The metal was cooling, losing its malleability, and the father proceeded to thrust it back into the furnace.

“Then, I take it that your value to Little Rivers is your cool hand with a gun,” he said, “and the summons is to uncertainties which may lead to something worse than a duel.  You are asked to come because you can fight.  Do you want to go for that?  To go to let the devil, as you call it, out of you?”

Now the metal was soft with the heat of the shame of the moment when Jack had called to Leddy, “I am going to kill you!” and of the moment when he saw Pedro Nogales’s limp, broken arm and ghastly face.

“No, no!” Jack gasped.  “I want no fight!  I never want to draw a bead on a man again!  I never want to have a revolver in my hand again!”

He was shuddering, half leaning against the desk for support.  His father waited in observant comprehension.  Convulsively, Jack straightened with desperation and all the impassioned pleading to Mary on the pass was in his eyes.

“But the thing that I cannot help—­the transcendent thing, not of logic, not of Little Rivers’ difficulties—­how am I to give that up?” he cried.

“Miss Ewold, you mean?”

“Yes!”

“Jack, I know!  I understand!  Who should understand if not I?” The father drew Jack’s hand into his own, and the fluid force of his desire for mastery was flowing out from his finger-ends into the son’s fibres, which were receptively sensitive to the caress.  “I know what it is when the woman you love dismisses you!  You have her to think of as well as yourself.  Your own wish may not be lord.  You may not win that which will not be won”—­how well he knew that!—­“either by protest, by persistence, or by labor.  You are dealing with the tender and intangible; with feminine temperament, Jack.  And, Jack, it is wise for you, isn’t it, to bear in mind that your life has not been normal?  With the switch from desert to city life homesickness has crept over you.  From to-night things will not be so strange, will they?  But if you wish a change, go to Europe—­yes, go, though I cannot bear to think of losing you the very moment that we have come to know each other; when the past is clear and amends are at hand.

“And, Jack, if your mother were here with us and were herself, would she want you to go back to take up a rifle instead of your work at my side?  I do not pretend to understand Jasper Ewold’s or Mary Ewold’s thoughts.  She has preferred to make another generation’s ill-feeling her own in a thing that concerns her life alone.  She has seen enough of you to know her mind.  For, from all I hear, you have not been a faint-hearted lover.  Is it fair to her to follow her back to the desert?  Is it the courage of self-denial, of control of impulse on your part?  Would your mother want you to persist in a veritable conquest by force of your will, whose strength you hardly realize, against Mary Ewold’s sensibilities?  And if you broke down her will, if you won, would there be happiness for you and for her?  Jack, wait!  If she cares for you, if there is any germ of love for you in her, it will grow of itself.  You cannot force it into blossom.  Come, Jack, am I not right?”