Over the Pass Part 53

"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!" a.s.sented 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 cla.s.s 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:

"Senor Jack, see there! Hors.e.m.e.n!"

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 pa.s.sing 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 impa.s.siveness.

"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?"