Their talk flitted here and there in exclamations, each bringing an entail of recollection of some familiar, enjoyed thing; and when at last it returned to their immediate surroundings the shadow of the range was creeping out onto the plain, cut by the brilliance of the sun through the V. Mary rose with a quick, self-accusing cry about the lateness of the hour. To him it was a call on his resources to delay their departure.
"Do you see where that shelf breaks abruptly?" he asked. "It must be the side of a canyon. Have you ever looked down?"
"I started to once."
"I should not like to go over the pass again without seeing if this is really a canyon of any account. I feel myself quite an authority on canyons."
"It will be dark before we reach Little Rivers!" she protested.
"Ten minutes—only a step!" and he was appealing in his boyish fashion to have his way.
"Nonsense! Besides, I do not care for canyons."
"You still fear, then, to look down from walls? You—"
And this decided her. On another occasion she had gone to the precipice edge and faltered. She would master her dizziness for once and all; he should not know from her any confession of a weakness which was purely of the imagination.
The point to which he had alluded was an immense overhanging slab of granite stratum deep set in the mountain side. As they approached, a thrill of lightness and uncertainty was setting her limbs a-quiver. Her elbow was touching his, her will driving her feet forward desperately. Suddenly she was gazing down, down, down, into black depths which seemed calling irresistibly and melting her power of muscular volition, while he with another step was on the very edge, leaning over and smiling. She dropped back convulsively. He was all happy absorption in the face of that abyss. How easy for him to topple over and go hurtling into the chasm!
"Don't!" she gasped, and blindly tugged at his arm to draw him back.
As he looked around in surprise and inquiry, she withdrew her hand in a reaction against her familiarity, yet did not lower it, holding it out with fingers spread in expression of her horror. Serenely he regarded her for a moment in her confusion and distress, and then, smiling, while the still light of confidence was in his eyes, he locked his arm in hers. Before she could protest or resist he had drawn her to his side.
"It is just as safe as looking off the roof of a porch on to a flower garden," he said.
And why she knew not, but the fact had come as something definite and settled: she was no longer dizzy or uncertain. Calmly, in the triumph of mind over fear, in the glory of a new sensation of power, she looked down into that gulf of shadows—looked down for a thousand feet, where the narrowing, sheer walls merged into darkness.
From this pit to the blue above there was only infinite silence, with no movement but his pulse-beat which she could feel in his wrist distinctly. He had her fast, a pawn of one of his impulses. A shiver of revolt ran through her. He had taken this liberty because she had shown weakness. And she was not weak. She had come to the precipice to prove that she was not.
"Thank you. My little tremor of horror has passed," she told him. "I can stand without help, now."
He released his hold and she stood quite free of him, a glance flashing her independence. Smilingly she looked down and smilingly and triumphantly back at him.
"You need not keep your arm up in that fashion ready to assist me. It is tiring," she said, with a touch of her old fire of banter over the barrier. "I am all right, now. I don't know what gave me that giddy turn—probably sitting still so long and looking out at the blaze of the desert."
He swept her with a look of admiration; and their eyes meeting, she looked back into the abyss.
"I wish I had such courage," he said with sudden, tense earnestness; "courage to master my revulsion against shadows."
"Perhaps it will come like an inspiration," she answered uncomprehendingly.
Then both were silent until she spoke of a stunted little pine three or four hundred feet down, in the crotch of an outcropping. Its sinking roots had split a rock, over which the other roots sprawled in gnarly persistence. Some passing bird had dropped the seed which had found a bed in a pocket of dust from the erosions of time. So it had grown and set up housekeeping in its isolation, even as the community of Little Rivers had in a desert basin beside a water-course.
"The little pine has courage—the courage of the dwarf," she said. "It is worth more than a whole forest of its majestic cousins in Maine. How green it is—greener than they!"
"But they rise straight to heaven in their majesty!" he returned, to make controversy.
"Yes, out of the ease of their rich beds!"
"In a crowd and waiting for the axe!"
"And this one, in its isolation, creating something where there was nothing! Every one of its needles is counted in its cost of birth out of the stubborn soil! And waiting all its life down there for the reward of a look and a word of praise!"
"But," he went on, in the delight of hearing her voice in rebuttal, "the big pines give us the masts of ships and they build houses and furnish the kindling for the hardwood logs of the hearth!"
"The little pine makes no pretensions. It has done more. It has given us something without which houses are empty: It has given us a thought!"
"True!" he exclaimed soberly, yielding. And now all the lively signals of the impulse of action played on his face. "For your glance and your word of praise it shall pay you tribute!" he cried. "I am going down to bring you one of its clusters of spines."
"But, Jack, it is a dangerous climb—it is late! No! no!"
"No climb at all. It is easy if I work my way around by that ledge yonder. I see stepping-places all the way."
How like him! While she thought only of the pine, he had been thinking how to make a descent; how to conquer some physical difficulty. Already he had started despite her protest.
"I don't want to rob the little pine!" she called, testily.
"I'll bring a needle, then!"
"Even every needle is precious!"
"I'll bring a dead one, then!"
There was no combatting him, she knew, when he was headstrong; and when he was particularly headstrong he would laugh in his soft way. He was laughing now as he took off his spurs and tossed them aside.
"No climbing in these cart-wheels, and I shall have to roll up my chaps!"
She went back to the precipice edge to prove to him, to prove to herself, that she could stand there alone, without the moral support of anyone at her side, and found that she could. She had mastered her weakness. It was as if a new force had been born in her. She felt its stiffening in every fibre as she saw him pass around the ledge and start down toward the little pine; felt it as something which could build barriers and mount them with an invulnerable guard.
How would he get past that steep shoulder? The worst obstacle confronted him at the very beginning of the descent. He was hugging a rock face, feeling his way, with nothing but a few inches of a projecting seam between him and the darkness far below. His foot slipped, his body turned half around, and she had a second of the horror that she had felt when waiting for the sound of Leddy's shot in Bill Lang's store. She saw his outspread hands clutching the seam above; watched for them to let go. But they held; the foot groped and got its footing again, and he worked his way out on a shelf.
He was safe and she dropped on her knees weakly, still looking down at him. It was the old story of their relations. Was this man ever to be subjecting her to spasms of fear on his account? And there he was beaming up at her reassuringly, while she felt the blood which had gone from her face return in a hot flood. It brought with it anger in place of fear.
"I don't want it! I don't want it!" she cried down.
"And I want to get it for you! I want to get it for you—for you!" His voice was a tumult of emotion in the abandon of passionate declaration. So long had she held him back that now when the flood came it had the power of conserved strength bursting a dam in wild havoc. "There is nothing I would not like to do for you, Mary!" he cried. "I'd like to pull that pine up for you, even if it bled and suffered! I'd like to go on doing things for you forever!"
