"Then you do know! Who is he? What is he to me?"
It seemed as if the ceiling were about to crack. The doctor looked away to avoid the bore of Jack's unrelenting scrutiny. He took a turn up and down, rapidly, nervously, his fingers pressed in against the palms and the muscles of his forearms moving in the way of one who is trying to hold himself in control by an outward expression of force against inward rebellion.
"I dined with your father to-night!" he exclaimed. "I counseled him to tell you the truth! I said that if he did not want to tell it for its own sake, as policy it was the only thing to you! I—I—" he stopped, facing Jack with a sort of grisly defiance. "Jack, a doctor is a confessor of men! He keeps their secrets! Good-night!" And he strode through the office door, which he closed behind him sharply, in reminder that the interview was at an end.
As Jack went down the steps into the night, the face of John Prather, with a satirical turn to the lips, was preceding him. Now he walked madly up and down and back and forth across town to the river fronts, with panting energy of stride, as he fastened the leash of will on quivering nerves. When dawn came it was the dawn of the desert calling to a brain that had fought its way to a lucid purpose. It started him to the store in the fervor of a grateful mission, while a familiar greeting kept repeating itself in his ears on the way:
"You won't forget, Jack, about giving me a chance to come along if you ever go out West again, will you?"
The question was one in answer to a promise; a reminder from certain employees into whom he had fused his own spirit of enthusiasm about dry wastes yielding abundance.
"But you must work very hard," he had told them. "Not until you have callouses on your hands can you succeed or really know how to enjoy a desert sunrise or sunset. After that, you will be able to stand erect and look destiny in the face."
"No February slush!" Burleigh, the fitter, had said. "No depending on one man to hold your job!"
"Your own boss! You own some land and you just naturally get what you earn!" according to Joe Mathewson.
"And from what I can make out," observed one of the automobile van drivers whom Jack had accompanied on the suburban rounds, "it requires about as much brains as running an automobile to be what you'd call a first-class, a number one desert Rube, Jack!"