LABELLED AND SHIPPED
Behold Jack clad in the habiliments of conventional civilization taken from the stock of ready-made suitings in an El Paso store! They were of the Moscowitz and Guggenheim type, the very latest and nattiest, as advertised in popular prints. The dealer said that no gentleman could be well dressed without them. He wanted to complete the transformation with a cream-colored Fedora or a brown derby.
"I'll wait on the thirty-third degree a little longer," said Jack, fondling the flat-brimmed cowpuncher model of affectionate predilection. Swinging on a hook on the sleeper with the sway of the train, its company was soothing to him all the way across the continent.
The time was March, that season of the northern year when winter growing stale has a gritty, sticky taste and the relief of spring seems yet far away. After the desert air the steam heat was stifling and nauseating. Jack's head was a barrel about to burst its hoops; his skin drying like a mummy's; his muscles in a starchy misery from lack of exercise. He felt boxed up, an express package labelled and shipped. When he crawled into his berth at night it was with a sense of giving himself up to asphyxiation at the whim of strange gods.
If you have ever come back to town after six months in the woods, six months far from the hysteria of tittering electric bells, the brassy honk-honk of automobiles, the clang of surface cars and the screech of their wheels on the rails, multiply your period of absence by ten, add a certain amount of desert temperament, and you will vaguely understand how the red corpuscles were raising rebellion in Jack's artery walls on the morning of his journey's end. From the ferryboat on the dull-green bosom of the river he first renewed his memory of the spectral and forbidding abysses and pinnacles of New York. Here time is everything; here man has done his mightiest in contriving masses to imitate the architectural chaos of genesis. A mantle of chill, smoky mist formed the dome of heaven, in which a pale, suffused, yellowish spot alone bespoke the existence of a sun in the universe.
In keeping with his promise to Dr. Bennington he had wired to his father, naming his train; and in a few minutes Wingfield, Sr. and Wingfield, Jr. would meet for the first time in five years. Jack was conscious of a faster beating of his heart and a feeling of awesome expectancy as the crowd debouched from the ferryboat. At the exit to the street a big limousine was waiting. The gilt initials on the door left no doubt for whom it had been sent. But there was no one to meet him, no one after his long absence except a chauffeur and a footman, who glanced at Jack sharply. After the exchange of a corroborative nod between them the footman advanced.
"If you please, Mr. Wingfield," he said, taking Jack's suit case.
"What would Jim Galway think of me now!" thought Jack. He put his head inside the car cautiously. "Another box!" he thought, this time aloud.
"You have the check for it, sir?" asked the footman, thinking that Jack was using the English of the mother island for trunk.
"No. That's all my baggage."