As with the gentle touch of a familiar hand, the ozone of high altitudes gradually and sweetly awakened Jack. The engine was puffing on an upgrade; the car creaked and leaned in taking a curve. Raising the shade of his berth he looked out on spectral ranges that seemed marching and tumbling through dim distances. With pillows doubled under his head he lay back, filling sight and mind with the indistinctness and spacious mystery of the desert at night; recalling his thoughts with his last view of it over two months ago in the morning hours after leaving El Paso and seeing his future with it now, where then he had seen his future with the store.
"Think of old Burleigh raising oranges! I am sure that the trees will be well trimmed," he whispered. "Think of Mamie Devore in the thick of the great jelly competition, while the weight of Joe Mathewson's shoulders starts a spade into the soil as if it were going right to the centre of the earth. Why, Joe is likely to get us into international difficulties by poking the ribs of a Chinese ancestor! Yes—if we don't lose our Little Rivers; and we must not lose it!"
The silvery face of the moon grew fainter with the coming of a ruddier light; the shadows of the mountains were being etched definitely on the plateaus that stretched out like vast floors under the developing glow of sunrise; and the full splendor of day had come, with its majestic spread of vision.
"When Joe sees that he will feel so strong he will want to get out and carry the Pullman," Jack thought. "But Mamie will not let him for fear that he will overdo!"
How slow the train seemed to travel! It was a snail compared to Jack's eagerness to arrive. He was inclined to think that P.D., Wrath of God, and Jag Ear were faster than through expresses. He kept inquiring of the conductor if they were on time, and the conductor kept repeating that they were. How near that flash of steel at a bend around a tongue of chaotic rock, stretching out into the desert sea, with its command to man to tunnel or accept a winding path for his iron horse! How long in coming to it in that rare air, with its deceit of distances! Landmark after landmark of peak or bold ridge took the angle of some recollected view of his five years' wanderings. It was already noon when he saw Galeria from the far end of the long basin that he had crossed, with the V as the compass of his bearings, on the ride that brought him to the top to meet Mary and Pete Leddy.
Then the V was lost while the train wound around the range that formed one side of the basin's rim. The blaze of midday had passed before it entered the reaches of the best valley yet in the judgment of a connoisseur in valleys; and under the Eternal Painter's canopy a spot of green quivered in the heat-rays of the horizon. His Majesty was in a dreamy mood. He was playing in delicate variations, tranquil and enchanting, of effects in gold and silver, now gossamery thin, now thick and rich.
"What is this thing crawling along on two silken threads and so afraid of the hills?" he was asking, sleepily. "Eh? No! Bring the easel to me, if you want a painting. I am not going to rise from my easy couch. There! Fix that cushion so! I am a leisurely, lordly aristocrat. Palette? No, I will just shake my soft beard of fine mist back and forth across the sky, a spectrum for the sunrays. So! so! I see that this worm is a railroad train. Let it curl up in the shadow of a gorge and take a nap. I will wake it up by and by when I seize my brush and start a riot in the heavens that will make its rows of window-glass eyes stare."
"I am on this train and in a hurry!" Jack objected.
"Do I hear the faint echo of a human ego down there on the earth?" demanded the Eternal Painter. "Who are you? One of the art critics?"
"One of Your Majesty's loving subjects, who has been away in a foreign kingdom and returns to your allegiance," Jack answered.
"So be it. I shall know if what you say is true when I gaze into your eyes at sunset."
"I am bringing you a Velasquez!" Jack added.
"Good! Put him where he can have a view out of the window of his first teacher at work in the studio of the universe."
The train crept on toward the hour of the Eternal Painter's riot and toward Little Rivers, while the patch of green was softly, impalpably growing, growing, until the crisscross breaks of the streets developed and Jack could identify the Doge's and other bungalows. He was on the platform of the car before the brakes ground on the wheels, leaning out to see a crowd at the station, which a minute later became a prospect of familiar, kindly, beaming faces. There was a roar of "Hello, Jack!" in the heavy voices of men and the treble of children. Then he did not see the faces at all for a second; he saw only mist.
"Not tanned, Jack, but you'll brown up soon!"
"Gosh! But we've been lonesome without you!"
"Cure any case of sore eyes on record!"
Jack was too full of the glory of this unaffected welcome in answer to his telegram that he was coming to find words at first; but as he fairly dropped off the steps into the arms of Jim Galway and Dr. Patterson he shouted in a shaking voice:
"Hello, everybody! Hello, Little Rivers!"
He noted, while all were trying to grasp his hands at once, that the men had their six-shooters. A half-dozen were struggling to get his suit case. Not one of his friends was missing except the Doge and Mary.
"Let the patient have a little air!" protested Dr. Patterson, as some started in to shake hands a second time.
"Fellow-citizens, if there's anything in the direct primary I feel sure of the nomination!" said Jack drily.
"You're already elected!" shouted Bob Worther.
Around at the other side of the station Jack found Firio waiting his turn in patient isolation, with P.D., Wrath of God, and Jag Ear.
"Sí! sí!" called Firio triumphantly to all the sceptics who had told him that Jack would not return.
Jack took the little Indian by the shoulders and rocked him back and forth in delight, while Firio's eyes were burning coals of jubilation.
"You knew!" Jack exclaimed. "You were right! I have come back!"
"Sí, sí! I know!" repeated Firio.
"No stopping him from bringing the whole cavalcade to the station, either," said Jim Galway. "And he wouldn't join the rest of us out in front of the station. He was going to be his own reception committee and hold an overflow meeting all by himself!"
There was no disguising the fact that the equine trio of veterans remembered Jack. With P.D. and Jag Ear the demonstration was unrestrained; but however exultant Wrath of God might be in secret, he was of no mind to compromise his reputation for lugubriousness by any public display of emotional weakness.
"Wrath of God, I believe you were a cross-eyed Cromwellian soldier in your previous incarnation!" said Jack; "and as it is hard for a horse to be crosseyed, you could not retain the characteristic. Think of that! Wouldn't a cross-eyed Cromwellian soldier strike fear to the heart of any loyalist? And Jag Ear, you're getting fat!"
"I keep his hoofs hard. When he fat he eat less on trail!" explainedFirio, becoming almost voluble. "All ready for trail!" he hinted.
"Not now, Firio," said Jack. "And, Firio, there's a package at the station, a big, flat case. It came by express on the same train with me—the most precious package in the world. See that it is taken to the house."
"Sí! You ride?" asked Firio, offering P.D.'s reins.
"No, we'll all walk."
The procession had started toward the town when Jack felt something soft poking him in the small of the back and looked around to find that the cause was P.D.'s muzzle. Wrath of God and Jag Ear might go with Firio, but P.D. proposed to follow Jack.
