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The Octopus : A Story of California

by Frank Norris · English · Gutenberg #268 · 1,136,524 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Octopus : A Story of California

Author: Frank Norris


        
Release date: July 11, 2008 [eBook #268]
                Most recently updated: March 11, 2018

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/268

Credits: Produced by John Hamm, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE OCTOPUS : A STORY OF CALIFORNIA ***




Produced by John Hamm





THE OCTOPUS

A Story of California

by Frank Norris





BOOK 1




CHAPTER I


Just after passing Caraher's saloon, on the County Road that ran south
from Bonneville, and that divided the Broderson ranch from that of Los
Muertos, Presley was suddenly aware of the faint and prolonged blowing
of a steam whistle that he knew must come from the railroad shops near
the depot at Bonneville. In starting out from the ranch house that
morning, he had forgotten his watch, and was now perplexed to know
whether the whistle was blowing for twelve or for one o'clock. He hoped
the former. Early that morning he had decided to make a long excursion
through the neighbouring country, partly on foot and partly on his
bicycle, and now noon was come already, and as yet he had hardly
started. As he was leaving the house after breakfast, Mrs. Derrick had
asked him to go for the mail at Bonneville, and he had not been able to
refuse.

He took a firmer hold of the cork grips of his handlebars--the road
being in a wretched condition after the recent hauling of the crop--and
quickened his pace. He told himself that, no matter what the time was,
he would not stop for luncheon at the ranch house, but would push on
to Guadalajara and have a Spanish dinner at Solotari's, as he had
originally planned.

There had not been much of a crop to haul that year. Half of the wheat
on the Broderson ranch had failed entirely, and Derrick himself had
hardly raised more than enough to supply seed for the winter's sowing.
But such little hauling as there had been had reduced the roads
thereabouts to a lamentable condition, and, during the dry season of the
past few months, the layer of dust had deepened and thickened to such
an extent that more than once Presley was obliged to dismount and trudge
along on foot, pushing his bicycle in front of him.

It was the last half of September, the very end of the dry season, and
all Tulare County, all the vast reaches of the San Joaquin Valley--in
fact all South Central California, was bone dry, parched, and baked
and crisped after four months of cloudless weather, when the day seemed
always at noon, and the sun blazed white hot over the valley from the
Coast Range in the west to the foothills of the Sierras in the east.

As Presley drew near to the point where what was known as the Lower Road
struck off through the Rancho de Los Muertos, leading on to Guadalajara,
he came upon one of the county watering-tanks, a great, iron-hooped
tower of wood, straddling clumsily on its four uprights by the roadside.
Since the day of its completion, the storekeepers and retailers of
Bonneville had painted their advertisements upon it. It was a landmark.
In that reach of level fields, the white letters upon it could be read
for miles. A watering-trough stood near by, and, as he was very thirsty,
Presley resolved to stop for a moment to get a drink.

He drew abreast of the tank and halted there, leaning his bicycle
against the fence. A couple of men in white overalls were repainting
the surface of the tank, seated on swinging platforms that hung by hooks
from the roof. They were painting a sign--an advertisement. It was all
but finished and read, “S. Behrman, Real Estate, Mortgages, Main Street,
Bonneville, Opposite the Post Office.” On the horse-trough that stood
in the shadow of the tank was another freshly painted inscription: “S.
Behrman Has Something To Say To You.”

As Presley straightened up after drinking from the faucet at one end of
the horse-trough, the watering-cart itself laboured into view around
the turn of the Lower Road. Two mules and two horses, white with dust,
strained leisurely in the traces, moving at a snail's pace, their limp
ears marking the time; while perched high upon the seat, under a yellow
cotton wagon umbrella, Presley recognised Hooven, one of Derrick's
tenants, a German, whom every one called “Bismarck,” an excitable little
man with a perpetual grievance and an endless flow of broken English.

“Hello, Bismarck,” said Presley, as Hooven brought his team to a
standstill by the tank, preparatory to refilling.

“Yoost der men I look for, Mist'r Praicely,” cried the other, twisting
the reins around the brake. “Yoost one minute, you wait, hey? I wanta
talk mit you.”

Presley was impatient to be on his way again. A little more time wasted,
and the day would be lost. He had nothing to do with the management
of the ranch, and if Hooven wanted any advice from him, it was so much
breath wasted. These uncouth brutes of farmhands and petty ranchers,
grimed with the soil they worked upon, were odious to him beyond words.
Never could he feel in sympathy with them, nor with their lives, their
ways, their marriages, deaths, bickerings, and all the monotonous round
of their sordid existence.

“Well, you must be quick about it, Bismarck,” he answered sharply. “I'm
late for dinner, as it is.”

“Soh, now. Two minuten, und I be mit you.” He drew down the overhanging
spout of the tank to the vent in the circumference of the cart and
pulled the chain that let out the water. Then he climbed down from the
seat, jumping from the tire of the wheel, and taking Presley by the arm
led him a few steps down the road.

“Say,” he began. “Say, I want to hef some converzations mit you. Yoost
der men I want to see. Say, Caraher, he tole me dis morgen--say, he tole
me Mist'r Derrick gowun to farm der whole demn rench hisseluf der next
yahr. No more tenants. Say, Caraher, he tole me all der tenants get der
sach; Mist'r Derrick gowun to work der whole demn rench hisseluf, hey?
ME, I get der sach alzoh, hey? You hef hear about dose ting? Say, me, I
hef on der ranch been sieben yahr--seven yahr. Do I alzoh----”

“You'll have to see Derrick himself or Harran about that, Bismarck,”
 interrupted Presley, trying to draw away. “That's something outside of
me entirely.”

But Hooven was not to be put off. No doubt he had been meditating his
speech all the morning, formulating his words, preparing his phrases.

“Say, no, no,” he continued. “Me, I wanta stay bei der place; seven yahr
I hef stay. Mist'r Derrick, he doand want dot I should be ge-sacked.
Who, den, will der ditch ge-tend? Say, you tell 'um Bismarck hef gotta
sure stay bei der place. Say, you hef der pull mit der Governor. You
speak der gut word for me.”

“Harran is the man that has the pull with his father, Bismarck,”
 answered Presley. “You get Harran to speak for you, and you're all
right.”

