Chapter V: Part I: An Easy Traveller (5)

He rarely met positive enthusiasm in her and everything in him called for it at the moment. He found it so inspiring that the problem of the bed was settled easily by his consent to all her suggestions--a too-ready consent, she told herself.

"After all, it is your flower garden," she reminded him.

"No, every flower garden in Little Rivers is yours!" he declared.

The way he said this made her frown. She saw him taking a step on the other side of that barrier over which she mounted guard.

"Never make your hyperboles felonious!" she warned him. "Besides, if you are going to be a real Little Riversite you should have opinions of your own."

"I haven't any to-day--none except victory!" and he held out his palms, exhibiting their yellowish plates. "Look! Even corns on the joints!"

"Yes, they look quite real," she admitted, censoriously.

"Haven't I made good? Do you remember how you stood here on the very site of my house and lectured me? I would not work! I would not--"

"You have worked a little--a little!" she said grudgingly, and showed him as much of the wondrous sparkle in her eyes as he could see out of the corners between the lashes. She never allowed him to look into her eyes if she apprehended any attempt to cross the barrier. But she could see well enough out of the corners to know that his glances had a kind of hungry joy and a promise of some new demonstration in his attitude toward her. She must watch that barrier very shrewdly.

"Look at my hedge!" he went on. "It is knee-high already, and my umbrella-trees cast enough shade for anybody, if he will wrap himself around the trunk. But such things are ornamental. I have a more practical appeal. Come on!"

His elation was insistent, superior to any prickling gibes of banter, as they walked on the mealy earth between rows of young orange settings, and the sweet odor of drying alfalfa came to their nostrils, borne by a vagrant breeze. He swept his hand toward the field in a gesture of pride, his shoulders thrown back in a deep breath of exultation.

"The callouses win!" And he exhibited them again.

But she refused even to glance at them this time.

"You seem to think callouses phenomenal. Most people in Little Rivers accept them as they do the noses on their faces."

"They certainly are phenomenal on me. So is my first crop! My first crop! I'll be up at dawn to stack it--and then I'm no longer a neophyte. I am an initiate! I'm a real rancher! A holiday is due! I celebrate!"

He was rhapsodic and he was serious, too. She was provokingly flippant as an antidote for Marcus Aurelius, whom she was still carrying in the little flexible leather volume.

"How celebrate?" she inquired. "By walking through the town with a wisp of alfalfa in one hand and exhibiting the callouses on the other? or will you be drawn on a float by Jag Ear--a float labeled, 'The Idler Enjoying His Own Reform?' We'll all turn out and cheer."

"Amusing, but not dignified and not to my taste. No! I shall celebrate by a terrific spree--a ride to the pass!"

He turned his face toward the range, earnest in its transfixion and suffused with the spirit of restlessness and the call of the mighty rock masses, gray in their great ribs and purple in their abysses. She felt that same call as something fluid and electric running through the air from sky to earth, and set her lips in readiness for whatever folly he was about to suggest.

"A ride to the pass and a view of the sunset from the very top!" he cried. He looked down at her quickly, and all the force of the call he had transformed into a sunny, personal appeal, which made her avert her glance. "My day in the country--my holiday, if you will go with me! Will you, and gaze out over that spot of green in the glare of the desert, knowing that a little of it is mine?"

"Your orange-trees are too young. It's so far away they will hardly show," she ventured, surveying the distance to the pass judicially.

"Will you?"

"Why, to me a ride to the pass is not a thing to be planned a day beforehand," she said deliberately, still studiously observing Galeria. "It is a matter of momentary inspiration. Make it a set engagement and it is but a plodding journey. I can best tell in the morning," she concluded. "And, by the way, I see you haven't yet tried grafting plums on the alfalfa stalks."

"No. I have learned better. It is not consistent. You see, you mow alfalfa and you pick plums."

This return to drollery, in keeping with the prescribed order of their relations, made her look up in candid amusement over the barrier which for a moment he had been endangering.

"Honestly, Jack, you do improve," she said, with mock encouragement. "You seem to have mastered a number of the simple truths of age-old agricultural experience."

"But will you? Will you ride to the pass?"

He had the question launched fairly into her eyes. She could not escape it. He saw one bright flash, whether of real anger or simply vexation at his reversion to the theme he could not tell, and her lashes dropped; she ran the leaf edges of the austere Marcus back and forth in her fingers, thip-thip-thip. That was the only sound for some seconds, very long seconds.

"As I've already tried to make clear to you, it's such a businesslike thing to ride to the pass unless you have the inspiration," she remarked thoughtfully to Marcus. "Perhaps I shall get the inspiration on the way back to the house;" which was a signal that she was going. "And, by the way, Jack, to return to the object of my coming, if you have ideas of your own about flowers incorporate them; that is the way to develop your floricultural talent."

She turned away, but he followed. He was at her side and proceeding with her, his head bent toward her, boyishly, eagerly.

"You see, I have never been out to the pass," he remarked urgently.

"What! You--" she started in surprise and checked herself.

"Didn't I come by train?" he asked reprovingly.

"No!" she answered. Her eyes were level with the road, her voice was a little unnatural. "No! You came over the pass, Jack."

