Chapter XIV: Part III: He Finds His Place in Life (2)

Still Prather did not so much as turn his head to get a glimpse of Jack, nor did he offer any sign of knowledge of Jack's presence when Jack reined alongside him so close that their stirrup leathers were brushing. Prather was gazing at the desert exactly in front of him, the reins hanging loose, almost out of hand. His horse was about spent, if not on the point of foundering. Jack was so near the mole on the cheek of the peculiar paleness that never tans that by half extending his arm he might have touched it. After all, it was only a raised patch of blue, a blemish removable by the slightest surgical operation which its owner must have preferred to retain.

Firio and Nogales, also riding side by side, were also silent. There was no sound except Jag Ear's bells, now sunk to a faint tinkle in keeping with the slow progress of Prather's beaten horse. Looking at Prather's hands, Jack was thinking of another pair of hands amazingly like them. In the uncanniness of its proximity he was imagining how the profile would look without the birthmark, and he found himself grateful for the silence, which spoke so powerfully to him, in the time that it provided for bringing his faculties under control.

"How do you do?" he said at last, pleasantly.

Probably the silence had been equally welcome to Prather in charting his own course in the now unavoidable interview. He looked around slowly, and he was smiling with a trace of the satire that Jack had seen in the elevator, but smiling watchfully in a way that covers the apprehension of a keen glance. And he saw features that were calm and eyes that were still as the sky.

"How do you do?" he answered; and paused as one who is about to slip a point of steel home into a scabbard. "How do you do, brother?" he added, as if uttering a shibboleth that could protect him from any physical violence.

"Brother! Brother! Yes!" repeated Jack, with dry lips.

This shaping of conviction into fact so nakedly, so coolly, made all the desert and the sky swim before him in kaleidoscopic patches of blue and gray, shot with zigzag flashes. He half reeled in the saddle; his hands gripped the pommel to hold himself in place. It was as if a long strain of nervous tension had come to an end with a crack. Prather's smile took a turn of deeper satisfaction. It was like John Wingfield, Sr.'s after Jack had left the library.

"This is the first time we have ever met to speak," said Prather, easily.

"Yes!" assented Jack, the gray settling back into desert and the blue into sky and the zigzag flashes becoming only the brilliance of late afternoon sunshine.

"Certainly it is time that we got acquainted, brother," said Prather.

"It is!" agreed Jack. "It is time that I knew your story!"

"Which you have hardly heard from your--I mean, our father!" The pause between the "your" and the "our" was made with an appreciative significance. "Well, you see, I was the brother who had the mole on his cheek!"

"Yes--pitifully yes!" said Jack, with a kind of horror at the expression of this face in his father's likeness, no less than at the words.

"Why, no! I've often thought of _you_ rather pitifully!" said Prather.

"You well might!" Jack answered, feelingly. "We may well share a common pity for each other."

There was no sign that John Prather subscribed to the sentiment except in a certain quizzical turn of his lips, as he looked away.

"Yes, the story has been kept from me. I have come for it!" said Jack.

"That is raking out the skeletons. But why not rake out our skeletons together, you and I?" said Prather.

It was clear that he enjoyed the prospect as an opportunity for retributive enlightenment.

"To begin with, I have the rights of primogeniture in my favor," he said. "I was born a day before you were, in the same city of New York. My mother's name was not down in the telephone list as Mrs. Wingfield, however--I look at it all philosophically, you understand--and it was just that which made the difference between you and me, outside of the difference of our natures. But I am proud of my birth on both sides, in my own way. My mother was won without marriage and she was true to father. A woman of real ability, my mother! She was well suited to be John Wingfield's wife; better, I think, in the practical world of materialism than your mother. By a peculiar coincidence, unknown to father, my mother called in Dr. Bennington. So you and I have a further bond, in that the same doctor brought us into the world."

"And my mother must have known this!" Jack exclaimed, in racking horror.

At last the cause of her exile was clear in all its grisly monstrousness; the source of the pain in her eyes in the portrait had been traced home. Again he saw her white and trembling when she returned to the house in Versailles to find a visitor there; and now he realized the fulness of her relief when the frail boy said that he did not like his father. Her travels had spoken the restlessness of flight in search of oblivion to the very fact of his paternity. The "I give! I give!" of the portrait was the giving of the infinity of her fine, sensitive being to him to make him all hers. His feeling which had held him on the desert when he should have gone home, that feeling of literal revulsion toward his inheritance, was a thing born in him which had grown under her caresses and her training. She had been living solely for him to that last moment when the book dropped out of her hand; and the incarnation of that which had killed her was riding beside him now in the flesh. He felt a weaving of his muscles, a tightening of his nerves, as if waiting on the spark of will, and all the strength that he had built in the name of the store was madly tempted. But no! John Prather was not to blame, any more than himself. He would listen to John Prather, as justice listens to evidence, and endure his stare to the end.

"Yes, your mother knew," continued Prather. "My mother made a point of having her know. That was part of my mother's own bitterness. That was her teaching to me from the first. She had no illusions. She knew the advantages and the disadvantages of her position. She was and is one of the few persons in the world of whom my father is a little afraid."

