Over the Pass

by Frederick Palmer

"Then she still lives?" asked Jack sharply.

"Yes, she is in California," Prather returned. "She often referred to the mole on my cheek as the symbol of my handicap in the world of convention. 'But for the mole, Jack, you would have the store,' she often said. It delighted her that I had my father's face. As I grew older the resemblance became more marked. I could see that I pleased my father with my practical ideas of life, which I developed when quite young. He saw to it that my mother and I lived well and that I went to a good school. From my books I drew the same lesson as from my peculiar inheritance; the lesson that my mother was always inculcating. 'A bank account,' she would repeat, 'will erase even a mole patch on the cheek. It is the supreme power that will carry you anywhere, Jack. You must make money!'

"When father came to see her he would talk with a candor with which I am sure he never talked to your mother. He would tell of his successes, revealing the strategy and system by which they were won, finding her both understanding and sympathetic. I became a little blade that delighted to get sharp against his big blade by asking him questions. He did not want me about the store, and this was one of the things in which my mother humored him. She knew just when to humor and just when to threaten the play of the strong card which she always held.

"All the while her ambition was laying its plans. It was that I should have the Wingfield store one day, myself. Out of school hours I would range the other department stores. You see, I had not only inherited my father's face more strikingly than you had, but also his talents. I spent the summer vacations of my fourteenth and fifteenth years in a store. I won the attention of my superiors and promise of promotion. I foresaw the day when I should so prove my ability that father would take me into his own store, and then, gradually, I would make my place, secure, while you were idling about Europe. And in those days you were frail and I was vigorous.

"There was no mistaking that father's sense of convention was the one thing that stood between him and my desire. He feared the world's opinion if the truth became known, and deep down in heart he could never get over the pride of having married into your mother's family. You had very good blood on the maternal side, as they say, while my mother had begun in the cloak department and was self-made, like father. Again, I was so truly his son in every instinct that he may have been a little jealous of me. Father does not like to think that any other man was ever quite as great as he is. I confess that is the way I feel, too. That is what life is, after all—it is yourself. Yes, I saw the store as mine—surely mine, with time!"

Prather's reins lay across the pommel of the saddle drawn taut by the drooping head of his horse, which was barely dragging one foot after another. He gave Jack a glance of flashing resentment and then, in his first impulse of real emotion, made a fist of one hand and drove it angrily into the palm of the other before continuing.

"Then father went to Europe to bring you home. He had decided for the son of convention, the son of blood! Though self-made, he was for family as against talent. Besides, it was a victory for him. At last you were his. After your return there was a scene between mother and him, a cool, bitter argument. He defied her to play her last card. He said that you knew the truth and that she could at best only make a row. And he wanted us out of New York; the place for me was a new country. He would make us a handsome allowance. So my mother agreed to his terms and we went to the Pacific coast. There I was to enter one of the colleges. My mother wanted me to have a college education, you see. The last meeting between father and me was very interesting, blade playing on blade. He really hated to let me go, for by this time he knew how hopeless you were. He embraced me and said that I would get on, anyway. I told him that the only trouble was that while I was the real son, I had a mole on my cheek.

"The West was best. There we could claim the favor of convention, Mrs. Prather and her son. I matriculated at Stanford, but I saw nothing in it for me. It was all dream stuff. Greek and Latin don't help in building a fortune. They handicap you with the loss of time it takes to learn them, at least; and I meant to be worth a million before I was thirty. Now I know that I shall be worth two or three or four millions at thirty, if all goes as I plan. So I cut college and broke for Goldfield. I ran a store and was a secret partner in a saloon that paid better than the store. I was in the game morning, noon, and night; it beat marching to class to recite Horace and fiddle with the binomial theorem, as it must for every man who counts for something in the world."

Throughout, Prather's tone, except for the one moment of anger, had been that of an even recital of facts by one who does not allow himself to consider anything but facts in the judgment of his position. At times he gave Jack covert glances out of the tail of his eye and saw Jack's face white and drawn and his head lowered. Now Prather became the victim—so he would have put it, no doubt—of another outburst of feeling.

"But it was not like having the store!" he said. "No, my heart was in the store; and that morning when you saw me looking down from the gallery I was permitting myself to dream. I was thinking of what had come to you, the fairy prince of good fortune, who had no talent for your inheritance, and of what I might have done with it. I was thinking how I could win men to work for me"—and there he was smiling with the father's charm—"and of the millions to come if I could begin to build on the foundation that father had laid. I saw branches in Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia—a great chain of stores all co-ordinated under my directing hand—I the master!"