+taken Jack's place in the saddle. The ancestor was rising in Jack.
+Prather saw an electric spark in Jack's eyes, the spark of the high
+voltage that made his muscles weave and a flutter come in his cheeks.
+"No, I am not going back until I have recovered the rights that you have
+taken from Little Rivers!" he said.
+
+Prather in sudden confusion realized that he had let his feelings go too
+soon. They were not yet at the water-hole, and he was within easy reach
+of that hand working on the reins in a way that promised an outburst.
+
+"You think of physical violence against me--your own flesh and blood!" he
+said defensively.
+
+He saw Jack shudder in reaction and knew that he was safe for the moment.
+When Jack looked away at the water-hole Prather's fingers slipped to his
+own six-shooter and rested there, twitching nervously; and in the rear
+Firio was watching both him and Nogales shrewdly.
+
+From any outward sign now, Jack might have been starting on another
+journey with quiet eagerness; a journey that might end at a precipice a
+few yards ahead or at the other side of the world. Of this alone you
+could be sure from the resoluteness of his features, that he was going
+straight on; while Firio, in the telepathy of desert companionship,
+understood that he was missing no developing detail within the narrow
+range of vision in front of P.D.'s nose. Trusting all to Jack, Firio was
+on wires, ready for a spring in any direction.
+
+They were coming to the edge of a depression of an old watercourse that
+wound around past the cotton-woods to the ridge itself and included the
+basin where Leddy and his followers had tethered their horses. But this
+part of it was dry sand. The standing figures around the water-hole had
+sunk down. Jack could see them as lumps in a row. A blade of flame from
+the setting sun fell on them, revealing the glint of rifle barrels.
+
+"Firio! Quick--down! P.D., down!" Jack called, dismounting with a leap;
+and as though in answer to his warning came the singing of bullets about
+their ears.
+
+P.D. had been trained to sink on all fours at a word and he and Jack
+together dropped into the cover of the _arroyo_, below the desert line.
+When he looked around Firio was at his side, still holding the reins of
+Wrath of God. But Wrath of God's sturdy, plodding nature had little
+facility in learning tricks. A tiny stream of blood was flowing down his
+forehead and he lay still. At last, all in loyal service, he had reached
+the horizon. His bony, homely, good old face seemed singularly peaceful,
+as if satisfied with the reward at his journey's end. Jag Ear was
+standing beside P.D. and Prather's burro next to him, both unharmed.
+Nogales's horse had also been killed, but its rider was safe. Prather was
+crawling down the side of the _arroyo_ on his belly, digging his hands
+into the dirt, his face white and contorted and his eyes shifting back
+and forth in ghastly incomprehension. His horse followed him and sank
+down in final surrender to exhaustion.
+
+By common impulse, Jack and Firio seized the rifles from Jag Ear's pack,
+while Nogales, a spectator, squatted beside Prather.
+
+"What--what does it mean?" Prather gasped, spasmodically. "I--I--was it
+Leddy that fired on us?"
+
+"Yes," said Jack over his shoulder, as he and Firio started up the bank
+of the _arroyo_ facing the water-hole. "No doubt of it."
+
+"It was you they wanted--not me--not me! I--I--"
+
+"I don't know. At all events, I do not mean they shall rush us!" Jack
+answered, as he and Firio hugged the slope with their rifles resting on
+top and only their heads showing above it.
+
+"No! It couldn't be that they recognized me. They will let me by! They
+expect me!"
+
+"Yes, you belong on their side!" Jack called back.
+
+"I will send out a flag of truce!" said Prather, brightening with
+the thought. "You, Nogales, take my handkerchief and go and explain
+to Leddy!"
+
+Nogales seemed agreeable to the suggestion. Indeed, he was very
+expeditious in starting. While Jack never took his eye off the sight of
+his barrel, Nogales walked across the gleaming interval between the two
+parties waving Prather's handkerchief. Leddy rose on his knee watchfully,
+rifle in hand, while he spoke with Nogales. Then Nogales started back
+with his head thrown up jubilantly, but stopped when he was within
+calling distance and sang out, truculently:
+
+"Leddy get you both! He get everything!"
+
+He turned on his heel and soon was another lump around the water-hole.
+
+"That makes nine, Firio!" said Jack.
+
+He smiled in relief to be rid of Nogales; smiled in happy confidence, as
+if he were truly the ancestor's child.
+
+"_Si_!" answered Firio, as if he had just as soon there were a regiment
+against them. He was happy beyond words. He patted his rifle barrel; he
+spread out his big red bandanna beside his elbow and on it nicely
+arranged a couple of extra charges of cartridges.
+
+Prather remained flat on the bottom of the _arroyo_, overwhelmed. It was
+some time before he could speak.
+
+"I--I don't understand! It isn't possible!" he said finally.
+
+"Everything is possible with Leddy. It seems that there can be peace
+between him and me in this valley in only one way," Jack answered.
+
+"But me! I suppose he found out that I--" Prather stopped without
+finishing the sentence. "What am I to do?" he asked Jack in livid appeal.
+
+"Why, it is three against nine, if you choose!" Jack answered. "You have
+a rifle, and it is for your life."
+
+"My life!" Prather gasped, another wave of fear submerging him.
+
+"Yes. We have no horses with which to make our escape and we should be
+winged as soon as we exposed ourselves. Leddy means that we shall die of
+thirst, or die fighting."
+
+Through all this dialogue Jack had been speaking to the head that lay
+between his eye and a target. As Prather reached up a trembling hand to
+take his rifle from the back of his burro one of the lumps around the
+water-hole rose, possibly to change position. When it became the
+silhouette of a kneeling man, Jack fired and the figure plunged forward
+like an automaton that had had its back broken.
+
+"Eight!" whispered Firio.
+
+"Duck!" Jack told him; for a response instantly came in a volley that
+kicked up the dust around their heads.
+
+But Jack's rifle lay in limp hands.
+
+"Eight!" he repeated, dazedly. "And I shot to kill--to kill!"
+
+His face blanched with horror at the thing that he had done. It seemed as
+if the strength had been struck out of him. He appeared ready to let
+destiny overtake him rather than fire again. Then as in a flash, the
+ancestor in him reappeared and in his features was written that very
+process of fate which Dr. Bennington had said was in him. Again his hand
+was firm on the barrel and his eye riveted on the sight, as he drew
+himself up until he lay even with the bank of the _arroyo_.
+
+The volley from the cotton-woods had swept over Prather's head at the
+instant that he had taken hold of his rifle. It dropped from his grasp.
+He burrowed in the sand under the pressure of that near and sinister rush
+of singing breaths.
+
+"I can't! I can't!" he said helplessly.
