"Because of a lie and what it concealed. Because of reasons that may not be so vague to you as they are to me."

"A lie! Yes, a lie that came home!" the Doge repeated, while he pa.s.sed his hand back and forth over his eyes. The hand was trembling. Indeed, his whole body was trembling, while he sought for self-control and to collect his thoughts for what he had to say to that still figure awaiting his words. When he looked up it was with an expression wholly new to Jack. Its candor was not that of transparent mental processes in serene philosophy or forensic display, but that of a man who was about to lay bare things of the past which he had kept secret.

"Sir Chaps, I am going to give you my story, however weak and blameworthy it makes me appear," he said. "Sir Chaps, you saw me in anger in the Wingfield drawing-room, further baffling you with a mystery which must have begun for you the night that you came to Little Rivers when we exchanged a look in which I saw that you knew that I recognized you. I tried to talk as if you were a welcome stranger, when I was holding in my rancor. There was no other face in the world that I would not rather have seen in this community than yours!

"How glad I was to hear that you were leaving by the morning train! How I counted the days of your convalescence after you were wounded! How glad I was at the news that you were to go as soon as you were well! With what a revelry of suggestion I planned to speed your parting! How demoralized I was when you announced that you were going to stay! How amazed at your seriousness about ranching--but how distrustful! Yet what joy in your companionship! At times I wanted to get my arms around you and hug you as a scarred old grizzly bear would hug a cub. And, first and last, your success with everybody here! Your cool hand in the duel! That iron in your will which would triumph at any cost when you broke Nogales's arm!

For some reason you had chosen to stop, in the play period of youth, on the way to the inheritance to overcome some obstacle that it pleased you to overcome and to amuse yourself a while in Little Rivers--you with your steadiness in a fight and your airy, smiling confidence in yourself!"

"I--I did not know that I was like that!" said Jack, in hurt, groping surprise. "Was I truly?"

The Doge nodded.

"As I saw you," he said.

Jack looked at Mary, frankly and calmly.

"Was I truly?" he asked her.

"As I saw you!" she repeated, as an impersonal, honest witness.

"Then I must have been!" he said, with conviction. "But I hope that I shall not be in the future." And he smiled at Mary wistfully. But her gaze was bent on the ground.

"And you want it all--all the story from me?" the Doge asked, hesitating.

"All!" Jack answered.

"It strikes hard at your father."

"The truth must strike where it will, now!"

"Then, your face, so like your father's, stood for the wreck of two lives to me, and for recollections in my own career that tinged my view of you, Jack. You were one newcomer to Little Rivers to whom I could not wholly apply the desert rule of oblivion to the past and judgment of every man solely by his conduct in this community. No! It was out of the question that I could ever look at you without thinking who you were.

"You know, of course, that your father and I spent our boyhood in Burbridge. Once I found that he had told me an untruth and we had our difference out, as boys will; and, as I was in the right, he confessed the lie before I let him up. That defeat was a hurt to his egoism that he could not forget. He was that way, John Wingfield, in his egoism. It was like flint, and his ambition and energy were without bounds. I remember he would say when teased that some day he should have more money than all the town together, and when he had money no one would dare to tease him.

He had a remarkable gift of ingratiation with anyone who could be of service to him. My uncle, who was the head of the family, was fond of him; he saw the possibilities of success in this smart youngster in a New England village. It was the Ewold money that gave John Wingfield his start. With it he bought the store in which he began as a clerk. He lost a good part of the Ewold fortune later in one of his enterprises that did not turn out well. But all this is trifling beside what is to come.

"He went on to his great commercial career. I, poor fool, was an egoist, too. I tried to paint. I had taste, but no talent. In outbursts of despair my critical discrimination consigned my own work to the rubbish heap. I tried to write books, only to find that all I had was a head stuffed with learning, mixed with the philosophy that is death to the concentrated application that means positive accomplishment. But I could not create. I was by nature only a drinker at the fountain; only a student, the pitiful student who could read his Caesar at eight, learn a language without half trying, but with no ability to make my knowledge of service; with no masterful purpose of my own--a failure!"

