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!"

THE END