+
+He was leaden flesh, without the power to move. At his words Jack glanced
+back to see a dropped jaw and glassy, staring eyes.
+
+"You are suffering!" exclaimed Jack. "Are you hit?"
+
+"No!" Prather managed to say, and reached out for his rifle in clumsy
+desperation, as if he were feeling for it in the dark.
+
+"Take your time!" said Jack encouragingly, as one would to a victim of
+stage fright. "There isn't any danger for the moment, while advantage of
+position is with us--the sun over our shoulders and in their faces."
+
+The lumps around the water-hole grew smaller. Evidently, as a result of
+the lesson, they were creeping backward on their stomachs to a less
+exposed position. Two had quite disappeared, or else the brilliant play
+of light had melted them into the golden carpet of reflected sunshine on
+which they rested. Directly, Jack saw two figures creeping over the rim
+of the pasturage basin.
+
+"So, that's it!" he said to Firio.
+
+Firio nodded his understanding of Leddy's plan to take them in flank
+under cover of the _arroyo_.
+
+"We shall have to respond in kind!" said Jack.
+
+He left his hat where his head had been and began crawling along the side
+of the _arroyo_, but paused to call to Prather, who, now that no bullets
+were flying, was trying the mechanism of his rifle with a somewhat
+steadier hand:
+
+"Prather, if you could manage to get up there beside Firio and join him
+in pouring out a magazine full at the right moment, it would help! If
+not, put your hat up there beside mine. You can do that without exposing
+yourself."
+
+Jack's tone was that of one who urges a tired man to take a few more
+steps, or an invalid without any appetite to try another sup of broth. It
+had no hint of irony.
+
+"No matter," said Firio. "Leddy know he can't fight. Leddy know there is
+only two of us!" His tone was without satire, but its sting was sharper
+than satire; that of an Indian shrug over a negligible quantity. It
+started Prather on all fours laboriously toward him.
+
+"I am going to the turn in the _arroyo_ that commands the next turn,"
+Jack explained. "When I whistle you empty your magazines. Keep your heads
+down and fire fast, no matter if not accurately, so as to disturb their
+aim at me!"
+
+"_Si_!" said Firio. "I know!" No one could deny that he was having a very
+good time making war in the company of Senor Jack. "Yes, Mister Prather,"
+he added, when, after toiling painfully on his belly for the few feet he
+had to go, Prather lay with his stark face near Firio's; a face strangely
+like that of John Wingfield, Sr. when he saw Jasper Ewold from the
+drawing-room doorway. "For your life, Mister Prather! _Si_! Up a little
+more! Chin high as mine, so! Eye on sight, so!"
+
+Prather obeyed in an abyssmal sort of shame which, for the time being,
+conquered his fear, though not his palsy; for his rifle barrel trembled
+on its rest.
+
+Meanwhile, Jack had crept to the bend in the _arroyo_. He was listening.
+It would not do to show his head as a warning of his presence. Faintly he
+heard men moving in the sand, moving slowly and cautiously. At the moment
+he chose as the right one, with rifle cocked and finger on trigger, he
+gave his signal. Then he sprang to the top of the bank, fully exposed to
+the marksmen at the water-hole. For no half measure would do. He must
+have a full view of the bottom of the next bend. There he saw two
+crawling figures. He fired twice and dropped down with three or four
+stinging whispers in his ears and a second volley overhead as he was
+under cover. Again he sprang up over the bank in the temptation to see
+the result of his aim. One of the would-be flankers lay prostrate and
+still, face downward. The other was disappearing beyond the second bend.
+
+"Seven, now!" he thought miserably, in comprehension of the whole
+business as ridicule in human savagery. "They won't trouble us again
+immediately. They will wait on darkness and thirst," he concluded; and
+called, as he turned back, to Firio: "It worked like a charm, O son of
+the sun! They could not fire at all straight with your bullets flying
+about their heads, disturbing their--" His speech ended at sight of
+Prather, half rolling, half tumbling down the slope, his hands over his
+face, while he uttered a prolonged moan.
+
+"Bullet hit a rock under sand!" said Firio, as Jack hastened to assist
+Prather, who had come to a halt at the very bottom of the _arroyo_ and
+lay gasping on his side. Jack took hold of Prather's wrists to draw his
+hands away from the wound.
+
+"My God! Out here, like a rat in a trap!" Prather groaned. "When I have
+all life before me! In sight of millions and power--a rat in a trap out
+on this damnable desert, as if I were of no more account than a rancher!"
+
+"Let me see!" said Jack; for Prather was holding his hands tight against
+his face, as if he feared that all the blood in his body would pour out
+if he removed them. "Let me see! Maybe it is not so bad!"
+
+Prather let his hands drop and the right one which was over the cheek
+with the mole was splashed red between the fingers. On the cheek was a
+raw spot, from which ran a slight trickle. The mole had gone. A splinter
+of rock, or perhaps a bullet, with its jacket split, ricocheting
+sidewise, had torn it clean from the flesh.
+
+"Not at all dangerous!" said Jack.
+
+"No?" exclaimed Prather, in utter relief.
+
+"It will heal in a fortnight!"
+
+A small medicine case was among the regular supplies that were always
+packed on that omnibus of a burro, Jag Ear. While Jack was bandaging the
+wound, Firio, who kept watch, had no news to report.
+
+"Nothing matters! They will get us, anyway!" Prather moaned. The shock of
+being hit had quite finished any pretence at concealing his mortal fear
+of the outcome.
+
+"Oh, I wouldn't say that! We already have them down to seven!" said Jack
+encouragingly, as he made a pillow of a blanket and bade Prather rest
+his head on it.
+
+But he knew well that they were a seven who had learned wisdom from the
+fate of their comrades. From Nogales, Leddy must have heard of the loss
+of two horses. At best, but one of the beleaguered three had any means of
+escape. Leddy could well afford to curb his impatience as he camped
+comfortably by the water-hole, while his own horses grazed.
+
+The sun was still above the western ridge in the effulgence of its adieu
+for the day. Jack was on his knee, with the broad, level glare full on
+him, looking at Prather, who was in the shadow; and his reflections were
+mixed with that pity which one feels toward another who is lame or blind
+or suffers for the want of any sense or faculty that is born to the
+average human being. For a man of true courage rarely sees a coward as
+anything but a man ailing; he is grateful for nature's kindness to
+himself. And the spark of John Wingfield, Knight, skipping generations
+before it settled on a descendant, had not chosen John Prather for its
+favor. The ancestor was all Jack's.
+
+Prather, in his agony of mind, had moments of wondering envy as he
+watched Jack's changing expression. He could see that Jack, in entire
+detachment from his problem of fighting Leddy, was thinking soberly in
+the silence of the desert, unconscious in his absorption of the presence
+of any other human being. Suddenly his eyes opened wide in the
+luminousness of a happy discovery; his lips turned a smile of supreme
+satisfaction, and his face seemed to be giving back the light of the sun.