“Sieben yahr I hef stay,” protested Hooven, “and who will der ditch
ge-tend, und alle dem cettles drive?”

“Well, Harran's your man,” answered Presley, preparing to mount his
bicycle.

“Say, you hef hear about dose ting?”

“I don't hear about anything, Bismarck. I don't know the first thing
about how the ranch is run.”

“UND DER PIPE-LINE GE-MEND,” Hooven burst out, suddenly remembering a
forgotten argument. He waved an arm. “Ach, der pipe-line bei der Mission
Greek, und der waater-hole for dose cettles. Say, he doand doo ut
HIMSELLUF, berhaps, I doand tink.”

“Well, talk to Harran about it.”

“Say, he doand farm der whole demn rench bei hisseluf. Me, I gotta
stay.”

But on a sudden the water in the cart gushed over the sides from the
vent in the top with a smart sound of splashing. Hooven was forced to
turn his attention to it. Presley got his wheel under way.

“I hef some converzations mit Herran,” Hooven called after him. “He
doand doo ut bei hisseluf, den, Mist'r Derrick; ach, no. I stay bei der
rench to drive dose cettles.”

He climbed back to his seat under the wagon umbrella, and, as he
started his team again with great cracks of his long whip, turned to the
painters still at work upon the sign and declared with some defiance:

“Sieben yahr; yais, sir, seiben yahr I hef been on dis rench. Git oop,
you mule you, hoop!”

Meanwhile Presley had turned into the Lower Road. He was now on
Derrick's land, division No. I, or, as it was called, the Home ranch,
of the great Los Muertos Rancho. The road was better here, the dust laid
after the passage of Hooven's watering-cart, and, in a few minutes, he
had come to the ranch house itself, with its white picket fence, its few
flower beds, and grove of eucalyptus trees. On the lawn at the side
of the house, he saw Harran in the act of setting out the automatic
sprinkler. In the shade of the house, by the porch, were two or three
of the greyhounds, part of the pack that were used to hunt down
jack-rabbits, and Godfrey, Harran's prize deerhound.

Presley wheeled up the driveway and met Harran by the horse-block.
Harran was Magnus Derrick's youngest son, a very well-looking young
fellow of twenty-three or twenty-five. He had the fine carriage that
marked his father, and still further resembled him in that he had the
Derrick nose--hawk-like and prominent, such as one sees in the later
portraits of the Duke of Wellington. He was blond, and incessant
exposure to the sun had, instead of tanning him brown, merely heightened
the colour of his cheeks. His yellow hair had a tendency to curl in a
forward direction, just in front of the ears.

Beside him, Presley made the sharpest of contrasts. Presley seemed to
have come of a mixed origin; appeared to have a nature more composite,
a temperament more complex. Unlike Harran Derrick, he seemed more of a
character than a type. The sun had browned his face till it was almost
swarthy. His eyes were a dark brown, and his forehead was the forehead
of the intellectual, wide and high, with a certain unmistakable lift
about it that argued education, not only of himself, but of his people
before him. The impression conveyed by his mouth and chin was that of
a delicate and highly sensitive nature, the lips thin and loosely shut
together, the chin small and rather receding. One guessed that Presley's
refinement had been gained only by a certain loss of strength. One
expected to find him nervous, introspective, to discover that his mental
life was not at all the result of impressions and sensations that came
to him from without, but rather of thoughts and reflections germinating
from within. Though morbidly sensitive to changes in his physical
surroundings, he would be slow to act upon such sensations, would not
prove impulsive, not because he was sluggish, but because he was merely
irresolute. It could be foreseen that morally he was of that sort
who avoid evil through good taste, lack of decision, and want of
opportunity. His temperament was that of the poet; when he told himself
he had been thinking, he deceived himself. He had, on such occasions,
been only brooding.

Some eighteen months before this time, he had been threatened with
consumption, and, taking advantage of a standing invitation on the part
of Magnus Derrick, had come to stay in the dry, even climate of the San
Joaquin for an indefinite length of time. He was thirty years old,
and had graduated and post-graduated with high honours from an
Eastern college, where he had devoted himself to a passionate study of
literature, and, more especially, of poetry.

It was his insatiable ambition to write verse. But up to this time,
his work had been fugitive, ephemeral, a note here and there, heard,
appreciated, and forgotten. He was in search of a subject; something
magnificent, he did not know exactly what; some vast, tremendous theme,
heroic, terrible, to be unrolled in all the thundering progression of
hexameters.

But whatever he wrote, and in whatever fashion, Presley was determined
that his poem should be of the West, that world's frontier of Romance,
where a new race, a new people--hardy, brave, and passionate--were
building an empire; where the tumultuous life ran like fire from dawn
to dark, and from dark to dawn again, primitive, brutal, honest, and
without fear. Something (to his idea not much) had been done to catch at
that life in passing, but its poet had not yet arisen. The few sporadic
attempts, thus he told himself, had only touched the keynote. He strove
for the diapason, the great song that should embrace in itself a whole
epoch, a complete era, the voice of an entire people, wherein all people
should be included--they and their legends, their folk lore, their
fightings, their loves and their lusts, their blunt, grim humour, their
stoicism under stress, their adventures, their treasures found in a day
and gambled in a night, their direct, crude speech, their generosity
and cruelty, their heroism and bestiality, their religion and profanity,
their self-sacrifice and obscenity--a true and fearless setting forth of
a passing phase of history, un-compromising, sincere; each group in its
proper environment; the valley, the plain, and the mountain; the ranch,
the range, and the mine--all this, all the traits and types of every
community from the Dakotas to the Mexicos, from Winnipeg to Guadalupe,
gathered together, swept together, welded and riven together in one
single, mighty song, the Song of the West. That was what he dreamed,
while things without names--thoughts for which no man had yet invented
words, terrible formless shapes, vague figures, colossal, monstrous,
distorted--whirled at a gallop through his imagination.

As Harran came up, Presley reached down into the pouches of the
sun-bleached shooting coat he wore and drew out and handed him the
packet of letters and papers.

“Here's the mail. I think I shall go on.”

“But dinner is ready,” said Harran; “we are just sitting down.”

Presley shook his head. “No, I'm in a hurry. Perhaps I shall have
something to eat at Guadalajara. I shall be gone all day.”