"And after I have ridden you thousands of miles and you've heard all my songs over and over! Well, well, P.D., you are a subtle flatterer! Come along!" Then he turned to Jim Galway: "Has John Prather arrived?"
"Yes, last night."
"He is here now?" Jack put in quickly.
"No; he pulled out at dawn on his way to Agua Fria."
"Oh!" Jack was plainly disappointed. "He has the grant for the water rights?"
"Yes," said Jim, "though he hasn't made the fact public. He does everything in his smooth, quiet fashion, with a long head, and I suppose he hasn't things just right yet to spring his surprise. But there is no disputing the fact—he has us!"
One man henceforth was in control of the water. His power over the desert community would be equivalent to control of the rains in a humid locality.
"You see," Jim continued, "old man Lefferts' partners had really never sold out to him; so his transfer to the Doge wasn't legal. He turned his papers over to Prather, giving Prather full power to act for him in securing the partners' surrender of their claims and straighten out everything with the Territory and get a bonafide concession. That is as I understand it, for the whole business has been done in an underhand way. Prather represented to the Doge that he was acting entirely in the interests of the community and his only charge would be the costs. The Doge quite believed in Prather's single-mindedness and public spirit. Well, with the use of money and all the influences he could command, including the kind that Pete Leddy exercises, he got the concession and in his name. It was very smart work. I suppose it was due to the crafty way he could direct the Doge to do his wishes that the Doge happened to be off the scene at the critical stage of the negotiations. When he went to New York all that remained was for him to obtain the capital for his scheme. Lefferts and his partners had the underlying rights and the Doge the later rights, thanks to his improvements, and Prather has them both. Well, Leddy and his crowd have been taking up plots right and left; that's their share in the exploitation. They're here, waiting for the announcement to be made and—well, the water users' association is still in charge; but it won't be when Prather says the word."
"And you have no plans?" Jack asked.
"None."
"And the Doge?"
"None. What can the old man do? Though nobody exactly blames him, a good many aren't of a mind to consult him at all. The crisis has passed beyond him. Three or four men, good men, too, were inclined to have it out with John Prather; but that would have precipitated a general fight with Leddy's gang. The conservatives got the hot-heads to wait till you came. You see, the trouble with every suggestion is that pretty much everybody is against it except the fellow who made it. The more we have talked, the more we have drifted back to you. It's a case of all we've got in the world and standing together, and we are ready to get behind you and take orders, Jack."
"Yes, ready to fight at the drop of the hat, seh, or to sit still on our doorsteps with our tongues in our cheeks and doing the wives' mending, as you say!" declared Bob Worther. "It's right up to you!"
"You are all of the same opinion?" asked Jack.
They were, with one voice, which was not vociferous. For theirs was that significantly quiet mood of an American crowd when easy-going good nature turns to steel. Their partisanship in pioneerdom had not been with six-shooters, but with the ethics of the Doge; and such men when aroused do not precede action with threats.
"All right!" said Jack.
There was a rustle and an exchange of satisfied glances and a chorus of approval like an indrawing of breath.
"First, I will see the Doge," Jack added; "and then I shall go to the house."
Galway, Dr. Patterson, Worther, and three or four others went on with him toward the Ewold bungalow. They were halted on the way by Pete Leddy, Ropey Smith, and a dozen followers, who appeared from a side street and stopped across Jack's path, every one of them with a certain slouching aggressiveness and staring hard at him. Pete and Ropey still kept faith with their pledge to Jack in thearroyo. 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 thearroyowhere 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 thearroyoagain. 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 asJune!" whispered Bob Worther to the man next him.
Again Jack was before the opening in the Ewold hedge, with its glimpse of the spacious living-room. The big ivory paper-cutter lay in its accustomed place on the broad top of the Florentine table. In line with it on the wall was a photograph of Abbey's mural in the Pennsylvania capitol and through the open window a photograph of a Puvis de Chavannes was visible. Evidently the Doge had already hung some of the reproductions of masterpieces which he had brought from New York. But no one was on the porch or in the living-room; the house was silent. As Jack started across the cement bridge he was halted by a laugh from his companions. He found that P.D. was taking no risks of losing his master again; he was going right on into the Doge's, too. Jim took charge of him, receiving in return a glance from the pony that positively reeked of malice.
Again Jack was on his way around the Doge's bungalow on the journey he had made so many times in the growing ardor of the love that had mastered his senses. The quiet of the garden seemed a part of the pervasive stillness that stretched away to the pass from the broad path of the palms under the blazonry of the sun. As he proceeded he heard the crunching of gravel under a heavy tread. The Doge was pacing back and forth in the cross path, fighting despair with the forced vigor of his steps, while Mary was seated watching him. As the Doge wheeled to face Jack at the sound of his approach, it was not in surprise, but rather in preparedness for the expected appearance of another character in a drama. This was also Mary's attitude. They had heard of his coming and they received his call with a trace of fatalistic curiosity. The Doge suddenly dropped on a bench, as if overcome by the weariness and depression of spirits that he had been defying; but there was something unyielding and indomitable in Mary's aspect.
"Well, Sir Chaps, welcome!" said the Doge. "We still have a seat in the shade for you. Will you sit down?"
But Jack remained standing, as if what he had to say would be soon said.
"I have come back and come for good," he began. "Yes, I have come back to take all the blue ribbons at ranching," he added, with a touch of garden nonsense that came like a second thought to soften the abruptness of his announcement.
"For good! For good! You!" The Doge stared at Jack in incomprehension.
"Yes, my future is out here, now."
"You give up the store—the millions—your inheritance!" cried the Doge, still amazed and sceptical as he sounded the preposterousness of this idea to worldly credulity.
"Quite!"
There was no mistaking the firmness of the word. "To make your fortune, your life, out here?"
The Doge's voice was throbbing with the wonder of the thing.
"Yes!"
"Why? Why? I feel that I have a right to ask why!" demanded the Doge, in all the majesty of the moment when he faced John Wingfield, Sr. in the drawing-room.
"Because of a lie and what it concealed. Because of reasons that may not be so vague to you as they are to me."
"A lie! Yes, a lie that came home!" the Doge repeated, while he passed his hand back and forth over his eyes. The hand was trembling. Indeed, his whole body was trembling, while he sought for self-control and to collect his thoughts for what he had to say to that still figure awaiting his words. When he looked up it was with an expression wholly new to Jack. Its candor was not that of transparent mental processes in serene philosophy or forensic display, but that of a man who was about to lay bare things of the past which he had kept secret.