+
+"It's all right!" he said. "Yes, everything is going to be all right!"
+
+"How?" asked Prather wistfully, feeling the infection of the confident
+ring of Jack's tone.
+
+"There is one horse left," said Jack. "He is in better condition than
+Leddy imagines. When darkness comes you can get away with him and by
+morning he will have brought you to water at Las Cascadas, halfway on the
+range trail. Then you will be quite safe."
+
+"Yes! Yes!" Prather half rose, his breath coming fast, his eyes ravenous.
+
+"And in return you will give Little Rivers back its water rights! Is that
+a bargain?" Jack asked.
+
+"Give up my concession and all it means to me! Give it up absolutely--its
+millions!" objected Prather, in an uncontrollable impulse of greed.
+
+"King Richard III, you remember," Jack declared, with a trace of his old
+humor breaking out over the new aspect of the situation, "said he would
+give his kingdom for a horse. He could not get the horse and he lost both
+his kingdom and his life. If he had been able to make the trade he might
+have saved his life and perhaps--who knows?--have won another kingdom."
+
+"I will save my life!" Prather concluded; but under his breath he added
+bitterly: "And you get both the store and Little Rivers!" in the
+prehensile instinct which gains one thing only to covet another.
+
+"You have the papers for the concession with you?" Jack asked.
+
+"I--I--"
+
+"Yes!" interposed Jack firmly.
+
+"Yes!" Prather admitted.
+
+"And you have pencil and paper to make some sort of transfer that will be
+the first legal step in undoing what you have done?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+While Prather was occupied with this, Jack found pencil and paper on his
+own account and by the light of the sun's last rays and in the happiness
+of one who has brought a story to a good end, he wrote to his father:
+
+"John Prather will tell you how he and I met out on the desert before you
+came and of the long talk we had.
+
+"You wanted a son who would go on building on the great foundation you
+had laid. You have one. He said that you wanted to give him the store.
+The reason why you might not give it to him no longer exists. The mole is
+gone. Of course there will be a scar where the mole was. I, too, shall
+have to carry a scar. But the means is in your power to go far toward
+erasing his, for his mother, Mrs. Prather, is still living.
+
+"So everything is clear. Everything is coming out right. John Prather and
+I change places, as nature intended that we should. You need have no
+apprehensions on my account. Though I had not a cent in the world I could
+make my living out here--a very sweet thought, this, to me, with its
+promise of something real and practical and worth while, at which I can
+make good. I know that you are going to keep the bargain that Prather and
+I have made; and think of me as over the pass and very happy as I write
+this, in the confidence that at last all accounts have been balanced and
+we can both turn to a fresh page in the ledger. JACK."
+
+When Jack, after he had received the transfer, gave the letter to Prather
+to read, Prather was transfixed with incredulity.
+
+"You mean this?" he gasped blankly, as his surprise became articulate.
+
+"Yes. You have quite the better of King Richard--you gain both the
+kingdom and the horse."
+
+"The store, yes, the store--mine! Mine--the store!" said Prather, in a
+slow, passionate monotone, his fingers trembling with the very triumph of
+possession as he thrust the letter into his pocket. "The store, yes, the
+store!" he repeated, amazement mixed with exultation. "But--" his keen,
+practical mind was recovering its balance; he was on guard again. Between
+him and the realization of his inheritance lay the shadow of the fear of
+the miles in the night. "But--there is no trick?" he hazarded in
+suspicion.
+
+"No!"
+
+Jack spoke in such a way that it removed the last doubt for Prather, who
+kneaded his palms together in a kind of frenzy, oblivious of all except
+the moneyed prospect of the kingdom craved that had become a kingdom won.
+
+"How long before I start?" he asked.
+
+"As soon as the first darkness settles and before the moon rises."
+
+"I shall need some food," Prather went on ingratiatingly. "And they say
+wounds bring on fever. Have you any water to drink on the way?"
+
+"We will fix you up the best we can. I will divide what water remains
+between you and P.D. He shall have his share now and you can drink
+yours later."
+
+The sun had set. The afterglow was fading, and in a few minutes, when the
+light was quite out of the heavens, Jack announced that it was time for
+Prather to start.
+
+"How shall I know the direction?" Prather asked.
+
+"Trust P.D. He will find it," said Jack. He held the stirrup for Prather
+to mount with the relief of freeing himself at last from the clinging
+touch of the phantoms. "You are perfectly safe. In two days you will be
+mounting the steps of a Pullman on your way to New York."
+
+"And you? What--what are you going to do?" Prather inquired hectically,
+with a momentary qualm of shame.
+
+"Why, if Firio and I are to have water to make coffee for breakfast we
+must take the water-hole!" Jack answered, as if this were a thing of
+minor importance beside seeing Prather safely on his way. "Be sure not to
+overwater P.D. after the night's ride, and don't overdo him on the final
+stretch, and turn him over to Galway when you arrive. Home, P.D.! Home!"
+he concluded, striking that good soldier with the flat of his hand on the
+buttocks. And P.D. trotted away into the night.
+
+Jack listened to the hoof-beats on the soft earth dying away and then
+crept up beside Firio on the bank and gazed into the black wall in the
+direction of the cotton-woods. A slight glow in the basin, which must be
+Leddy's camp-fire, was the only sign of life in the neighborhood. The
+silence was profound. He had not spoken a word to Firio. With one
+problem forever solved, he was absorbed in another.
+
+"Leddy drinks, eats, waits!" whispered Firio. "If we try to go they
+hunt us down!"
+
+"Yes," said Jack.
+
+"And we not go, eh? We stay? We fight?"
+
+"For water, Firio, yes! Two against seven!"
+
+"_Si_!" Firio had no illusions about the situation. "_Si_!" he repeated
+stoically.
+
+"And, Firio--" Jack's hand slipped with a quick, gripping caress onto
+Firio's shoulder. An inspiration had come to the mind of action, just as
+a line comes to a poet in a flash; as one must have come to the ancestor
+many times after he had gone into a tight place trusting to his wits and
+his blade to bring him out. "And, Firio, we are going to change our base,
+as the army men say--and change it before the moon rises. Jag Ear, we
+shall have to leave you behind," he added, when they had dropped back to
+the burro's side. "Just make yourself comfortable. Leddy surely wouldn't
+think of killing so valuable a member of the non-combatant class. We will
+come for you, by and by. It will be all right!"
+
+He gave the sliver of ear an affectionate corkscrew twist before he and
+Firio, taking all their ammunition, crawled along the bottom of the
+_arroyo_ and up the ridge where they settled down comfortably behind a
+ledge commanding the water-hole at easy range.