He delayed a few moments longer, tightening a loose nut on his forward
wheel, while Harran, recognising his father's handwriting on one of the
envelopes, slit it open and cast his eye rapidly over its pages.

“The Governor is coming home,” he exclaimed, “to-morrow morning on the
early train; wants me to meet him with the team at Guadalajara; AND,” he
cried between his clenched teeth, as he continued to read, “we've lost
the case.”

“What case? Oh, in the matter of rates?”

Harran nodded, his eyes flashing, his face growing suddenly scarlet.

“Ulsteen gave his decision yesterday,” he continued, reading from his
father's letter. “He holds, Ulsteen does, that 'grain rates as low as
the new figure would amount to confiscation of property, and that, on
such a basis, the railroad could not be operated at a legitimate profit.
As he is powerless to legislate in the matter, he can only put the rates
back at what they originally were before the commissioners made the
cut, and it is so ordered.' That's our friend S. Behrman again,” added
Harran, grinding his teeth. “He was up in the city the whole of the time
the new schedule was being drawn, and he and Ulsteen and the Railroad
Commission were as thick as thieves. He has been up there all this last
week, too, doing the railroad's dirty work, and backing Ulsteen up.
'Legitimate profit, legitimate profit,'” he broke out. “Can we raise
wheat at a legitimate profit with a tariff of four dollars a ton for
moving it two hundred miles to tide-water, with wheat at eighty-seven
cents? Why not hold us up with a gun in our faces, and say, 'hands up,'
and be done with it?”

He dug his boot-heel into the ground and turned away to the house
abruptly, cursing beneath his breath.

“By the way,” Presley called after him, “Hooven wants to see you. He
asked me about this idea of the Governor's of getting along without the
tenants this year. Hooven wants to stay to tend the ditch and look after
the stock. I told him to see you.”

Harran, his mind full of other things, nodded to say he understood.
Presley only waited till he had disappeared indoors, so that he might
not seem too indifferent to his trouble; then, remounting, struck at
once into a brisk pace, and, turning out from the carriage gate, held
on swiftly down the Lower Road, going in the direction of Guadalajara.
These matters, these eternal fierce bickerings between the farmers of
the San Joaquin and the Pacific and Southwestern Railroad irritated him
and wearied him. He cared for none of these things. They did not belong
to his world. In the picture of that huge romantic West that he saw in
his imagination, these dissensions made the one note of harsh colour
that refused to enter into the great scheme of harmony. It was material,
sordid, deadly commonplace. But, however he strove to shut his eyes to
it or his ears to it, the thing persisted and persisted. The romance
seemed complete up to that point. There it broke, there it failed, there
it became realism, grim, unlovely, unyielding. To be true--and it was
the first article of his creed to be unflinchingly true--he could not
ignore it. All the noble poetry of the ranch--the valley--seemed in his
mind to be marred and disfigured by the presence of certain immovable
facts. Just what he wanted, Presley hardly knew. On one hand, it was his
ambition to portray life as he saw it--directly, frankly, and through no
medium of personality or temperament. But, on the other hand, as well,
he wished to see everything through a rose-coloured mist--a mist that
dulled all harsh outlines, all crude and violent colours. He told
himself that, as a part of the people, he loved the people and
sympathised with their hopes and fears, and joys and griefs; and yet
Hooven, grimy and perspiring, with his perpetual grievance and his
contracted horizon, only revolted him. He had set himself the task of
giving true, absolutely true, poetical expression to the life of the
ranch, and yet, again and again, he brought up against the railroad,
that stubborn iron barrier against which his romance shattered itself to
froth and disintegrated, flying spume. His heart went out to the people,
and his groping hand met that of a slovenly little Dutchman, whom it was
impossible to consider seriously. He searched for the True Romance, and,
in the end, found grain rates and unjust freight tariffs.

“But the stuff is HERE,” he muttered, as he sent his wheel rumbling
across the bridge over Broderson Creek. “The romance, the real romance,
is here somewhere. I'll get hold of it yet.”

He shot a glance about him as if in search of the inspiration. By now he
was not quite half way across the northern and narrowest corner of Los
Muertos, at this point some eight miles wide. He was still on the Home
ranch. A few miles to the south he could just make out the line of wire
fence that separated it from the third division; and to the north, seen
faint and blue through the haze and shimmer of the noon sun, a long file
of telegraph poles showed the line of the railroad and marked Derrick's
northeast boundary. The road over which Presley was travelling ran
almost diametrically straight. In front of him, but at a great distance,
he could make out the giant live-oak and the red roof of Hooven's barn
that stood near it.

All about him the country was flat. In all directions he could see for
miles. The harvest was just over. Nothing but stubble remained on the
ground. With the one exception of the live-oak by Hooven's place, there
was nothing green in sight. The wheat stubble was of a dirty yellow; the
ground, parched, cracked, and dry, of a cheerless brown. By the roadside
the dust lay thick and grey, and, on either hand, stretching on toward
the horizon, losing itself in a mere smudge in the distance, ran the
illimitable parallels of the wire fence. And that was all; that and the
burnt-out blue of the sky and the steady shimmer of the heat.

The silence was infinite. After the harvest, small though that harvest
had been, the ranches seemed asleep. It was as though the earth, after
its period of reproduction, its pains of labour, had been delivered of
the fruit of its loins, and now slept the sleep of exhaustion.

It was the period between seasons, when nothing was being done, when the
natural forces seemed to hang suspended. There was no rain, there was no
wind, there was no growth, no life; the very stubble had no force even
to rot. The sun alone moved.

Toward two o'clock, Presley reached Hooven's place, two or three grimy
frame buildings, infested with a swarm of dogs. A hog or two wandered
aimlessly about. Under a shed by the barn, a broken-down seeder lay
rusting to its ruin. But overhead, a mammoth live-oak, the largest tree
in all the country-side, towered superb and magnificent. Grey bunches
of mistletoe and festoons of trailing moss hung from its bark. From its
lowest branch hung Hooven's meat-safe, a square box, faced with wire
screens.