There was not even a movement of her lips in answer. It seemed to her now that there on the precipice edge, while he held her arm in his, the iridescent house of glass had fallen about them in a confused, dazzling shower of wreckage. He had found an opening. He had broken through the barrier.
Half unconscious of his progress, of the chasm itself, she waited in a daze and came out of it to see him sweeping his hat upward from beside the pine before he reached as far as he could among the branches and, with what seemed to her the refinement of effrontery and disregard of her wishes, broke off a tawny young branch. He waved it to her—this garland of conquest won out of the jaws of danger, which he was ready to throw at her feet from the lists.
"No, no, no!" she said, half aloud.
She saw him start back with his sure steps, his shoulders swinging with the lithe, adaptable movement of his body; and every step was drawing him nearer to a meeting which would be like no other between them. Soon he would be crunching the glass of the house under that confident tread; in the ecstasy of a new part he would be before the opening he had broken in the barrier with the jauntiness of one who expected admission. His pulse-beat under the touch of her fingers at the precipice edge, his artery-beat in thearroyo, was hammering in her temples, hammering out a decision which, when it came, brought her to her feet.
Now the shadows were deep; all the glory of the sunset in the Eternal Painter's chaotic last moments of his day's work overspread the western sky, and from the furnace in which he dipped his brush came a blade of rich, blazing gold through the pass and lay across the trail. It enveloped her as, half running, mindless of her footing, slipping as she went, she hurried toward the other side of Galeria.
When Jack Wingfield came up over the ledge, a pine tassel in his hand, his languor of other days transformed into high-strung, triumphant intensity, the sparkle of a splendid hope in his eyes, only Firio was there to welcome him.
"Señorita Ewold said she no could wait," Firio explained. "It was very late, she said."
Jack stopped as if struck and his features became a lifeless mask, as lifeless as the walls of the canyon. He looked down at the trophy of his climb and ran his fingers over the needles slowly, again and again, in abstraction.
"I understand!" he said, half to himself; and then aloud: "Firio, we will not go into town to-night. We will camp on the other side by the river."
"Sí! I shot enough quail this afternoon for dinner."
But Jack did not have much appetite, and after dinner he did not amuse Firio with inventions of his fancy. He lay long awake, his head on his clasped hands, looking at the stars.
A faint aureole of light crept up back of the pass.
"Dawn at last!" Jack breathed, in relief. "Firio! Firio! Up with you!"
"Oh-yuh!" yawned Firio. "Sí, sí!" he said, rising numbly to his feet and rubbing his eyes with his fists, while he tried to comprehend an astonishing reversal of custom. Usually he awakened his camp-mate; but this morning his camp-mate had awakened him. A half shadow in the semi-darkness, Jack was already throwing the saddle over P.D.'s back.
"We will get away at once," he said.
Firio knew that something strange had come over Señor Jack after he had met Señorita Ewold on the pass, and now he was convinced that this thing had been working in Señor Jack's mind all night.
"Coffee before we start?" he inquired ingratiatingly.
"Coffee at the ranch," Jack answered.
In their expeditious preparations for departure he hummed no snatches of song as a paean of stretching muscles and the expansion of his being with the full tide of the conscious life of day; and this, too, was contrary to custom.
Before it was fairly light they were on the road, with Jack urging P.D. forward at a trot. The silence was soft with the shimmer of dawn; all glistening and still the roofs and trees of Little Rivers took form. The moist sweetness of its gardens perfumed the fresh morning air in greeting to the easy traveller, while the makers of gardens were yet asleep.
It was the same hour that Mary had hurried forth after her wakeful night to stop the duel in thearroyo. As Jack approached the Ewold home he had a glimpse of something white, a woman's gown he thought, that disappeared behind the vines. He concluded that Mary must have risen early to watch the sunrise, and drew rein opposite the porch; but through the lace-work of the vines he saw that it was empty. Yet he was positive that he had seen her and that she must have seen him coming. She was missing the very glorious moment which she had risen to see. A rim of molten gold was showing in the defile and all the summits of the range were topped with flowing fire.
"Mary!" he called.
There was no answer. Had he been mistaken? Had mental suggestion played him a trick? Had his eyes personified a wish when they saw a figure on the steps?
"Mary!" he called again, and his voice was loud enough for her to have heard if she were awake and near. Still there was no answer.
The pass had now become a flaming vortex which bathed him in its far-spreading radiance. But he had lost interest in sunrises. A last backward, hungry glance over his shoulder as he started gave him a glimpse through the open door of the living-room, and he saw Mary leaning against the table looking down at her hands, which were half clasped in her lap, as if she were waiting for him to get out of the way.
Thus he understood that he had ended their comradeship when he had broken through the barrier on the previous afternoon, and the only thing that could bring it back was the birth of a feeling in her greater than comradeship. His shoulders fell together, the reins loosened, while P.D., masterless if not riderless, proceeded homeward.
"Hello, Jack!"
It was the greeting of Bob Worther, the inspector of ditches, who was the only man abroad at that hour. Jack looked up with an effort to be genial and found Bob closely studying his features in a stare.
"What's the matter, Bob?" he asked. "Has my complexion turned green over night or my nose slipped around to my ear?"
"I was trying to make out if you do look like him!" Bob declared.
"Like whom? What the deuce is the mystery?"
"What—why, of course you're the most interested party and the onlyLittle Riversite that don't know about it, seh!"
After all, there was some compensation for early rising. Bob expanded with the privilege of being the first to break the news.
"If you'd come yesterday you'd have seen him. He went by the noon train," he said, and proceeded with the story of Prather.
Jack had never heard of the man before and was obviously uninterested. He did not seem to care if a dozen doubles came to town.
"Oh, yes, there's another thing concerning you," Bob continued. "I was so interested in telling you about Prather that I near forgot it. A swell-looking fellow—says he's a doctor and he's got New York written all over him—came in yesterday particularly to see you."
Though it was a saying in Little Rivers that nobody ever found Jack at a loss, he started perceptibly now. His fingers worked nervously on the reins and he bit his lips in irritation.
"He was asking a lot of questions about you," Bob added.
By this time Jack had summoned back his smile. He did not seem to mind if a dozen doctors came to town at the same time as a dozen doubles.
"Did you tell him that I had a cough—kuh-er?" he asked, casually.
"Why, no! I said you could thrash your weight in wildcats and he says, 'Well, he'll have to, yet!' and then shut up as if he'd overspoke himself—and I judge that he ain't the kind that does that often. But say, Jack," Bob demanded, in the alarm of local partisanship which apprehends that it may unwittingly have served an outside interest, "did you want us to dope it out that you were an invalid? We ain't been getting you in wrong, I hope?"