"Sir Chaps, I am going to give you my story, however weak and blameworthy it makes me appear," he said. "Sir Chaps, you saw me in anger in the Wingfield drawing-room, further baffling you with a mystery which must have begun for you the night that you came to Little Rivers when we exchanged a look in which I saw that you knew that I recognized you. I tried to talk as if you were a welcome stranger, when I was holding in my rancor. There was no other face in the world that I would not rather have seen in this community than yours!
"How glad I was to hear that you were leaving by the morning train! How I counted the days of your convalescence after you were wounded! How glad I was at the news that you were to go as soon as you were well! With what a revelry of suggestion I planned to speed your parting! How demoralized I was when you announced that you were going to stay! How amazed at your seriousness about ranching—but how distrustful! Yet what joy in your companionship! At times I wanted to get my arms around you and hug you as a scarred old grizzly bear would hug a cub. And, first and last, your success with everybody here! Your cool hand in the duel! That iron in your will which would triumph at any cost when you broke Nogales's arm! For some reason you had chosen to stop, in the play period of youth, on the way to the inheritance to overcome some obstacle that it pleased you to overcome and to amuse yourself a while in Little Rivers—you with your steadiness in a fight and your airy, smiling confidence in yourself!"
"I—I did not know that I was like that!" said Jack, in hurt, groping surprise. "Was I truly?"
The Doge nodded.
"As I saw you," he said.
Jack looked at Mary, frankly and calmly.
"Was I truly?" he asked her.
"As I saw you!" she repeated, as an impersonal, honest witness.
"Then I must have been!" he said, with conviction. "But I hope that I shall not be in the future." And he smiled at Mary wistfully. But her gaze was bent on the ground.
"And you want it all—all the story from me?" the Doge asked, hesitating.
"All!" Jack answered.
"It strikes hard at your father."
"The truth must strike where it will, now!"
"Then, your face, so like your father's, stood for the wreck of two lives to me, and for recollections in my own career that tinged my view of you, Jack. You were one newcomer to Little Rivers to whom I could not wholly apply the desert rule of oblivion to the past and judgment of every man solely by his conduct in this community. No! It was out of the question that I could ever look at you without thinking who you were.
"You know, of course, that your father and I spent our boyhood in Burbridge. Once I found that he had told me an untruth and we had our difference out, as boys will; and, as I was in the right, he confessed the lie before I let him up. That defeat was a hurt to his egoism that he could not forget. He was that way, John Wingfield, in his egoism. It was like flint, and his ambition and energy were without bounds. I remember he would say when teased that some day he should have more money than all the town together, and when he had money no one would dare to tease him. He had a remarkable gift of ingratiation with anyone who could be of service to him. My uncle, who was the head of the family, was fond of him; he saw the possibilities of success in this smart youngster in a New England village. It was the Ewold money that gave John Wingfield his start. With it he bought the store in which he began as a clerk. He lost a good part of the Ewold fortune later in one of his enterprises that did not turn out well. But all this is trifling beside what is to come.
"He went on to his great commercial career. I, poor fool, was an egoist, too. I tried to paint. I had taste, but no talent. In outbursts of despair my critical discrimination consigned my own work to the rubbish heap. I tried to write books, only to find that all I had was a head stuffed with learning, mixed with the philosophy that is death to the concentrated application that means positive accomplishment. But I could not create. I was by nature only a drinker at the fountain; only a student, the pitiful student who could read his Caesar at eight, learn a language without half trying, but with no ability to make my knowledge of service; with no masterful purpose of my own—a failure!"
"No one is a failure who spreads kindliness and culture as he goes through life," Jack interrupted, earnestly; "who gives of himself unstintedly as you have; who teaches people to bring a tribute of flowers to a convalescent! Why, to found a town and make the desert bloom—that is better than to add another book to the weight of library shelves or to get a picture on the line!"
"Thank you, Jack!" said the Doge, with a flash of his happy manner of old, while there was the play of fleeting sunshine over the hills and valleys of his features. "I won't call it persiflage. I am too selfish, too greedy of a little cheer to call it persiflage. I like the illusion you suggest."
He was silent for a while, and when he spoke again it was with the tragic simplicity of one near his climax.
"Your father and I loved the same girl—-your mother. It seemed that in every sympathy of mind and heart she and I were meant to travel the long highway together. But your father won her with his gift for ingratiation with the object of his desire, which amounts to a kind of genius. He won her with a lie and put me in a position that seemed to prove that the lie was truth. She accepted him in reaction; in an impulse of heart-break that followed what she believed to be a revelation of my true character as something far worse than that of idler. I married the woman whom he had made the object of his well-managed calumny. My wife knew where my heart was and why I had married her. It is from her that Mary gets her dark hair and the brown of her cheeks which make her appear so at home on the desert. Soon after Mary's birth she chose to live apart from me—but I will not speak further of her. She is long ago dead. I knew that your mother had left your father. I saw her a few times in Europe. But she never gave the reason for the separation. She would talk nothing of the past, and with the years heavy on our shoulders and the memory of what we had been to each other hovering close, words came with difficulty and every one was painful. Her whole life was bound up in you, as mine was in Mary. It was you that kept her from being a bitter cynic; you that kept her alive.
"Some of the Ewold money that John Wingfield lost was mine. You see how he kept on winning; how all the threads of his weaving closed in around me. I came to the desert to give Mary life with the fragments of my fortune; and here I hope that, as you say, I have done something worthier than live the life of a wandering, leisurely student who had lapsed into the observer for want of the capacity by nature or training to do anything else.
"But sometimes I did long for the centres of civilization; to touch elbows with their activities; to feel the flow of the current of humanity in great streets. Not that I wanted to give up Little Rivers, but I wanted to go forth to fill the mind with argosies which I could enjoy here at my leisure. And Mary was young. The longing that she concealed must be far more powerful than mine. I saw the supreme selfishness of shutting her up on the desert, without any glimpse of the outer world. I sensed the call that sent her on her lonely rides to the pass. I feared that your coming had increased her restlessness.
"But I wander! That is my fault, as you know, Sir Chaps. Well, we come to the end of the weaving; to the finality of John Wingfield's victory. Little Rivers was getting out of hand. I could plan a ranch, but I had not a business head. I had neither the gift nor the experience to deal with lawyers and land-grabbers. I knew that with the increase of population and development our position was exciting the cupidity of those who find quicker profit in annexing what others have built than in building on their own account. I knew that we ought to have a great dam; that there was water to irrigate ten times the present irrigated area.
