There were to be no stories of Little Rivers at dinner; no questions asked about desert life. This chapter of Jack's career was a past rung of the ladder to John Wingfield, Sr. who was ever looking up to the rungs above. The magnetism and charm with which he won men to his service now turned to the immediate problem of his son, whom he was to refashion according to his ideas.

"Are you ready to settle down?" he asked, half fearful lest that scene in the drawing-room might have wrought a change of purpose.

In answer he was seeing another Jack; a Jack relaxed, amiable, even amenable.

"If you have the patience," said Jack. "You know, father, I haven't a cash-register mind. I'm starting out on a new trail and I am likely to go lame at times. But I mean to be game."

He looked very frankly and earnestly into his father's eyes.

"Wild oats sown! My boy, after all!" thought the father. "Respected his mother! Well, didn't I respect mine? Of course—and let him! It is good principles. It is right. He has health; that is better than schooling."

In place of the shock of the son's will against his, he was feeling it as a force which might yet act in unison with his. He expanded with the pride of the fortune-builder. He told how a city within a city is created and run; of tentacles of investment and enterprise stretching beyond the store in illimitable ambition; how the ball of success, once it was set rolling, gathered bulk of its own momentum and ever needed closer watching to keep it clear of obstacles.

"And I am to stand on top like a gymnast on a sphere or be rolled under," thought Jack. "And I'll have cloth of gold breeches and a balancing pole tipped with jewels; but—but—"

"A good listener, and that is a lot!" thought the father, happily.

Jack had interrupted neither with questions nor vagaries. He was gravely attentive, marveling over this story of a man's labor and triumph.

"And the way to learn the business is not from talks by me," said his father, finally. "You cannot begin at the top."

"No! no!" said Jack, aghast. "The top would be quite too insecure, too dizzy to start with."

"Right!" the father exclaimed, decidedly. "You must learn each department of itself, and then how it works in with the others. It will be drudgery, but it is best—right at the bottom!"

"Yes, father, where there is no danger of a fall."

"You will be put on an apprentice salary of ten dollars a week."

"And I'll try to earn it."

"Of course, you understand that the ten is a charge against the store. That's business. But as for a private allowance, you are John Wingfield's son and—"

"I think I have enough of my own for the present," Jack put in.

"As you wish. But if you need more, say the word. And you shall name the department where you are to begin. Did you get any idea of which you'd choose from looking the store over to-day?"

"That's very considerate of you!" Jack answered. He was relieved and pleased and made his choice quickly, though he mentioned it half timidly as if he feared that it might be ridiculous, so uncertain was he about the rules of apprenticeship.

"You see I have been used to the open air and I'd like a little time in which to acclimatize myself in New York. Now, all those big wagons that bring the goods in and the little wagons that take them out—there is an out-of-door aspect to the delivery service. Is that an important branch to learn?"

"Very—getting the goods to the customer—very!"

"Then I'll start with that and sort of a roving commission to look over the other departments."

"Good! We will consider it settled. And, Jack, every man's labor that you can save and retain efficiency—that is the trick! Organization and ideas, that's what makes the employer and so makes success. Why, Jack, if you could cut down the working costs in the delivery department or improve the service at the present cost, why—" John Wingfield, Sr. rubbed the palms of his hands together delightedly.

Everything was going finely—so far. He added that proviso of so far instinctively.

"Besides, Jack," he went on, changing to another subject that was equally vital to his ego, "this name of Wingfield is something to work for. I was the son of a poor New England clergyman, but there is family back of it; good blood, good blood! I was not the first John Wingfield and you shall not be the last!"

He rose from the table, bidding the servant to bring the coffee to the drawing-room. With the same light, quick step that he ascended the flights in the store, he led the way downstairs, his face alive with the dramatic anticipation that it had worn when he took Jack out of the office to look down from the balcony of the court.

"Ah, we have something besides the store, Jack!" he was saying, in the very exultation of the pride of possession, as he went to the opposite side of the mantel from the mother's portrait and turned on the reflector over a picture.

Jack saw a buccaneer under the brush of the gold and the shadows of Spain; a robust, ready figure on fighting edge, who seemed to say, "After you, sir; and, then, pardon me, but it's your finish, sir!"

"It's a Velasquez!" Jack exclaimed.

"And you knew that at a glance!" said his father.

"Why, yes!"

"Not many Velasquezes in America," said the father, thinking, incidentally, that his son would not have to pay the dealers a heavy toll for an art education, while he revelled in a surprise that he was evidently holding back.

"Or many better Velasquezes than this, anywhere," added Jack. "What mastery! What a gift from heaven that was vouchsafed to a human being to paint like that!"

He was in a spell, held no less by the painter's art than by the subject.

"Absolutely a certified Velasquez, bought from the estate of Count Galting," continued his father. "I paid a cool two hundred and fifty thousand for it. And that isn't all, Jack, that isn't all that you are going to drudge for as an apprentice in the delivery department. I know what I am talking about. I wasn't fooled by any of the genealogists who manufacture ancestors. I had it all looked up by four experts, checking one off against another."

"Yes," answered Jack, absently. He had hardly heard his father's words. In fervent scrutiny he was leaning forward, his weight on the ball of the foot, the attitude of the man in the picture.

"And who do you think he is—who?" pursued John Wingfield, Sr.

"A man who fought face to face with the enemy; a man whom men followed!
Velasquez caught all that!" answered Jack.

"That old fellow was a great man in his day—a great Englishman—and his name was John Wingfield! He was your ancestor and mine!"

After a quick breath of awakening comprehension Jack took a step nearer the portrait, all his faculties in the throe of beaming inquiry of SeÑor Don't Care and desert freedom, in the self-same, alert readiness of pose as the figure he was facing.

"They say I resemble him!" The father repeated that phrase which he had used in benignant satisfaction to many a guest, but now seeing with greedy eyes a likeness between his son and the ancestor deeper than mere resemblance of feature, he added: "But you—you, Jack, you're the dead spit of him!"

"Yes," said Jack, as if he either were not surprised or were too engrossed to be interested. To the buccaneer's "After you, sir; and, then, your finish, sir!" he seemed to be saying, in the fully-lived spirit of imagination: "A good epitaph, sir! I'll see that it is written on your tombstone!"

The father, singularly affected by the mutual and enjoyed challenge that he was witnessing, half expected to see a sword leap out of the scabbard of the canvas and another from Jack's side.

"If he had lived in our day," said the father, "he would have built himself a great place; he would have been the head of a great institution, just as I am."

"Two centuries is a long way to fetch a comparison," answered Jack, hazily, out of a corner of his brain still reserved for conversation, while all the rest of it was centered elsewhere. "He might have been a cow-puncher, a revolutionist, or an aviator. Certainly, he would never have been a camp-follower."

"At all events, a man of power. It's in the blood!"

"It's in the blood!" Jack repeated, with a sort of staring, lingering emphasis. He was hearing Mary's protest on the pass; her final, mysterious reason for sending him away; her "It's not in the blood!" There could be no connection between this and the ancestor; yet, in the stirred depths of his nature, probing the inheritance in his veins, her hurt cry had come echoing to his ears.

"Why, I would have paid double the price rather than not have got that picture!" the father went on. "There is a good deal of talk about family trees in this town and a strong tendency in some quarters for second generations of wealth to feel a little superiority over the first generation. Here I come along with an ancestor eight generations back, painted by Velasquez. I tell you it was something of a sensation when I exhibited him in the store!"

"You—you—" and Jack glanced at his father perplexedly; "you exhibited him in the store!" he said.

"Why, yes, as a great Velasquez I had just bought. I didn't advertise him as my ancestor, of course. Still, the fact got around; yes, the fact got around, Jack."

While Jack studied the picture, his father studied Jack, whose face and whose manner of blissful challenge to all comers in the unconcern of easy fatality and ready blade seemed to grow more and more like that of the first John Wingfield. At length, Jack passed over to the other side of the mantel and turned on the reflector over the portrait of his mother; and, in turn, standing silently before her all his militancy was gone and in its place came the dreamy softness with which he would watch the Eternal Painter cloud-rolling on the horizon. And he was like her not in features, not in the color of hair or eyes, but in a peculiar sensitiveness, distinguished no less by a fatalism of its own kind than was the cheery aggressiveness of the buccaneer.