"Not a bit!" answered Jack with a reassuring slap on Bob's shoulder. "Was his name Bennington?"
"Yes, that's it."
"Well," said Jack thoughtfully and with a return of his annoyance, "he will find me at home when he calls." And P.D. knew that the reins were still held in listless hands as he turned down the side street toward the new ranch.
Firio was feeling like an astrologer who had lost faith in his crystal ball. An interrogation had taken the place of his confident "Sí, sí" of desert understanding of the mind of his patron. Jack had broken camp with the precipitancy of one who was eager to be quit of the trail and back at the ranch; yet he gave his young trees only a passing glance before entering the house. He had not wanted coffee on the road, yet coffee served with the crisp odor of bacon accompanying its aroma, after his bath and return to ranch clothes, found no appetite. He was as a man whose mind cannot hold fast to anything that he is doing. Firio, restless, worried, his eyes flicking covert glances, was frequently in and out of the living-room on one excuse or another.
"What work to-day?" he asked, as he cleared away the breakfast dishes."What has Señor Jack planned for us to do?"
"The work to-day? The work to-day?" Jack repeated absently. "First the mail." He nodded toward a pile on the table.
"And I shall make ready to stay a long time?" Firio insinuated softly.
"No!" Jack answered to space.
The pyramid of mail might have been a week's batch for the Doge himself. At the bottom were a number of books and above them magazines which Jack had subscribed for when he found that they were not on the Doge's list. There was only one letter as a first-class postage symbol of the exile's intimacy with the outside world, and out of this tumbled a check and a blank receipt to be filled in. He tore off the wrappers of the magazines as a means of some sort of physical occupation and rolled them into balls, which he cast at the waste-basket; but neither the contents of the magazines nor those of the newspapers seemed to interest him. His aspect was that of one waiting in a lobby to keep an appointment.
When he heard steps on the porch he sang out cheerily, "Come in!" but, contrary to the habit of Little Rivers hospitality, he did not hasten to meet his caller, and any keenness of anticipation which he may have felt was well masked.
There entered a man of middle age, with close-cropped gray beard, clad in soft flannels, the trousers bottoms turned up in New York fashion for negligee business suits for that spring. To the simple interior of a western ranch house he brought the atmosphere of complex civilization as a thing ineradicably bred into his being. It was evident, too, that he had been used to having his arrival in any room a moment of importance which summoned the rapt attention of everybody, whether nurses, fellow physicians, or the members of the patient's family. But this time that was lacking. The young man leaning against the table was not visibly impressed.
"Hello, doctor!" said Jack, as unconcernedly as he would have passed the time of day with Jim Galway in the street.
"Hello, Jack!" said the doctor.
Jack went just half-way across the room to shake hands. Then he dropped back to his easy position, with the table as a rest, after he had set a chair for the visitor.
"How do you like Little Rivers?" Jack asked.
"I have been here only thirty-six hours," answered the doctor, avoiding a direct answer. He was pulling off his silk summer gloves, making the operation a trifle elaborate, one which seemed to require much attention. "I came pretty near mistaking another man for you, but his mole patch saved me. I didn't think you could have grown one out here. Wonderfully like you! Have you met him?"
He glanced up as he asked this question, which seemed the first to occur to him as a warming-up topic of conversation before he came to the business in hand.
"No. I have just heard of him," Jack answered.
The doctor smiled at his gloves, which he now folded and put in his pocket. Don't the lecturers to young medical students say, "Divert your patient's mind to some topic other than himself as you get your first impression"? Now Dr. Bennington drew forward in his chair, rested the tips of the long fingers of a soft, capable hand on the edge of the table, and looked up to Jack in professional candor, sweeping him with the knowing eye of the modern confessor of the secrets of all manner of mankind. With the other hand he drew a stethoscope from his side coat-pocket.
"Well, Jack, you can guess what brought me all the way from New York—just five minutes' work!" and he gave the symbol of examination a flourish in emphasis.
"I don't think I have forgotten the etiquette of the patient on such occasions," Jack returned. "It is an easy function in this Arizona climate."
He drew his shirt up from a compact loin and lean middle, revealing the arch of his deep chest, the flesh of which was healthy pink under neck and face plated with Indian tan. The doctor's eyes lighted with the bliss of a critic used to searching for flaws at sight of a masterpiece. While he conducted the initial plottings with the rubber cup which carried sounds to one of the most expensive senses of hearing in America, Jack was gazing out of the window, as if his mind were far away across the cactus-spotted levels.
"Breathe deep!" commanded the doctor.
Jack's nostrils quivered with the indrawing of a great gust of air and his diaphragm swelled until his ribs were like taut bowstrings.
"And you were the pasty-faced weakling that left my office five years ago—and you, you husky giant, have brought me two thousand miles to see if you were really convalescent!"
"I hope the trip will do you good!" said Jack, sweetly.
"But it is great news that I take back, great news!" said the doctor, as he put the stethoscope in his pocket.
"Yes?" returned Jack, slipping his head through his shirt. "You don't find even a speck?"
"Not a speck! No sign of the lesion! There is no reason why you should not have gone home long ago."
"No?" Jack was fastening his string tie and doing this with something of the urban nicety with which the doctor had folded his gloves. That tie was one of the few inheritances from complex civilization which still had Jack's favor.
"What have you found to do all these years?"
Jack was surprised at the question.
"I have just wandered about and read and thought," he explained.
"Without developing any sense of responsibility?" demanded the doctor in exasperation.
"I have tried to be good to my horses, and of late I have taken to ranching. There is a lot of responsibility in that and care, too. Take the scale, for instance!"
"A confounded little ranch out in this God-forsaken place, that a Swede immigrant might run!"
"No, the Swedes aren't particularly good at irrigation, though better than the Dutch. You see, the Hollanders are used to having so much water that—"
Jack was leaning idly against the table again. The fashionable practitioner, accustomed to having his words accepted at their cost price in gold, broke in hotly:
"It is past all understanding! You, the heir to twenty millions!"
"Is it twenty now?" Jack asked softly and sadly.
"Nearer thirty, probably! And shirking your duty! Shirking and for what—for what?"
Jack faced around. The doctor, meeting a calm eye that was quizzically challenging, paused abruptly, feeling that in some way he had been caught at a professional disadvantage in his outburst of emotion.
"Don't you like Little Rivers?" asked Jack.
"I should be bored to death!" the doctor admitted, honestly.