"Then came John Prather. I saw in him the judgment, energy, and ability for organization of a real man of affairs. He was young, self-made, engaging and convincing of manner. He liked our life and ideals in Little Rivers; he wanted to share our future. In his resemblance to you I saw nothing but a coincidence that I passed over lightly. He knew how to handle the difficult situation that arose with the reappearance of old man Lefferts' partners. He would get the water rights legalized beyond dispute and turn them over to the water users' association; he would bring in capital for the dam; the value of our property would be enhanced; Little Rivers would become a city in her own right, while I was growing old delectably in the pride of founder. So he pictured it and so I dreamed. I was so sure of the future that I dared the expense of a trip to New York.
"And always to me, when I looked at you and when I thought of you, you were the son of John Wingfield; you incarnated the inheritance of his strength. But when, from the drawing-room, I saw your father, whom I had not seen for fifteen years, then—well, the thing came to me in a burning second, the while I glimpsed his face before he saw mine. He was smiling as if pleased with himself and his power; he was rubbing the palms of his hands together; and I saw that it was John Prather who was like John Wingfield in manner, pose, and feature. You were like the fighting man, your ancestor, and your airy confidence was his. And I, witless and unperceiving, had been won by the same methods of ingratiation with which John Wingfield had won the assistance of the Ewold fortune for the first step of his career; with which he had won Alice Jamison and kept me unaware of his plan while he was lying to her.
"Finally, let us say, in all charity, that your father is what he is because of what is born in him and for the same reason that the snowball gathers size as it rolls; and I am what I am for the same reason that the wind scatter the sands of the desert—a man full of books and tangent inconsequence of ideas, without sense; a simpleton who knows a painting but does not know men; a garrulous, philosophizing, blind, old simpleton, whose pompous incompetency has betrayed a trust! Through me, men and women came here to settle and make a home! Through me they lose—to my shame!"
The Doge buried his face in his hands and drew a deep breath more pitiful than a sob, which, as it went free of the lungs, seemed to leave an empty ruin of what had once been a splendid edifice. He was in striking contrast to Mary, who, throughout the story fondly regarding him, had remained as straight as a young pine. Now, with her rigidity suddenly become so pliant that it was a fluid thing mixed of indignation, fearlessness, and compelling sympathy, she sprang to his side. She knew the touchstone to her father's emotion. He did not want his cheek patted in that moment of agony. He wanted a stimulant; some justification for living.
"There is no shame in believing in those who speak fairly! There is honor, the honor of faith in mankind!" she cried penetratingly. "There is no shame in being the victim of lies!"
"No! No shame!" the Doge cried, rising unsteadily to his feet under the whip.
"And we are not afraid for the future!" she continued. "And the other men and women in Little Rivers are not afraid for the future!"
"No, not afraid under this sun, in this air. Afraid!"
An unconquerable flame had come into his eyes in answer to that inMary's.
"The others have asked me to act for them, and I think I may yet save our rights," said Jack. "Will you also trust me?"
"Will I trust you, Jack? Trust you who gave up your inheritance?" exclaimed the Doge. "I would trust you on a mission to the stars or to lead a regiment; and the wish of the others is mine."
Jack had turned to go, but he looked back at Mary.
"And you, Mary? I have your good wishes?"
He could not resist that question; and though it was clear that nothing could stay him—as clear as it had been in thearroyothat he would keep his word and face Leddy—he was hanging on her word and he was seeing her eyes moist, with a bright fire like that of sunshine on still water. She was swaying slightly as a young pine might in a wind. Her eyes darkened as with fear, then her cheeks went crimson with the stir of her blood; and suddenly, her eyes were sparkling in their moisture like water when it ripples under sunshine.
"Yes, Jack," she said quietly, with the tense eagerness of a good cause that sends a man away to the wars.
"That is everything!" he answered.
So it was! Everything that he could ask now, with his story and hers so fresh in mind! He started up the path, but stopped at the turn to look back and wave his hand to the two figures in a confident gesture.
"Luck with you, Sir Chaps!" called the Doge, with all the far-carrying force of his oldtime sonorousness.
"Luck! luck!" Mary called, on her part; and her voice had a flute note that seemed to go singing on its own ether waves through the tender green foliage, through all the gardens of Little Rivers, and even away to the pass.
"Mary! Mary!" he answered, with a ring of cheeriness. "Luck for me will always come at your command!"
A moment later Galway and the others saw him smiling with a hope that ran as high as his purpose, as he passed through the gateway of the hedge.
"It will all be right!" he told them.
With P.D. keeping his muzzle close to the middle of Jack's back, the party started toward his house, which took them almost the length of the main street.
"Prather went by the range trail, of course?" Jack asked Galway.
"No, straight out across the desert," said Galway.
"Straight out across the desert!" exclaimed Jack, mystified.
For one had a choice of two routes to Agua Fria, which was well over the border in Mexico. Not a drop of water was to be had on the way across the trackless plateau, but halfway on the range trail was a camping-place, Las Cascadas, where a spring which spouted in a tiny cascade welcomed the traveller. Under irrigation, most of the land for the whole stretch between the two towns would be fertile. There was said to be a big underground run at Agua Fria that could be pumped at little expense.
"All I can make out of Prather's taking a straight line, which really is slower, as you know, on account of the heavy sand in places, is to look over the soil," said Galway. "He may be preparing to get a concession in Mexico at the same time as on this side, so as to secure control of the whole valley. It means railroads, factories, new towns, millions—but you and I have talked all this before in our dreams."
"Who was with him?" Jack asked.
"Pedro Nogales. He seems to have taken quite a fancy to Pedro and Pedro is acting as guide. Leddy recommended him, I suppose."
"No one else?"
"No."
"Good!" said Jack.
As they turned into the side street where the front of Jack's bungalow was visible, Jim Galway observed that they had seen nothing of Leddy or any of his followers.
"Maybe he's gone to join Prather," said Bob Worther.
But Jack paid no attention to the remark. He was preoccupied with the first sight of his ranch in over two months.
"It will be all right!" he called out to the crowd in his yard; for the others who had met him at the station were waiting for him there. "Bob, those umbrella-trees could shade a thin, short man now, even if he didn't hug the trunk! Firio has done well, hasn't he?" he concluded, after he had walked through the garden and surveyed the fields and orchards in fond comparison as to progress.
"The best I ever knew an Indian to do!" said Jim Galway.
"And everything kept right on growing while I was away! That's the joy of planting things. They are growing for somebody, if not for you!"
Inside the house he found Firio, with the help of some of the ranchers, taking the pictures out of their cases. Firio surveyed the buccaneer for some time, squinting his eyes and finally opening them saucer-wide in approval.
"You!" he said to Jack. And of the Sargent, after equally deliberate observation, he said: "A lady!"
