Over the Pass Part 37

The same question was put to Peter Mortimer.

"We all love him. I think a lot of people in the store would march out to the desert after him," said Mortimer, with real rejoicing in his candor and courage. Indeed, of late he had been developing cheer as well as courage, imbibing both, perhaps, from the roses in the vase on his employer's desk. Jack had ordered a fresh bunch put there every day; and when employees were sick packages of grapes and bunches of flowers came to them, in Little Rivers fashion, with J.W. on the card, as if they had come from the head of the firm himself.

"Maybe Jack will soften the old man a little," ran a whisper from bas.e.m.e.nt to roof. For the battalions called him "Jack," rather than "Mr.

Wingfield," just as Little Rivers had.

"The boy's good nature isn't making him too familiar with the employees?"

was a second question which the father had asked both the general manager and Mortimer.

"No. That is the surprising thing--the gift of being friendly without being familiar," answered the manager.

"He's got a kind of self-respect that induces respect in others,"

said Peter.

John Wingfield, Sr. was the proprietor of the store, but the human world of the store began to feel a kind of proprietorship in Jack, while its guardian interest in helping him in his mistakes was common enough to be a conspiracy.

And the callouses were gone from his hands. There was no longer a dividing line between tan and white on his forehead. No outward symbol of the desert clung to his person except the moments of the far vision of distances in his eyes. Superficially, on the Avenue he would have been taken for one of his caste.

But tossing a cowpuncher hat out of a window into Broadway was easier than tossing a thing out of mind. He sat up nights to write to Mary.

Letter after letter he poured out as a diary of his experiences in his new world, letters breathing a pupil's hope of learning and all that pupil's sorry vagaries. No answer ever came, not even to the most appealing ones about his most adventurous conflicts with the dinosaur.

He felt the chagrin of the army of unpublished novelists who lay their hearts bare on the stone slab of the dissectors in a publisher's office. He might as well have thrown all he wrote into the waste-basket so far as any result was concerned; yet he kept on writing as if it were his glorious duty to report to her as his superior. But he found a more responsive correspondent in Jim Galway; and this was the letter he received:

"DEAR JACK:

"The whole valley is not yet sprouting with dates as you said it would from your thinking of us. Maybe we didn't use the right seed. Your ranch is still called Jack's ranch, and Firio is doing his best and about the best I ever knew in an Indian. But as you always said, Indians are mostly human, like the rest of us, barring a sort of born twist in their intellect for which they aren't responsible. You see, Jack, a lot of your sayings still live with us, though you are gone.

"Well, Firio keeps your P.D. exercised and won't let anybody but himself ride him. He says you will need him. For you can't budge the stubborn little cuss. He declares you're coming back. When we tell him you're worth twenty millions and he's plumb full of primitive foolishness and general ignorance of the outside world, he says, '_Si_, he will come back!' like some heathen oracle that's strong on repet.i.tion and weak on vocabulary.

"Of course you know about the new addition to our citizenship, John Prather, that double of yours that you didn't happen to meet. And I might mention that by this time, after we've seen so much of him, we agree with the Doge that he doesn't look a bit like you. Well, he's making a fine ranch across the road from you, but hiring all his work done, which ain't exactly according to Little Rivers custom, as you will remember. The Doge sets a lot by him, though I can't see how there's much in common between them. This fellow's not full of all that kind of scholastic persiflage that you are, Jack. He's so all-fired practical his joints would crack if he wasn't so oily; and he's up to old man Lefferts' pretty often.

"He goes to Phoenix a good deal. When I was there the other day I heard he was circulating around among the politicians in his quiet way, and I saw him and Pete Leddy hobn.o.bbing together. I didn't like that. But when I told the Doge of it he said he guessed there wasn't much real hobn.o.bbing. The Doge is certainly strong for Prather. Another thing I heard was that, after all, old man Lefferts' two partners aren't dead, and Prather's been hunting them up.

"Come to think of it, I didn't tell you that Pete Leddy and some of the gang have been back in town. Of course we have every confidence in the Doge, he's been so fair to this community. Still, some of us can't help having our private suspicions, considering what a lot we have at stake.

And four or five of us was talking the other night, when suddenly we all agreed how you'd shine in any trouble, and if there was going to be any--not that there is--we wished you were here.

"Well, Jack, the pa.s.s hasn't changed and the sunsets are just as grand as ever and the air just as free. The pa.s.s won't have changed and the sunsets will be doing business at the old stand when the antiquaries are digging up the remote civilization of Little Rivers and putting it in a high scale because they ran across a pot of Mrs. Galway's jam in the ruins--the same hifalutin compliment being your own when you were nursing your wound, as you will remember.

"Here's wishing you luck from the whole town, way out here in nowhere.

"As ever yours,

"James R. Galway.

"P.S. Belvy Smith wants to know if you won't write just one story. I told her you were too busy for such nonsense now. But she refuses to believe it. She says being busy doesn't matter to you. She says the stories just pop out. So I transmit her request. J.R.G."

"P.D. waiting!" breathed Jack. "No changing Firio! He is like the pa.s.s. I wonder how Wrath of G.o.d and Jag Ear are!"