"Then she still lives?" asked Jack sharply.

"Yes, she is in California," Prather returned. "She often referred to the mole on my cheek as the symbol of my handicap in the world of convention. 'But for the mole, Jack, you would have the store,' she often said. It delighted her that I had my father's face. As I grew older the resemblance became more marked. I could see that I pleased my father with my practical ideas of life, which I developed when quite young. He saw to it that my mother and I lived well and that I went to a good school. From my books I drew the same lesson as from my peculiar inheritance; the lesson that my mother was always inculcating. 'A bank account,' she would repeat, 'will erase even a mole patch on the cheek. It is the supreme power that will carry you anywhere, Jack. You must make money!'

"When father came to see her he would talk with a candor with which I am sure he never talked to your mother. He would tell of his successes, revealing the strategy and system by which they were won, finding her both understanding and sympathetic. I became a little blade that delighted to get sharp against his big blade by asking him questions. He did not want me about the store, and this was one of the things in which my mother humored him. She knew just when to humor and just when to threaten the play of the strong card which she always held.

"All the while her ambition was laying its plans. It was that I should have the Wingfield store one day, myself. Out of school hours I would range the other department stores. You see, I had not only inherited my father's face more strikingly than you had, but also his talents. I spent the summer vacations of my fourteenth and fifteenth years in a store. I won the attention of my superiors and promise of promotion. I foresaw the day when I should so prove my ability that father would take me into his own store, and then, gradually, I would make my place, secure, while you were idling about Europe. And in those days you were frail and I was vigorous.

"There was no mistaking that father's sense of convention was the one thing that stood between him and my desire. He feared the world's opinion if the truth became known, and deep down in heart he could never get over the pride of having married into your mother's family. You had very good blood on the maternal side, as they say, while my mother had begun in the cloak department and was self-made, like father. Again, I was so truly his son in every instinct that he may have been a little jealous of me. Father does not like to think that any other man was ever quite as great as he is. I confess that is the way I feel, too. That is what life is, after all--it is yourself. Yes, I saw the store as mine--surely mine, with time!"

Prather's reins lay across the pommel of the saddle drawn taut by the drooping head of his horse, which was barely dragging one foot after another. He gave Jack a glance of flashing resentment and then, in his first impulse of real emotion, made a fist of one hand and drove it angrily into the palm of the other before continuing.

"Then father went to Europe to bring you home. He had decided for the son of convention, the son of blood! Though self-made, he was for family as against talent. Besides, it was a victory for him. At last you were his. After your return there was a scene between mother and him, a cool, bitter argument. He defied her to play her last card. He said that you knew the truth and that she could at best only make a row. And he wanted us out of New York; the place for me was a new country. He would make us a handsome allowance. So my mother agreed to his terms and we went to the Pacific coast. There I was to enter one of the colleges. My mother wanted me to have a college education, you see. The last meeting between father and me was very interesting, blade playing on blade. He really hated to let me go, for by this time he knew how hopeless you were. He embraced me and said that I would get on, anyway. I told him that the only trouble was that while I was the real son, I had a mole on my cheek.

"The West was best. There we could claim the favor of convention, Mrs. Prather and her son. I matriculated at Stanford, but I saw nothing in it for me. It was all dream stuff. Greek and Latin don't help in building a fortune. They handicap you with the loss of time it takes to learn them, at least; and I meant to be worth a million before I was thirty. Now I know that I shall be worth two or three or four millions at thirty, if all goes as I plan. So I cut college and broke for Goldfield. I ran a store and was a secret partner in a saloon that paid better than the store. I was in the game morning, noon, and night; it beat marching to class to recite Horace and fiddle with the binomial theorem, as it must for every man who counts for something in the world."

Throughout, Prather's tone, except for the one moment of anger, had been that of an even recital of facts by one who does not allow himself to consider anything but facts in the judgment of his position. At times he gave Jack covert glances out of the tail of his eye and saw Jack's face white and drawn and his head lowered. Now Prather became the victim--so he would have put it, no doubt--of another outburst of feeling.

"But it was not like having the store!" he said. "No, my heart was in the store; and that morning when you saw me looking down from the gallery I was permitting myself to dream. I was thinking of what had come to you, the fairy prince of good fortune, who had no talent for your inheritance, and of what I might have done with it. I was thinking how I could win men to work for me"--and there he was smiling with the father's charm--"and of the millions to come if I could begin to build on the foundation that father had laid. I saw branches in Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia--a great chain of stores all co-ordinated under my directing hand--I the master!"

He rubbed the palms of his hands together as he had over the scintillation of the jewelry counters. Though Jack had not looked around, his ear recognized that crisp sound of exultant power.

"Yes," Jack murmured thoughtfully, as if inviting Prather to go on with anything further he might have to say.

"All mine--mine!" Prather concluded, in a sort of hypnosis with his own picture.

Jack still stared at the earth, his profile limned in gold and the side of his face toward Prather in shadow. They were nearing the clump of cotton-woods around the water-hole at the base of a tongue of the range which ran out into the desert, and Firio rode up to whisper in Spanish:

"Señor Jack, see there! Horsemen!"

Jack raised his head with a returning sense of his surroundings to see some mounted men, eight in all he counted, riding along the range trail a half mile nearer the water-hole than themselves. Their horses had the gait of exhaustion after a long, hard ride.

"You know who it is?" Firio whispered.

"Yes," Jack answered. "They had the better trail and have outridden us. All right, Firio!"

"Leddy--Pete Leddy and some of his men!" exclaimed Prather, shading his eyes to watch the file of figures now passing under the cotton-woods. It seemed to relieve him. "I suppose he came on my account," he added, nodding to Nogales.

"Yes," said Nogales, with a grin. He always either grinned or his face had a half savage impassiveness.

"I wonder if Leddy thought I was in danger," and Prather gave Jack a knowing glance of satisfaction. "We shall all camp together," he added, smiling.

Jack did not answer for a moment. He was intent on the cotton-woods. Leddy and his companions appeared on the other side, the figures of riders and horses bathed in the sunset glow. Then they disappeared as if the earth had swallowed them up.

"They are going on! They are not going to stop!" said Prather apprehensively.

"There is a basin beyond the water-hole and the seepage makes a little pasture," Jack explained. "You will see them back in a moment."

"Oh, yes!" said Prather, with a thrill in his voice; and again the palms of his hands were making that refrain of delight. "But I have told my story," he resumed. "Now may I ask you a question? Why have you come back?"

Jack looked around frankly and dispassionately.

"To save Little Rivers from you! I understand that you have secured the water rights."

"Well, then, I have!" declared Prather, confidently, "and I mean to have the rights for the whole valley!" and he struck his fist into his palm. "You see," he went on, with another flash of satire, "it is not exactly fair that you should have the store and Little Rivers, too. I had heard of the possibilities here from my friend Leddy, who was also at Goldfield. A useful man in his place! He got his sixth notch there. When I came and looked around and saw that here was the opportunity I wanted, I wired father that in any fair division of territory everything west of the Mississippi belonged to me"--he was showing some bravado in his sense of security now, when he saw that Leddy and his men were returning through the cotton-woods to the water-hole--"and I should like to have you out of my way. I told him you were the picture of health, even if you didn't have anything in your head, and if you were ever going to learn the business it was time that you began. But father is always careful. Naturally he wanted to check off my report with another's; for he didn't want you back if you were ill. So he sent Dr. Bennington out to get professional confirmation of my statement."

"And you told Jasper Ewold that you wanted the rights only to turn them over to the water users' association and then bring in capital to build a dam, with everybody sharing alike in the prosperity that was to come."

"Yes, and Jasper Ewold was so simple! Well, what I told him was strategy--strategy of which I think father would approve. When you have a big object in view the end must justify the means. Look at the situation! Two hundred thousand acres of land waiting on water to be the most fertile in the world! Why, when I rode up the valley the first time and saw what could be done, I was amazed to think that such an opportunity should be lying around loose. Little Rivers was so out of the way that other promoters had overlooked it, and everybody had sort of taken it for granted that Jasper Ewold and his water users' association really had legal possession. It was my chance. I thought big. That dam should be mine. I had the money I had made in Goldfield, but it was not enough for my purpose.

"Where should I turn for outside capital that would not demand a majority interest in the project? I concluded that it was time father did something for me in return for giving up the store. Besides this call of justice I had another influence with him. I was sure that when he told my mother that you knew the truth he was making a statement that suited his purpose. I was sure that you knew nothing of my story and that father did not want you to know it. I was ready to tell if he did not meet my demands.

"Well, you know how he can talk when he wants to gain a point. I fancy that I talked as well as father when I showed him how that dam would pay for itself in five years in tolls and twenty per cent on the capital after that; when I showed him how a population ten times that of his store would have to take their water from me; when I showed him all the side issues of profit from town sites and the increase of values of the big holdings which Leddy's men would take up for me. You ought to have seen his eyes glow. He could not withstand his pride in me. 'You have the gift, the one gift!' he said. I told him yes, it was in the blood; and I struck while the iron was hot. I got an outright sum from him; and he could not resist a chance to share all that profit when capital was to be had in New York for three or four per cent. He went in as silent partner, as I was in the saloon at Goldfield; as a partner with a minority interest."

John Prather paused to laugh to himself over his victory, while the movement of palm on palm was rapid and prolonged.

"Our arrangement amounted to the commercial division of territory for the family, which I had suggested," he went on with appreciative irony. "You and he were to have the east side of the Mississippi and I was to have the west, and you were never to know my story. Publicly, father and I were strangers and quits, and we came to this agreement in the room of a down-town hotel.

"The day before I started West I simply had to have a look through the store--the store that I loved and that I had to lose. Yes, the store is far more to my taste than this rough western life. Naturally, as my existence was to be kept a secret from you, when you followed me to the elevator and tried to get acquainted I couldn't have it."

