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