What gave a special interest to Hooven's was the fact that here was the
intersection of the Lower Road and Derrick's main irrigating ditch, a
vast trench not yet completed, which he and Annixter, who worked the
Quien Sabe ranch, were jointly constructing. It ran directly across
the road and at right angles to it, and lay a deep groove in the field
between Hooven's and the town of Guadalajara, some three miles farther
on. Besides this, the ditch was a natural boundary between two divisions
of the Los Muertos ranch, the first and fourth.

Presley now had the choice of two routes. His objective point was the
spring at the headwaters of Broderson Creek, in the hills on the
eastern side of the Quien Sabe ranch. The trail afforded him a short cut
thitherward. As he passed the house, Mrs. Hooven came to the door, her
little daughter Hilda, dressed in a boy's overalls and clumsy boots, at
her skirts. Minna, her oldest daughter, a very pretty girl, whose
love affairs were continually the talk of all Los Muertos, was visible
through a window of the house, busy at the week's washing. Mrs. Hooven
was a faded, colourless woman, middle-aged and commonplace, and offering
not the least characteristic that would distinguish her from a thousand
other women of her class and kind. She nodded to Presley, watching
him with a stolid gaze from under her arm, which she held across her
forehead to shade her eyes.

But now Presley exerted himself in good earnest. His bicycle flew.
He resolved that after all he would go to Guadalajara. He crossed the
bridge over the irrigating ditch with a brusque spurt of hollow sound,
and shot forward down the last stretch of the Lower Road that yet
intervened between Hooven's and the town. He was on the fourth division
of the ranch now, the only one whereon the wheat had been successful, no
doubt because of the Little Mission Creek that ran through it. But he no
longer occupied himself with the landscape. His only concern was to get
on as fast as possible. He had looked forward to spending nearly the
whole day on the crest of the wooded hills in the northern corner of the
Quien Sabe ranch, reading, idling, smoking his pipe. But now he would
do well if he arrived there by the middle of the afternoon. In a few
moments he had reached the line fence that marked the limits of the
ranch. Here were the railroad tracks, and just beyond--a huddled mass of
roofs, with here and there an adobe house on its outskirts--the little
town of Guadalajara. Nearer at hand, and directly in front of Presley,
were the freight and passenger depots of the P. and S. W., painted in
the grey and white, which seemed to be the official colours of all the
buildings owned by the corporation. The station was deserted. No trains
passed at this hour. From the direction of the ticket window, Presley
heard the unsteady chittering of the telegraph key. In the shadow of
one of the baggage trucks upon the platform, the great yellow cat that
belonged to the agent dozed complacently, her paws tucked under her
body. Three flat cars, loaded with bright-painted farming machines,
were on the siding above the station, while, on the switch below, a huge
freight engine that lacked its cow-catcher sat back upon its monstrous
driving-wheels, motionless, solid, drawing long breaths that were
punctuated by the subdued sound of its steam-pump clicking at exact
intervals.

But evidently it had been decreed that Presley should be stopped at
every point of his ride that day, for, as he was pushing his bicycle
across the tracks, he was surprised to hear his name called. “Hello,
there, Mr. Presley. What's the good word?”

Presley looked up quickly, and saw Dyke, the engineer, leaning on
his folded arms from the cab window of the freight engine. But at the
prospect of this further delay, Presley was less troubled. Dyke and he
were well acquainted and the best of friends. The picturesqueness of the
engineer's life was always attractive to Presley, and more than once he
had ridden on Dyke's engine between Guadalajara and Bonneville. Once,
even, he had made the entire run between the latter town and San
Francisco in the cab.

Dyke's home was in Guadalajara. He lived in one of the remodelled 'dobe
cottages, where his mother kept house for him. His wife had died some
five years before this time, leaving him a little daughter, Sidney, to
bring up as best he could. Dyke himself was a heavy built, well-looking
fellow, nearly twice the weight of Presley, with great shoulders and
massive, hairy arms, and a tremendous, rumbling voice.

“Hello, old man,” answered Presley, coming up to the engine. “What are
you doing about here at this time of day? I thought you were on the
night service this month.”

“We've changed about a bit,” answered the other. “Come up here and sit
down, and get out of the sun. They've held us here to wait orders,” he
explained, as Presley, after leaning his bicycle against the tender,
climbed to the fireman's seat of worn green leather. “They are changing
the run of one of the crack passenger engines down below, and are
sending her up to Fresno. There was a smash of some kind on the
Bakersfield division, and she's to hell and gone behind her time. I
suppose when she comes, she'll come a-humming. It will be stand clear
and an open track all the way to Fresno. They have held me here to let
her go by.”

He took his pipe, an old T. D. clay, but coloured to a beautiful shiny
black, from the pocket of his jumper and filled and lit it.

“Well, I don't suppose you object to being held here,” observed Presley.
“Gives you a chance to visit your mother and the little girl.”

“And precisely they choose this day to go up to Sacramento,” answered
Dyke. “Just my luck. Went up to visit my brother's people. By the way,
my brother may come down here--locate here, I mean--and go into the
hop-raising business. He's got an option on five hundred acres just back
of the town here. He says there is going to be money in hops. I don't
know; may be I'll go in with him.”

“Why, what's the matter with railroading?”

Dyke drew a couple of puffs on his pipe, and fixed Presley with a
glance.

“There's this the matter with it,” he said; “I'm fired.”

“Fired! You!” exclaimed Presley, turning abruptly toward him. “That's
what I'm telling you,” returned Dyke grimly.

“You don't mean it. Why, what for, Dyke?”

