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.