+
+"It's lucky we learned to shoot in the moonlight!" Jack whispered.
+
+"_Si"!_ Firio answered, in perfect understanding.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVII
+
+THE END OF THE WEAVING
+
+
+For over a week a private car had stood on a siding at Little Rivers.
+Every morning a porter polished the brasswork of the platform in heraldry
+of the luxury within. Occasionally a young man with a plaster over a
+wound on his cheek would walk up and down the road-bed on the far side of
+the car. Indeed, he had worn a path there. He never went into town, and
+any glances that he may have cast in that direction spoke his desire to
+be forever free of its sight. Not a train passed that he did not wish
+himself aboard and away. But as heir-apparent he had no thought of
+endangering his new kingdom by going before his father went. He meant to
+keep very close to the throne. He had become clingingly, determinedly
+filial. At times the gleam of the brasswork would exercise the same
+hypnosis over his senses as the scintillation of the jewelry counters of
+the store, and he would rub his hands crisply together.
+
+John Wingfield, Sr. spent little time in the car. Morning and afternoon
+and evening he would go over to Dr. Patterson's with the question: "How
+is he?" which all Little Rivers was asking. The rules of longevity were
+in oblivion and the routine channels of a mind, so used to teeming
+detail, had become abysses as dark and void as the canyons of the range.
+
+On the day of his arrival in Little Rivers he found a town peopled
+mostly by women and children. All of the men who could bear arms and get
+a horse had departed, and with them Mary. Thereby hangs a story all to
+the honor of little Ignacio. After Jack had ridden away with his
+insistent refusal of assistance, apprehension among the group that
+watched him disappear in the gathering darkness was allayed by reports of
+men who had been at the store, where they found the Leddyites hanging
+about as usual. True, no one had seen either Pete or Ropey Smith, but
+Lang said that they were upstairs playing poker, a favorite relaxation
+from the strain of their intellectual life.
+
+But Ignacio learned from another Indian in Lang's service that Pete and
+seven of his best shots had started for Agua Fria about the same time as
+Jack, while the rest of the gang that had been left behind were making it
+their business to cover the leader's absence. Distrusting Ignacio, they
+locked him in a closet off the bar. In the early hours of the morning he
+succeeded in escaping with his news, which he carried first to Mary. She
+was not asleep when he rapped at her door. It had been a night of
+wakefulness for her, recalling the night after her meeting with Jack on
+the pass before the duel in the _arroyo_.
+
+"I for Senor Don't Care, now! I for every devil in him! And they go to
+kill him!" was the incoherent way in which he began his announcement.
+
+In an hour the alarm had travelled from house to house. While the gang
+slept at Lang's or in their tents, a solemn cavalcade set forth quietly
+into the night, with rifles slung over their shoulders or lying across
+the pommels of their saddles, bound to rescue Jack Wingfield. They had
+protested against Mary's going with all the old, familiar arguments that
+occur to the male at thought of a woman in physical danger.
+
+"It is the least that any of us can do," she declared.
+
+"But of what service will you be?" Dr. Patterson asked.
+
+"No one can say yet," she replied. "And no one shall stop me!" She was
+driven by the same impulse that had sent her across the _arroyo_ in face
+of the ruffians on the bank to Jack's side after he was wounded. "My pony
+can keep up with the best of yours," she added.
+
+Leddy had eight hours' start on a two-days' journey. It was not in
+horse-flesh to gain much on his fast and hardened ponies. There was
+little chance that Jack could hold out against such odds as he must face,
+even if he had escaped an ambush. So they rode in desperation and in
+silence, each too certain of what was in the minds of the others to make
+pretence of a hope that was not in the heart.
+
+Their only stop for rest was at Las Cascadas in the hot hours of midday.
+Darkness had fallen when they overtook a solitary horseman coming from
+Agua Fria. John Prather drew rein well to one side of the trail. He had
+a moment, as they approached, in which to think out his explanation of
+his position.
+
+"It's Prather, and riding P.D.!" Galway announced.
+
+"Where is Jack Wingfield?" came the merciless question as in one
+voice from all.
+
+"You are his friends! You have come to rescue him!" Prather cried.
+
+He seemed overcome by his relief. At all events, the wildness of his
+exclamation in face of the force barring the trail was without
+affectation.
+
+"There is time? There is hope?"
+
+"Yes! yes!" gasped Prather, as the men began to surround him.
+
+"Why are you here? Why on his horse?"
+
+"Leddy turned on me, too! I was fighting at Wingfield's side! We got two
+of them before dark! Then I was wounded and couldn't see to shoot. And I
+came for help. And you will be in time! He's in a good position!"
+
+"I think you are lying!" said Galway.
+
+"He couldn't help it!" said Bob Worther.
+
+"How--how would I have his horse if he weren't willing?" protested
+Prather, frantically.
+
+"By stealing it, in keeping with your character!"
+
+"Yes! On general principles we ought to--"
+
+"I have a piece of rope!" called a voice from the rear.
+
+"There isn't any tree. But we can drop him over the wall of a chasm!"
+
+Spectral figures with set faces appallingly grim in the thin moonlight
+pressed close to Prather.
+
+"My God! No!" he pleaded, throatily. "We fought together, I tell you! We
+drew lots to see which one should take the risk of riding through danger
+to save the other!"
+
+"Lying again!"
+
+"Here's the rope! All we've got to do is to slip a noose over his head!"
+
+"It's a clean piece of rope, isn't it?" said the Doge, in his mellow
+voice. "I don't think it's worth while soiling a clean piece of
+rope. Come! Taking his life is no way to save Jack's. Come, we are
+losing time!"
+
+"Right, Doge!" said the man with the rope. "But it is some satisfaction
+to give him a scare."
+
+"And take care of P.D.!" called another.
+
+"Yes, if you founder Jack's pony you'll hear from us a-plenty!"
+
+This was their adieu to John Prather, who was left to pursue his way in
+safety to his kingdom, while they rode on, following a hard path at the
+base of the range. Those with the best horses took the lead, while the
+heavier men, including the Doge, whose weight was telling on their
+mounts, fell to the rear. Mary was at the head, between Dr. Patterson and
+Jim Galway.
+
+The stars flickered out; the moon grew pale, and for a while the horsemen
+rode into a wall of blackness, conscious of progress only by the sound of
+hoof-beats which they were relentlessly urging forward. Then dawn flashed
+up over the chaos of rocks, pursuing night with the sweep of its
+broadening, translucent wings across the valley to the other range. The
+tops of the cotton-woods rose out of the sparkling sea, floating free of
+any visible support of trunks, and the rescuers saw that they were near
+the end of their journey.