"No one is a failure who spreads kindliness and culture as he goes through life," Jack interrupted, earnestly; "who gives of himself unstintedly as you have; who teaches people to bring a tribute of flowers to a convalescent! Why, to found a town and make the desert bloom--that is better than to add another book to the weight of library shelves or to get a picture on the line!"

"Thank you, Jack!" said the Doge, with a flash of his happy manner of old, while there was the play of fleeting sunshine over the hills and valleys of his features. "I won't call it persiflage. I am too selfish, too greedy of a little cheer to call it persiflage. I like the illusion you suggest."

He was silent for a while, and when he spoke again it was with the tragic simplicity of one near his climax.

"Your father and I loved the same girl---your mother. It seemed that in every sympathy of mind and heart she and I were meant to travel the long highway together. But your father won her with his gift for ingratiation with the object of his desire, which amounts to a kind of genius. He won her with a lie and put me in a position that seemed to prove that the lie was truth. She accepted him in reaction; in an impulse of heart-break that followed what she believed to be a revelation of my true character as something far worse than that of idler. I married the woman whom he had made the object of his well-managed calumny. My wife knew where my heart was and why I had married her. It is from her that Mary gets her dark hair and the brown of her cheeks which make her appear so at home on the desert. Soon after Mary's birth she chose to live apart from me--but I will not speak further of her. She is long ago dead. I knew that your mother had left your father. I saw her a few times in Europe. But she never gave the reason for the separation. She would talk nothing of the past, and with the years heavy on our shoulders and the memory of what we had been to each other hovering close, words came with difficulty and every one was painful. Her whole life was bound up in you, as mine was in Mary. It was you that kept her from being a bitter cynic; you that kept her alive.

"Some of the Ewold money that John Wingfield lost was mine. You see how he kept on winning; how all the threads of his weaving closed in around me. I came to the desert to give Mary life with the fragments of my fortune; and here I hope that, as you say, I have done something worthier than live the life of a wandering, leisurely student who had lapsed into the observer for want of the capacity by nature or training to do anything else.

"But sometimes I did long for the centres of civilization; to touch elbows with their activities; to feel the flow of the current of humanity in great streets. Not that I wanted to give up Little Rivers, but I wanted to go forth to fill the mind with argosies which I could enjoy here at my leisure. And Mary was young. The longing that she concealed must be far more powerful than mine. I saw the supreme selfishness of shutting her up on the desert, without any glimpse of the outer world. I sensed the call that sent her on her lonely rides to the pa.s.s. I feared that your coming had increased her restlessness.

"But I wander! That is my fault, as you know, Sir Chaps. Well, we come to the end of the weaving; to the finality of John Wingfield's victory.

Little Rivers was getting out of hand. I could plan a ranch, but I had not a business head. I had neither the gift nor the experience to deal with lawyers and land-grabbers. I knew that with the increase of population and development our position was exciting the cupidity of those who find quicker profit in annexing what others have built than in building on their own account. I knew that we ought to have a great dam; that there was water to irrigate ten times the present irrigated area.

"Then came John Prather. I saw in him the judgment, energy, and ability for organization of a real man of affairs. He was young, self-made, engaging and convincing of manner. He liked our life and ideals in Little Rivers; he wanted to share our future. In his resemblance to you I saw nothing but a coincidence that I pa.s.sed over lightly. He knew how to handle the difficult situation that arose with the reappearance of old man Lefferts' partners. He would get the water rights legalized beyond dispute and turn them over to the water users' a.s.sociation; he would bring in capital for the dam; the value of our property would be enhanced; Little Rivers would become a city in her own right, while I was growing old delectably in the pride of founder. So he pictured it and so I dreamed. I was so sure of the future that I dared the expense of a trip to New York.