It was the first time in the months of his citizenship of Little Rivers that she had ever hinted anything but belief in the fiction that they had first met when he asked her to show him a parcel of land. She seemed to be calling a truth out of the past and grappling with it, while her lips tightened and she drew in her chin.

"Then I did come over the pass," he agreed; and after a pause added: "But there was no Pete Leddy."

"Yes, oh, yes--there was a Pete Leddy!"

"But he will not be there this time!"

And now his voice, in a transport that seemed to touch the cloud heights, was neither like the voice of the easy traveller on the pass, nor the voice of his sharp call to Leddy to disarm, nor the voice of the storyteller. It had a new note, a note startling to her.

"We shall be on the pass without Leddy and smiling over Leddy and thanking him for his unwitting service in making me stop in Little Rivers," he concluded.

"Yes, he did that," she admitted stoically, as if it were some oppressive fact for which she could offer no thanks.

"I want to see our ponies with their bridles hanging loose! I want the great silence! I want company, with imagination speaking from the sky and reality speaking from the patch of green out on the sea of gray! Will you?"

Their steps ran rhythmically together. His look was eager in anticipation, while she kept on running the leaves of the austere Marcus through her fingers. Her lips were half open, as if about to speak, but were without words; the thin, delicate nostrils trembled.

"Will you? Will you, because I kept the faith of callouses? Will you go forth and dream for a day? We'll tell fairy stories! We'll get a pole and prod the dinosaur through the narrow part of the pass and hear him roar his awfullest. Will you?"

Her fingers paused in the pages as if they had found a helpful passage. The chin tilted upward resolutely and he had a full view of her eyes, dancing with challenging lights. She was augustly, gloriously mischievous.

"Will you go in costume? Will you wear your spurs and the chaps and the silk shirt?"

The question said that it was not a time to be serious. It sprinkled the crest of the barrier with gleaming slivers of glass, which might give zest to words spoken across it, but would be most sharp to the touch.

"I will wear my spurs around my wrists, if you say, tie roses in the fringe of my chaps, bind my hat with a big red silk bandanna, and put streamers on P.D.'s bits!"

"That is too enticing for refusal," she answered, playfully. "I particularly want to hear the dinosaur roar."

They had come to the opening of the Ewold hedge, and they paused to consider arrangements. There was no one in sight on the street except Jim Galway, who was approaching at some distance.

"Shall we start in the morning and have luncheon at the foot of the range?" suggested Jack.

She favored an early afternoon start; he argued for his point of view, and in their preoccupation with the passage of arms they did not notice Pedro Nogales slipping along beside the hedge with soft steps, his hand under his jacket. A gleam out of the bosom of Pedro's jacket, a cry from Mary, and a knife flashed upward and drove toward Jack's neck.

Jack had seemed oblivious of his surroundings, his gaze centered on Mary. Yet he was able to duck backward so that the blade only slit open his shirt as Pedro, with the misdirected force of his blow, lunged past its object. Mary saw that face which had been laughing into hers, which had been so close to hers in its persistent smile of persuasion, struck white and rigid and a glint like that of the blade itself in the eyes. In a breath Jack had become another being of incarnate, unthinking physical power and swiftness. One hand seized Pedro's wrist, the other his upper arm, and Mary heard the metallic click of the knife as it struck the earth and the sickening sound of the bone of Pedro's forearm cracking. She saw Pedro's eyes bursting from their sockets in pain and fear; she saw Jack's still profile of unyielding will and the set muscles of his neck and the knitting muscles of his forearm driving Pedro over against the hedge, as if bent on breaking the Mexican's back in two, and she waited in frozen apprehension to hear another bone crack, even expecting Pedro's death cry.

"The devil is out of Señor Don't Care!" It was the voice of Ignacio, who had come around the house in time to witness the scene.

"What fearful strength! You will kill him!" It was the voice of the Doge, from the porch.

"Yes, please stop!" Mary pleaded.

Suddenly, at the sound of her cry, Jack released his hold. The strong column of his neck became apparently too weak to hold the weight of his head. Inert, he fell against the hedge for support, his hands hanging limp at his side, while he stared dazedly into space. It seemed then that Pedro might have picked up the knife and carried out his plan of murder without defence by the victim.

"Yes, yes, yes!" Jack repeated.

Pedro had not moved from the hollow in the hedge which the impress of his body had made. He was trembling, his lips had fallen away from his teeth, and he watched Jack in stricken horror, a beaten creature waiting on some judgment from which there was no appeal.

"We'll tell fairy stories"--Jack's soft tones of persuasion repeated themselves in Mary's ears in contrast to the effect of what she had just witnessed. Her hand slipped along the crest of the hedge, as if to steady herself.

"I'll change my mind about going to the pass, Jack," she said.

"Yes, Mary," he answered in a faint tone.

He looked around to see her back as she turned away from him; then, with an effort, he stepped free of the hedge.

"Come, we will go to the doctor!" he said to the Mexican.

He touched Pedro's shoulder softly and softly ran his hand down the sleeve in which the arm hung limp. Pedro had not moved; he still leaned against the hedge inanimate as a mannikin.

"Come! Your legs are not broken! You can walk!" said Jim Galway, who had come up in a hurry when he saw what was happening.