+
+There was a faint sound of a shot; then of another shot and another.
+After that, the radiant, baffling silence of daybreak on uninhabited
+wastes, when the very active glory of the spreading, intensifying light
+ought, one feels, to bring paeans of orchestral splendor. It set
+desperation in the hearts of the riders, which was communicated to weary
+ponies driven to a last effort of speed. And still no more shots. The
+silence spoke the end of some tragedy with the first streaks from the
+rising sun clearing a target to a waiting marksman's eye.
+
+Around the cotton-woods was no sign of human movement; nothing but
+inanimate, dark spots which developed into prostrate human forms, in
+pantomimic expression of the story of that night's work done in the
+moonlight and finished with the first flush of morning. Two of the
+outstretched figures were lying head to head a few yards apart on either
+side of the water-hole. The one on the side toward the ridge was
+recognized as Jack, still as death. Another a short distance behind him,
+at the sound of hoof-beats looked up with face blanched despite its dark
+skin, the parched lips stretched over the teeth; but in Firio's eyes
+there was still fire, as he whispered, "All right!" before he sank back
+unconscious. A wound in his shoulder had been bandaged, but the wrist of
+his gun hand lay beside a fresh red spot on the earth.
+
+Jack had a bullet hole in the upper left arm plugged with a bit of
+cotton; and a deep furrow across the temple, which was bleeding. His
+rigid fingers were still gripping his six-shooter. He lay partly on his
+side, facing Leddy, who had rolled over on his back dead.
+
+Mary and Dr. Patterson dropped from their horses simultaneously. The
+doctor pressed his hand over Jack's heart, to find it still beating.
+
+"Jack!" they whispered. "Jack!" they called aloud.
+
+He roused slightly, lifting his weary eyelids and gazing at them as if
+they were uncertain shadows who wanted some kind of an explanation from
+him which he had not the strength to give.
+
+"We must drink--blaze away, Leddy," he murmured. "I'm coming down after
+the stars go out--close--close as you like--we must drink!"
+
+"No vital hit!" said the doctor; while Mary bringing water assisted him
+to bathe the wounds before he dressed them. "No, not from a bullet!" he
+added, after the dressing was finished and he had one hand on Jack's hot
+brow and the other on his pulse.
+
+Then he attended to Firio, who was talking incoherently:
+
+"Take water-hole--boil coffee in the morning--quail for dinner, Senor
+Jack--_si, si_!"
+
+When they had moved Jack and Firio into the shadow of the cotton-woods
+and forced water down their throats, Firio revived enough to recognize
+those around him and to cry out an inquiry about Jack; but Jack himself
+continued in a stupor, apparently unconscious of his surroundings and
+scarcely alive except for breathing. Yet, when litters of blankets and
+rifles tied together had been fashioned and attached to the pack-saddles
+of tandem burros, as he was lifted into place for the return he seemed to
+understand that he was starting on a journey; for he said, disjointedly:
+
+"Don't forget Wrath of God--and Jag Ear is thirsty--and bury Wrath of God
+fittingly--give him an epitaph! He was gloomy, but it was a good gloom, a
+kind of kingly gloom, and he liked the prospect when at last he stuck his
+head through the blue blanket of the horizon."
+
+Those of the party who remained behind for the last duty to the dead
+counted its most solemn moment, perhaps, the one that gave Wrath of God
+the honorable due of a soldier who had fallen face to the enemy. Bob
+Worther wrote the epitaph with a pencil on a bit of wood: "Here lies the
+gloomiest pony that ever was. The gloomier he was the better he went and
+the better Jack Wingfield liked him;" which was Bob's way of interpreting
+Jack's instructions.
+
+Then Worther and his detail rode as fast as they might to overtake the
+slow-marching group in trail of the litters with the question that all
+Little Rivers had been asking ever since, "How is he?" A ghastly,
+painfully tedious journey this homeward one, made mostly in the night,
+with the men going thirsty in the final stretches in order that wet
+bandages might be kept on Jack's feverish head; while Dr. Patterson was
+frequently thrusting his little thermometer between Jack's hot,
+cracking lips.
+
+"If he were free of this jouncing! It is a terrible strain on him, but
+the only thing is to go on!" the doctor kept repeating.
+
+But when Jack lay white and still in his bedroom and Firio was rapidly
+convalescing, the fever refused to abate. It seemed bound to burn out the
+life that remained after the hemorrhage from his wounds had ceased. Men
+found it hard to work in the fields while they waited on the crisis. John
+Wingfield, Sr. sat for hours under Dr. Patterson's umbrella-tree in
+moody absorption. He talked to all who would talk to him. Always he was
+asking about the duel in the _arroyo_ which was fought in Jack's way. He
+could not hear enough of it; and later he almost attached himself to the
+one eye-witness of the final duel, which had been fought in Leddy's way.
+
+When Firio was well enough to walk out he was to be found in a long
+chair on Jack's porch, ever raising a warning finger for silence to
+anyone who approached and looking out across the yard to Jag Ear, who was
+winning back the fat he had lost in a constitutional crisis, and P.D.,
+who, after bearing himself first and last in a manner characteristic of a
+pony who was P.D. but never Q., seemed already none the worse for the
+hardships he had endured. The master of twenty millions would sit on the
+steps, while Firio occupied the chair and regarded him much as if he were
+a blank wall. But at times Firio would humor the persistent inquirer with
+a few abbreviated sentences. It was out of such fragments as this that
+John Wingfield, Sr. had to piece the story of the fight for the
+water-hole.
+
+"Senor Jack and Mister Prather, they no look alike," said Firio one day,
+evidently bound to make an end of the father's company. "Anybody say
+that got bad eyes. Mister Prather"--and Firio smiled peculiarly--"I call
+him the mole! He burrow in the sand, so! His hand tremble, so! He act
+like a man believe himself the only god in the world when he in no
+danger, but when he get in danger he act like he afraid he got to meet
+some other god!"
+
+"But Jack? Now, after Prather had gone?" persisted the father greedily.
+
+"We glad the mole go. It sort of hurt inside to think a man like him. He
+make you wonder what for he born."
+
+John Wingfield, Sr. half rose in a sudden movement, as if he were about
+to go, but remained in response to another emotion that was stronger than
+the impulse.
+
+"And Jack? He kept his head! He figured out his chances coolly! Now,
+that trick he played by going up on the ridge under cover of darkness?"
+
+"No trick!" said Firio resentfully, in instinctive defence. "That the
+place to fight! Senor Jack he see it."
+
+"And all through the night you kept firing?"
+
+"_Si,_ after moon very bright and over our shoulders in their faces!