"But as the elevator descended you pointed to the mole," said Jack.

"Did I? I suppose that was an involuntary, instinctive pleasantry. The previous evening father and I had had a farewell visit together. We went into the country."

"The night after the scene in the drawing-room!" Jack thought.

"I knew that father was worried because he had to make an effort to show that he was not. Usually he can cover his worries perfectly. He said that he might have a fight in order to keep you and that he very much wanted you to stay. But he did not succeed," concluded Prather, fist driving into palm. "You came on the express after me."

"Because, fortunately, you went to the house to have a look at the ancestor!"

"Yes," said Prather. "But I did not see you."

"However, I saw you from the landing and overheard what passed between you and father!"

"No matter!" cried Prather harshly. "I am prepared for you!" He looked toward the water-hole significantly. "And the concession is mine! The dam will be mine!"

"The dam could be built and all the valley might bloom without so much power passing into the hands of one man," said Jack.

P.D. scenting the pasturage and feeling the pangs of thirst was starting forward at a smarter pace; but Jack held him back to the snail's crawl of Prather's pony.

"Who would do it? Jasper Ewold? Jim Galway?" Prather demanded. "What these men need is a leader. They don't realize what I am doing for them. Do they think I want to put in ten years out here for nothing? For every dollar that they make for me they are going to make one for themselves. That's the rule of prosperity. I am not robbing them. I am taking only my fair share in return for creative business genius. The fellows in Little Rivers who sulk and don't get on will have only themselves to thank."

"But they lose their independence," Jack was arguing quietly, as if he would thrash out the subject. "There are other things than money in this world."

"There's nothing much money won't do!" said Prather.

"It will not give one self-respect or courage or moral fibre; it will not bring the gift of poetry, music, or painting; or turn a lie into truth; or bring back virtue to a woman who has been defiled; or make the courage to face death calmly."

"It will do all I want!" Prather answered. "Father not having been true to his agreement by keeping you in New York, why should I keep his secret? He breaks faith; I break faith. It seems to me as if there were no escaping the penalty of my birth. I no sooner arrive than I find the whole town knows of your return; and not only that, but a wire comes from father saying that we had better not meet until he comes."

"Until he comes! Yes, go on!"

"Well, as you say, you are here to save Little Rivers and that meant an interview with me, and--well," again the palms in their crisp movement, "before I started out I told Pete Leddy that if you came after me I should look to him for protection, and it seems he is on time."

"Yes," said Jack, without looking at Prather. All the while he had kept watch on the water-hole, and he received Prather's announcement stoically as a confirmation of his suspicions.

"So, if you will take my advice, brother, the best thing for you to do is to ride back before we reach the water-hole, unless you prefer Leddy's company. This time he will fight you in his way."

"My horse is tired and there is neither water nor feed for him except there." Jack stated this quietly and stubbornly, as he nodded toward the cotton-woods. Then he looked around to Prather. Suddenly Prather found himself looking at a face that seemed to have only the form of that face by the side of which he had been riding. It was as if another man had taken Jack's place in the saddle. The ancestor was rising in Jack. Prather saw an electric spark in Jack's eyes, the spark of the high voltage that made his muscles weave and a flutter come in his cheeks. "No, I am not going back until I have recovered the rights that you have taken from Little Rivers!" he said.

Prather in sudden confusion realized that he had let his feelings go too soon. They were not yet at the water-hole, and he was within easy reach of that hand working on the reins in a way that promised an outburst.

"You think of physical violence against me--your own flesh and blood!" he said defensively.

He saw Jack shudder in reaction and knew that he was safe for the moment. When Jack looked away at the water-hole Prather's fingers slipped to his own six-shooter and rested there, twitching nervously; and in the rear Firio was watching both him and Nogales shrewdly.

From any outward sign now, Jack might have been starting on another journey with quiet eagerness; a journey that might end at a precipice a few yards ahead or at the other side of the world. Of this alone you could be sure from the resoluteness of his features, that he was going straight on; while Firio, in the telepathy of desert companionship, understood that he was missing no developing detail within the narrow range of vision in front of P.D.'s nose. Trusting all to Jack, Firio was on wires, ready for a spring in any direction.

They were coming to the edge of a depression of an old watercourse that wound around past the cotton-woods to the ridge itself and included the basin where Leddy and his followers had tethered their horses. But this part of it was dry sand. The standing figures around the water-hole had sunk down. Jack could see them as lumps in a row. A blade of flame from the setting sun fell on them, revealing the glint of rifle barrels.

"Firio! Quick--down! P.D., down!" Jack called, dismounting with a leap; and as though in answer to his warning came the singing of bullets about their ears.

