Jack studied the young man's back half amusedly to see if this, too, were like his own, and laughed at himself because he was sure that he would not know his own back if it were preceding him in a promenade up the Avenue. In peculiar suspense he was hoping that the young man would pause and look around, as his father always did and shoppers often did, in a survey of the busy, moving picture of the whole floor. But the young man went on to the top of the flight. There he proceeded along the railing of the court. His profile was again in view under a strong light, and Jack realized that his first recognition of a resemblance was the recognition of an indisputable fact.
"Have I a double out West and another in New York?" he thought. "It gives a man a kind of secondhand feeling!"
Then he recalled Jim's letter saying that John Prather had gone to New York. Was this John Prather? He had no doubt that it was when the object of his scrutiny, with full face in view, stopped and leaned over the balcony just above the diamond counter. There was a mole patch on the cheek such as Jack remembered that the accounts of John Prather had mentioned.
"I am as much fussed as the giant was at the sight of yellow!"
Jack mused.
But for the mole patch the features were his own, as he knew them, though no one not given to more frequent personal councils with mirrors than Señor Don't Care of desert trails knows quite the lights and shadows of his own countenance, which give it its character even more than does its form. John Prather was regarding the jewelry display, where the diamonds were scintillating under the light from the milk glass roof, with a smile of amused contemplation. His expression was unpleasant to Jack. It had a quality of satire and of covetousness as its owner leaned farther over the rail and rubbed the palms of his hands together as gleefully as if the diamonds were about to fly into his pockets by enchantment.
All the time Jack had stood motionless in fixed and amazed observation.
He wondered that his stare had not drawn the other's attention. But John
Prather seemed too preoccupied with the dazzle of wealth to be
susceptible to any telepathic influence.
"Great heavens! I am gaping at him as if he were climbing hand over hand up the face of a sky-scraper!" Jack thought. It was time something happened. Why should he get so wrought up over the fact that another man looked like him? "I'll get acquainted!" he declared, shaking himself free of his antipathy. "We are both from Little Rivers and that's a ready excuse for introducing myself."
As he started across the floor toward the stairs, Prather straightened from his leaning posture. For an instant his glance seemed to rest on Jack. Indeed, eye met eye for a flash; and then Prather moved away. His decision to go might easily have been the electric result of Jack's own decision to join him. Jack ran up the stairs. At the head of the flight he saw, at half the distance across the floor, Prather's back entering an elevator on the down trip. He hurried forward, his desire to meet and speak with the man whose influence Jim Galway and Mary feared now overwhelming.
"Hello!" Jack sang out; and this to Prather's face after he had turned around in the elevator.
In the second while the elevator man was swinging to the door, Jack and Prather were fairly looking at each other. Prather had seen that Jack wanted to speak to him, even if he had not heard the call. His answer was a smile of mixed recognition and satire. He made a gesture of appreciative understanding of the distinction in their likeness by touching the mole on his cheek with his finger, which was Jack's last glimpse of him before he was shot down into the lower regions of the store.