+_Si_, at the little lumps that lie so still. When they move quick like
+they stung, we know we hit!"
+
+"Ah, that was it! You hit! You hit! And the other fellows couldn't. You
+had the light with you--everything! Jack had seen to that! He used his
+head! He--he was strong, strong!"
+
+Quite unconsciously, John Wingfield, Sr. rubbed his palms together.
+
+"When you pleased you always rub your hands same as Mister Prather,"
+observed Firio.
+
+"Oh! Do I? I--" John Wingfield, Sr. clasped his fingers together
+tightly. "Yes, and the finish of the fight--how was that?"
+
+"Sometimes, when there no firing, Senor Jack and Leddy call out to each
+other. Leddy he swear hard, like he fight. Senor Jack he sing back his
+answers cheerful, like he fight. Toward morning we both wounded and
+only Leddy and one other man alive on his side. When a cloud slip over
+the moon and the big darkness before morning come, we creep down from
+the ridge and with first light we bang-bang quick--and I no remember
+any more."
+
+"Forced the fighting--forced it right at the end!" cried John Wingfield,
+Sr. in the flush of a great pride.
+
+"The aggressive, that is it--that is the way to win, always!"
+
+"But Senor Jack no fight just to win!" said Firio. "He no want to fight.
+In the big darkness, before we crawl down to the water-hole, he call out
+to Leddy to make quits. He almost beg Leddy. But Leddy, he say: 'I never
+quit and I get you!' 'Sorry,' says Senor Jack, with the devil out again,
+'sorry--and we'll see!' No, Senor Jack no like to fight till you make him
+fight and the devil is out. He fight for water; he fight for peace. He no
+want just to win and kill, but--but--" bringing his story to an end,
+Firio looked hard at the father, his velvety eyes shot with a
+comprehending gleam as he shrugged his shoulders--"but you no understand,
+you and the mole!"
+
+John Wingfield, Sr. shifted his gaze hurriedly from the little Indian.
+His face went ashen and it was working convulsively as he assisted
+himself to rise by gripping the veranda post.
+
+"Why do you think that?" he asked.
+
+"I know!" said Firio.
+
+His lips closed firmly. That was all he had to say. John Wingfield, Sr.
+turned away with the unsteady step of a man who is afraid of slipping or
+stumbling, though the path was hard and even.
+
+Out in the street he met the cold nods of the people of a town where his
+son had a dominion founded on something that was lacking in his own. And
+one of those who nodded to him ever so politely was a new citizen, who
+had once been a unit of his own city within a city.
+
+Peter Mortimer had arrived in Little Rivers only two days after his late
+employer. Peter had been like some old tree that everybody thinks has
+seen its last winter. But now he waited only on the good word from the
+sick-room for the sap of renewed youth to rise in his veins and his
+shriveled branches to break into leaf at the call of spring.
+
+And the good word did come thrilling through the community. The physical
+crisis had passed. The fever was burning itself out. But a mental crisis
+developed, and with it a new cause for apprehension. Even after Jack's
+temperature was normal and he should have been well on the road to
+convalescence, there was a veil over his eyes which would not allow him
+to recognize anybody. When he spoke it was in delirium, living over some
+incident of the past or of sheer imagination.
+
+Now he was the ancestor, fitting out his ship:
+
+"No, you can't come! A man who is a malingerer on the London docks would
+be a malingerer on the Spanish Main. I don't want bullies and boasters.
+Let them stay at home to pick quarrels in the alleys and cheer the Lord
+Mayor's procession!"
+
+Now his frigate was under full sail, sighting the enemy:
+
+"Suppose they have two guns to our one! That makes it about even! We'll
+get the windward side, as we have before! Who cares about their guns once
+we start to board!"
+
+Another time he was on the trail:
+
+"I'll grow so strong, so strong that he can never call me a weakling
+again! He will be proud of me. That is my only way to make good."
+
+Then he was apprenticed to the millions:
+
+"All this detail makes me feel as if my brains were a tangled spool of
+thread. But I will master it--I will!"
+
+Again, he was happily telling stories to the children; or tragically
+pleading with Leddy that there had been slaughter enough around the
+water-hole; or serenely planning the future which he foresaw for himself
+when the phantoms were laid:
+
+"I may not know how to run the store, but I do seem to fit in here. We
+can find the capital! We will build the dam ourselves!"
+
+His body grew stronger, with little appreciable change otherwise. For an
+instant he would seem to know the person who was speaking to him; then he
+was away on the winds of delirium.
+
+"His mind is too strong for him not to come out of this all right. It is
+only a question of time, isn't it?" insisted the father.
+
+"There was a far greater capacity in him for suffering in that hellish
+fight than there was in Pete Leddy," said Dr. Patterson. "He had
+sensitiveness to impressions which was born in him, at the same time that
+a will of steel was born in him--the sensitiveness of the mother,
+perhaps, and the will of the ancestor. His life hung by a thread when we
+found him and his nerves had been twisted and tortured by the ordeal of
+that night. And that isn't all. There was more than fighting. Something
+that preceded the fight was even harder on him. I knew from his look when
+he set out for Agua Fria that he was under a terrible strain; a strain
+worse than that of a few hours' battle--the kind that had been weighing
+day after day on the will that grimly sustained its weight. And that
+wound in the head was very close, very, and it came at the moment when
+he collapsed in reaction after that last telling shot. Something snapped
+then. There was a fracture of the kind that only nature can set. Will he
+come out of this delirium, you ask? I don't know. Much depends upon
+whether that strain is over for good or if it is still pressing on his
+mind. When he rises from his bed he may be himself or he may ride away
+madly into the face of the sun. I don't know. Nobody on earth can know."
+
+"Yes, yes!" said John Wingfield, Sr. slowly.
+
+In Jack's wildest moments it was Mary's voice that had the most telling
+effect. However low she spoke he seemed always to recognize the tone and
+would greet it with a smile and frequently break into verses and scraps
+of remembered conversations of his boyhood exile in villa gardens. One
+morning, when she and Dr. Patterson had entered the room together, Jack
+called out miserably:
+
+"Just killing, killing, killing! What will Mary say to me, now?"
+
+He raised his hands, fingers spread, and stared at them with a ghastly
+look. She sprang to the bedside and seized them fast in hers, and bending
+very close to him, as if she would impart conviction with every quivering
+particle of her being, she said:
+
+"She thinks you splendid! She is glad, glad! It is just what she wanted
+you to do. She wished every bullet that you fired luck--luck for your
+sake, to speed it straight to the mark!"
+
+He seemed to understand what she was saying, as one understands that
+shade is cool after the broiling torment of the sun.
+
+"Luck will always come at your command, Mary!" he whispered, repeating
+his last words when he left the Ewold garden to go to the wars.