P.D. had been trained to sink on all fours at a word and he and Jack together dropped into the cover of the _arroyo_, below the desert line. When he looked around Firio was at his side, still holding the reins of Wrath of God. But Wrath of God's sturdy, plodding nature had little facility in learning tricks. A tiny stream of blood was flowing down his forehead and he lay still. At last, all in loyal service, he had reached the horizon. His bony, homely, good old face seemed singularly peaceful, as if satisfied with the reward at his journey's end. Jag Ear was standing beside P.D. and Prather's burro next to him, both unharmed. Nogales's horse had also been killed, but its rider was safe. Prather was crawling down the side of the _arroyo_ on his belly, digging his hands into the dirt, his face white and contorted and his eyes shifting back and forth in ghastly incomprehension. His horse followed him and sank down in final surrender to exhaustion.

By common impulse, Jack and Firio seized the rifles from Jag Ear's pack, while Nogales, a spectator, squatted beside Prather.

"What--what does it mean?" Prather gasped, spasmodically. "I--I--was it Leddy that fired on us?"

"Yes," said Jack over his shoulder, as he and Firio started up the bank of the _arroyo_ facing the water-hole. "No doubt of it."

"It was you they wanted--not me--not me! I--I--"

"I don't know. At all events, I do not mean they shall rush us!" Jack answered, as he and Firio hugged the slope with their rifles resting on top and only their heads showing above it.

"No! It couldn't be that they recognized me. They will let me by! They expect me!"

"Yes, you belong on their side!" Jack called back.

"I will send out a flag of truce!" said Prather, brightening with the thought. "You, Nogales, take my handkerchief and go and explain to Leddy!"

Nogales seemed agreeable to the suggestion. Indeed, he was very expeditious in starting. While Jack never took his eye off the sight of his barrel, Nogales walked across the gleaming interval between the two parties waving Prather's handkerchief. Leddy rose on his knee watchfully, rifle in hand, while he spoke with Nogales. Then Nogales started back with his head thrown up jubilantly, but stopped when he was within calling distance and sang out, truculently:

"Leddy get you both! He get everything!"

He turned on his heel and soon was another lump around the water-hole.

"That makes nine, Firio!" said Jack.

He smiled in relief to be rid of Nogales; smiled in happy confidence, as if he were truly the ancestor's child.

"_Sí_!" answered Firio, as if he had just as soon there were a regiment against them. He was happy beyond words. He patted his rifle barrel; he spread out his big red bandanna beside his elbow and on it nicely arranged a couple of extra charges of cartridges.

Prather remained flat on the bottom of the _arroyo_, overwhelmed. It was some time before he could speak.

"I--I don't understand! It isn't possible!" he said finally.

"Everything is possible with Leddy. It seems that there can be peace between him and me in this valley in only one way," Jack answered.

"But me! I suppose he found out that I--" Prather stopped without finishing the sentence. "What am I to do?" he asked Jack in livid appeal.

"Why, it is three against nine, if you choose!" Jack answered. "You have a rifle, and it is for your life."

"My life!" Prather gasped, another wave of fear submerging him.

"Yes. We have no horses with which to make our escape and we should be winged as soon as we exposed ourselves. Leddy means that we shall die of thirst, or die fighting."

Through all this dialogue Jack had been speaking to the head that lay between his eye and a target. As Prather reached up a trembling hand to take his rifle from the back of his burro one of the lumps around the water-hole rose, possibly to change position. When it became the silhouette of a kneeling man, Jack fired and the figure plunged forward like an automaton that had had its back broken.

"Eight!" whispered Firio.

"Duck!" Jack told him; for a response instantly came in a volley that kicked up the dust around their heads.

But Jack's rifle lay in limp hands.

"Eight!" he repeated, dazedly. "And I shot to kill--to kill!"

His face blanched with horror at the thing that he had done. It seemed as if the strength had been struck out of him. He appeared ready to let destiny overtake him rather than fire again. Then as in a flash, the ancestor in him reappeared and in his features was written that very process of fate which Dr. Bennington had said was in him. Again his hand was firm on the barrel and his eye riveted on the sight, as he drew himself up until he lay even with the bank of the _arroyo_.

The volley from the cotton-woods had swept over Prather's head at the instant that he had taken hold of his rifle. It dropped from his grasp. He burrowed in the sand under the pressure of that near and sinister rush of singing breaths.

"I can't! I can't!" he said helplessly.

He was leaden flesh, without the power to move. At his words Jack glanced back to see a dropped jaw and glassy, staring eyes.

"You are suffering!" exclaimed Jack. "Are you hit?"

"No!" Prather managed to say, and reached out for his rifle in clumsy desperation, as if he were feeling for it in the dark.

"Take your time!" said Jack encouragingly, as one would to a victim of stage fright. "There isn't any danger for the moment, while advantage of position is with us--the sun over our shoulders and in their faces."

The lumps around the water-hole grew smaller. Evidently, as a result of the lesson, they were creeping backward on their stomachs to a less exposed position. Two had quite disappeared, or else the brilliant play of light had melted them into the golden carpet of reflected sunshine on which they rested. Directly, Jack saw two figures creeping over the rim of the pasturage basin.

"So, that's it!" he said to Firio.

Firio nodded his understanding of Leddy's plan to take them in flank under cover of the _arroyo_.

"We shall have to respond in kind!" said Jack.