"Yes, father," he said, "that old ruffian forebear of ours could swear and could kill. But he had the virtue of truth. He could not act or live a lie. And I guess something else—how supremely gentle he could be before a woman like her. Velasquez brought out a joyous devil and Sargent brought out a soul!"

John Wingfield, Sr., who stood by the grate, was drumming nervously on the mantel. The drumming ceased. The fingers rested rigid and white on the dark wood. Alive to another manifestation of the lurking force in his son, he hastened to change the subject.

"I had almost forgotten that you always had a taste for art, Jack."

"Yes, from her;" which was hardly changing the subject.

"As for the first John Wingfield, you may be sure that I wanted to know
everything there was to know about the old fellow," said the father. "So
I set a lot of bookworms looking up the archives of the English and
Spanish governments and digging around in the libraries after material.
Then I had it all put together in proper shape by a literary sharp."

"You have that!" cried Jack. "You have the framework from which you can build the whole story of him—the story of how he fought and how Velasquez came to paint him? Oh, I want to read it!" With an unexplored land between gilt-tooled covers under his arm he went upstairs early, in the transport of wanderlust that had sent him away over the sand from Little Rivers. SÍ, sÍ, Firio, outward bound, camp under the stars! If SeÑor Don't Care's desert journeys were over—and he had no thought but that they were—there was no ban on travelling in fancy over sea trails in the ancestor's company.

Jack was with the buccaneer when he boarded the enemy at the head of his men; with him before the Board of Admiralty when, a young captain of twenty-two, he refused to lie to save his skin; with him when, in answer to the scolding of Elizabeth, then an old woman, he said: "It is glorious for one who fought so hard for Your Majesty to have the recognition even of Your Majesty's chiding in answer to the protest of the Spanish ambassador," which won Elizabeth's reversal of the Admiralty's decision; with him when, in a later change of fortune, he went to the court of Spain for once on a mission which required a sheathed blade; with him when the dark eye of Velasquez, who painted men and women of his time while his colleagues were painting Madonnas, glowed with a discoverer's joy at sight of this fair-haired type of the enemy, whom he led away to his studio.

More than once was there mention of the fact that this terrible fighter was gentle with women and fonder of the company of children than of statesmen or courtiers. He had married the daughter of a great merchant, a delicate type of beauty; the last to fascinate a buccaneer, according to the gossips of the time. Rumor had it that he had taken her for the wherewithal to pay the enormous debts contracted in his latest exploit. To disprove this he went to sea in a temper with a frigate and came back laden with the treasure of half a dozen galleons, to find that his wife had died at the birth of a son. He promised himself to settle down for good; but the fog of London choked lungs used to soft airs; he heard the call of the sun and was away again to seek adventure in the broiling reaches of the Caribbean. A man of restless, wild spirit, breathing inconsistencies incomprehensible to the conventions of Whitehall! And his son had turned a Cromwellian, who, in poverty, sought refuge in America when Charles II. came to the throne; and from him, in the vicissitudes of five generations, the poor clergyman was descended.

Thus ran the tale in its completeness. The end of the ancestor's career had been in keeping with its character and course. He had been spared the slow decay of faculties in armchair reminiscence. He had gone down in his ship without striking his colors, fighting the Spaniards one to three. When Jack closed the cover on the last page tenderly and in enraptured understanding, it was past midnight.

The spaciousness of the sea under clouds of battle smoke had melted into the spaciousness of the desert under the Eternal Painter's canopy. Then four walls of a bedroom in Madison Avenue materialized, shutting out the horizon; a carpet in place of sand formed the floor; and in place of a blanket roll was a canopied bed upon which a servant had laid out a suit of pajamas. In the impulse of a desire to look into the face of the first John Wingfield in the light of all he now knew, Jack went downstairs, and in the silence of the house drank in the portrait again.

"You splendid old devil, you!" he breathed, understandingly. "How should you like to start out delivering goods with me in the morning?"