That seemed about all there was to say and expressed the thought of the onlookers.
"And, Firio, now it's the trail!" said Jack.
"Sí, sí!" said Firio, ever so softly. "We take rifles?"
"Yes. Food for a week and two-days' water."
It pleased Jack to hang the portraits while Firio was putting on Jag Ear's pack; and he made it a ceremony in which his silence was uninterrupted by the comments of the ranchers. They stood in wondering awe before John Wingfield, Knight, hung where he could watch the Eternal Painter at his sunset displays and looking at the "Portrait of a Lady" across the breadth of the living-room, whose neutral tones made a perfect setting for their dominant genius.
"I believe they are at home," said Jack, with a fond look from one to the other, when Firio came to say that everything was ready.
"Señor Jack," whispered Firio insinuatingly, "for the trail you wear the grand, glad trail clothes and the big spurs. I keep them shiny—the big spurs!" He was speaking with the authority of an expert in trail fashions, who would consider Jack in very bad form if he refused.
"Why, yes, Firio, yes; it is so long since we have been on the trail!"And he went into the bedroom to make the change.
"I've never seen him quite so dumb quiet!" said Worther.
Jack certainly had been quiet, ominously quiet and self-contained. When he came out of the bedroom he was without the jaunty freedom of manner that Little Rivers always associated with his full regalia. In place of the dreamy distances in his eyes on such occasions were a sad preoccupation and determination. When they went outside to Firio and the waiting ponies, the Eternal Painter was in his evening orgy of splendor. But even Jack did not look up at the sky this time as he walked along in silence with his fellow-citizens to the point where the farthest furrow of his ranch had been drawn across the virgin desert. His foot was already in the stirrup when Jim Galway spoke the thought of all:
"Jack, there's only two of you, and if it happened that you metLeddy—"
"It is Prather that I want to see," Jack answered.
"But Leddy's whole gang! We don't know what your plans are, but if there's going to be a mix-up, why, we've got to be with you!"
"No!" said Jack, decidedly. "Remember, Jim, you were to trust me. This is a mission that requires only two; it is between Prather and me. We are going to get acquainted for the first time."
Already Firio, riding Wrath of God, had started, and the bells of Jag Ear were jingling, while the rifles, their bores so clean from Firio's care, danced with the gleams of sunset in their movement with the burro's jogging trot. Jack sprang into the saddle, his face lighting as the foot came home in the stirrup.
"It will be all right!" he called back.
P.D. in the freshness of his long holiday, feeling a familiar pressure of a leg, hastened to overtake his companions; and the group of Little Riversites watched a chubby horseman and a tall, gaunt horseman, bathed in gold, riding away on a hazy sea of gold, with Jag Ear's bells growing fainter and fainter, until the moving specks were lost in the darkness.
Easy traveller had turned speedy traveller, on a schedule. Never had he and Firio ridden so fast as in pursuit of John Prather, who had eight hours' start of them on a two-days' journey. Jag Ear had to trot all the time to keep up. Ounce by ounce he was drawing on his sinking fund of fat in a constitutional crisis.
"I keep his hoofs good. I keep his wind good. All right!" said Firio.
It was after midnight before the steady jingle of Jag Ear's orchestra had any intermission. An hour for food and rest and the little party was off again in the delicious cool of the night, toward a curtain pricked with stars which seemed to be drawn down over the edge of the world.
"What sort of horses had Prather and Nogales?" Jack asked. He must reach the water-hole as soon as Prather; for it was not unlikely that Prather might have fresh mounts waiting there to take him on to the nearest railroad station in Mexico.
"Look good, but bad. Nogales no know horses!" Firio answered.
"And they rode in the heat of the day!" said Jack, confidently.
"Sí! And we ride P.D. and Wrath of God!"
There were no sign-posts on this highway of desert space except the many-armed giant cacti, in their furrowed armor set with clusters of needles, like tawny auroras gleaming faintly; no trail on the hard earth under foot, mottled with bunches of sagebrush and sprays of low-lying cacti, all as still as the figures of an inlaid flooring in the violet sheen, with an occasional quick, irregular, shadowy movement when a frightened lizard or a gopher beat a precipitate retreat from the invading thud of hoofs in this sanctuary of dust-dry life. And the course of the hoofs was set midway between the looming masses of the mountain walls of the valley.
Firio listened for songs from Señor Jack; he waited for stories from Señor Jack; but none came. He, the untalkative one of the pair, the living embodiment of a silent and happy companionship back and forth from Colorado to Chihuahua, liked to hear talk. Without it he was lonesome. If, by the criterion of a school examination, he never understood more than half of what Jack said, yet, in the measure of spirit, he understood everything.
Now Jack was going mile after mile with nothing except occasional urging words to P.D. His close-cut hair well brushed back from his forehead revealed the sweep of his brow, lengthening his profile and adding to the effect of his leanness. The moonlight on his face, which had lost its tan, gave him an aspect of subdued and patient serenity in keeping with the surroundings. You would have said that he could ride on forever without tiring, and that he could go over a precipice now without even seeing any danger sign. He had never been like this in all Firio's memory. The silence became unsupportable for once to Indian taciturnity. If Jack would not talk Firio would. Yes, he would ask a question, just to hear the sound of a voice.
"We go to fight?"
"No, Firio."
"Not to fight Prather?"
"No."
"To fight Leddy?"
"I hope not."
"Why we go? Why so—why so—" he had not the language to express the strange, brooding inquiry of his mind.
"I go to save Little Rivers."
"Sí!" said Firio, but as if this did not answer his question.
"I go to get the end of a story, Firio—my story!" continued Jack. "I have travelled long for the story and now I shall have it all from John Prather."
"Sí, sí!" said Firio, as if all the knowledge in the world had flashed into his head quicker than the hand of legerdemain could run the leaves of a pack of cards through its fingers. "And then?"
At last Firio had won a smile from the untanned face which could not be the same to him until it was tanned.
"Then I shall plant seeds and keep the ground around them soft and the weeds out of it; and I shall wear my heart on my sleeve and lay a siege—a siege in the open, without parallels or mines! A siege in the open!"
Firio did not understand much about parallels or mines or, for that matter, about sieges; but he could see the smile fading from Jack's lips and could comprehend that the future of which Jack was speaking was very far from another prospect, which was immediate and vivid in his mind.
"But you must fight Leddy!Sí, sí! You must fight Leddy first!"
"Then I must, I suppose," said Jack, absently. "All things in their turn and time."
"Sí!" answered Firio. All things in their turn and time! This desert truth was bred in him through his ancestry, no less than in the Eternal Painter himself.