He left his hat where his head had been and began crawling along the side of the _arroyo_, but paused to call to Prather, who, now that no bullets were flying, was trying the mechanism of his rifle with a somewhat steadier hand:

"Prather, if you could manage to get up there beside Firio and join him in pouring out a magazine full at the right moment, it would help! If not, put your hat up there beside mine. You can do that without exposing yourself."

Jack's tone was that of one who urges a tired man to take a few more steps, or an invalid without any appetite to try another sup of broth. It had no hint of irony.

"No matter," said Firio. "Leddy know he can't fight. Leddy know there is only two of us!" His tone was without satire, but its sting was sharper than satire; that of an Indian shrug over a negligible quantity. It started Prather on all fours laboriously toward him.

"I am going to the turn in the _arroyo_ that commands the next turn," Jack explained. "When I whistle you empty your magazines. Keep your heads down and fire fast, no matter if not accurately, so as to disturb their aim at me!"

"_Sí_!" said Firio. "I know!" No one could deny that he was having a very good time making war in the company of Señor Jack. "Yes, Mister Prather," he added, when, after toiling painfully on his belly for the few feet he had to go, Prather lay with his stark face near Firio's; a face strangely like that of John Wingfield, Sr. when he saw Jasper Ewold from the drawing-room doorway. "For your life, Mister Prather! _Sí_! Up a little more! Chin high as mine, so! Eye on sight, so!"

Prather obeyed in an abyssmal sort of shame which, for the time being, conquered his fear, though not his palsy; for his rifle barrel trembled on its rest.

Meanwhile, Jack had crept to the bend in the _arroyo_. He was listening. It would not do to show his head as a warning of his presence. Faintly he heard men moving in the sand, moving slowly and cautiously. At the moment he chose as the right one, with rifle cocked and finger on trigger, he gave his signal. Then he sprang to the top of the bank, fully exposed to the marksmen at the water-hole. For no half measure would do. He must have a full view of the bottom of the next bend. There he saw two crawling figures. He fired twice and dropped down with three or four stinging whispers in his ears and a second volley overhead as he was under cover. Again he sprang up over the bank in the temptation to see the result of his aim. One of the would-be flankers lay prostrate and still, face downward. The other was disappearing beyond the second bend.

"Seven, now!" he thought miserably, in comprehension of the whole business as ridicule in human savagery. "They won't trouble us again immediately. They will wait on darkness and thirst," he concluded; and called, as he turned back, to Firio: "It worked like a charm, O son of the sun! They could not fire at all straight with your bullets flying about their heads, disturbing their--" His speech ended at sight of Prather, half rolling, half tumbling down the slope, his hands over his face, while he uttered a prolonged moan.

"Bullet hit a rock under sand!" said Firio, as Jack hastened to assist Prather, who had come to a halt at the very bottom of the _arroyo_ and lay gasping on his side. Jack took hold of Prather's wrists to draw his hands away from the wound.

"My God! Out here, like a rat in a trap!" Prather groaned. "When I have all life before me! In sight of millions and power--a rat in a trap out on this damnable desert, as if I were of no more account than a rancher!"

"Let me see!" said Jack; for Prather was holding his hands tight against his face, as if he feared that all the blood in his body would pour out if he removed them. "Let me see! Maybe it is not so bad!"

Prather let his hands drop and the right one which was over the cheek with the mole was splashed red between the fingers. On the cheek was a raw spot, from which ran a slight trickle. The mole had gone. A splinter of rock, or perhaps a bullet, with its jacket split, ricocheting sidewise, had torn it clean from the flesh.

"Not at all dangerous!" said Jack.

"No?" exclaimed Prather, in utter relief.

"It will heal in a fortnight!"

A small medicine case was among the regular supplies that were always packed on that omnibus of a burro, Jag Ear. While Jack was bandaging the wound, Firio, who kept watch, had no news to report.

"Nothing matters! They will get us, anyway!" Prather moaned. The shock of being hit had quite finished any pretence at concealing his mortal fear of the outcome.

"Oh, I wouldn't say that! We already have them down to seven!" said Jack encouragingly, as he made a pillow of a blanket and bade Prather rest his head on it.

But he knew well that they were a seven who had learned wisdom from the fate of their comrades. From Nogales, Leddy must have heard of the loss of two horses. At best, but one of the beleaguered three had any means of escape. Leddy could well afford to curb his impatience as he camped comfortably by the water-hole, while his own horses grazed.

The sun was still above the western ridge in the effulgence of its adieu for the day. Jack was on his knee, with the broad, level glare full on him, looking at Prather, who was in the shadow; and his reflections were mixed with that pity which one feels toward another who is lame or blind or suffers for the want of any sense or faculty that is born to the average human being. For a man of true courage rarely sees a coward as anything but a man ailing; he is grateful for nature's kindness to himself. And the spark of John Wingfield, Knight, skipping generations before it settled on a descendant, had not chosen John Prather for its favor. The ancestor was all Jack's.