"Well, you see this air never healed a lesion for you! You never uttered a prayer to it for strength with every breath! And, doctor," Jack hesitated, while his lips were half open, showing his even teeth slightly apart in the manner of a break in a story to the children where he expected them to be very attentive to what was coming, "you can take a piece of tissue and analyze it, yes, a piece of brain tissue and find all the blood-vessels, but not what a man was thinking, can you? Until you can take a precipitate of his thoughts—the very thoughts he is unconscious of himself—and put them under a microscope, why, there must be a lot of guesswork about the source of all unconventional human actions."
Jack laughed over his invasion of psychology; and when he laughed in a certain way the impulse to join him was strong, as Mary first found on the pass. So the doctor laughed, partly in relief, perhaps, that this uncertain element which he was finding in Jack had not yet proved explosive.
"That would make a capital excuse for a student flunking in examinations!" he said.
"It might be a worthy one—not that I say it ought to pass him."
"Now, Jack," the doctor began afresh, the reassuring force of his personality again in play.
He took a step and raised his hands as if he would put them on Jack's shoulders. One could imagine him driving hypochondria out of many a patient's mind by thus making his own vigorous optimism flow down from his fingertips, while he looked into the patient's eye. But his hands remained in the air, though Jack had been only smiling at him. This was not the way to handle this patient, something told his trained, sensitive instinct in time, and he let his hands fall in semblance of a gesture of protest, gave a shrug and came directly to the point very genuinely.
"Well, Jack—your father!"
"Yes." And Jack's face was still and blank, while shadows played over it in a war among themselves. "He did not even tell me you were coming," he added.
"Perhaps he feared that it would give you time to develop a cough or you would start overland to Chihuahua so I should miss you. Jack, he needs you! All that fortune waits for you!"
"Now that I am strong, yes! He did not come out to see me even during the first year when I had not the health to go to him, nor did he think to come with you."
"He—he is a very busy man!" explained the doctor, in ready championship. And yet he looked away from Jack, and when he looked back it was with an appeal to conscience rather than to filial affection. "Is it right to remain, however much you like this desert life? Have you any excuse?"
"Yes, an overwhelming one!" exclaimed Jack in a voice that was high-pitched and determined, while his eyes burned and no trace of humor remained on lips that were as firm as the outline of his chin. "Yes, one that thrills me from head to foot with the steady ardor of the soldier who makes a siege!"
"I—I—you are beyond me! Then you will stay? You are not coming home?"
"Yes," Jack answered, in another mood, but one equally rigid. "I am coming at once. That was all settled last night under the stars. I have found the courage!"
"The courage to go to twenty millions!" gasped the doctor. "But—good! You will go! That is enough! Why shouldn't we take the same train back?" he went on enthusiastically. "I shall be coming through here in less than a week. You see, I am so near California that I simply had to steal a few days with my sister, who can't come East on account of her health. I have been so tied down to practice that I have not seen her for fifteen years. That will give you time to arrange your affairs. How about it?"
"It would be delightful, but—" Jack was hesitating. "No, I will refuse. You see, I rode horseback when I entered this valley for the first time and I should like to ride out in the way I came. Just sentiment!"
"Jack!" exclaimed the doctor.
He was casting about how to express his suspicion when something electric checked him—a current that began in Jack's measured glance. Jack was not mentioning that his word was being questioned, but something still and effective that came from far away out on the untrod desert was in the room. It fell on the nerves of the ambassador from the court of complex civilization like a sudden hush on a city's traffic. Jack broke the silence by asking, in a tone of lively hospitality:
"You will join me at luncheon?"
"I should like to," answered the doctor, "but I can catch a train on the other trunk line that will give me a few more hours with my sister. And what shall I wire your father? Have you any suggestion?"
"Why, that he will be able to judge for himself in a few days how near cured I am."
"You will wire him the date of your arrival?"
"Yes."
"Jack," said the doctor at the door, "that remark of yours about the analysis of brain tissue and of thought put a truth very happily. Come and see me and let me know how you get on. Good-by!"
He took his departure thoughtfully, rather than with a sense of triumph over the success of a two-thousand-mile mission in the name of twenty millions.
It was the thing thrilling him with the ardor of a soldier preparing for a siege that sent Jack to the Ewolds' later in the morning. He had come determined to finish the speech that he had called up to Mary from the canyon. As he crossed the cement bridge, Ignacio appeared on the path and took his position there obdurately, instead of standing to one side with a nod, as usual, to let the caller pass.
"Señorita Ewold is not at home!" he announced, before Jack had spoken.
"Not even in the garden?"
"No, señor."
"But she will be back soon?"
"I do not think so."
Ignacio's face was as blank as a wall, but knowingly, authoritatively blank. His brown eyes glistened with cold assurance. He seemed to have become the interpreter of a message in keeping with Mary's flight from the pass and her withdrawal from the porch when she had seen Jack approaching. Here was a new barrier which did not permit even banter across the crest. She must know that he was going, for the news of his approaching departure had already spread through the town. She had chosen not to see him again, even for a farewell.
For a little time he stood in thought, while Ignacio remained steadfast on the path, watchful, perhaps, for the devil in Señor Don't Care to appear. Suddenly Jack's features glowed with action; he took a step as if he would sweep by Ignacio on into the garden. But the impulse instantly passed. He stopped, his face drawn as it had been when he fell limp against the hedge stricken by the horror of his seeming brutality to Pedro Nogales, and turned away into the street with a mask of smiles for the greetings and regrets of the friends whom he met.
Worth twenty millions or twenty cents, he was still Jack to Little Rivers; still the knight who had come over the range to vanquish Pete Leddy; still a fellow-rancher in the full freemasonry of calloused hands; still the joyous teller of stories. The thought of losing him set tendrils in the ranchers' hearts twitching in sympathy with tendrils in his own, which he found rooted very deep now that he must tear them out.
That afternoon at the appointed hour for his departure every man, woman, and child had assembled at the end of the main street, where it broke into the desert trail. The principal found an excuse for dismissing school an hour earlier than usual. That is, everyone was present except Mary. The Doge came, if a little late, to fulfil his function as chosen spokesman for all in bidding Jack Godspeed on his journey.
"Señor Don't Care, you are a part of the history of Little Rivers!" he said, airily. "You have brought us something which we lacked in our singularly peaceful beginning. Without romance, sir, no community is complete. I have found you a felicitous disputant whom I shall miss; for you leave me to provide the arguments on both sides of a subject on the same evening. Our people have found you a neighbor of infinite resources of humor and cheer. We wish you a pleasant trail. We wish you warm sunshine when the weather is chill and shade when the weather is hot, and that you shall ever travel with a singing heart, while old age never overtakes the fancy of youth."
