Jordan was driving a spirited team along the water-front when Jimmy came up from the wharf, and he smiled when the latter swung himself up into the light, four-wheeled vehicle. Jimmy was dressed tastefully in his English shore-going clothes, and now looked very much unlike a yacht-hand. He was well endued physically, and, though the bronze in his face and a certain steadiness of gaze betrayed his calling, there was an indefinite but unmistakable stamp upon him which he had acquired on board the big mail-boats, and perhaps also in a greater measure from his comrades on the battleship. Jimmy had certainly not cultivated it, and was, in fact, not aware that he possessed it, but his companion had already recognized it.
"Take a cigar, and light it before I let the team out. They look as if they could go," he said.
Jimmy did so, and then found it somewhat difficult to keep his seat as his comrade sent the horses through the city as fast as they could lay hoof to the ground, and out of it past the clustering wooden hovels in its less reputable quarter, and up the slope that led into the shadowy bush. Roads are not remarkable for their smoothness anywhere in that country, but it was evident that Jordan liked fast traveling and could handle a team. He laughed when Jimmy said so.
"I come of farmer stock, and that's probably why I always had a notion of the sea," he said. "If you look at it in one way, the thing's quite natural."
"I suppose it is," said Jimmy. "Why didn't you go to sea?"
"It seemed to me one has mighty few chances of picking up money there, though I found out quite early that the poor man has no great show anywhere. It was a mortgage he couldn't pay off that broke up my father."
He stopped for a moment, with a little confidential gesture. "I guess that's why I wanted to do what I could for your father. In one or two ways he's very much like the man I buried back in Washington. He was straight—and it wasn't his fault if he didn't whale all the meanness out of me—but, when smartness means getting your grip on what belongs to somebody else, he was just a trifle slow. He worked hard, and gave every man a hundred cents' worth for his dollar—and that's quite likely why there was mighty little but a mortgage on the ranch when he died."
Jimmy was not astonished, in view of their short acquaintance, that his companion should tell him this. He was aware that reticence is not a prominent characteristic of the men of the Pacific Slope, and, besides this, there was a rapidly growing sympathy between himself and Jordan. Still, he sat silent, and his companion spoke again.
"I was about sixteen then, and I saw I had to make out differently," he said. "Well, somehow I've done it—looked on this life as a battle where the hurt man gets no mercy, and I've cleared quite a little money on my royalties—but now and then the memory of those old days on the ranch comes back to me. Then I feel that if ever it's necessary for me to get my knife into any kind of mortgage man, it will be red right to the hilt when it comes out again."
The snap in his companion's dark eyes and the hardening of his lips were comprehensible to Jimmy, for he had once or twice been sensible of much the same feeling. Jordan had, as is usual in the land to which he belonged, expressed himself frankly, and perhaps a trifle crudely; but Jimmy recognized that it was with very genuine tenderness and regret he remembered the man he had buried long ago in Washington. He asked an abrupt question, which did not, however, altogether change the subject.