"Pedro, you will learn not to play with the devil in Señor Don't Care!" whispered Ignacio, while Mary had disappeared in the house and the Doge stood watching.

Jack had stroked Pedro's head while the bone was being set. He had arranged for Pedro's care. And now he was in his own yard with Jag Ear and the ponies, rubbing their muzzles alternately in silent impartiality, his head bowed reflectively as Firio came around the corner of the house. At first he half stared at Firio, then he surveyed the steeds of his long journeyings in questioning uncertainty, and then looked back at Firio, smiling wanly.

"Firio," he said, "I feel that I am a pretty big coward. Firio, I am full up--full to overflowing. My mind is stuffed with cobwebs. I--I must think things out. I must have the solitudes."

"The trail!" prescribed Doctor Firio.

After Jack had given his ranch in charge to Galway, he rode away in the dusk, not by the main street, but straight across the levels toward the pass.

XVII

THE DOGE SNAPS A RUBBER BAND

Jasper Ewold was a disciple of an old-fashioned custom that has fallen into disuse since the multiplicity of typewriters made writing for one's own pleasure too arduous; or, if you will have another reason, since our existence and feelings have become so complex that we can no longer express them with the simple directness of our ancestors. He kept a diary with what he called a perfect regularity of intermittency. A week might pass without his writing a single word, and again he might indulge freely for a dozen nights running. He wrote as much or as little as he pleased. He wrote when he had something to tell and when he was in the mood to tell it.

"It is facing yourself in your own ink," he said. "It is confessing that you are an egoist and providing an antidote for your egoism. Firstly, you will never be bored by your own past if you can appreciate your errors and inconsistencies. Secondly, you will never be tempted to bore others with your past as long as you wish to pose as a wise man."

He must have found, as you would find if you had left youth behind and could see yourself in your own ink, that the first tracery of any controlling factor in your life was faint and inconsequential to you at the time, without presage of its importance until you saw other lines, also faint and inconsequential in their beginnings, drawing in toward it to form a powerful current.

On the evening that Jack took to the trail again, Jasper Ewold had a number of thick notebooks out of the box in the library which he always kept locked, and placed them on the living-room table beside his easy chair, in which he settled himself. Mary was sewing while he pored over his life in review as written by his own hand. Her knowledge of the secrets of that chronicle from wandering student days to desert exile was limited to glimpses of the close lines of fine-written pages across the breadth of the circle of the lamp's reflection. He surrounded his diary with a line of mystery which she never attempted to cross. On occasions he would read to her certain portions which struck his recollection happily; but these were invariably limited to his impressions of some city or some work of art that he was seeing for the first time in the geniality of the unadulterated joy of living in what she guessed was the period of youth before she was born; and never did they throw any light on his story except that of his views as a traveller and a personality. But he did not break out into a single quotation to-night. It seemed as if he were following the thread of some reference from year to year; for he ran his fingers through the leaves of certain parts hastily and became studiously intense at other parts as he gloomily pondered over them.

Neither she nor her father had mentioned Jack since the scene by the hedge. This was entirely in keeping with custom. It seemed a matter of instinct with both that they never talked to each other of him. Yet she was conscious that he had been in her father's mind all through the evening meal, and she was equally certain that her father realized that he was in her mind.

It was late when the Doge finished his reading, and he finished it with the page of the last book, where the fine handwriting stopped at the edge of the blank white space of the future. An old desire, ever strong with Mary, which she had never quite had the temerity to express, had become impelling under the influence of her father's unusually long and silent preoccupation.

"Am I never to have a glimpse of that treasure? Am I never, never to read your diary?" she asked.

The Doge drew his tufted eyebrows together in utter astonishment.

"What! What, Mary! Why, Mary, I might preach a lesson on the folly of feminine curiosity. Do you think I would ask to see your diary?"

"But I don't keep one."

"Hoo-hoo-hoo!" The Doge was blowing out his lips in an ado of deprecatory nonsense. "Don't keep one? Have you lost your memory?"

"I had it a minute ago--yes," after an instant's playful consideration, "I am sure that I have it now."

"Then, everybody with a memory certainly keeps a diary. Would you want me to read all the foolish things you had ever thought? Do you think I would want to?"

"No," she answered.

"There you are, then!" declared the Doge victoriously, as he rose, slipping a rubber band with a forbidding snap over the last book. "And this is all stupid personal stuff--but mine own!"

There was an unconscious sigh of weariness as he took up the thumbed leather volumes. He was haggard. "Mine own" had given him no pleasure that evening. All the years of his life seemed to rest heavily upon him for a silent moment. Mary feared that she had hurt him by her request.

"You have read so much you will scarcely do any writing to-night," she ventured.

"Yes, I will add a few more lines--the spirit is in me--a few more days to the long record," he said, absently, then, after a pause, suddenly, with a kind of suppressed force vibrating in his voice: "Well, our Sir Chaps has gone."

"As unceremoniously as he came," she answered.

"It was terrible the way he broke Nogales's wrist!" remarked the Doge narrowly.

"Terrible!" she assented as she folded her work, her head bent.

"Gone, and doubtless for good!" he continued, still watching her sharply.

"Very likely!" she answered carelessly without looking up. "His vagarious playtime for this section is over."

"Just it! Just it!" the Doge exclaimed happily.