Prather, in his agony of mind, had moments of wondering envy as he watched Jack's changing expression. He could see that Jack, in entire detachment from his problem of fighting Leddy, was thinking soberly in the silence of the desert, unconscious in his absorption of the presence of any other human being. Suddenly his eyes opened wide in the luminousness of a happy discovery; his lips turned a smile of supreme satisfaction, and his face seemed to be giving back the light of the sun.

"It's all right!" he said. "Yes, everything is going to be all right!"

"How?" asked Prather wistfully, feeling the infection of the confident ring of Jack's tone.

"There is one horse left," said Jack. "He is in better condition than Leddy imagines. When darkness comes you can get away with him and by morning he will have brought you to water at Las Cascadas, halfway on the range trail. Then you will be quite safe."

"Yes! Yes!" Prather half rose, his breath coming fast, his eyes ravenous.

"And in return you will give Little Rivers back its water rights! Is that a bargain?" Jack asked.

"Give up my concession and all it means to me! Give it up absolutely--its millions!" objected Prather, in an uncontrollable impulse of greed.

"King Richard III, you remember," Jack declared, with a trace of his old humor breaking out over the new aspect of the situation, "said he would give his kingdom for a horse. He could not get the horse and he lost both his kingdom and his life. If he had been able to make the trade he might have saved his life and perhaps--who knows?--have won another kingdom."

"I will save my life!" Prather concluded; but under his breath he added bitterly: "And you get both the store and Little Rivers!" in the prehensile instinct which gains one thing only to covet another.

"You have the papers for the concession with you?" Jack asked.

"I--I--"

"Yes!" interposed Jack firmly.

"Yes!" Prather admitted.

"And you have pencil and paper to make some sort of transfer that will be the first legal step in undoing what you have done?"

"Yes."

While Prather was occupied with this, Jack found pencil and paper on his own account and by the light of the sun's last rays and in the happiness of one who has brought a story to a good end, he wrote to his father:

"John Prather will tell you how he and I met out on the desert before you came and of the long talk we had.

"You wanted a son who would go on building on the great foundation you had laid. You have one. He said that you wanted to give him the store. The reason why you might not give it to him no longer exists. The mole is gone. Of course there will be a scar where the mole was. I, too, shall have to carry a scar. But the means is in your power to go far toward erasing his, for his mother, Mrs. Prather, is still living.

"So everything is clear. Everything is coming out right. John Prather and I change places, as nature intended that we should. You need have no apprehensions on my account. Though I had not a cent in the world I could make my living out here--a very sweet thought, this, to me, with its promise of something real and practical and worth while, at which I can make good. I know that you are going to keep the bargain that Prather and I have made; and think of me as over the pass and very happy as I write this, in the confidence that at last all accounts have been balanced and we can both turn to a fresh page in the ledger. JACK."

When Jack, after he had received the transfer, gave the letter to Prather to read, Prather was transfixed with incredulity.

"You mean this?" he gasped blankly, as his surprise became articulate.

"Yes. You have quite the better of King Richard--you gain both the kingdom and the horse."

"The store, yes, the store--mine! Mine--the store!" said Prather, in a slow, passionate monotone, his fingers trembling with the very triumph of possession as he thrust the letter into his pocket. "The store, yes, the store!" he repeated, amazement mixed with exultation. "But--" his keen, practical mind was recovering its balance; he was on guard again. Between him and the realization of his inheritance lay the shadow of the fear of the miles in the night. "But--there is no trick?" he hazarded in suspicion.

"No!"

Jack spoke in such a way that it removed the last doubt for Prather, who kneaded his palms together in a kind of frenzy, oblivious of all except the moneyed prospect of the kingdom craved that had become a kingdom won.

"How long before I start?" he asked.

"As soon as the first darkness settles and before the moon rises."

"I shall need some food," Prather went on ingratiatingly. "And they say wounds bring on fever. Have you any water to drink on the way?"

"We will fix you up the best we can. I will divide what water remains between you and P.D. He shall have his share now and you can drink yours later."

The sun had set. The afterglow was fading, and in a few minutes, when the light was quite out of the heavens, Jack announced that it was time for Prather to start.

"How shall I know the direction?" Prather asked.

"Trust P.D. He will find it," said Jack. He held the stirrup for Prather to mount with the relief of freeing himself at last from the clinging touch of the phantoms. "You are perfectly safe. In two days you will be mounting the steps of a Pullman on your way to New York."

"And you? What--what are you going to do?" Prather inquired hectically, with a momentary qualm of shame.

"Why, if Firio and I are to have water to make coffee for breakfast we must take the water-hole!" Jack answered, as if this were a thing of minor importance beside seeing Prather safely on his way. "Be sure not to overwater P.D. after the night's ride, and don't overdo him on the final stretch, and turn him over to Galway when you arrive. Home, P.D.! Home!" he concluded, striking that good soldier with the flat of his hand on the buttocks. And P.D. trotted away into the night.