Again the silence of the morning darkness, with all the stars twinkling more faintly and some slipping from their places in the curtain into the deeper recesses of the broad band of night on the surface of the rolling ball. The plodding hoofs kept up their regular beat of the march of their little world of action in the presence of the Infinite; plodding, plodding on into the dawn which sent the last of the stars in flight, while the curtain melted away before blue distances swimming with light. Still bareheaded, Jack looked into the face of the sun which heaved above an irregular roof of rocks. It blazed into the range on the other side of the valley. It slaked its thirst with the slight fall of dew as a great, red tongue would lick up crumbs. Sun and sky, cactus and sagebrush, rock and dry earth and sand, that was all. Nowhere in that stretch of basin that seemed without end was there a sign of any other horseman or of human life.
But at length, as they rode, their eyes saw what only eyes used to desert reaches could see, that the speck in the distance was not a cactus or even two or three cacti in line, but something alive and moving. Perceptibly they were gaining on it, while it developed into two riders and a pack animal in single file. Now Jack and Firio were coming into a region of more stunted vegetation, and soon the two figures emerged into a stretch of gray carpet on which they were as clearly silhouetted as a white sail on a green sea.
"Very thick sand there—five or six miles of it. It make this the long way," said Firio. "They call it the apron of hell to fools who ride at noon."
"And beyond that how many miles to the water-hole?"
"Five or six."
But Firio knew a way around where the going was good. It made a difference of two or three miles in distance against them, but two or three times that in their favor in time and the strength taken out of their ponies.
"How long will Prather be in getting through the sand?" Jack asked.
Firio squinted at the objects of their pursuit for a while, as if he wanted to be exact.
"Almost as many hours as miles," he said.
Near the zenith now, the sun was a bulging furnace eye, piercing through shirts into the flesh and sucking the very moisture of the veins. A single catspaw was all that the Eternal Painter had to offer over that basin shut in between the long, jagged teeth of the ranges biting into the steel-blue of the sky. The savage, merciless hours of the desert day approached; the hours of reckoning for unknowing and unprepared travellers.
Jag Ear's bells had a faint plaintiveness at intervals and again their jingling was rapid and hysterical, as he tried to make up the distance lost through a lapse in effort. He had ceased altogether to wiggle the sliver of ear—the baton with which he conducted his orchestra—because this was clearly a waste of energy. P.D.'s steps still retained their dogged persistence, but their regular beat was slower, like that of a clock that needs winding. His head hung low. Wrath of God was no more and no less melancholy than when he was rusticating in Jack's yard. It seemed as if his sad visage, so reliably and grandly sad, might still be marching on toward the indeterminate line of the horizon when his legs were worn off his body.
"Firio, you brown son of the sun," said Jack, with a sudden display of his old-time trail imagery, "you prolix, garrulous Firio, you knew! You had the great equine trio ready, and look at the miles they have done since sunset to prove it! You, P.D., favorite trooper of our household cavalry! You, Wrath of God, don't be afraid to make an inward smile, for your face will never tell on you! You, Jag Ear, beat a tattoo with the fragment of the gothic glory of burrohood, for we rest, to go on all the faster when the heat of the day is past!"
While Prather and Nogales were riding over hell's apron, their pursuers had saddles off hot, moist backs, over which knowing hands were run to find no sores. After they had eaten, P.D. and Wrath of God and Jag Ear stood in drooping relaxation which would make the most of every moment of respite. Jack and Firio, with a blanket fastened to the rifles as standards, made a patch of shade in which they lay down.
"Have a nap, Firio," said Jack. "I will wake you when it is time to start."
"And you—you no sleep?" asked Firio.
"I could not sleep to-day," Jack answered. "I don't feel as if I could sleep until I've seen Prather and heard his story—my story—Firio!" And he lay with eyes half closed, staring at the steel blue overhead.
It was well after midday when they mounted for the remainder of the journey. The Eternal Painter was shaking out the silvery cloud-mist of his beard across a background that had a softer, kindlier, deeper blue. The shadows of the ponies and their riders and Jag Ear and his pack no longer lay under their bellies heavily, but were stretched out to one side by the angle of the sun, in cheerful, jogging fraternity. Prather and Nogales had again become only a speck.
"Do you think that they are out of the sand?" asked Jack.
"Very near," Firio answered.
"Their ponies had a whole night's rest—we must not forget that," said Jack; "and they must be in a hurry, for certainly Nogales had sense enough to rest over noon."
"Quien sabe!" answered Firio. "But we catch them—sí, sí!"
Leading the way, Firio turned toward the eastern range until he came to a narrow tongue of shale almost as hard to the hoofs as asphalt, that ran like a shoal across that sea of sand. Rest had given the great equine trio renewed life. P.D., reduced in rank to second place, could not think of allowing more than a foot between his muzzle and the tail of Wrath of God, who was bound to make up the time he had lost in pursuit of the horizon. Another hypothesis of Jack's as to the cause of Wrath of God's melancholy was that solemn Covenanter's inability to get any nearer to the edge of the earth. Once he could poke his nose through the blue curtain and see what was on the other side, the satisfaction of his eternal curiosity might have made him a rollicking comedian. As for Jag Ear, his baton was once more conducting his orchestra in spirited tempo. He, who was nearest of all three in heart to Firio, might well have been saying to himself: "I knew! I knew we were not going through the sand! Firio and I knew!"
So rapidly were they gaining that, when past the sand and they turned back westward, it was only a question of half an hour or so to come up with Prather and Nogales. Nogales had been riding ahead; but now Prather, after gazing over his shoulder for some time at his pursuers, took the lead. He was urging his horse as if he would avoid being overtaken. Evidently Nogales did not share that desire, for he let Prather go on alone. But Prather's horse was too tired after its effort in the sand and he halted and waited until Nogales, at a slow walk, closed up the gap between them, when they proceeded at their old, weary gait.
As Jack and Firio came within hailing distance, both Prather and Nogales glanced at them sharply; but no word was spoken on either side. The absence of any call between these isolated voyagers of the desert sea was strangely unlike the average desert meeting. Prather and Nogales did not look back again, not even when Jack and Firio were very near. A neigh by P.D., a break into a trot by him and Wrath of God, and Firio was saying to Nogales:
"You went right through the sand!"
"Sí!" answered Pedro, with a grin.
Still Prather did not so much as turn his head to get a glimpse of Jack, nor did he offer any sign of knowledge of Jack's presence when Jack reined alongside him so close that their stirrup leathers were brushing. Prather was gazing at the desert exactly in front of him, the reins hanging loose, almost out of hand. His horse was about spent, if not on the point of foundering. Jack was so near the mole on the cheek of the peculiar paleness that never tans that by half extending his arm he might have touched it. After all, it was only a raised patch of blue, a blemish removable by the slightest surgical operation which its owner must have preferred to retain.
Firio and Nogales, also riding side by side, were also silent. There was no sound except Jag Ear's bells, now sunk to a faint tinkle in keeping with the slow progress of Prather's beaten horse. Looking at Prather's hands, Jack was thinking of another pair of hands amazingly like them. In the uncanniness of its proximity he was imagining how the profile would look without the birthmark, and he found himself grateful for the silence, which spoke so powerfully to him, in the time that it provided for bringing his faculties under control.
"How do you do?" he said at last, pleasantly.
Probably the silence had been equally welcome to Prather in charting his own course in the now unavoidable interview. He looked around slowly, and he was smiling with a trace of the satire that Jack had seen in the elevator, but smiling watchfully in a way that covers the apprehension of a keen glance. And he saw features that were calm and eyes that were still as the sky.
"How do you do?" he answered; and paused as one who is about to slip a point of steel home into a scabbard. "How do you do, brother?" he added, as if uttering a shibboleth that could protect him from any physical violence.
"Brother! Brother! Yes!" repeated Jack, with dry lips.
This shaping of conviction into fact so nakedly, so coolly, made all the desert and the sky swim before him in kaleidoscopic patches of blue and gray, shot with zigzag flashes. He half reeled in the saddle; his hands gripped the pommel to hold himself in place. It was as if a long strain of nervous tension had come to an end with a crack. Prather's smile took a turn of deeper satisfaction. It was like John Wingfield, Sr.'s after Jack had left the library.
"This is the first time we have ever met to speak," said Prather, easily.
"Yes!" assented Jack, the gray settling back into desert and the blue into sky and the zigzag flashes becoming only the brilliance of late afternoon sunshine.
"Certainly it is time that we got acquainted, brother," said Prather.
"It is!" agreed Jack. "It is time that I knew your story!"
"Which you have hardly heard from your—I mean, our father!" The pause between the "your" and the "our" was made with an appreciative significance. "Well, you see, I was the brother who had the mole on his cheek!"
"Yes—pitifully yes!" said Jack, with a kind of horror at the expression of this face in his father's likeness, no less than at the words.
"Why, no! I've often thought ofyourather pitifully!" said Prather.
"You well might!" Jack answered, feelingly. "We may well share a common pity for each other."
There was no sign that John Prather subscribed to the sentiment except in a certain quizzical turn of his lips, as he looked away.
"Yes, the story has been kept from me. I have come for it!" said Jack.
"That is raking out the skeletons. But why not rake out our skeletons together, you and I?" said Prather.
It was clear that he enjoyed the prospect as an opportunity for retributive enlightenment.
"To begin with, I have the rights of primogeniture in my favor," he said. "I was born a day before you were, in the same city of New York. My mother's name was not down in the telephone list as Mrs. Wingfield, however—I look at it all philosophically, you understand—and it was just that which made the difference between you and me, outside of the difference of our natures. But I am proud of my birth on both sides, in my own way. My mother was won without marriage and she was true to father. A woman of real ability, my mother! She was well suited to be John Wingfield's wife; better, I think, in the practical world of materialism than your mother. By a peculiar coincidence, unknown to father, my mother called in Dr. Bennington. So you and I have a further bond, in that the same doctor brought us into the world."
"And my mother must have known this!" Jack exclaimed, in racking horror.
At last the cause of her exile was clear in all its grisly monstrousness; the source of the pain in her eyes in the portrait had been traced home. Again he saw her white and trembling when she returned to the house in Versailles to find a visitor there; and now he realized the fulness of her relief when the frail boy said that he did not like his father. Her travels had spoken the restlessness of flight in search of oblivion to the very fact of his paternity. The "I give! I give!" of the portrait was the giving of the infinity of her fine, sensitive being to him to make him all hers. His feeling which had held him on the desert when he should have gone home, that feeling of literal revulsion toward his inheritance, was a thing born in him which had grown under her caresses and her training. She had been living solely for him to that last moment when the book dropped out of her hand; and the incarnation of that which had killed her was riding beside him now in the flesh. He felt a weaving of his muscles, a tightening of his nerves, as if waiting on the spark of will, and all the strength that he had built in the name of the store was madly tempted. But no! John Prather was not to blame, any more than himself. He would listen to John Prather, as justice listens to evidence, and endure his stare to the end.
"Yes, your mother knew," continued Prather. "My mother made a point of having her know. That was part of my mother's own bitterness. That was her teaching to me from the first. She had no illusions. She knew the advantages and the disadvantages of her position. She was and is one of the few persons in the world of whom my father is a little afraid."
"Then she still lives?" asked Jack sharply.
"Yes, she is in California," Prather returned. "She often referred to the mole on my cheek as the symbol of my handicap in the world of convention. 'But for the mole, Jack, you would have the store,' she often said. It delighted her that I had my father's face. As I grew older the resemblance became more marked. I could see that I pleased my father with my practical ideas of life, which I developed when quite young. He saw to it that my mother and I lived well and that I went to a good school. From my books I drew the same lesson as from my peculiar inheritance; the lesson that my mother was always inculcating. 'A bank account,' she would repeat, 'will erase even a mole patch on the cheek. It is the supreme power that will carry you anywhere, Jack. You must make money!'
"When father came to see her he would talk with a candor with which I am sure he never talked to your mother. He would tell of his successes, revealing the strategy and system by which they were won, finding her both understanding and sympathetic. I became a little blade that delighted to get sharp against his big blade by asking him questions. He did not want me about the store, and this was one of the things in which my mother humored him. She knew just when to humor and just when to threaten the play of the strong card which she always held.
"All the while her ambition was laying its plans. It was that I should have the Wingfield store one day, myself. Out of school hours I would range the other department stores. You see, I had not only inherited my father's face more strikingly than you had, but also his talents. I spent the summer vacations of my fourteenth and fifteenth years in a store. I won the attention of my superiors and promise of promotion. I foresaw the day when I should so prove my ability that father would take me into his own store, and then, gradually, I would make my place, secure, while you were idling about Europe. And in those days you were frail and I was vigorous.
"There was no mistaking that father's sense of convention was the one thing that stood between him and my desire. He feared the world's opinion if the truth became known, and deep down in heart he could never get over the pride of having married into your mother's family. You had very good blood on the maternal side, as they say, while my mother had begun in the cloak department and was self-made, like father. Again, I was so truly his son in every instinct that he may have been a little jealous of me. Father does not like to think that any other man was ever quite as great as he is. I confess that is the way I feel, too. That is what life is, after all—it is yourself. Yes, I saw the store as mine—surely mine, with time!"