+
+"And she wants you to rest--just rest--and not worry!"
+
+This had the effect of a soothing draught. Smilingly he fell back on the
+pillow and slept.
+
+"You put some spirit into that!" said the doctor, after he and Mary had
+tiptoed out of the room; "a little of the spirit in keeping with a
+dark-eyed girl who lives in the land of the Eternal Painter."
+
+"All I had!" answered Mary, with simple earnestness.
+
+At noon Jack was still sleeping. He slept on through the last hours
+of the day.
+
+"The first long stretch he has had," ran the bulletin, from tongue to
+tongue, "and real sleep, too--the kind that counts!"
+
+In the late afternoon, when the coolness and the shadows of evening were
+creeping in at the doors and windows, the doctor, Peter Mortimer, the
+father, and Firio were on the veranda, while Mrs. Galway was on watch by
+the bedside.
+
+"He's waking!" she came out to whisper.
+
+The doctor hastened past her into the sick-room. As he entered, Jack
+looked up with a bright, puzzled light in his eyes.
+
+"Just what does this mean?" he asked. "Just how does it happen that I am
+here? I thought that I--"
+
+"We brought you in some days ago," the doctor explained. "And since you
+took the water-hole your mind has been enjoying a little vacation, while
+we moved your body about as we pleased."
+
+"I took the water-hole, then! And Firio? Firio? He--"
+
+"He is just waiting outside to congratulate you on the re-establishment
+of the old cordial relations between mind and body," the doctor returned;
+and slipped out to call Firio and to announce: "He is right as rain,
+right as rain!" news that Mrs. Galway set forth immediately to herald
+through the community.
+
+As for Firio, he strode into Jack's presence with the air of conqueror,
+sage, and prophet in one.
+
+"Is it really you, Firio? Come here, so that I can feel of you and make
+sure, you son of the sun!"
+
+Jack put out his thin, white hand to Firio, and the velvet of Firio's
+eyes was very soft, indeed.
+
+"Did you know when they brought you in?" Jack asked.
+
+"When burro stumble I feel ouch and see desert and then I drift away
+up to sky again," answered Firio. "All right now, eh? Pretty soon
+you so strong I have to broil five--six--seven quail a day and still
+you hungry!"
+
+The doctor who had been looking on from the doorway felt a vigorous touch
+on the arm and turned to hear John Wingfield, Sr. asking him to make
+way. With a grimace approaching a scowl he drew back free of Jack's sight
+and held up his hand in protest. "You had better not excite him!" he
+whispered.
+
+"But I am his father!" said John Wingfield, Sr. with something of his
+old, masterful manner in a moment of irritation, as he pushed by the
+doctor. He paused rather abruptly when his eyes met Jack's. A faint
+flush, appearing in Jack's cheeks, only emphasized his wanness and the
+whiteness of his neck and chin and forehead.
+
+"Well, Jack, right as rain, they say! I knew you would come out all
+right! It was in the blood that--" and the rest of John Wingfield, Sr.'s
+speech fell away into inarticulateness.
+
+It was a weak, emaciated son, this son whom he saw in contrast to the one
+who had entered his office unannounced one morning; and yet the father
+now felt that same indefinable radiation of calm strength closing his
+throat that he had felt then. Jack was looking steadily in his father's
+direction, but through him as through a thin shadow and into the
+distance. He smiled, but very faintly and very meaningly.
+
+"Father, you will keep the bargain I have made," he said, as if this were
+a thing admitting of no dispute. "It is fair to the other one, isn't it?
+Yes, we have found the truth at last, haven't we? And the truth makes it
+all clear for him and for you and for me."
+
+"You mean--it is all over--you stay out here for good--you--" said John
+Wingfield, Sr. gropingly.
+
+Then another figure appeared in the doorway and Jack's eyes returned from
+the distances to rest on it fondly. In response to an impulse that he
+could not control, Peter Mortimer was peering timidly into the sick-room.
+
+"Why, Peter!" exclaimed Jack, happily. "Come farther in, so I can see
+more of you than the tip of your nose."
+
+After a glance of inquiry at the doctor, which received an affirmative
+nod, Peter ventured another step.
+
+"So it's salads and roses, is it, Peter?" Jack continued. "Well, I think
+you may telegraph any time, now, that the others can come as soon as they
+are ready and their places are filled."
+
+Thus John Wingfield, Sr. had his answer; thus the processes of fate that
+Dr. Bennington had said were in the younger man had worked out their end.
+Under the spur of a sudden, powerful resolution, the father withdrew. In
+the living-room he met Jasper Ewold. The two men paused, facing each
+other. They were alone with the frank, daring features from Velasquez's
+brush and with the "I give! I give!" of the Sargent, both reflecting the
+afterglow of sunset; while the features of the living--John Wingfield,
+Sr.'s, in stony anger, and Jasper Ewold's, serene in philosophy--told
+their story without the touch of a painter's genius.
+
+"You have stolen my son, Jasper Ewold!" declared John Wingfield, Sr.
+with the bitterness of one whose personal edict excluded defeat from his
+lexicon, only to find it writ broad across the page. "I suppose you think
+you have won, damn you, Jasper Ewold!"
+
+The Doge flushed. He seemed on the point of an outburst. Then he
+looked significantly from the portrait of the ancestor to the portrait
+of the mother.
+
+"He was never yours to lose!" was the answer, without passion.
+
+John Wingfield, Sr. recoiled, avoiding a glance at the walls where the
+pictures hung. The Doge stepped to one side to leave the way clear. John
+Wingfield, Sr. went out unsteadily, with head bowed. But he had not gone
+far before his head went up with a jerk and he struck fist into palm
+decisively. Rigidly, ignoring everyone he passed and looking straight
+ahead, he walked rapidly toward the station, as if every step meant
+welcome freedom, from the earth that it touched.
+
+His private car was attached to the evening express, and while it started
+homeward with the king and the determinedly filial heir-apparent to the
+citadel of the push-buttons, through all the gardens of Little Rivers ran
+the joyous news that Jack was "right as rain." It was a thing to start a
+continual exchange of visits and to keep the lights burning in the houses
+unusually late.
+
+But all was dark and silent out at Bill Lang's store. After their return
+from Agua Fria, the rescuing party, Jim Galway leading, had attended to
+another matter. The remnants of Pete Leddy's gang, far from offering any
+resistance, explained that they had business elsewhere which admitted of
+no delay. There was peace in the valley of Little Rivers. Its phantoms
+had been laid at the same time as Jack's.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVIII
+
+THEIR SIDE OF THE PASS
+
+
+"Persiflage! Persiflage!" cried the Doge.