Every one of the familiar faces grouped around the fine, cultured old face of the Doge expressed the thoughts to which he had given form.
"May your arguments be as thick as fireflies, O Doge!" Jack answered, "everyone bearing a torch to illumine the outer darkness of ignorance! May every happy thought I have for Little Rivers spring up in a date-tree wonderful! Then, before the year is out, you will have a forest of date-trees stretching from foothills to foothills, across the whole valley."
"And one more about the giant with the little voice and the dwarf with the big voice and the cat with the stripes down her back!" cried Belvy Smith, spokeswoman for the children. "Are they just going on forever having adventures and us never knowing about them?"
"No. I have been holding back the last story," Jack said. "Both the giant and the dwarf were getting old, as you all know, and they were pretty badly battered up from their continual warfare. Why, the scar which the giant got on his forehead in their last battle was so big that if the dwarf had had it there would have been no top left to his head. After the cat had lost that precious black tip to her tail she became more and more thoughtful. She made up her mind to retire and reform and have a permanent home. And you know what a gift she had for planning out things and how clever she was about getting her own way. Now she sat in a hedge corner thinking and thinking and looking at the stubby end of her tail, and suddenly she cried, 'Eureka!' And what do you think she did? She went to a paint shop and had her left ear painted yellow and her right ear painted green. So, now you can see her any day sunning herself on the steps of the cottage where the giant and the dwarf live in peace. Whenever they have an inclination to quarrel she jumps between them and wiggles the yellow ear at the giant and the green ear at the dwarf, which fusses them both so that they promise to be good and rush off to get her a saucer of milk."
"A green ear and a yellow ear! What a funny looking cat she must be!" exclaimed Belvy.
"So she says to herself between purrs," concluded Jack. "But she is a philosopher and knows that she would look still funnier if she had lost her ears as Jag Ear has. Good-by, children! Good-by, everybody! Good-by, Little Rivers!"
Jack gave P.D. a signal and the crowd broke into a cheer, which was punctuated by the music of Jag Ear's bells as his burrohood got in motion. The Doge, who had brought his horse, mounted.
"I will ride a little distance with you," he said.
He appeared like a man who had a great deal on his mind and yet was at a loss for words. There was the unprecedented situation of silence between the two exponents of persiflage in Little Rivers.
"I—" he began, and paused as if the subject were too big for him and it were better not to begin at all. Then he drew rein.
"Luck, Jack!" he said, simply, and there was something like pity in his tone.
"And Mary—you will say good-by to her and thank her!" said Jack.
"I think you may meet her," answered the Doge. "She went away early taking her luncheon, before she knew that you were going."
So Ignacio had been acting on his own authority! The thrill of the news singing in Jack's veins was too overwhelming for him to notice the challenge and apprehension in the Doge's glance. The Doge saw the glow of a thousand happy, eager thoughts in Jack's face. He hesitated again on the brink of speech, before, with a toss of his leonine head as if he were veritably leaving fate's affairs to fate, he turned to go; and Jack mechanically touched P.D.'s rein, while he gazed toward the pass. P.D. had not gone many steps when Jack heard the same sonorous call that had greeted him that first night when he stopped before the door of the Ewolds; the call of a great, infectious fellowship between men:
"Luck, Sir Chaps! I defy you to wear your spurs up the Avenue! Give my love to that new Campanile in Babylon, the Metropolitan tower! Get it in the mist! Get it under the sun! Kiss your hand to golden Diana, huntress of Manhattan's winds! Say ahoy to old Farragut! And on gray days have a look for me at the new Sorollas in the Museum! Luck, Sir Chaps!"
"Good crops and a generous mail, O Doge!"
Jack rode fast, in the gladness of a hope this side of the pass and in the face of shadows on the other side which he did not attempt to define. To Firio he seemed to have grown taller and older.
Apprehensively he watched the end of the ribbon running under P.D.'s hoofs for the sight of a horsewoman breaking free of the foothills. The momentary fear which rode with him was that Mary might be returning earlier than usual. If they met on the road—why, the road was without imagination and, in keeping with her new attitude toward him, she might pass him by with a nod. But at the top of the pass imagination would be supreme. There they had first met; there they had found their first thought in common in the ozone which had meant life to them both.
He did not look up at the sky changes. As he climbed the winding path worn by moccasined feet before the Persians marched to Thermopylae, his mind was too occupied making pictures of its own in glowing anticipation to have any interest in outside pictures. This path was narrow. Here, at least, she must pause; and she must listen. Every turn which showed another empty stretch ahead sent his spirits soaring. Then he saw a pony with an empty side-saddle on the shelf. A few steps more and he saw Mary.
She was seated with the defile at her back, her hands clasped over her knee. In this position, as in every position which she naturally took, she had a pliant and personal grace. The welter of light of the low sun was ablaze in her face. Her profile had a luminous wistfulness. Her lashes were half closed, at once retaining the vision of the panorama at her feet as a thing of atmospheric enjoyment and shutting it out from the intimacy of her thoughts. And more enveloping than the light was the silence which held her in a spell as still as the rocks themselves, waiting on time's dispensation where time was nothing. Yet the soft movement of her bosom with her even breaths triumphed in a life supreme and palpitant over all that dead world.
Thus he drank her in before the crunch of a stone under his heel warned her of his presence and set her breaths going and coming in quick gusts as she wheeled around, half rising and then dropping back to a position as still as before, with a trace of new dignity in her grace, while her starkness of inquiry gradually changed to stoicism.
"Mary, I came upon you very suddenly," he said.
"Yes"—a bare, echoing monosyllable.
He stepped to one side to let Firio and his little cavalcade pass. All the while she continued to look at him through the screen of her half-closed lashes in a way that set her repose and charm apart as something precious and cold and baffling. Now he realized that he had made a breach in the barrier of their old relations only to find himself in a garden whose flowers fell to ashes at his touch. He saw the light that enveloped her as an armor far less vulnerable than any wall, and the splendor of her was growing in his eyes.
Jag Ear's bells with their warm and merry notes became a faint tinkle that was lost in the depths of the defile. The two were alone on the spot where the Eternal Painter had introduced them so simply as Jack and Mary, and where he, as the easy traveller, had listened to her plead for his own life. It was his turn to plead. She was not to be won by fighting Leddys or tearing up pine-trees by their roots. That armor was without a joint; a lance would bend like so much tin against its plates, and yet there must be some alchemy that would make it melt as a mist before the sun. It was tenanted by a being all sentiency, which saw him through her visor as a passer-by in a gallery. But one in armor does not fly from passers-by as she had flown while he was climbing up the canyon wall with his pine-tree branch.
