“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!”

He rubbed the palms of his hands together as he had over the scintillation of the jewelry counters.  Though Jack had not looked around, his ear recognized that crisp sound of exultant power.

“Yes,” Jack murmured thoughtfully, as if inviting Prather to go on with anything further he might have to say.

“All mine—­mine!” Prather concluded, in a sort of hypnosis with his own picture.

Jack still stared at the earth, his profile limned in gold and the side of his face toward Prather in shadow.  They were nearing the clump of cotton-woods around the water-hole at the base of a tongue of the range which ran out into the desert, and Firio rode up to whisper in Spanish: 

“Senor Jack, see there!  Horsemen!”

Jack raised his head with a returning sense of his surroundings to see some mounted men, eight in all he counted, riding along the range trail a half mile nearer the water-hole than themselves.  Their horses had the gait of exhaustion after a long, hard ride.

“You know who it is?” Firio whispered.

“Yes,” Jack answered.  “They had the better trail and have outridden us.  All right, Firio!”