"And if Leddy overtakes him now, it's his own affair!"

"Yes, yes! He and his Wrath of God and Jag Ear are away to other worlds!"

"And other Leddys!"

"No doubt! No doubt!" concluded the Doge, in high good humor, all the vexation of his diary seemingly forgotten as he left the room.

But, as the Doge and Mary were to find, they were alone among Little Riversites in thinking that the breaking of Pedro Nogales's wrist was horrible. Jim Galway, who had witnessed the affair, took a radically contrary view, which everyone else not of the Leddy partisanship readily accepted. Despite the frequency of Jack's visits to the Ewold garden and all the happy exchange of pleasantries with his hosts, the community could not escape the thought of a certain latent hostility toward Jack on the part of the Doge, the more noticeable because it was so out of keeping with his nature.

"Doge, sometimes I think you are almost prejudiced against Jack Wingfield because he didn't let Leddy have his way," said Jim, with an outright frankness that was unprecedented in speaking to Jasper Ewold. "You're such a regular old Quaker!"

"But that little Mexican panting in abject fear against the hedge!" persisted the Doge.

"A nice, peaceful little Mexican with a knife, sneaking up to plant it in Jack's neck!"

"But Jack is so powerful! And his look! I was so near I could see it well as he towered over Nogales!"

"Yes, no mistaking the look. I saw it in the _arroyo_. It made me think of what the look of one of those old sea-fighters might have been like when they lashed alongside and boarded the enemy."

"And the crack of the bone!" continued the Doge.

"Would you have a man turn cherub when he has escaped having his jugular slashed by a margin of two or three inches? Would you have him say, 'Please, naughty boy, give me your knife? You mustn't play with such things!'"

"No! That's hyperbole!" the Doge returned with a lame attempt at a laugh.

"Mebbe it is, whatever hyperbole is," said Jim; "but if so, hyperbole is a darned poor means of self-defence. Yes, the trouble is you are against Jack Wingfield!"

"Yes, I am!" said the Doge suddenly, as if inward anger had got the better of him.

"And the rest of us are for him!" Jim declared sturdily.

"Naturally! naturally!" said the Doge, passing his hand over his brow. "Yes, youth and color and bravery!" He shook his head moodily, as if Jim's statement brought up some vital, unpleasant, but inevitable fact to his mind.

"It's beyond me how anybody can help liking him!" concluded Galway stubbornly.

"I like him--yes, I do like him! I cannot help it!" the Doge admitted rather grudgingly as he turned away.

"So we weren't so far apart, after all!" Galway hastened to call after the Doge in apology for his testiness. "We like him for what he has been to us and will always be to us. That's the only criterion of character in Little Rivers according to your own code, isn't it, Jasper Ewold?"

"Exactly!" answered the Doge over his shoulder.

The community entered into a committee of the whole on Jack Wingfield. With every citizen contributing a quota of personal experience, his story was rehearsed from the day of his arrival to the day of his departure. Argument fluctuated on the question of whether or not he would ever return, with now the noes and now the ayes having it. On this point Jim had the only first-hand evidence.

"He said to let things grow until he showed up or I heard from him," said Jim.

"Not what I would call enlightening," said Bob Worther.

"That was his way of expressing it; but to do him justice, he showed what a good rancher he was by his attention to the details that had to be cared for," Jim added.

"He's like the spirit of the winds, I guess," put in Mrs. Galway. "Something comes a-calling him or a-driving him, I don't know which. Indeed, I'm not altogether certain that it isn't a case of Mary Ewold this time!"

"Yes," agreed Jim. "The fighting look went out of his face when she spoke, and when he saw how horrified she was, why, I never saw such a change come over a man! It was just like a piece of steel wilting."

However, the children, who had no part in the august discussions of the committee of the whole, were certain that their story-teller would come back. Their ideas about Jack were based on a simple, self-convincing faith of the same order as Firio's. Lonely as they were, they were hardly more lonely than their elders, who were supposed to have the philosophy of adults.

No Jack singing out "Hello!" on the main street! No Jack looking up from work to ask boyishly: "Am I learning? Oh, I'll be the boss rancher yet!" No Jack springing all sorts of conceits, not of broad humor, but the kind that sort of set a "twinkling in your insides," as Bob Worther expressed it! No Jack inspiring a feeling deeper than twinkles on his sad days! He had been an improvement in town life that became indispensable once it was absent. Little Rivers was fairly homesick for him.

"How did we ever get along without him before he came, anyway?" Bob Worther demanded.

Then another new-comer, as distinctive from the average settler as Jack was, diverted talk into another channel, without, however, reconciling the people to their loss.

XVIII

ANOTHER STRANGER ARRIVES

If the history of Little Rivers were to be written in chapter headings the first would be, "Jasper Ewold Founded the Town"; the second, "Jack Wingfield Arrived"; and the third, "John Prather Arrived."

While Jack came in chaps and spurs, bearing an argosy of fancy, Prather came by rail, carrying a suitcase in a conventional and businesslike fashion. Bill Deering, as the representative of a spring wagon that did the local omnibus and express business, was on the platform of the station when the 11:15 rolled in, and sang out, in a burst of joy, as the stranger, a man in the early twenties, stepped off the Pullman:

"What's this, Jack? Back by train--and in store clothes? Well, of all--" and saw his mistake when the stranger's full face was turned toward him.

"Yes, I am sometimes called Jack," said the stranger pleasantly. "Now, where have we met before? Perhaps in Goldfield? No matter. It is time we got acquainted. My name is Prather, and yours?"

As he surveyed the man before him, Bill was as fussed as the giant of the fairy story had been by a display of yellow. He was uncertain whether he was giving his own baptismal name or somebody's else.

"By Jing! No, I don't know you, but you sure are the dead spit of a fellow I do know!" said Bill.

"Well, he has done me the favor of introducing me to you, anyway," said Prather, who had a remarkably ingratiating smile. "I would like a place to stop while I take a look around. Is there a hotel?"

"Rooms over the store and grub at Mrs. Smith's--none better!"

"That will do."

As they rode into town more than one passer-by called out a ringing "Hello, Jack!" or, "Back, eh, Jack? Hurrah for you!" and then uttered an exclamation of disillusion when Prather turned his head.

"The others see it, too," said Bill.

"They seem to. Who is this double of mine?"

"Jack Wingfield."

"Jack Wingfield? It seems that our first names are the same, too. He lives here, I take it."

"Yes. But he's away now."

"Well, when he comes back"--with a pause of slight irritation--"there will be no difficulty in telling us apart."

He put his finger to a triangular patch of mole on his cheek. His irritation passed and a sense of appreciative amusement at the distinction took its place.

"Now, where shall I find Jasper Ewold?" he asked, as Bill drew up before the Smiths.

A few minutes later the Doge, busy among his orange-trees, hearing a step, looked up with a signal of recognition which changed to blank inquiry when the cheek with the mole was turned toward him.

"Upon my word, sir, I--I thought that you were--" he began.

"Mr. Wingfield! Yes, everybody in town seems to think so at first glance, so I am quite used to the comparison by this time," Prather put in, easily. "It is very interesting to meet the founder of a town, and I have come to you to find out about conditions here."

Prather did not appear as if he had ever done manual labor. He was too young to have turned from ill health or failure in the city to the refuge of the land. Indeed, his quiet gray suit of good material indicated unostentatious prosperity. Evidently he was well-bred and evidently he was not an agent for a new style of seeding harrow or weed killer.

"You think of settling?" asked the Doge.

"Yes. From all I have heard of Little Rivers, it's a community where I should feel at home."

"Then, sir, we will talk of it at luncheon; it is knocking-off time for the morning. Yes, I'll talk as much as you please. Come on, Mr. Prather!" They started along the avenue of palms, the Doge still studying the face at his side. "Pardon me for staring at you, but the resemblance to Jack Wingfield at first sight is most striking," he added.

"Has he travelled much in the West?" asked Prather.

"Yes, much--leading an aimless life."

"Then he must be the one that I was taken for in Salt Lake City one day. The man who called out to me saw his mistake, just as you did, when he saw my full face;" and again Prather made a gesture of understanding amusement to the mole.

"When you consider what confusion there must be in the workrooms, with the storks flapping and screeching like newsboys outside the delivery room," mused the Doge, "and when you consider the multitudinous population of the earth, it's surprising that the good Lord is able to furnish such a variety of faces as he does. But they do say that every one of us has a few doubles. In the case of famous public men they get their pictures in the papers."

"Yes, very few of us but have been mistaken for a friend by a stranger passing in the street!" Prather suggested.

"Only to have the stranger see his mistake at a second glance; and on second glance you do not look very much like Jack Wingfield," the Doge concluded. "Just a coincidence in physiognomy!"

And Prather was very frank about his past.

"I have led rather a hard life," he said. "Though I was well brought up my father left mother and me quite penniless. I had to fend for myself at the age of sixteen. A friend gave me an opportunity to go to Goldfield at the outbreak of the excitement there. The rough experience of a mining-camp was not exactly to my taste, but it meant a livelihood. My real interest has always been in irrigation farming. I would rather grow a good crop than mine for gold. Well, I saved a little money at Goldfield--saved it to buy land. But land is not the only consideration. The surroundings, the people with whom you have to live count for a great deal when you mean to settle permanently."

"Excellent!" declared the Doge. "A good citizen in full fellowship with your neighbors! Exactly what we want in Little Rivers."

Prather had a complexion of that velvety whiteness that never tans. His eyes were calm, yet attractive, with a peculiar insinuating charm when he talked that made it seem easy and natural to respond to his wishes. In listening he had an ingratiating manner that was flattering to the speaker.

"A practical man!" the Doge said to Mary that evening. "The kind we need here. He and I had a grand afternoon of it together. Every one of his questions about soils and cultivation was to the point."

"Not one argument?" she asked.

"No, Mary; no time for argument."

"You do like people to agree with you, after all!" she hazarded. For she did not like Prather.

"Pooh! Not a matter of agreement! No persiflage! No altitudinous conversation of the kind that grows no crops. Prather wants to learn, and he's got good, clean ideas, with a trained and accurate mind--the best possible combination. I hope he will stay for the very reason that he is not the kind that takes up a plot of land for life on an impulse, which usually results in turning on the water and getting discouraged because nature will not do the rest. But he is very favorably impressed. He said that after Goldfield Little Rivers was like Paradise--practical Paradise. Good phrase, practical Paradise!"