Jack listened to the hoof-beats on the soft earth dying away and then crept up beside Firio on the bank and gazed into the black wall in the direction of the cotton-woods. A slight glow in the basin, which must be Leddy's camp-fire, was the only sign of life in the neighborhood. The silence was profound. He had not spoken a word to Firio. With one problem forever solved, he was absorbed in another.

"Leddy drinks, eats, waits!" whispered Firio. "If we try to go they hunt us down!"

"Yes," said Jack.

"And we not go, eh? We stay? We fight?"

"For water, Firio, yes! Two against seven!"

"_Sí_!" Firio had no illusions about the situation. "_Sí_!" he repeated stoically.

"And, Firio--" Jack's hand slipped with a quick, gripping caress onto Firio's shoulder. An inspiration had come to the mind of action, just as a line comes to a poet in a flash; as one must have come to the ancestor many times after he had gone into a tight place trusting to his wits and his blade to bring him out. "And, Firio, we are going to change our base, as the army men say--and change it before the moon rises. Jag Ear, we shall have to leave you behind," he added, when they had dropped back to the burro's side. "Just make yourself comfortable. Leddy surely wouldn't think of killing so valuable a member of the non-combatant class. We will come for you, by and by. It will be all right!"

He gave the sliver of ear an affectionate corkscrew twist before he and Firio, taking all their ammunition, crawled along the bottom of the _arroyo_ and up the ridge where they settled down comfortably behind a ledge commanding the water-hole at easy range.

"It's lucky we learned to shoot in the moonlight!" Jack whispered.

"_Sí"!_ Firio answered, in perfect understanding.

XXXVII

THE END OF THE WEAVING

For over a week a private car had stood on a siding at Little Rivers. Every morning a porter polished the brasswork of the platform in heraldry of the luxury within. Occasionally a young man with a plaster over a wound on his cheek would walk up and down the road-bed on the far side of the car. Indeed, he had worn a path there. He never went into town, and any glances that he may have cast in that direction spoke his desire to be forever free of its sight. Not a train passed that he did not wish himself aboard and away. But as heir-apparent he had no thought of endangering his new kingdom by going before his father went. He meant to keep very close to the throne. He had become clingingly, determinedly filial. At times the gleam of the brasswork would exercise the same hypnosis over his senses as the scintillation of the jewelry counters of the store, and he would rub his hands crisply together.

John Wingfield, Sr. spent little time in the car. Morning and afternoon and evening he would go over to Dr. Patterson's with the question: "How is he?" which all Little Rivers was asking. The rules of longevity were in oblivion and the routine channels of a mind, so used to teeming detail, had become abysses as dark and void as the canyons of the range.

On the day of his arrival in Little Rivers he found a town peopled mostly by women and children. All of the men who could bear arms and get a horse had departed, and with them Mary. Thereby hangs a story all to the honor of little Ignacio. After Jack had ridden away with his insistent refusal of assistance, apprehension among the group that watched him disappear in the gathering darkness was allayed by reports of men who had been at the store, where they found the Leddyites hanging about as usual. True, no one had seen either Pete or Ropey Smith, but Lang said that they were upstairs playing poker, a favorite relaxation from the strain of their intellectual life.

But Ignacio learned from another Indian in Lang's service that Pete and seven of his best shots had started for Agua Fria about the same time as Jack, while the rest of the gang that had been left behind were making it their business to cover the leader's absence. Distrusting Ignacio, they locked him in a closet off the bar. In the early hours of the morning he succeeded in escaping with his news, which he carried first to Mary. She was not asleep when he rapped at her door. It had been a night of wakefulness for her, recalling the night after her meeting with Jack on the pass before the duel in the _arroyo_.

"I for Señor Don't Care, now! I for every devil in him! And they go to kill him!" was the incoherent way in which he began his announcement.

In an hour the alarm had travelled from house to house. While the gang slept at Lang's or in their tents, a solemn cavalcade set forth quietly into the night, with rifles slung over their shoulders or lying across the pommels of their saddles, bound to rescue Jack Wingfield. They had protested against Mary's going with all the old, familiar arguments that occur to the male at thought of a woman in physical danger.

"It is the least that any of us can do," she declared.

"But of what service will you be?" Dr. Patterson asked.

"No one can say yet," she replied. "And no one shall stop me!" She was driven by the same impulse that had sent her across the _arroyo_ in face of the ruffians on the bank to Jack's side after he was wounded. "My pony can keep up with the best of yours," she added.

Leddy had eight hours' start on a two-days' journey. It was not in horse-flesh to gain much on his fast and hardened ponies. There was little chance that Jack could hold out against such odds as he must face, even if he had escaped an ambush. So they rode in desperation and in silence, each too certain of what was in the minds of the others to make pretence of a hope that was not in the heart.

Their only stop for rest was at Las Cascadas in the hot hours of midday. Darkness had fallen when they overtook a solitary horseman coming from Agua Fria. John Prather drew rein well to one side of the trail. He had a moment, as they approached, in which to think out his explanation of his position.

"It's Prather, and riding P.D.!" Galway announced.

"Where is Jack Wingfield?" came the merciless question as in one voice from all.