"I have learned now to look over any kind of a precipice without getting dizzy," she announced, quietly.
He was not the Jack who had come over the ledge in the energy of his passion yesterday to find her gone. He had turned gentle and was smiling with craved permission for a respite from her evident severity as he dropped to a half-lying posture near her. Overhead, the Eternal Painter was throwing in the smoky purple of a false thunderhead, sweeping it away with the promise of a downpour, rolling in piles of silver clouds and drawing them out into filmy fingers melting into a luminous blue.
"One can never tire of this," he said, tentatively.
"To me it is all!" she answered, in an absorption with the scene that made him as inconsequential as the rocks around her.
"And you never long for cities, with their swift currents and busy eddies?" he asked.
"Cities are life, the life of humanity, and I am human. I—" The unfinished sentence sank into the silence of things inexpressible or which it was purposeless to express.
Her voice suggested the tinkle of Jag Ear's bells floating away into space. If a precipitate were taken from her forehead, in keeping with Jack's suggestion to Dr. Bennington, it would have been mercury, which is so tangible to the eye and intangible to the touch. Press it and it breaks into little globules, only to be shaken together in a coherent whole. If there is joy or pain in the breaking, either one must be glittering and immeasurable.
"But Little Rivers is best," she added after a time, speaking not to him, but devoutly to the oasis of green.
In the crystal air Little Rivers seemed so near that one could touch the roofs of the houses with the fingertips of an extended arm, and yet so diminutive in the spacious bosom of the plateau that it might be set in the palm of the hand.
Jack was as one afraid of his own power of speech. A misplaced word might send her away as oblivious of him as a globule of mercury rolling free from the grasp. Here was a Mary unfathomed of all his hazards of study, undreamed of in all his flights of fancy.
"It is my last view," he began. "I have said all my good-bys in town. I am going."
Covertly, fearfully, he watched the effect of the news. At least now she would look around at him. He would no longer have to talk to a profile and to the golden mist of the horizon about the greatest thing of his life. But there was no sign of surprise; not even an inclination of her head.
"Yes," she told the horizon; and after a little silence added: "The time has come to play another part?"
She asked the question of the horizon, without any trace of the old banter over the wall. She asked it in confirmation of a commonplace.
"I know that you have always thought of me as playing a part. But I am not my own master. I must go. I—"
"Back to your millions!" She finished the sentence for him.
"Then you—you knew! You knew!" But his exclamation of astonishment did not move her to a glance in his direction or even a tremor.
"Yes," she went on. "Father told me about your millions last night. He has known from the first who you were."
"And he told no one else in Little Rivers? He never mentioned it to me or even to you before!"
"Why should he when you did not mention it yourself? His omission was natural delicacy, in keeping with your own attitude. Isn't it part of the custom of Little Rivers that pasts melt into the desert? There is no standard except the conduct of the present!"
And all this speech was in a monotone of quiet explanation.
"He did not even tell you until last night! Until after our meeting on the other side of the pass! It is strange! strange!" he repeated in the insistence of wonder.
He saw the lashes part a little, then quiver and close as she lifted her gaze from the horizon rim to the vortex of the sun. Then she smiled wearily.
"He likes a joke," she said. "Probably he enjoyed his knowledge of your secret and wanted to see if I would guess the truth before you were through playing your part."
"But the part was not a part!" he said, with the emphasis of fire creeping along a fuse. "It was real. I do not want to leave Little Rivers!"
"Not in your present enthusiasm," she returned with a warning inflection of literalness, when he would have welcomed satire, anger, or any reprisal of words as something live and warm; something on which his mind could lay definite hold.
In her impersonal calm she was subjecting him to an exquisite torture. He was a man flayed past all endurance, flayed by a love that fed on the revelation of a mystery in her being superbly in control. The riot of all the colors of the sky spoke from his eyes as he sprang to his feet. He became as intense as in the supreme moment in thearroyo; as reckless as when he walked across the store toward a gun-muzzle. Only hers were this time the set, still features. His were lighted with all the strength of him and all the faith of him.
"A part!" he cried. "Yes, a part—a sovereign and true part which I shall ever play! I was going that day we first met, going before the legate of the millions came to me. Why did I stay? Because I could not go when I saw that you wanted to turn me out of the garden!"
His quivering words were spoken to a profile of bronze, over which flickered a smile as she answered with a prompting and disinterested analysis.
"You said it was to make callouses on your hands. But that must have been persiflage. The truth is that you imagined a challenger. You wanted to win a victory!" she answered.
"It was for you that I calloused my hands!"
"Time will make them soft!"
She was half teasing now, but teasing through the visor, not over the wall.
"And if I sought victory I saw that I was being beaten while I made a profession of you, not of gardening! Yes, of you! I could confess it to all the world and its ridicule!"
"Jack, you are dramatic!"
If she would only once look at him! If he could only speak into her eyes!If her breaths did not come and go so regularly!
"Why did I take to the trail after Pedro Nogales struck at me with his knife? Because I saw the look on your face when you saw that I had broken his arm. I had not meant to break his arm—yet I know that I might have done worse but for you! I did not mean to kill Leddy—yet there was something in me which might have killed him but for you!"
"I am glad to have prevented murder!" she answered almost harshly.
A shadow of horror, as if in recollection of the scene in thearroyoand beside the hedge, passed over her face.
"Yes, I understand! I understand!" he said. "And you must hear why this terrible impulse rose in me."
"I know."
"You know? You know?" he repeated.
"About the millions," she corrected herself, hastily. "Go on, Jack, if you wish!" Urgency crept into her tone, the urgency of wishing to have done with a scene which she was bearing with the fortitude of tightened nerves.
"It was the millions that sent me out here with a message, when I did not much care about anything, and their message was: 'We do not want to see you again if you are to be forever a weakling. Get strong, for our power is to the strong! Get strong, or do not come back!'"
"Yes?"
For the first time since he had begun his story she looked fairly at him. It was as if the armor had melted with sympathy and pity and she, in the pride of the poverty of Little Rivers, was armed with a Samaritan kindliness. For a second only he saw her thus, before she looked away to the horizon and he saw that she was again in armor.