Prather's reins lay across the pommel of the saddle drawn taut by the drooping head of his horse, which was barely dragging one foot after another. He gave Jack a glance of flashing resentment and then, in his first impulse of real emotion, made a fist of one hand and drove it angrily into the palm of the other before continuing.
"Then father went to Europe to bring you home. He had decided for the son of convention, the son of blood! Though self-made, he was for family as against talent. Besides, it was a victory for him. At last you were his. After your return there was a scene between mother and him, a cool, bitter argument. He defied her to play her last card. He said that you knew the truth and that she could at best only make a row. And he wanted us out of New York; the place for me was a new country. He would make us a handsome allowance. So my mother agreed to his terms and we went to the Pacific coast. There I was to enter one of the colleges. My mother wanted me to have a college education, you see. The last meeting between father and me was very interesting, blade playing on blade. He really hated to let me go, for by this time he knew how hopeless you were. He embraced me and said that I would get on, anyway. I told him that the only trouble was that while I was the real son, I had a mole on my cheek.
"The West was best. There we could claim the favor of convention, Mrs. Prather and her son. I matriculated at Stanford, but I saw nothing in it for me. It was all dream stuff. Greek and Latin don't help in building a fortune. They handicap you with the loss of time it takes to learn them, at least; and I meant to be worth a million before I was thirty. Now I know that I shall be worth two or three or four millions at thirty, if all goes as I plan. So I cut college and broke for Goldfield. I ran a store and was a secret partner in a saloon that paid better than the store. I was in the game morning, noon, and night; it beat marching to class to recite Horace and fiddle with the binomial theorem, as it must for every man who counts for something in the world."
Throughout, Prather's tone, except for the one moment of anger, had been that of an even recital of facts by one who does not allow himself to consider anything but facts in the judgment of his position. At times he gave Jack covert glances out of the tail of his eye and saw Jack's face white and drawn and his head lowered. Now Prather became the victim—so he would have put it, no doubt—of another outburst of feeling.
"But it was not like having the store!" he said. "No, my heart was in the store; and that morning when you saw me looking down from the gallery I was permitting myself to dream. I was thinking of what had come to you, the fairy prince of good fortune, who had no talent for your inheritance, and of what I might have done with it. I was thinking how I could win men to work for me"—and there he was smiling with the father's charm—"and of the millions to come if I could begin to build on the foundation that father had laid. I saw branches in Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia—a great chain of stores all co-ordinated under my directing hand—I the master!"
He rubbed the palms of his hands together as he had over the scintillation of the jewelry counters. Though Jack had not looked around, his ear recognized that crisp sound of exultant power.
"Yes," Jack murmured thoughtfully, as if inviting Prather to go on with anything further he might have to say.
"All mine—mine!" Prather concluded, in a sort of hypnosis with his own picture.
Jack still stared at the earth, his profile limned in gold and the side of his face toward Prather in shadow. They were nearing the clump of cotton-woods around the water-hole at the base of a tongue of the range which ran out into the desert, and Firio rode up to whisper in Spanish:
"Señor Jack, see there! Horsemen!"
Jack raised his head with a returning sense of his surroundings to see some mounted men, eight in all he counted, riding along the range trail a half mile nearer the water-hole than themselves. Their horses had the gait of exhaustion after a long, hard ride.
"You know who it is?" Firio whispered.
"Yes," Jack answered. "They had the better trail and have outridden us.All right, Firio!"
"Leddy—Pete Leddy and some of his men!" exclaimed Prather, shading his eyes to watch the file of figures now passing under the cotton-woods. It seemed to relieve him. "I suppose he came on my account," he added, nodding to Nogales.
"Yes," said Nogales, with a grin. He always either grinned or his face had a half savage impassiveness.
"I wonder if Leddy thought I was in danger," and Prather gave Jack a knowing glance of satisfaction. "We shall all camp together," he added, smiling.
Jack did not answer for a moment. He was intent on the cotton-woods. Leddy and his companions appeared on the other side, the figures of riders and horses bathed in the sunset glow. Then they disappeared as if the earth had swallowed them up.
"They are going on! They are not going to stop!" said Prather apprehensively.
"There is a basin beyond the water-hole and the seepage makes a little pasture," Jack explained. "You will see them back in a moment."
"Oh, yes!" said Prather, with a thrill in his voice; and again the palms of his hands were making that refrain of delight. "But I have told my story," he resumed. "Now may I ask you a question? Why have you come back?"
Jack looked around frankly and dispassionately.
"To save Little Rivers from you! I understand that you have secured the water rights."
"Well, then, I have!" declared Prather, confidently, "and I mean to have the rights for the whole valley!" and he struck his fist into his palm. "You see," he went on, with another flash of satire, "it is not exactly fair that you should have the store and Little Rivers, too. I had heard of the possibilities here from my friend Leddy, who was also at Goldfield. A useful man in his place! He got his sixth notch there. When I came and looked around and saw that here was the opportunity I wanted, I wired father that in any fair division of territory everything west of the Mississippi belonged to me"—he was showing some bravado in his sense of security now, when he saw that Leddy and his men were returning through the cotton-woods to the water-hole—"and I should like to have you out of my way. I told him you were the picture of health, even if you didn't have anything in your head, and if you were ever going to learn the business it was time that you began. But father is always careful. Naturally he wanted to check off my report with another's; for he didn't want you back if you were ill. So he sent Dr. Bennington out to get professional confirmation of my statement."
"And you told Jasper Ewold that you wanted the rights only to turn them over to the water users' association and then bring in capital to build a dam, with everybody sharing alike in the prosperity that was to come."
"Yes, and Jasper Ewold was so simple! Well, what I told him was strategy—strategy of which I think father would approve. When you have a big object in view the end must justify the means. Look at the situation! Two hundred thousand acres of land waiting on water to be the most fertile in the world! Why, when I rode up the valley the first time and saw what could be done, I was amazed to think that such an opportunity should be lying around loose. Little Rivers was so out of the way that other promoters had overlooked it, and everybody had sort of taken it for granted that Jasper Ewold and his water users' association really had legal possession. It was my chance. I thought big. That dam should be mine. I had the money I had made in Goldfield, but it was not enough for my purpose.
"Where should I turn for outside capital that would not demand a majority interest in the project? I concluded that it was time father did something for me in return for giving up the store. Besides this call of justice I had another influence with him. I was sure that when he told my mother that you knew the truth he was making a statement that suited his purpose. I was sure that you knew nothing of my story and that father did not want you to know it. I was ready to tell if he did not meet my demands.