“Now, YOU tell me what for,” growled the other savagely. “Boy and man,
I've worked for the P. and S. W. for over ten years, and never one yelp
of a complaint did I ever hear from them. They know damn well they've
not got a steadier man on the road. And more than that, more than that,
I don't belong to the Brotherhood. And when the strike came along, I
stood by them--stood by the company. You know that. And you know, and
they know, that at Sacramento that time, I ran my train according to
schedule, with a gun in each hand, never knowing when I was going over a
mined culvert, and there was talk of giving me a gold watch at the
time. To hell with their gold watches! I want ordinary justice and fair
treatment. And now, when hard times come along, and they are cutting
wages, what do they do? Do they make any discrimination in my case? Do
they remember the man that stood by them and risked his life in their
service? No. They cut my pay down just as off-hand as they do the pay
of any dirty little wiper in the yard. Cut me along with--listen to
this--cut me along with men that they had BLACK-LISTED; strikers that
they took back because they were short of hands.” He drew fiercely on
his pipe. “I went to them, yes, I did; I went to the General Office, and
ate dirt. I told them I was a family man, and that I didn't see how
I was going to get along on the new scale, and I reminded them of my
service during the strike. The swine told me that it wouldn't be fair
to discriminate in favour of one man, and that the cut must apply to all
their employees alike. Fair!” he shouted with laughter. “Fair! Hear the
P. and S. W. talking about fairness and discrimination. That's good,
that is. Well, I got furious. I was a fool, I suppose. I told them that,
in justice to myself, I wouldn't do first-class work for third-class
pay. And they said, 'Well, Mr. Dyke, you know what you can do.' Well, I
did know. I said, 'I'll ask for my time, if you please,' and they gave
it to me just as if they were glad to be shut of me. So there you are,
Presley. That's the P. & S. W. Railroad Company of California. I am on
my last run now.”

“Shameful,” declared Presley, his sympathies all aroused, now that the
trouble concerned a friend of his. “It's shameful, Dyke. But,” he added,
an idea occurring to him, “that don't shut you out from work. There are
other railroads in the State that are not controlled by the P. and S.
W.”

Dyke smote his knee with his clenched fist.

“NAME ONE.”

Presley was silent. Dyke's challenge was unanswerable. There was a lapse
in their talk, Presley drumming on the arm of the seat, meditating on
this injustice; Dyke looking off over the fields beyond the town, his
frown lowering, his teeth rasping upon his pipestem. The station agent
came to the door of the depot, stretching and yawning. On ahead of the
engine, the empty rails of the track, reaching out toward the horizon,
threw off visible layers of heat. The telegraph key clicked incessantly.

“So I'm going to quit,” Dyke remarked after a while, his anger somewhat
subsided. “My brother and I will take up this hop ranch. I've saved a
good deal in the last ten years, and there ought to be money in hops.”

Presley went on, remounting his bicycle, wheeling silently through the
deserted streets of the decayed and dying Mexican town. It was the hour
of the siesta. Nobody was about. There was no business in the town. It
was too close to Bonneville for that. Before the railroad came, and
in the days when the raising of cattle was the great industry of
the country, it had enjoyed a fierce and brilliant life. Now it was
moribund. The drug store, the two bar-rooms, the hotel at the corner of
the old Plaza, and the shops where Mexican “curios” were sold to those
occasional Eastern tourists who came to visit the Mission of San Juan,
sufficed for the town's activity.

At Solotari's, the restaurant on the Plaza, diagonally across from the
hotel, Presley ate his long-deferred Mexican dinner--an omelette in
Spanish-Mexican style, frijoles and tortillas, a salad, and a glass
of white wine. In a corner of the room, during the whole course of his
dinner, two young Mexicans (one of whom was astonishingly handsome,
after the melodramatic fashion of his race) and an old fellow! the
centenarian of the town, decrepit beyond belief, sang an interminable
love-song to the accompaniment of a guitar and an accordion.

These Spanish-Mexicans, decayed, picturesque, vicious, and romantic,
never failed to interest Presley. A few of them still remained in
Guadalajara, drifting from the saloon to the restaurant, and from the
restaurant to the Plaza, relics of a former generation, standing for a
different order of things, absolutely idle, living God knew how, happy
with their cigarette, their guitar, their glass of mescal, and their
siesta. The centenarian remembered Fremont and Governor Alvarado, and
the bandit Jesus Tejeda, and the days when Los Muertos was a Spanish
grant, a veritable principality, leagues in extent, and when there
was never a fence from Visalia to Fresno. Upon this occasion, Presley
offered the old man a drink of mescal, and excited him to talk of the
things he remembered. Their talk was in Spanish, a language with which
Presley was familiar.

“De La Cuesta held the grant of Los Muertos in those days,” the
centenarian said; “a grand man. He had the power of life and death over
his people, and there was no law but his word. There was no thought of
wheat then, you may believe. It was all cattle in those days, sheep,
horses--steers, not so many--and if money was scarce, there was always
plenty to eat, and clothes enough for all, and wine, ah, yes, by the
vat, and oil too; the Mission Fathers had that. Yes, and there was wheat
as well, now that I come to think; but a very little--in the field north
of the Mission where now it is the Seed ranch; wheat fields were there,
and also a vineyard, all on Mission grounds. Wheat, olives, and the
vine; the Fathers planted those, to provide the elements of the Holy
Sacrament--bread, oil, and wine, you understand. It was like that, those
industries began in California--from the Church; and now,” he put his
chin in the air, “what would Father Ullivari have said to such a crop
as Senor Derrick plants these days? Ten thousand acres of wheat! Nothing
but wheat from the Sierra to the Coast Range. I remember when De La
Cuesta was married. He had never seen the young lady, only her miniature
portrait, painted”--he raised a shoulder--“I do not know by whom, small,
a little thing to be held in the palm. But he fell in love with that,
and marry her he would. The affair was arranged between him and the
girl's parents. But when the time came that De La Cuesta was to go to
Monterey to meet and marry the girl, behold, Jesus Tejeda broke in upon
the small rancheros near Terrabella. It was no time for De La Cuesta to
be away, so he sent his brother Esteban to Monterey to marry the girl by
proxy for him. I went with Esteban. We were a company, nearly a hundred
men. And De La Cuesta sent a horse for the girl to ride, white, pure
white; and the saddle was of red leather; the head-stall, the bit,
and buckles, all the metal work, of virgin silver. Well, there was
a ceremony in the Monterey Mission, and Esteban, in the name of his
brother, was married to the girl. On our way back, De La Cuesta rode
out to meet us. His company met ours at Agatha dos Palos. Never will
I forget De La Cuesta's face as his eyes fell upon the girl. It was a
look, a glance, come and gone like THAT,” he snapped his fingers. “No
one but I saw it, but I was close by. There was no mistaking that look.
De La Cuesta was disappointed.”

“And the girl?” demanded Presley.

“She never knew. Ah, he was a grand gentleman, De La Cuesta. Always he
treated her as a queen. Never was husband more devoted, more respectful,
more chivalrous. But love?” The old fellow put his chin in the air,
shutting his eyes in a knowing fashion. “It was not there. I could tell.
They were married over again at the Mission San Juan de Guadalajara--OUR
Mission--and for a week all the town of Guadalajara was in fete. There
were bull-fights in the Plaza--this very one--for five days, and to each
of his tenants-in-chief, De La Cuesta gave a horse, a barrel of tallow,
an ounce of silver, and half an ounce of gold dust. Ah, those were days.
That was a gay life. This”--he made a comprehensive gesture with his
left hand--“this is stupid.”

“You may well say that,” observed Presley moodily, discouraged by the
other's talk. All his doubts and uncertainty had returned to him. Never
would he grasp the subject of his great poem. To-day, the life was
colourless. Romance was dead. He had lived too late. To write of the
past was not what he desired. Reality was what he longed for, things
that he had seen. Yet how to make this compatible with romance. He rose,
putting on his hat, offering the old man a cigarette. The centenarian
accepted with the air of a grandee, and extended his horn snuff-box.
Presley shook his head.

“I was born too late for that,” he declared, “for that, and for many
other things. Adios.”

“You are travelling to-day, senor?”

“A little turn through the country, to get the kinks out of the
muscles,” Presley answered. “I go up into the Quien Sabe, into the high
country beyond the Mission.”

“Ah, the Quien Sabe rancho. The sheep are grazing there this week.”

Solotari, the keeper of the restaurant, explained:

“Young Annixter sold his wheat stubble on the ground to the sheep
raisers off yonder;” he motioned eastward toward the Sierra foothills.
“Since Sunday the herd has been down. Very clever, that young Annixter.
He gets a price for his stubble, which else he would have to burn, and
also manures his land as the sheep move from place to place. A true
Yankee, that Annixter, a good gringo.”

After his meal, Presley once more mounted his bicycle, and leaving the
restaurant and the Plaza behind him, held on through the main street of
the drowsing town--the street that farther on developed into the road
which turned abruptly northward and led onward through the hop-fields
and the Quien Sabe ranch toward the Mission of San Juan.

The Home ranch of the Quien Sabe was in the little triangle bounded on
the south by the railroad, on the northwest by Broderson Creek, and on
the east by the hop fields and the Mission lands. It was traversed in
all directions, now by the trail from Hooven's, now by the irrigating
ditch--the same which Presley had crossed earlier in the day--and again
by the road upon which Presley then found himself. In its centre were
Annixter's ranch house and barns, topped by the skeleton-like tower of
the artesian well that was to feed the irrigating ditch. Farther on,
the course of Broderson Creek was marked by a curved line of grey-green
willows, while on the low hills to the north, as Presley advanced, the
ancient Mission of San Juan de Guadalajara, with its belfry tower and
red-tiled roof, began to show itself over the crests of the venerable
pear trees that clustered in its garden.

When Presley reached Annixter's ranch house, he found young Annixter
himself stretched in his hammock behind the mosquito-bar on the front
porch, reading “David Copperfield,” and gorging himself with dried
prunes.

Annixter--after the two had exchanged greetings--complained of terrific
colics all the preceding night. His stomach was out of whack, but
you bet he knew how to take care of himself; the last spell, he had
consulted a doctor at Bonneville, a gibbering busy-face who had filled
him up to the neck with a dose of some hogwash stuff that had made him
worse--a healthy lot the doctors knew, anyhow. HIS case was peculiar. HE
knew; prunes were what he needed, and by the pound.

Annixter, who worked the Quien Sabe ranch--some four thousand acres
of rich clay and heavy loams--was a very young man, younger even than
Presley, like him a college graduate. He looked never a year older than
he was. He was smooth-shaven and lean built. But his youthful appearance
was offset by a certain male cast of countenance, the lower lip thrust
out, the chin large and deeply cleft. His university course had hardened
rather than polished him. He still remained one of the people, rough
almost to insolence, direct in speech, intolerant in his opinions,
relying upon absolutely no one but himself; yet, with all this, of
an astonishing degree of intelligence, and possessed of an executive
ability little short of positive genius. He was a ferocious worker,
allowing himself no pleasures, and exacting the same degree of energy
from all his subordinates. He was widely hated, and as widely trusted.
Every one spoke of his crusty temper and bullying disposition,
invariably qualifying the statement with a commendation of his resources
and capabilities. The devil of a driver, a hard man to get along with,
obstinate, contrary, cantankerous; but brains! No doubt of that; brains
to his boots. One would like to see the man who could get ahead of him
on a deal. Twice he had been shot at, once from ambush on Osterman's
ranch, and once by one of his own men whom he had kicked from the
sacking platform of his harvester for gross negligence. At college,
he had specialised on finance, political economy, and scientific
agriculture. After his graduation (he stood almost at the very top of
his class) he had returned and obtained the degree of civil engineer.
Then suddenly he had taken a notion that a practical knowledge of law
was indispensable to a modern farmer. In eight months he did the work of
three years, studying for his bar examinations. His method of study was
characteristic. He reduced all the material of his text-books to notes.
Tearing out the leaves of these note-books, he pasted them upon the
walls of his room; then, in his shirt-sleeves, a cheap cigar in his
teeth, his hands in his pockets, he walked around and around the room,
scowling fiercely at his notes, memorising, devouring, digesting. At
intervals, he drank great cupfuls of unsweetened, black coffee. When the
bar examinations were held, he was admitted at the very head of all the
applicants, and was complimented by the judge. Immediately afterwards,
he collapsed with nervous prostration; his stomach “got out of whack,”
 and he all but died in a Sacramento boarding-house, obstinately refusing
to have anything to do with doctors, whom he vituperated as a rabble
of quacks, dosing himself with a patent medicine and stuffing himself
almost to bursting with liver pills and dried prunes.

He had taken a trip to Europe after this sickness to put himself
completely to rights. He intended to be gone a year, but returned at
the end of six weeks, fulminating abuse of European cooking. Nearly his
entire time had been spent in Paris; but of this sojourn he had brought
back but two souvenirs, an electro-plated bill-hook and an empty bird
cage which had tickled his fancy immensely.

He was wealthy. Only a year previous to this his father--a widower, who
had amassed a fortune in land speculation--had died, and Annixter, the
only son, had come into the inheritance.

For Presley, Annixter professed a great admiration, holding in deep
respect the man who could rhyme words, deferring to him whenever there
was question of literature or works of fiction. No doubt, there was
not much use in poetry, and as for novels, to his mind, there were only
Dickens's works. Everything else was a lot of lies. But just the same,
it took brains to grind out a poem. It wasn't every one who could rhyme
“brave” and “glaive,” and make sense out of it. Sure not.

But Presley's case was a notable exception. On no occasion was
Annixter prepared to accept another man's opinion without reserve.
In conversation with him, it was almost impossible to make any direct
statement, however trivial, that he would accept without either
modification or open contradiction. He had a passion for violent
discussion. He would argue upon every subject in the range of
human knowledge, from astronomy to the tariff, from the doctrine of
predestination to the height of a horse. Never would he admit himself to
be mistaken; when cornered, he would intrench himself behind the remark,
“Yes, that's all very well. In some ways, it is, and then, again, in
some ways, it ISN'T.”

Singularly enough, he and Presley were the best of friends. More than
once, Presley marvelled at this state of affairs, telling himself
that he and Annixter had nothing in common. In all his circle of
acquaintances, Presley was the one man with whom Annixter had never
quarrelled. The two men were diametrically opposed in temperament.
Presley was easy-going; Annixter, alert. Presley was a confirmed
dreamer, irresolute, inactive, with a strong tendency to melancholy;
the young farmer was a man of affairs, decisive, combative, whose
only reflection upon his interior economy was a morbid concern in
the vagaries of his stomach. Yet the two never met without a mutual
pleasure, taking a genuine interest in each other's affairs, and often
putting themselves to great inconvenience to be of trifling service to
help one another.

As a last characteristic, Annixter pretended to be a woman-hater, for
no other reason than that he was a very bull-calf of awkwardness in
feminine surroundings. Feemales! Rot! There was a fine way for a man to
waste his time and his good money, lally gagging with a lot of feemales.
No, thank you; none of it in HIS, if you please. Once only he had an
affair--a timid, little creature in a glove-cleaning establishment in
Sacramento, whom he had picked up, Heaven knew how. After his return
to his ranch, a correspondence had been maintained between the two,
Annixter taking the precaution to typewrite his letters, and never
affixing his signature, in an excess of prudence. He furthermore made
carbon copies of all his letters, filing them away in a compartment
of his safe. Ah, it would be a clever feemale who would get him into a
mess. Then, suddenly smitten with a panic terror that he had committed
himself, that he was involving himself too deeply, he had abruptly sent
the little woman about her business. It was his only love affair. After
that, he kept himself free. No petticoats should ever have a hold on
him. Sure not.

As Presley came up to the edge of the porch, pushing his bicycle in
front of him, Annixter excused himself for not getting up, alleging that
the cramps returned the moment he was off his back.

“What are you doing up this way?” he demanded.

“Oh, just having a look around,” answered Presley. “How's the ranch?”

“Say,” observed the other, ignoring his question, “what's this I hear
about Derrick giving his tenants the bounce, and working Los Muertos
himself--working ALL his land?”

Presley made a sharp movement of impatience with his free hand. “I've
heard nothing else myself since morning. I suppose it must be so.”

“Huh!” grunted Annixter, spitting out a prune stone. “You give Magnus
Derrick my compliments and tell him he's a fool.” “What do you mean?”

“I suppose Derrick thinks he's still running his mine, and that the same
principles will apply to getting grain out of the earth as to getting
gold. Oh, let him go on and see where he brings up. That's right,
there's your Western farmer,” he exclaimed contemptuously. “Get the
guts out of your land; work it to death; never give it a rest. Never
alternate your crop, and then when your soil is exhausted, sit down and
roar about hard times.”

“I suppose Magnus thinks the land has had rest enough these last two dry
seasons,” observed Presley. “He has raised no crop to speak of for two
years. The land has had a good rest.”

“Ah, yes, that sounds well,” Annixter contradicted, unwilling to be
convinced. “In a way, the land's been rested, and then, again, in a way,
it hasn't.”

But Presley, scenting an argument, refrained from answering, and
bethought himself of moving on.

“I'm going to leave my wheel here for a while, Buck,” he said, “if you
don't mind. I'm going up to the spring, and the road is rough between
here and there.”

“Stop in for dinner on your way back,” said Annixter. “There'll be a
venison steak. One of the boys got a deer over in the foothills last
week. Out of season, but never mind that. I can't eat it. This stomach
of mine wouldn't digest sweet oil to-day. Get here about six.”

“Well, maybe I will, thank you,” said Presley, moving off. “By the way,”
 he added, “I see your barn is about done.”

“You bet,” answered Annixter. “In about a fortnight now she'll be all
ready.”

“It's a big barn,” murmured Presley, glancing around the angle of the
house toward where the great structure stood.

“Guess we'll have to have a dance there before we move the stock in,”
 observed Annixter. “That's the custom all around here.”

Presley took himself off, but at the gate Annixter called after him, his
mouth full of prunes, “Say, take a look at that herd of sheep as you go
up. They are right off here to the east of the road, about half a mile
from here. I guess that's the biggest lot of sheep YOU ever saw. You
might write a poem about 'em. Lamb--ram; sheep graze--sunny days. Catch
on?”

Beyond Broderson Creek, as Presley advanced, tramping along on foot now,
the land opened out again into the same vast spaces of dull brown earth,
sprinkled with stubble, such as had been characteristic of Derrick's
ranch. To the east the reach seemed infinite, flat, cheerless,
heat-ridden, unrolling like a gigantic scroll toward the faint shimmer
of the distant horizons, with here and there an isolated live-oak to
break the sombre monotony. But bordering the road to the westward, the
surface roughened and raised, clambering up to the higher ground, on the
crest of which the old Mission and its surrounding pear trees were now
plainly visible.

Just beyond the Mission, the road bent abruptly eastward, striking off
across the Seed ranch. But Presley left the road at this point, going
on across the open fields. There was no longer any trail. It was toward
three o'clock. The sun still spun, a silent, blazing disc, high in the
heavens, and tramping through the clods of uneven, broken plough was
fatiguing work. The slope of the lowest foothills begun, the surface of
the country became rolling, and, suddenly, as he topped a higher ridge,
Presley came upon the sheep.

