“You won’t forget, Jack, about giving me a chance to come along if you ever go out West again, will you?”

The question was one in answer to a promise; a reminder from certain employees into whom he had fused his own spirit of enthusiasm about dry wastes yielding abundance.

“But you must work very hard,” he had told them.  “Not until you have callouses on your hands can you succeed or really know how to enjoy a desert sunrise or sunset.  After that, you will be able to stand erect and look destiny in the face.”

“No February slush!” Burleigh, the fitter, had said.  “No depending on one man to hold your job!”

“Your own boss!  You own some land and you just naturally get what you earn!” according to Joe Mathewson.

“And from what I can make out,” observed one of the automobile van drivers whom Jack had accompanied on the suburban rounds, “it requires about as much brains as running an automobile to be what you’d call a first-class, a number one desert Rube, Jack!”

“Yes,” Jack told him.  “The process that makes the earth fruitful is not less complicated than a motor, simply because it is one of the earliest inventions.  You mix in nature’s carbureter light and moisture with the chemical elements of the soil.”

“I’m on!” the chauffeur rejoined.  “If a man works with a plow instead of a screwdriver, it doesn’t follow that his mind is as vacant as a cow that stands stockstill in the middle of the road to show you that you can’t fool her into thinking that radiators are good to eat.”

In explaining the labor and pains of orange-growing, which ended only with the careful picking and packing, Jack would talk as earnestly as his father would about the tedious detail which went into the purchase and sale of the articles in any department of the store.  He might not be able to choose the best expert for the ribbon counter, but he had a certain confidence that he could tell the man or the woman who would make good in Little Rivers.  No manager was more thorough in his observation of clerks for promotion than Jack in observing would-be ranchers.  He had given his promise to one after another of a test list of disciples; and at times he had been surprised to find how serious both he and the disciples were over a matter that existed entirely on the hypothesis that he was not going to stay permanently in New York.

This morning he was at the store for the last time, arriving even before the delivery division, to circulate the news that he was returning to Little Rivers.  Trouble was brewing out there, he explained, but they could depend on him.  He would make a place for them and send word when he was ready; and all whom he had marked as faithful were eager to go.  Thus he had builded unwittingly for another future of responsibilities when he had paused in the midst of the store’s responsibilities to tell stories of how a desert ranch is run.

But one disciple did not even want to wait on the message.  It was Peter Mortimer, whom Jack caught on his way to the elevator at eight, his usual hour, to make sure of having the letters opened and systematically arranged when his employer should appear.