He wrote a story for Belvy. He wrote to Firio in resolute a.s.sertion that he would never require the services of P.D. again, when he knew that Firio, despite the protests, would still keep P.D. fit for the trail. He wrote to Jim Galway how immersed he was in his new career, but that he might come for a while--for a little while, with emphasis--if ever Jim wired that he was needed.

"That was a good holiday--a regular week-end debauch away from the shop!"

he thought, when the letters were finished.

Soon after this came an event which, for the first time, gave John Wingfield, Sr. a revelation of the side of his son that had won Little Rivers and the interest of the rank and file of the store. Among Jack's many suggestions, in his aim to carry out his father's talk about the creative business sense the first night they were together, had been one for a suburban clubbing delivery system. It had been dismissed as fantastic, but Jack had asked that it be given a trial and his father had consented. Its basis was a certain confidence in human nature. Jack and his father had dined together the evening after the master of the push-b.u.t.tons had gone through the final reports of the experiment.

"Well, Jack, I am going to raise your salary to a hundred a week," the father announced.

"On the ground that if you pay me more I might make myself worth more?"

Jack asked respectfully.

"No, as a matter of business. Whenever any man makes two dollars for the store, he gets one dollar and I keep the other. That is the basis of my success--others earning money for me. Your club scheme is a go. As the accountant works it out, it has brought a profit of two hundred a week."

"Then I have done something worth while, really?" Jack asked, eagerly, but half sceptical of such good fortune.

"Yes. You have created a value. You have used your powers of observation and your brain. That's the thing that makes a few men employers while the mult.i.tude remains employees."

"Father! Then I am not quite hopeless?"

"Hopeless! My son hopeless! No, no! I didn't expect you to learn the business in a week, or a month, or even a year. Time! time!"

Nor did John Wingfield, Sr. wish his son to develop too rapidly. Now that he was so sure of beating threescore and ten, while retaining the full possession of his faculties, if he followed the rules of longevity, he would not have welcomed a son who could spring into the saddle at once. He wanted to ride alone. He who had never shared his power with anyone! He who had never admitted anyone into even a few shares of company partnership in his concern! Time! time! The boy would never fall heir to undivided responsibility before he was forty. John Wingfield, Sr. was pleased with himself; pleased over a good sign; and he could not deny that he was pleased at the sudden change in Jack. For he saw Jack's eyes sparkling into his own; sparkling with comradeship and spontaneous gratification. Was the boy to be his in thought and purpose, after all?

Yes, of course; yes, inevitably, with the approach of maturity. Gradually the flightiness of his upbringing would wear off down to the steel, the hard-tempered, paternal steel.

"You can scarcely realize what a fight it has been for me until you know the life I led out in Arizona, getting strong for you and the store,"

Jack began.

"Strong for me! For the store! Yes, Jack!" There was an emphasis on the subjective personal p.r.o.noun--for _him_; for the store!

The father's face beamed a serene delight. This Jack accepted as the expression of sympathy and understanding which he had craved. It was to him an inspiration of fellowship that set the well of his inner being in overflow and the force of his personality, which the father had felt uncannily before the mother's picture, became something persuasive in its radiance rather than something held in leash as a threatening and volcanic element. Now he could talk as freely and happily of the desert to his father as to Burleigh and Mathewson. He told of the long rides; of Firio and Wrath of G.o.d. He made the tinkle of Jag Ear's bells heard in the silence of the dining-room as it was heard in the silences of the trail. He mentioned how he was afraid to come back after he was strong.

"Afraid?" queried his father.

"Yes. But I was coming--coming when, at the top of the pa.s.s, I saw Little Rivers for the first time."

He sketched his meeting with Mary Ewold; the story of the town and the story of Jasper Ewold as he knew it, now glancing at his father, now seeming to see nothing except visualization of the pictures of his story.

The father, looking at the table-cloth, at times playing with his coffee-spoon, made no comment.

"And that first night I saw that Jasper Ewold had met me somewhere before. But--" he went on after going back to the incident of the villa in his childhood--"that hardly explained. How could he remember the face of a grown man from the face of a boy? Jasper Ewold! Do you recall ever having met him? He must have known my mother. Perhaps he knew you, though why he should not have told me I don't know."

"Yes, yes--Jasper Ewold," said the father. "I knew him in his younger days. His was an old family up in Burbridge, the New England town where I came from. Too much college, too much travel, as I remember, characterized Jasper Ewold. No settled point of view; and I judge from what you say that he must have run through his patrimony. One of the ups and downs of the world, Jack. And he never mentioned that he had met me?"

"No."

"Probably a part of that desert notion of freemasonry in keeping pasts a secret. But why did you stay on after you had recovered from your wound?"

he asked penetratingly, though he was looking again at the bottom of his coffee-cup.

"For a reason that comes to a man but once in his life!" Jack answered.

Had the father looked up--it was a habit of his in listening to any report to lower his eyes, his face a mask--he might have seen Jack's face in the supremacy of emotion, as it was when he had called up to Mary from the canyon and when he had pleaded with her on the pa.s.s. But John Wingfield, Sr. could not mistake the message of a voice vibrating with all the force of a being let free living over the scene. With the shadows settling over his eyes, Jack came to her answer and to the finality of her cry: