A faint aureole of light crept up back of the pass.

"Dawn at last!" Jack breathed, in relief. "Firio! Firio! Up with you!"

"Oh-yuh!" yawned Firio. "SÍ, sÍ!" he said, rising numbly to his feet and rubbing his eyes with his fists, while he tried to comprehend an astonishing reversal of custom. Usually he awakened his camp-mate; but this morning his camp-mate had awakened him. A half shadow in the semi-darkness, Jack was already throwing the saddle over P.D.'s back.

"We will get away at once," he said.

Firio knew that something strange had come over SeÑor Jack after he had met SeÑorita Ewold on the pass, and now he was convinced that this thing had been working in SeÑor Jack's mind all night.

"Coffee before we start?" he inquired ingratiatingly.

"Coffee at the ranch," Jack answered.

In their expeditious preparations for departure he hummed no snatches of song as a paean of stretching muscles and the expansion of his being with the full tide of the conscious life of day; and this, too, was contrary to custom.

Before it was fairly light they were on the road, with Jack urging P.D. forward at a trot. The silence was soft with the shimmer of dawn; all glistening and still the roofs and trees of Little Rivers took form. The moist sweetness of its gardens perfumed the fresh morning air in greeting to the easy traveller, while the makers of gardens were yet asleep.

It was the same hour that Mary had hurried forth after her wakeful night to stop the duel in the arroyo. As Jack approached the Ewold home he had a glimpse of something white, a woman's gown he thought, that disappeared behind the vines. He concluded that Mary must have risen early to watch the sunrise, and drew rein opposite the porch; but through the lace-work of the vines he saw that it was empty. Yet he was positive that he had seen her and that she must have seen him coming. She was missing the very glorious moment which she had risen to see. A rim of molten gold was showing in the defile and all the summits of the range were topped with flowing fire.

"Mary!" he called.

There was no answer. Had he been mistaken? Had mental suggestion played him a trick? Had his eyes personified a wish when they saw a figure on the steps?

"Mary!" he called again, and his voice was loud enough for her to have heard if she were awake and near. Still there was no answer.

The pass had now become a flaming vortex which bathed him in its far-spreading radiance. But he had lost interest in sunrises. A last backward, hungry glance over his shoulder as he started gave him a glimpse through the open door of the living-room, and he saw Mary leaning against the table looking down at her hands, which were half clasped in her lap, as if she were waiting for him to get out of the way.

Thus he understood that he had ended their comradeship when he had broken through the barrier on the previous afternoon, and the only thing that could bring it back was the birth of a feeling in her greater than comradeship. His shoulders fell together, the reins loosened, while P.D., masterless if not riderless, proceeded homeward.

"Hello, Jack!"

It was the greeting of Bob Worther, the inspector of ditches, who was the only man abroad at that hour. Jack looked up with an effort to be genial and found Bob closely studying his features in a stare.

"What's the matter, Bob?" he asked. "Has my complexion turned green over night or my nose slipped around to my ear?"

"I was trying to make out if you do look like him!" Bob declared.

"Like whom? What the deuce is the mystery?"

"What—why, of course you're the most interested party and the only
Little Riversite that don't know about it, seh!"

After all, there was some compensation for early rising. Bob expanded with the privilege of being the first to break the news.

"If you'd come yesterday you'd have seen him. He went by the noon train," he said, and proceeded with the story of Prather.

Jack had never heard of the man before and was obviously uninterested. He did not seem to care if a dozen doubles came to town.

"Oh, yes, there's another thing concerning you," Bob continued. "I was so interested in telling you about Prather that I near forgot it. A swell-looking fellow—says he's a doctor and he's got New York written all over him—came in yesterday particularly to see you."

Though it was a saying in Little Rivers that nobody ever found Jack at a loss, he started perceptibly now. His fingers worked nervously on the reins and he bit his lips in irritation.

"He was asking a lot of questions about you," Bob added.

By this time Jack had summoned back his smile. He did not seem to mind if a dozen doctors came to town at the same time as a dozen doubles.

"Did you tell him that I had a cough—kuh-er?" he asked, casually.

"Why, no! I said you could thrash your weight in wildcats and he says, 'Well, he'll have to, yet!' and then shut up as if he'd overspoke himself—and I judge that he ain't the kind that does that often. But say, Jack," Bob demanded, in the alarm of local partisanship which apprehends that it may unwittingly have served an outside interest, "did you want us to dope it out that you were an invalid? We ain't been getting you in wrong, I hope?"

"Not a bit!" answered Jack with a reassuring slap on Bob's shoulder. "Was his name Bennington?"

"Yes, that's it."

"Well," said Jack thoughtfully and with a return of his annoyance, "he will find me at home when he calls." And P.D. knew that the reins were still held in listless hands as he turned down the side street toward the new ranch.

Firio was feeling like an astrologer who had lost faith in his crystal ball. An interrogation had taken the place of his confident "SÍ, sÍ" of desert understanding of the mind of his patron. Jack had broken camp with the precipitancy of one who was eager to be quit of the trail and back at the ranch; yet he gave his young trees only a passing glance before entering the house. He had not wanted coffee on the road, yet coffee served with the crisp odor of bacon accompanying its aroma, after his bath and return to ranch clothes, found no appetite. He was as a man whose mind cannot hold fast to anything that he is doing. Firio, restless, worried, his eyes flicking covert glances, was frequently in and out of the living-room on one excuse or another.

"What work to-day?" he asked, as he cleared away the breakfast dishes.
"What has SeÑor Jack planned for us to do?"

"The work to-day? The work to-day?" Jack repeated absently. "First the mail." He nodded toward a pile on the table.

"And I shall make ready to stay a long time?" Firio insinuated softly.

"No!" Jack answered to space.

The pyramid of mail might have been a week's batch for the Doge himself. At the bottom were a number of books and above them magazines which Jack had subscribed for when he found that they were not on the Doge's list. There was only one letter as a first-class postage symbol of the exile's intimacy with the outside world, and out of this tumbled a check and a blank receipt to be filled in. He tore off the wrappers of the magazines as a means of some sort of physical occupation and rolled them into balls, which he cast at the waste-basket; but neither the contents of the magazines nor those of the newspapers seemed to interest him. His aspect was that of one waiting in a lobby to keep an appointment.

When he heard steps on the porch he sang out cheerily, "Come in!" but, contrary to the habit of Little Rivers hospitality, he did not hasten to meet his caller, and any keenness of anticipation which he may have felt was well masked.

There entered a man of middle age, with close-cropped gray beard, clad in soft flannels, the trousers bottoms turned up in New York fashion for negligee business suits for that spring. To the simple interior of a western ranch house he brought the atmosphere of complex civilization as a thing ineradicably bred into his being. It was evident, too, that he had been used to having his arrival in any room a moment of importance which summoned the rapt attention of everybody, whether nurses, fellow physicians, or the members of the patient's family. But this time that was lacking. The young man leaning against the table was not visibly impressed.

"Hello, doctor!" said Jack, as unconcernedly as he would have passed the time of day with Jim Galway in the street.

"Hello, Jack!" said the doctor.

Jack went just half-way across the room to shake hands. Then he dropped back to his easy position, with the table as a rest, after he had set a chair for the visitor.

"How do you like Little Rivers?" Jack asked.

"I have been here only thirty-six hours," answered the doctor, avoiding a direct answer. He was pulling off his silk summer gloves, making the operation a trifle elaborate, one which seemed to require much attention. "I came pretty near mistaking another man for you, but his mole patch saved me. I didn't think you could have grown one out here. Wonderfully like you! Have you met him?"

He glanced up as he asked this question, which seemed the first to occur to him as a warming-up topic of conversation before he came to the business in hand.

"No. I have just heard of him," Jack answered.

The doctor smiled at his gloves, which he now folded and put in his pocket. Don't the lecturers to young medical students say, "Divert your patient's mind to some topic other than himself as you get your first impression"? Now Dr. Bennington drew forward in his chair, rested the tips of the long fingers of a soft, capable hand on the edge of the table, and looked up to Jack in professional candor, sweeping him with the knowing eye of the modern confessor of the secrets of all manner of mankind. With the other hand he drew a stethoscope from his side coat-pocket.

"Well, Jack, you can guess what brought me all the way from New York—just five minutes' work!" and he gave the symbol of examination a flourish in emphasis.

"I don't think I have forgotten the etiquette of the patient on such occasions," Jack returned. "It is an easy function in this Arizona climate."

He drew his shirt up from a compact loin and lean middle, revealing the arch of his deep chest, the flesh of which was healthy pink under neck and face plated with Indian tan. The doctor's eyes lighted with the bliss of a critic used to searching for flaws at sight of a masterpiece. While he conducted the initial plottings with the rubber cup which carried sounds to one of the most expensive senses of hearing in America, Jack was gazing out of the window, as if his mind were far away across the cactus-spotted levels.

"Breathe deep!" commanded the doctor.

Jack's nostrils quivered with the indrawing of a great gust of air and his diaphragm swelled until his ribs were like taut bowstrings.

"And you were the pasty-faced weakling that left my office five years ago—and you, you husky giant, have brought me two thousand miles to see if you were really convalescent!"

"I hope the trip will do you good!" said Jack, sweetly.

"But it is great news that I take back, great news!" said the doctor, as he put the stethoscope in his pocket.

"Yes?" returned Jack, slipping his head through his shirt. "You don't find even a speck?"

"Not a speck! No sign of the lesion! There is no reason why you should not have gone home long ago."

"No?" Jack was fastening his string tie and doing this with something of the urban nicety with which the doctor had folded his gloves. That tie was one of the few inheritances from complex civilization which still had Jack's favor.

"What have you found to do all these years?"

Jack was surprised at the question.

"I have just wandered about and read and thought," he explained.

"Without developing any sense of responsibility?" demanded the doctor in exasperation.

"I have tried to be good to my horses, and of late I have taken to ranching. There is a lot of responsibility in that and care, too. Take the scale, for instance!"

"A confounded little ranch out in this God-forsaken place, that a Swede immigrant might run!"

"No, the Swedes aren't particularly good at irrigation, though better than the Dutch. You see, the Hollanders are used to having so much water that—"

Jack was leaning idly against the table again. The fashionable practitioner, accustomed to having his words accepted at their cost price in gold, broke in hotly:

"It is past all understanding! You, the heir to twenty millions!"

"Is it twenty now?" Jack asked softly and sadly.

"Nearer thirty, probably! And shirking your duty! Shirking and for what—for what?"

Jack faced around. The doctor, meeting a calm eye that was quizzically challenging, paused abruptly, feeling that in some way he had been caught at a professional disadvantage in his outburst of emotion.

"Don't you like Little Rivers?" asked Jack.

"I should be bored to death!" the doctor admitted, honestly.

"Well, you see this air never healed a lesion for you! You never uttered a prayer to it for strength with every breath! And, doctor," Jack hesitated, while his lips were half open, showing his even teeth slightly apart in the manner of a break in a story to the children where he expected them to be very attentive to what was coming, "you can take a piece of tissue and analyze it, yes, a piece of brain tissue and find all the blood-vessels, but not what a man was thinking, can you? Until you can take a precipitate of his thoughts—the very thoughts he is unconscious of himself—and put them under a microscope, why, there must be a lot of guesswork about the source of all unconventional human actions."

Jack laughed over his invasion of psychology; and when he laughed in a certain way the impulse to join him was strong, as Mary first found on the pass. So the doctor laughed, partly in relief, perhaps, that this uncertain element which he was finding in Jack had not yet proved explosive.

"That would make a capital excuse for a student flunking in examinations!" he said.

"It might be a worthy one—not that I say it ought to pass him."

"Now, Jack," the doctor began afresh, the reassuring force of his personality again in play.

He took a step and raised his hands as if he would put them on Jack's shoulders. One could imagine him driving hypochondria out of many a patient's mind by thus making his own vigorous optimism flow down from his fingertips, while he looked into the patient's eye. But his hands remained in the air, though Jack had been only smiling at him. This was not the way to handle this patient, something told his trained, sensitive instinct in time, and he let his hands fall in semblance of a gesture of protest, gave a shrug and came directly to the point very genuinely.

"Well, Jack—your father!"

"Yes." And Jack's face was still and blank, while shadows played over it in a war among themselves. "He did not even tell me you were coming," he added.

"Perhaps he feared that it would give you time to develop a cough or you would start overland to Chihuahua so I should miss you. Jack, he needs you! All that fortune waits for you!"

"Now that I am strong, yes! He did not come out to see me even during the first year when I had not the health to go to him, nor did he think to come with you."

"He—he is a very busy man!" explained the doctor, in ready championship. And yet he looked away from Jack, and when he looked back it was with an appeal to conscience rather than to filial affection. "Is it right to remain, however much you like this desert life? Have you any excuse?"

"Yes, an overwhelming one!" exclaimed Jack in a voice that was high-pitched and determined, while his eyes burned and no trace of humor remained on lips that were as firm as the outline of his chin. "Yes, one that thrills me from head to foot with the steady ardor of the soldier who makes a siege!"

"I—I—you are beyond me! Then you will stay? You are not coming home?"

"Yes," Jack answered, in another mood, but one equally rigid. "I am coming at once. That was all settled last night under the stars. I have found the courage!"

"The courage to go to twenty millions!" gasped the doctor. "But—good! You will go! That is enough! Why shouldn't we take the same train back?" he went on enthusiastically. "I shall be coming through here in less than a week. You see, I am so near California that I simply had to steal a few days with my sister, who can't come East on account of her health. I have been so tied down to practice that I have not seen her for fifteen years. That will give you time to arrange your affairs. How about it?"

"It would be delightful, but—" Jack was hesitating. "No, I will refuse. You see, I rode horseback when I entered this valley for the first time and I should like to ride out in the way I came. Just sentiment!"

"Jack!" exclaimed the doctor.

He was casting about how to express his suspicion when something electric checked him—a current that began in Jack's measured glance. Jack was not mentioning that his word was being questioned, but something still and effective that came from far away out on the untrod desert was in the room. It fell on the nerves of the ambassador from the court of complex civilization like a sudden hush on a city's traffic. Jack broke the silence by asking, in a tone of lively hospitality:

"You will join me at luncheon?"

"I should like to," answered the doctor, "but I can catch a train on the other trunk line that will give me a few more hours with my sister. And what shall I wire your father? Have you any suggestion?"

"Why, that he will be able to judge for himself in a few days how near cured I am."

"You will wire him the date of your arrival?"

"Yes."

"Jack," said the doctor at the door, "that remark of yours about the analysis of brain tissue and of thought put a truth very happily. Come and see me and let me know how you get on. Good-by!"

He took his departure thoughtfully, rather than with a sense of triumph over the success of a two-thousand-mile mission in the name of twenty millions.