+
+He and Jack were in the full tilt of controversy, Jack pressing an
+advantage as they came around the corner of the Ewold house. It was like
+the old times and better than the old times. For now there was
+understanding where then there had been mystery. The stream of their
+comradeship ran smoothly in an open country, with no unsounded depths.
+
+"But I notice that you always say persiflage just as I am getting the
+better of the argument!" Jack whipped back.
+
+"Has it taken you all this time to find that out? For what purpose is
+the word in the English vocabulary? But I'll take the other side, which
+is the easy one, next time, and then we'll see! Boom! boom!" The Doge
+pursed out his lips in mock terrorization of his opponent. "You are
+pretty near yourself again, young sir," he added, as he paused at the
+opening in the hedge.
+
+"Yes, strength has been fairly flooding back the last two or three days.
+I can feel it travelling in my veins and making the tissues expand. It is
+glorious to be alive, O Doge!"
+
+"Now, do you want me to take the other side on that question so you can
+have another unearned victory? I refuse to humor the invalid any longer
+and I agree. The proposition that it is glorious to live on such an
+afternoon as this is carried unanimously. But I will never agree that you
+can grow dates the equal of mine."
+
+"Not until my first crop is ripe; then there will be no dispute!"
+
+"That is real persiflage!" the Doge called after Jack.
+
+Jack had made his first visit to the Doge's garden since he had left it
+to meet Prather and Leddy rather brief when he found that Mary was not at
+home. She had ridden out to the pass. Her trips to the pass had been so
+frequent of late that he had seen little of her during his convalescence.
+Yet he had eaten her jelly exclusively. He had eaten it with his bread,
+his porridge, his dessert, and with the quail that Firio had broiled. He
+had even intimated his willingness to mix it with his soup. She advised
+him to stir it into his coffee, instead.
+
+When he was seated in the long chair on the porch and she called to ask
+how he was, they had kept to the domain of nonsense, with never a
+reference to sombre memories; but she was a little constrained, a little
+shy, and he never gave her cause to raise the barrier, even if she had
+been of the mind in face of a possible recurrence of former provocations
+while he was weak and easily tired. It was enough for him to hear her
+talk; enough to look out restfully toward the gray masses of the range;
+enough to know that the desert had brought him oblivion to the past;
+enough to see his future as clear as the V of Galeria against the sky,
+sharing the life of the same community with her.
+
+And what else? He was almost in fear of the very question that was never
+out of his mind. She might wish him luck in the wars, but he knew her too
+well to have any illusions that this meant the giving of the great thing
+she had to give, unless in the full spontaneity of spirit. This
+afternoon, with the flood of returning strength, the question suddenly
+became commanding in a fresh-born suspense.
+
+As he walked back to the house he met Belvy Smith and some of the
+children. Of course they asked for a story, and he continued one about a
+battered knight and his Heart's Desire, which he had begun some days
+previously.
+
+"He wasn't a particularly handsome knight or particularly good--inclined
+to mischief, I think, when he forgot himself--but he was mightily in
+earnest. He didn't know how to take no. Say 'No!' to him and push him off
+the mountain top and there he was, starting for the peak again! And he
+was not so foolish as he might seem. When he reached the top he was happy
+just to get a smile from his Heart's Desire before he was tossed back
+again. His fingers were worn clear down to the first joint and his feet
+off up to the knees, so he could not hold on to the seams of canyons as
+well as before. He would have been a ridiculous spectacle if he weren't
+so pitiful. And that wasn't the worst of it. He was pretty well shot to
+pieces by the brigands whom he had met on his travels. With every ascent
+there was less of him to climb, you see. In fact, he was being worn down
+so fast that pretty soon there wouldn't be much left of him except his
+wishbone. That was indestructible. He would always wish. And after the
+hardest climb of all, here he is very near the top again, and--"
+
+"And--and--"
+
+"I'll have to finish this story later," said Jack, sending the youngsters
+on their way, while he went his own to call to Firio, as he entered the
+yard: "Son of the sun, I feel so strong that I am going for a ride!"
+
+"You wear the big spurs and the grand chaps?" Firio asked.
+
+Jack hesitated thoughtfully.
+
+"No, just plain togs," he answered. "I think we will hang up that
+circus costume as a souvenir. We are past that stage of our career. My
+devil is dead."
+
+It was Firio's turn to be thoughtful.
+
+"_Si_! We had enough fight! We get old and sober! _Si_, I know! We settle
+down. I am going to begin to shave!" he concluded, stroking the black
+down on his boyish lip.
+
+With the town behind him and the sinking sun over his shoulder, the
+battered knight rode toward the foothills and on up the winding path,
+oblivious of the Eternal Painter's magic and conscious only that every
+step brought him nearer his Heart's Desire. Here was the rock where she
+was seated when he had first seen her. What ages had passed since then!
+And there, around the escarpment, he saw her pony on the shelf! Dropping
+P.D.'s reins, he hurried on impetuously. With the final turn he found
+Mary seated on the rock where she had been the day that he had come to
+say farewell before he went to battle with the millions. Now as then, she
+was gazing far out over that sea of singing, quivering light, and the
+crunch of his footsteps awakened her from her revery.
+
+But how differently she looked around! Her breaths were coming in a happy
+storm, her face crimsoning, her nostrils playing in trembling dilation.
+In her eyes he saw open gates and a long vista of a fair highway in a
+glorious land; and the splendor of her was something near and yielding.
+He sank down beside her. Her hands stole into his; her head dropped on
+his shoulder; and he felt a warm and palpitating union with the very
+breath of her life.
+
+"What do I see!" cried the Eternal Painter. "Two human beings who have
+climbed up as near heaven as they could and seem as happy as if they had
+reached it!"
+
+"We have reached it!" Jack called back. "And we like it, you
+hoary-bearded, Olympian impersonality!"
+
+Thus they watched the sun go down, gilding the foliage of their
+Little Rivers, seeing their future in the fulness and richness of the
+life of their choice, which should spread the oasis the length of
+that valley, and knowing that any excursions to the world over the
+pass would only sink their roots deeper in the soil of the valley
+that had given them life.
+
+"Jack, oh, Jack! How I did fight against the thing that was born in me
+that morning in the _arroyo_! I was in fear of it and of myself. In fear
+of it I ran from you that day you climbed down to the pine. But I
+shan't run again--not so far but that I can be sure you can catch me.
+Jack, oh, Jack! And this is the hand that saved you from Leddy--the
+right hand! I think I shall always like it better than the left hand!
+And, Jack, there is a little touch of gray on the temples"--Mary was
+running her fingers very, very gently over the wound--"which I like. But
+we shall be so happy that it will be centuries before the rest of your
+hair is gray! Jack, oh, Jack!"
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Over the Pass, by Frederick Palmer
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