"And I craved strength! It was my one way to make good. I rode the solitudes, following the seasons, getting strength. I rejoiced in the tan of my arm and the movement of my own muscles. I learned to love the feel of a rifle-stock against my shoulder, the touch of the trigger to my finger's end. I would shoot at the cactus in the moonlight—oh, that is difficult, shooting by moonlight!—and I gloried in my increasing accuracy—I, the weakling of libraries and galleries and sunny verandas of tourist resorts! Afraid at first of a precipice's edge, I came to enjoy looking over into abysses and in spending a whole day climbing down into their depths, while Firio waited in camp. And at times I would cry out: 'Millions, I am strong! I am not afraid of you! I am not afraid of anything!' In the days when I knew I could never be acceptable as their master I knew I was in no danger of ever having to face them. When I had grown strong, less than ever did I want to face them. I know not why, but I saw shadows; I looked into another kind of depths—mental depths—which held a message that I feared. So I procrastinated, staying on in the air which had given me red blood. But that was cowardly, and that day I came over the pass I was making my last ride in the kingdom of irresponsibility. I was going home!
"When you asked me not to face Leddy I simply had to refuse. I had just as soon as not that Leddy would shoot at me, because I wanted to see if he would. Yes, I was strong. I had conquered. And if Leddy hit me, why, I did not have to go back to battle with the shadows—the obsession of shadows which had grown in my mind as my strength grew. When I was smiling in Leddy's muzzle, as they say I did, I was just smiling exultantly at the millions that had called me a weakling, and saying, like some boaster, 'Could you do this, millions?' I—I—well, Mary, I—I have told you what I never was quite able to tell myself before."
"Thank you, Jack!" she answered, and all the particles of sunlight that bathed her seemed to reflect her quiet gladness as something detached, permeating, and transcendent.
"When Leddy challenged me I wanted to fight," he went on. "I wanted to see how cool I, the weakling whom the millions scorned, could be in battle. After Leddy's shot in thearroyoI found that strength had discovered something else in me—something that had lain dormant in boyhood and had not awakened to any consciousness of itself in the five years on the desert—something of which all my boyhood training made me no less afraid than of the shadows, born of the blood, born of the very strength I had won. It seemed to run counter to books and gardens and peace itself—a lawless, devil-like creature! Yes, I gloried in the fact that I could kill Leddy. It was an intoxication to hold a steady bead on him. And you saw and felt that in me—yes, I tell you everything as a man must when he comes to a woman offering himself, his all, with his angels, his devils, and his dreams!"
He paused trembling, as before a judge. She turned quickly, with a sudden, winsome vivacity, the glow of a great satisfaction in her eyes and smiling a comradeship which made her old attitude over the wall a thing of dross and yet far more intimate. Her hand went out to meet his.
"Jack, we have had good times together," she said. "We were never mawkish; we were just good citizens of Little Rivers, weren't we? And, Jack, every mortal of us is partly what he is born and the rest is what he can do to bend inheritance to his will. But we can never quite transform our inheritance and if we stifle it, some day it will break loose. The first thing is to face what seems born in us, and you have made a good beginning."
She gave his hands a nervous, earnest clasp and withdrew hers as she rose. So they stood facing each other, she in the panoply of good will, he with his heart on his sleeve. The swiftly changing pictures of the Eternal Painter in his evening orgy seemed to fill the air with the music of a symphony in its last measures, and her very breaths and smiles to be keeping time with its irresistible movement toward the finale.
"I must be starting back, Jack," she said.
"And, Mary, I must learn how to master the millions. Oh, I have not the courage of the little dwarf pine in the canyon! Mary, Mary, I calloused my hands for you! I want to master the millions for you! I would give you the freedom of Little Rivers and all the cities of the world!"
"No, Jack! This is my side of the pass. I shall be very happy here."
"Then I will stay in Little Rivers! I will leave the millions to the shadows! I will stay on ranch-making, fortune-making. Mary, I love you! I love you!"
There was no staying the flame of his feeling. He seized her hands; he drew her to him. But her hands were cold; they were shivering.
"Jack! No, no! It is not in the blood!" she cried in the face of some mocking phantom, her calmness gone and her words rocking with the tumult of emotion.
"In the blood, Mary? What do you mean? What do you know that I don't know? Do you know those shadows that I cannot understand better than I?" he pleaded; and he was thinking of the Doge's look of pity and challenge and of the meeting long ago in Florence as the hazy filaments of a mystery.
"No, I should not have said that. What do I know? Little—nothing that will help! I know what is in me, as I know what is in you. I am afraid of myself—afraid of you!"
"Mary, I will fight all the shadows!" He drew her close to him resistlessly in his might.
"Jack, you will not use your strength against me! Jack!"
He saw her eyes in a mist of pain and reproach as he released her. And now she threw back her head; she was smiling in the philosophy of garden nonsense as she cried:
"Good-by, Jack! Luck against the dinosaur! Don't press him too hard when he is turning a sharp corner. Remember he has a long reach with his old paleozoic tail. Luck!" with a laugh through her tears; a laugh with tremulous cheer in it and yet with the ring of a key in the lock of a gate.
Unsteadily he bent over and taking her hands in his pressed his lips to them.
"Yes, luck!" he repeated, and half staggering turned toward the defile.
"Luck!" she called after him when he was out of sight. "Luck!" she called to the silence of the pass.
Three days with the trail and the Eternal Painter mocking him, when the singing of Spanish verses that go click with the beat of horse-hoofs in the sand sounded hollow as the refrain of vain memories, and from the steps of a Pullman he had a final glimpse of Firio's mournful face, with its dark eyes shining in the light of the station lamp. Firio had in his hand a paper, a sort of will and testament given him at the last minute, which made him master in fee simple of the ranch where he had been servant, with the provision that the Doge of Little Rivers might store his overflow of books there forever.
Behold Jack clad in the habiliments of conventional civilization taken from the stock of ready-made suitings in an El Paso store! They were of the Moscowitz and Guggenheim type, the very latest and nattiest, as advertised in popular prints. The dealer said that no gentleman could be well dressed without them. He wanted to complete the transformation with a cream-colored Fedora or a brown derby.
"I'll wait on the thirty-third degree a little longer," said Jack, fondling the flat-brimmed cowpuncher model of affectionate predilection. Swinging on a hook on the sleeper with the sway of the train, its company was soothing to him all the way across the continent.
The time was March, that season of the northern year when winter growing stale has a gritty, sticky taste and the relief of spring seems yet far away. After the desert air the steam heat was stifling and nauseating. Jack's head was a barrel about to burst its hoops; his skin drying like a mummy's; his muscles in a starchy misery from lack of exercise. He felt boxed up, an express package labelled and shipped. When he crawled into his berth at night it was with a sense of giving himself up to asphyxiation at the whim of strange gods.