In two or three days the new-comer knew everyone in town; but though he addressed the men by their first names they always addressed him as "Mr. Prather." In another respect besides his features he was like Jack: he was much given to smiling.

"The difference between his smile and Jack's," said Mrs. Galway, who was at one with Mary in not liking him, "is that his is sort of a drawing-in kind of smile and Jack's sort of radiates."

The children developed no interest in him. It was evident that he could not tell stories, except with an effort. In his goings and comings, ever asking pleasant questions and passing compliments, he was usually accompanied by the Doge, and his attitude toward the old man was the admiring deference of disciple for master.

"I am sorry I don't understand that," he would say when the Doge fell into a scholastic allusion to explain a point. "I was hard at work when lots of my friends were in college."

"Learning may be ruination," responded the Doge, "though it wouldn't have been in your case. It's the man that counts. See what you have made of yourself!"

"Ah, yes, but I feel that I have missed something. When I am settled here I shall be able to make up for lost time, with your help, sir."

"Every pigeonhole in my mind will be open at your call!" said the Doge, glowing at the prospect.

The favor that Prather found in the eyes of Jasper Ewold partly accounted for what favor he found in Little Rivers' eyes.

"Prather has certainly made a hit with the Doge!" quoth Bob Worther. "As the Doge gets older I reckon he will like compliments better than persiflage. But Jack could pay a compliment, too--only he never used the ladle."

It was Bob, as inspector of ditches and dams, who provided a horse for Prather to inspect the source of the water supply. In keeping with a characteristic thoroughness, Prather wanted to go up the river into the canyon. He made himself a very enjoyable companion on the way, drawing out all of Bob's best stories. When they stopped in sight of the streak of blue sky through the breach in the mighty wall that had once imprisoned the ancient lake, he was silent for some time, while he surveyed this grandeur of the heights with smiling contemplation, at intervals rubbing the palms of his hands together in a manner habitual with him when he was particularly pleased.

"I guess the same idea has struck you that strikes everybody at sight of that, seh!" said Bob.

"Yes, a dam might be practical," Prather answered. "But it would take a lot of capital--a lot of capital!"

On the way back they stopped before a dilapidated shanty near the foothills. In the midst of a littered yard old man Lefferts, half dozing, occupied a broken chair.

"Since the Doge came old man Lefferts has had to do no work at all. A Mexican looks after him. But it hasn't made him any happier," Bob explained as they approached.

"Howdy yourself?" growled Lefferts in answer to Bob's greeting.

"He seems to be a character!" whispered Prather to Bob, as he smiled at the prospect. "To confess the truth, I am a little saddle sore and tired. I didn't get much riding in Goldfield. I think I'll stop and rest and get acquainted."

"You won't get much satisfaction but growls."

"That will be all the more fun for me," rejoined Prather. "But don't let me keep you."

"No. I must be going on. I've got some things to look after before nightfall," said Bob, while Prather, in a humor proof against any hermit cantankerousness, rode into the yard.

When he returned after dark he said, laughingly, that he had enjoyed himself, though the conversation was all on one side. The next morning he decided to take up the plot of land adjoining Jack's.

"But I shall not be able to begin work for a few weeks," he said. "I must go to Goldfield to settle up my affairs before I begin my new career."

"If Jack ever comes back I wonder what he will say to his new neighbor!" Little Rivers wondered.

XIX

LOOKING OVER PRECIPICES

To Mary Ewold the pass was a dividing line between two appeals. The Little Rivers side, with the green patch of oasis in the distance, had a message of peaceful enjoyment of what fortune had provided for her. Under its spell she saw herself content to live within garden walls forever in the land that had given her life, grateful for the trickles of intelligence that came by mail from the outside world.

The other side aroused a mighty restlessness. Therefore, she rarely made that short journey which spread another panorama of space before her. But this was one of the afternoons when she welcomed a tumult of any kind as a relief from her depression; and she went on through the V as soon as she reached the summit.

Seated on a flat-topped rock, oblivious of the passage of time, of the dream cities of the Eternal Painter, she was staring far away where the narrowing gray line between the mountain rims met the sky. She was seeing beyond the horizon. She was seeing cities of memory and reality. A great yearning was in her heart. All the monotonous level lap of the heights which seemed without end was a symbol that separated her from her desire.

She imagined herself in a Pullman, flashing by farms and villages; in a shop selecting gowns; viewing from a high window the human stream of Fifth Avenue; taking passage on a steamer; hearing again foreign tongues long ago familiar to her ears; sensing the rustle of great audiences before a curtain rose; glimpsing the Mediterranean from a car window; feeling herself a unit in the throbbing promenade of the life of many streets while her hunger took its fill of a busy world.

"It is hard to do it all in imagination!" she said to herself. "Even imagination needs an occasional nest-egg of reality by way of encouragement."

An hour on the far side of the pass played the emotional part for her of a storm of tears for many another woman. She rejoiced in being utterly alone; rejoiced in the grandeur of the very wastes around her as mounting guard over the freedom of her thoughts. There was no living speck on the trail, which she knew lay across the expanse of parched earth to the edge of the blue dome; there was not even a bird in the air. Undisturbed, she might think anything, pray for anything; she might feed the flame of revolt till the fuel of many weeks' accumulation had burned itself out and left her calm in the wisdom and understanding that reconciled her to her portion and freshened to return through Galeria to the quiet routine of her daily existence.