"And always to me, when I looked at you and when I thought of you, you were the son of John Wingfield; you incarnated the inheritance of his strength. But when, from the drawing-room, I saw your father, whom I had not seen for fifteen years, then--well, the thing came to me in a burning second, the while I glimpsed his face before he saw mine. He was smiling as if pleased with himself and his power; he was rubbing the palms of his hands together; and I saw that it was John Prather who was like John Wingfield in manner, pose, and feature. You were like the fighting man, your ancestor, and your airy confidence was his. And I, witless and unperceiving, had been won by the same methods of ingratiation with which John Wingfield had won the a.s.sistance of the Ewold fortune for the first step of his career; with which he had won Alice Jamison and kept me unaware of his plan while he was lying to her.

"Finally, let us say, in all charity, that your father is what he is because of what is born in him and for the same reason that the s...o...b..ll gathers size as it rolls; and I am what I am for the same reason that the wind scatter the sands of the desert--a man full of books and tangent inconsequence of ideas, without sense; a simpleton who knows a painting but does not know men; a garrulous, philosophizing, blind, old simpleton, whose pompous incompetency has betrayed a trust! Through me, men and women came here to settle and make a home! Through me they lose--to my shame!"

The Doge buried his face in his hands and drew a deep breath more pitiful than a sob, which, as it went free of the lungs, seemed to leave an empty ruin of what had once been a splendid edifice. He was in striking contrast to Mary, who, throughout the story fondly regarding him, had remained as straight as a young pine. Now, with her rigidity suddenly become so pliant that it was a fluid thing mixed of indignation, fearlessness, and compelling sympathy, she sprang to his side. She knew the touchstone to her father's emotion. He did not want his cheek patted in that moment of agony. He wanted a stimulant; some justification for living.

"There is no shame in believing in those who speak fairly! There is honor, the honor of faith in mankind!" she cried penetratingly. "There is no shame in being the victim of lies!"

"No! No shame!" the Doge cried, rising unsteadily to his feet under the whip.

"And we are not afraid for the future!" she continued. "And the other men and women in Little Rivers are not afraid for the future!"

"No, not afraid under this sun, in this air. Afraid!"

An unconquerable flame had come into his eyes in answer to that in Mary's.

"The others have asked me to act for them, and I think I may yet save our rights," said Jack. "Will you also trust me?"

"Will I trust you, Jack? Trust you who gave up your inheritance?"

exclaimed the Doge. "I would trust you on a mission to the stars or to lead a regiment; and the wish of the others is mine."

Jack had turned to go, but he looked back at Mary.

"And you, Mary? I have your good wishes?"

He could not resist that question; and though it was clear that nothing could stay him--as clear as it had been in the _arroyo_ that he would keep his word and face Leddy--he was hanging on her word and he was seeing her eyes moist, with a bright fire like that of sunshine on still water. She was swaying slightly as a young pine might in a wind. Her eyes darkened as with fear, then her cheeks went crimson with the stir of her blood; and suddenly, her eyes were sparkling in their moisture like water when it ripples under sunshine.

"Yes, Jack," she said quietly, with the tense eagerness of a good cause that sends a man away to the wars.

"That is everything!" he answered.

So it was! Everything that he could ask now, with his story and hers so fresh in mind! He started up the path, but stopped at the turn to look back and wave his hand to the two figures in a confident gesture.

"Luck with you, Sir Chaps!" called the Doge, with all the far-carrying force of his oldtime sonorousness.

"Luck! luck!" Mary called, on her part; and her voice had a flute note that seemed to go singing on its own ether waves through the tender green foliage, through all the gardens of Little Rivers, and even away to the pa.s.s.

"Mary! Mary!" he answered, with a ring of cheeriness. "Luck for me will always come at your command!"

A moment later Galway and the others saw him smiling with a hope that ran as high as his purpose, as he pa.s.sed through the gateway of the hedge.

"It will all be right!" he told them.

With P.D. keeping his muzzle close to the middle of Jack's back, the party started toward his house, which took them almost the length of the main street.