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