Her mind paused in its travels from capital to capital and she was conscious solely of the stark majesty of her surroundings. She listened. There was no sound. The spacious stillness was soothing to her nerves; a specific when all the Eternal Painter's art failed. She closed her eyes, trying to realize that great silence as one would try to realize the Infinite. Then faintly she heard a man's voice singing. It seemed at first a trick of the imagination. But nearer and nearer it came, in the fellowship of life joyfully invading the solitude; and with a readjustment of her faculties to the expected event, she watched the point where the trail dipped on a sharp turn of grade.

Above it rose a cowpuncher hat, then a silk shirt with a string tie, and after that a sage baggage burro with clipped ears, a solemn-faced pony, and an Indian. Jack was watching his steps in the uneven path, and not until the full length of him had appeared and he was flush on the level with her did he look up.

She was leaning back, her weight partly poised on the flat of her hand on the rock, revealing the full curve of throat and the soft sweep of the lines of her slim figure, erect, her head thrown back, her face in shadow with the sun behind playing in her hair, in half-defiant readiness. She saw him as the spirit of travel--its ease, mystery, unattachedness--which had spanned the distances between her and the horizon, in the freedom of his wandering choice. His low-pitched exclamation of surprise was vibrant with appreciation of the picture she made, and he stood quite still in a second's wistful silence, waiting on her first word after the lapse of the many days since he had brought a look of horror into her eyes.

"Hello, Jack!" she said in the old tone of comradeship. It struck a spark electrifying him with all his old, happy manner.

He swept off his hat with a grand bow, blinking in the blaze of the sun which turned his tan to a bronze and touched the smile, which was born as an inspiration from her greeting, with radiance.

"Hello to you, Mary, guarding the pass to Little Rivers!" he said exultantly. "You are just the person I wanted to see. I have been in a hurry to tell you about a certain thing ever since it came to me this morning."

She guessed that he was about to make up a new story. He must have had time for many inventions in the ten days of his absence. But she welcomed any tangent of nonsense that set the right key for the coincidence of their meeting. She had refused to ride to the pass with him and here they were alone together on the pass. Three or four steps, so light that they seemed to be irresistibly winning permission from her, and he had sat down on another flat-topped rock close by. Firio and the baggage train moved on up the trail methodically and stopped well in the background.

"You know how when you meet a person you are sometimes haunted by a conviction that you have met him before!" he began. "How exasperated you are not to be able to recall the time and place!"

"Had you forgotten where you met the dinosaur?" she asked. "He must have thought you very impolite after all the trouble he had taken to make you remember him the last time you went through the pass."

"Oh, the dinosaur and I have patched up a truce, because it seems, after all, that I had mistaken his identity and he was a pleosaur. But"--he did not take the pains to parry her interruption with more foolery, and proceeded as if she had not spoken--"it has never been out of my mind that your father gave me a glance at our first meeting which asked the question that has kept recurring to me: Where had he and I seen each other before?"

"Well?" she said curiously, recalling her father's repeated allusions to "this Wingfield," his strange depression after Jack had left the night before the duel, his reticence and animadversions.

"I said nothing about it, nor did he. I wonder if it has not been a kind of contest between us as to which should be the first to say 'Tag!'"

She smiled at this and leaned farther back, but with the curtain of her eyelashes widening in tremulous intensity.

"I knew it would come!" he went on, with dramatic fervor. "Such things do come unexpectedly in a flash when there is a sudden electric connection with some dusty pigeonhole in the mind. It was in Florence that he and I met! In Florence, on the road to Fiesole!"

"Florence! The road to Fiesole!" Mary repeated; and the names seemed to rouse in her a rapturous recollection. She leaned forward now, her lips apart, her eyes glowing. In place of wastes she was seeing brown roofs and the sweep of the Tuscan Valley.

"And _we_ met--_you_ and _I_!"

"We?" Her glance came sharply back from the distances in the astonishment of dilating pupils that drew together in inquiry as she saw that he was in earnest.

"Yes. I was at the extremely mature age of six and you must have been about a year younger. Do you remember it at all?"

"No!" She was silent, concentrated, groping. "No, no!" she repeated. "Five is very immature compared to six!"

"Your father had a beard then, a great blond beard that excited my emulation. When I grew up I was going to have one like it and just such bushy eyebrows. You came up the Fiesole road at his side, holding fast to his thumb. I was playing at our villa gate. You went up the path with him to see my mother--I can see just how you looked holding so fast to that thumb! After a while you came straying out alone. Now don't you remember? Don't you? Something quite sensational happened."

"No!"

"Well, I showed off what a great boy I was. I walked on the parapet of the villa wall. I bowed to my audience aged five with the grandeur of a tight-rope performer who has just done his best thriller as a climax to his turn."

"Yes--yes!" she breathed, with quick-running emphasis. Out of the mists of fifteen years had come a signal. She bent nearer to him in the wonder of a thing found in the darkness of memory, which always has the fascination of a communication from another world. "You wanted me to come up on the wall," she said, taking up the thread of the story. "You said it was so easy, and you helped me up, and when I looked down at the road I was overcome and fell down all in a heap on the parapet."

