ng thing--the gift of being friendly without
being familiar," answered the manager.

"He's got a kind of self-respect that induces respect in others,"
said Peter.

John Wingfield, Sr. was the proprietor of the store, but the human world
of the store began to feel a kind of proprietorship in Jack, while its
guardian interest in helping him in his mistakes was common enough to be
a conspiracy.

And the callouses were gone from his hands. There was no longer a
dividing line between tan and white on his forehead. No outward symbol of
the desert clung to his person except the moments of the far vision of
distances in his eyes. Superficially, on the Avenue he would have been
taken for one of his caste.

But tossing a cowpuncher hat out of a window into Broadway was easier
than tossing a thing out of mind. He sat up nights to write to Mary.
Letter after letter he poured out as a diary of his experiences in his
new world, letters breathing a pupil's hope of learning and all that
pupil's sorry vagaries. No answer ever came, not even to the most
appealing ones about his most adventurous conflicts with the dinosaur.
He felt the chagrin of the army of unpublished novelists who lay their
hearts bare on the stone slab of the dissectors in a publisher's
office. He might as well have thrown all he wrote into the
waste-basket so far as any result was concerned; yet he kept on
writing as if it were his glorious duty to report to her as his
superior. But he found a more responsive correspondent in Jim Galway;
and this was the letter he received:

"DEAR JACK:

"The whole valley is not yet sprouting with dates as you said it would
from your thinking of us. Maybe we didn't use the right seed. Your ranch
is still called Jack's ranch, and Firio is doing his best and about the
best I ever knew in an Indian. But as you always said, Indians are mostly
human, like the rest of us, barring a sort of born twist in their
intellect for which they aren't responsible. You see, Jack, a lot of your
sayings still live with us, though you are gone.

"Well, Firio keeps your P.D. exercised and won't let anybody but himself
ride him. He says you will need him. For you can't budge the stubborn
little cuss. He declares you're coming back. When we tell him you're
worth twenty millions and he's plumb full of primitive foolishness and
general ignorance of the outside world, he says, '_Si_, he will come
back!' like some heathen oracle that's strong on repeti