If you have ever come back to town after six months in the woods, six months far from the hysteria of tittering electric bells, the brassy honk-honk of automobiles, the clang of surface cars and the screech of their wheels on the rails, multiply your period of absence by ten, add a certain amount of desert temperament, and you will vaguely understand how the red corpuscles were raising rebellion in Jack's artery walls on the morning of his journey's end. From the ferryboat on the dull-green bosom of the river he first renewed his memory of the spectral and forbidding abysses and pinnacles of New York. Here time is everything; here man has done his mightiest in contriving masses to imitate the architectural chaos of genesis. A mantle of chill, smoky mist formed the dome of heaven, in which a pale, suffused, yellowish spot alone bespoke the existence of a sun in the universe.
In keeping with his promise to Dr. Bennington he had wired to his father, naming his train; and in a few minutes Wingfield, Sr. and Wingfield, Jr. would meet for the first time in five years. Jack was conscious of a faster beating of his heart and a feeling of awesome expectancy as the crowd debouched from the ferryboat. At the exit to the street a big limousine was waiting. The gilt initials on the door left no doubt for whom it had been sent. But there was no one to meet him, no one after his long absence except a chauffeur and a footman, who glanced at Jack sharply. After the exchange of a corroborative nod between them the footman advanced.
"If you please, Mr. Wingfield," he said, taking Jack's suit case.
"What would Jim Galway think of me now!" thought Jack. He put his head inside the car cautiously. "Another box!" he thought, this time aloud.
"You have the check for it, sir?" asked the footman, thinking that Jack was using the English of the mother island for trunk.
"No. That's all my baggage."
In the tapering, cut-glass vase between the two front window-panels of the "box" was a rose—a symbol of the luxury of the twenty millions, evidently put there regularly every morning by direction of their master. Its freshness and color appealed to Jack. He took it out and pressed it to his nostrils.
"Just needs the morning sun and the dew to be perfect," he said to the amazed attendants; "and I will walk if you will take the suit case to the house."
He kept the rose, which he twirled in his fingers as he sauntered across town, now pausing at curb corners to glance back in thoughtful survey, now looking aloft at the peaks of Broadway which lay beyond the foothills of the river-front avenues.
"All to me what the desert is to other folks!" he mused; "desert, without any cacti or mesquite! All the trails cross one another in a maze. A boxed-up desert—boxes and boxes piled on top of one another! Everybody in harness and attached by an invisible, unbreakable, inelastic leash to a box, whither he bears his honey or goes to nurse his broken wings!—so it seems to me and very headachy!"
At Madison Square he was at the base of the range itself; and halting on the corner of Twenty-third Street and the Avenue he was a statue as aloof as the statue of Farragut from his surroundings. Salt sea spray ever whispers in the atmosphere around the old sailor. How St. Gaudens created it and keeps it there in the heart of New York is his secret. Possibly the sculptor put some of his soul into it as young Michael Angelo did into his young David.
It is a great thing to put some of your soul into a thing, whether it is driving a nail or moulding a piece of clay into life. There are men who pause before the old Admiral and see the cutwater of men-of-war's bows and hear the singing of the signal halyards as they rise with the command to close in. Perhaps the Eternal Painter had put a little of his soul into the heart of Jack; for some busy marchers of the Avenue trail as they glanced at him saw the free desert and heard hoof-beats in the sand. Others seeing a tanned Westerner kissing his hand to Diana of Madison Square Garden probably thought him mad. Next, performing another sentimental errand for the Doge of Little Rivers, his gaze rose along the column of the Metropolitan tower. Its heights were half shrouded in mist, through which glowed the gold of the lantern.
"Oh, bully! bully!" he thought. "The only sun in sight a manufactured one, shining on top of a manufactured mountain! It is a big business building a mountain; only, when God Almighty scattered so many ready-made ones about, why take the trouble?" he concluded. "Or so it seems to me," he added, sadly, in due appreciation of the utterly reactionary mood of a man who has been boxed up for a week.
Now he turned toward a quarter which he had, thus far, kept out of the compass of observation. He looked up the jagged range of Broadway where, over a terra-cotta pile, floated a crimson flag with "John Wingfield" in big, white letters.
"My mountain! My box! My millions!" he breathed half audibly.
How the people whom he passed, their faces speaking city keenness of ambition, must envy his position! How little reason they had to envy him, he thought, as he walked around the great building and saw his name glaring at him in gilt letters over the plate-glass windows and on all the delivery wagons, open-mouthed for the packages being wheeled out under the long glass awning.
"A whole block now! Yes, the doctor was right. It must be thirty instead of twenty millions!" he concluded, as his vision swept the straight-line, window-checkered mass of the twelve stories. "And I do wish we had a tower! If one could go up on top of a tower and look out over the range now and then and breathe deep, it would help."
When he entered the main door he paused in a maze, gazing at the acreage of counters manned by clerks and the aisles swarming with shoppers under the glare of the big, electric globes, and listening to the babble of shrill talk, the calls of the elevator boys, the coughing of the pneumatic tubes and the clang of the elevator doors. It was all like some devilishly complicated dream from which he would never awake. He must have a little time in order to orient himself before he could think rationally. The roar of the train still obsessed him; the air in the store seemed more stifling than that of the sleeper.
So he decided that, rather than be shot up into The Presence by the elevator, he would gradually scale the heights. Ascending stairway after stairway, he ranged back and forth over the floors, a stranger in his own wonderland. When he reached the eleventh floor, with only one more to the offices, the whole atmosphere seemed suddenly to turn rare with expectancy; a rustle to run through all the goods on the counters; the very Paris gowns among which he was standing to be called to martial attention.
"The boss!" he heard one of the model girls say.
Turning to follow her nod toward the stairway, Jack saw, two-thirds of the way up the broad flight, a man past middle age, in dark gray suit and neutral tie, rubbing his palms together as he surveyed a stratum of his principality. The sight of him to Jack was like the touch of a myriad electric needles that pricked sharply, without exhilaration.
"The boss is likely to run up that way any time of the day," said the model girl to a customer; "and what he don't see don't count!"
"Not much older; not much changed!" thought Jack; and his realization of the disinterestedness of his observation tipped the needles with acid.
In the sharpness of the master's button-counting survey there was swift finality; and his impressions completed, analyzed, docketed for reference, he ran on up the flight with light step, still rubbing the palms of his hands in the unctuously well-contained and appreciative sense of his power. To Jack he was a fascinating, grand, distant figure, this of his own father, yet mortally near.
If the model girl had had the same keenness of observation for what is borne in the face as for what is worn on the back, she could not have failed to note the strong family resemblance between the young man standing near her and the man who had paused on the stairway. This glimpse of his father's mastery of every detail of that organization which he had built, this glimpse of cool, self-centered authority, only reminded Jack of his own ignorance and flightiness in view of all that would be expected of him. He knew less than one of the cash girls about how to run the store. A duel with Leddy was a simple matter beside this battle he had to wage.