"We all love him. I think a lot of people in the store would march out to the desert after him," said Mortimer, with real rejoicing in his candor and courage. Indeed, of late he had been developing cheer as well as courage, imbibing both, perhaps, from the roses in the vase on his employer's desk. Jack had ordered a fresh bunch put there every day; and when employees were sick packages of grapes and bunches of flowers came to them, in Little Rivers fashion, with J.W. on the card, as if they had come from the head of the firm himself.
"Maybe Jack will soften the old man a little," ran a whisper from basement to roof. For the battalions called him "Jack," rather than "Mr. Wingfield," just as Little Rivers had.
"The boy's good nature isn't making him too familiar with the employees?" was a second question which the father had asked both the general manager and Mortimer.
"No. That is the surprising thing—the gift of being friendly without being familiar," answered the manager.
"He's got a kind of self-respect that induces respect in others," said Peter.
John Wingfield, Sr. was the proprietor of the store, but the human world of the store began to feel a kind of proprietorship in Jack, while its guardian interest in helping him in his mistakes was common enough to be a conspiracy.
And the callouses were gone from his hands. There was no longer a dividing line between tan and white on his forehead. No outward symbol of the desert clung to his person except the moments of the far vision of distances in his eyes. Superficially, on the Avenue he would have been taken for one of his caste.
But tossing a cowpuncher hat out of a window into Broadway was easier than tossing a thing out of mind. He sat up nights to write to Mary. Letter after letter he poured out as a diary of his experiences in his new world, letters breathing a pupil's hope of learning and all that pupil's sorry vagaries. No answer ever came, not even to the most appealing ones about his most adventurous conflicts with the dinosaur. He felt the chagrin of the army of unpublished novelists who lay their hearts bare on the stone slab of the dissectors in a publisher's office. He might as well have thrown all he wrote into the waste-basket so far as any result was concerned; yet he kept on writing as if it were his glorious duty to report to her as his superior. But he found a more responsive correspondent in Jim Galway; and this was the letter he received:
"DEAR JACK:
"The whole valley is not yet sprouting with dates as you said it would from your thinking of us. Maybe we didn't use the right seed. Your ranch is still called Jack's ranch, and Firio is doing his best and about the best I ever knew in an Indian. But as you always said, Indians are mostly human, like the rest of us, barring a sort of born twist in their intellect for which they aren't responsible. You see, Jack, a lot of your sayings still live with us, though you are gone.