"And heavens!" he gasped, living the scene over again, "wasn't I frightened for fear you would tumble off!"

"But I remember that you helped me down very nicely--and--and that is all I do remember. What then?"

She had come to a blind alley and perplexity was in her face, though she tried to put the question nonchalantly. What then? How deep ran the current of this past association?

"Why, there wasn't much else. Your father came down the path and his big thumb took you in tow. I did not see you again. A week later mother and I had gone to Switzerland--we were always on the move."

The candor of his glance told her that this was all. As boy and girl they had met under an Italian sky. As man and woman they had met under an Arizona sky.

Now the charm of the Florence of their affections held them with a magic touch. They were not in a savage setting, looking out over savage distances, but on the Piazzale Michelangelo, looking out over the city of Renaissance genius which slumbers on the refulgent bosom of its past; they were oblivious of the Eternal Painter's canvasses and enjoying Raphael's, Botticelli's, and Andrea del Sarto's. Possibly the Eternal Painter, in the leniency of philosophic appreciation of their oblivion to his art, hazarded a guess about the destiny of this pair. He could not really have known their destiny. No, it is impossible to grant him the power of divination; for if he had it he might not be so young of heart.

Their talk flitted here and there in exclamations, each bringing an entail of recollection of some familiar, enjoyed thing; and when at last it returned to their immediate surroundings the shadow of the range was creeping out onto the plain, cut by the brilliance of the sun through the V. Mary rose with a quick, self-accusing cry about the lateness of the hour. To him it was a call on his resources to delay their departure.

"Do you see where that shelf breaks abruptly?" he asked. "It must be the side of a canyon. Have you ever looked down?"

"I started to once."

"I should not like to go over the pass again without seeing if this is really a canyon of any account. I feel myself quite an authority on canyons."

"It will be dark before we reach Little Rivers!" she protested.

"Ten minutes--only a step!" and he was appealing in his boyish fashion to have his way.

"Nonsense! Besides, I do not care for canyons."

"You still fear, then, to look down from walls? You--"

And this decided her. On another occasion she had gone to the precipice edge and faltered. She would master her dizziness for once and all; he should not know from her any confession of a weakness which was purely of the imagination.

The point to which he had alluded was an immense overhanging slab of granite stratum deep set in the mountain side. As they approached, a thrill of lightness and uncertainty was setting her limbs a-quiver. Her elbow was touching his, her will driving her feet forward desperately. Suddenly she was gazing down, down, down, into black depths which seemed calling irresistibly and melting her power of muscular volition, while he with another step was on the very edge, leaning over and smiling. She dropped back convulsively. He was all happy absorption in the face of that abyss. How easy for him to topple over and go hurtling into the chasm!

"Don't!" she gasped, and blindly tugged at his arm to draw him back.

As he looked around in surprise and inquiry, she withdrew her hand in a reaction against her familiarity, yet did not lower it, holding it out with fingers spread in expression of her horror. Serenely he regarded her for a moment in her confusion and distress, and then, smiling, while the still light of confidence was in his eyes, he locked his arm in hers. Before she could protest or resist he had drawn her to his side.

"It is just as safe as looking off the roof of a porch on to a flower garden," he said.

And why she knew not, but the fact had come as something definite and settled: she was no longer dizzy or uncertain. Calmly, in the triumph of mind over fear, in the glory of a new sensation of power, she looked down into that gulf of shadows--looked down for a thousand feet, where the narrowing, sheer walls merged into darkness.

From this pit to the blue above there was only infinite silence, with no movement but his pulse-beat which she could feel in his wrist distinctly. He had her fast, a pawn of one of his impulses. A shiver of revolt ran through her. He had taken this liberty because she had shown weakness. And she was not weak. She had come to the precipice to prove that she was not.

"Thank you. My little tremor of horror has passed," she told him. "I can stand without help, now."

He released his hold and she stood quite free of him, a glance flashing her independence. Smilingly she looked down and smilingly and triumphantly back at him.

"You need not keep your arm up in that fashion ready to assist me. It is tiring," she said, with a touch of her old fire of banter over the barrier. "I am all right, now. I don't know what gave me that giddy turn--probably sitting still so long and looking out at the blaze of the desert."

He swept her with a look of admiration; and their eyes meeting, she looked back into the abyss.

"I wish I had such courage," he said with sudden, tense earnestness; "courage to master my revulsion against shadows."

"Perhaps it will come like an inspiration," she answered uncomprehendingly.

Then both were silent until she spoke of a stunted little pine three or four hundred feet down, in the crotch of an outcropping. Its sinking roots had split a rock, over which the other roots sprawled in gnarly persistence. Some passing bird had dropped the seed which had found a bed in a pocket of dust from the erosions of time. So it had grown and set up housekeeping in its isolation, even as the community of Little Rivers had in a desert basin beside a water-course.

"The little pine has courage--the courage of the dwarf," she said. "It is worth more than a whole forest of its majestic cousins in Maine. How green it is--greener than they!"

"But they rise straight to heaven in their majesty!" he returned, to make controversy.