Already he had passed the larger part of the herd--an intervening rise
of ground having hidden it from sight. Now, as he turned half way about,
looking down into the shallow hollow between him and the curve of the
creek, he saw them very plainly. The fringe of the herd was some two
hundred yards distant, but its farther side, in that illusive shimmer of
hot surface air, seemed miles away. The sheep were spread out roughly
in the shape of a figure eight, two larger herds connected by a smaller,
and were headed to the southward, moving slowly, grazing on the wheat
stubble as they proceeded. But the number seemed incalculable. Hundreds
upon hundreds upon hundreds of grey, rounded backs, all exactly alike,
huddled, close-packed, alive, hid the earth from sight. It was no longer
an aggregate of individuals. It was a mass--a compact, solid, slowly
moving mass, huge, without form, like a thick-pressed growth of
mushrooms, spreading out in all directions over the earth. From it there
arose a vague murmur, confused, inarticulate, like the sound of very
distant surf, while all the air in the vicinity was heavy with the warm,
ammoniacal odour of the thousands of crowding bodies.

All the colours of the scene were sombre--the brown of the earth, the
faded yellow of the dead stubble, the grey of the myriad of undulating
backs. Only on the far side of the herd, erect, motionless--a single
note of black, a speck, a dot--the shepherd stood, leaning upon an empty
water-trough, solitary, grave, impressive.

For a few moments, Presley stood, watching. Then, as he started to move
on, a curious thing occurred. At first, he thought he had heard some one
call his name. He paused, listening; there was no sound but the vague
noise of the moving sheep. Then, as this first impression passed, it
seemed to him that he had been beckoned to. Yet nothing stirred; except
for the lonely figure beyond the herd there was no one in sight. He
started on again, and in half a dozen steps found himself looking over
his shoulder. Without knowing why, he looked toward the shepherd; then
halted and looked a second time and a third. Had the shepherd called
to him? Presley knew that he had heard no voice. Brusquely, all his
attention seemed riveted upon this distant figure. He put one forearm
over his eyes, to keep off the sun, gazing across the intervening herd.
Surely, the shepherd had called him. But at the next instant he started,
uttering an exclamation under his breath. The far-away speck of black
became animated. Presley remarked a sweeping gesture. Though the man
had not beckoned to him before, there was no doubt that he was beckoning
now. Without any hesitation, and singularly interested in the incident,
Presley turned sharply aside and hurried on toward the shepherd,
skirting the herd, wondering all the time that he should answer the call
with so little question, so little hesitation.

But the shepherd came forward to meet Presley, followed by one of his
dogs. As the two men approached each other, Presley, closely studying
the other, began to wonder where he had seen him before. It must have
been a very long time ago, upon one of his previous visits to the ranch.
Certainly, however, there was something familiar in the shepherd's face
and figure. When they came closer to each other, and Presley could see
him more distinctly, this sense of a previous acquaintance was increased
and sharpened.

The shepherd was a man of about thirty-five. He was very lean and spare.
His brown canvas overalls were thrust into laced boots. A cartridge belt
without any cartridges encircled his waist. A grey flannel shirt, open
at the throat, showed his breast, tanned and ruddy. He wore no hat. His
hair was very black and rather long. A pointed beard covered his chin,
growing straight and fine from the hollow cheeks. The absence of any
covering for his head was, no doubt, habitual with him, for his face was
as brown as an Indian's--a ruddy brown quite different from Presley's
dark olive. To Presley's morbidly keen observation, the general
impression of the shepherd's face was intensely interesting. It was
uncommon to an astonishing degree. Presley's vivid imagination chose to
see in it the face of an ascetic, of a recluse, almost that of a young
seer. So must have appeared the half-inspired shepherds of the Hebraic
legends, the younger prophets of Israel, dwellers in the wilderness,
beholders of visions, having their existence in a continual dream,
talkers with God, gifted with strange powers.

Suddenly, at some twenty paces distant from the approaching shepherd,
Presley stopped short, his eyes riveted upon the other.

“Vanamee!” he exclaimed.

The shepherd smiled and came forward, holding out his hands, saying, “I
thought it was you. When I saw you come over the hill, I called you.”

“But not with your voice,” returned Presley. “I knew that some one
wanted me. I felt it. I should have remembered that you could do that
kind of thing.”

“I have never known it to fail. It helps with the sheep.”

“With the sheep?”

“In a way. I can't tell exactly how. We don't understand these things
yet. There are times when, if I close my eyes and dig my fists into
my temples, I can hold the entire herd for perhaps a minute. Perhaps,
though, it's imagination, who knows? But it's good to see you again. How
long has it been since the last time? Two, three, nearly five years.”

It was more than that. It was six years since Presley and Vanamee had
met, and then it had been for a short time only, during one of the
shepherd's periodical brief returns to that part of the country. During
a week he and Presley had been much together, for the two were devoted
friends. Then, as abruptly, as mysteriously as he had come, Vanamee
disappeared. Presley awoke one morning to find him gone. Thus, it had
been with Vanamee for a period of sixteen years. He lived his life in
the unknown, one could not tell where--in the desert, in the mountains,
throughout all the vast and vague South-west, solitary, strange. Three,
four, five years passed. The shepherd would be almost forgotten. Never
the most trivial scrap of information as to his whereabouts reached Los
Muertos. He had melted off into the surface-shimmer of the desert, into
the mirage; he sank below the horizons; he was swallowed up in the waste
of sand and sage. Then, without warning, he would reappear, coming in
from the wilderness, emerging from the unknown. No one knew him well. In
all that countryside he had but three friends, Presley, Magnus Derrick,
and the priest at the Mission of San Juan de Guadalajara, Father Sarria.
He remained always a mystery, living a life half-real, half-legendary.
In all those years he did not seem to have grown older by a single day.
At this time, Presley knew him to be thirty-six years of age. But since
the first day the two had met, the shepherd's face and bearing had, to
his eyes, remained the same. At this moment, Presley was looking into
the same face he had first seen many, many years ago. It was a face
stamped with an unspeakable sadness, a deathless grief, the permanent
imprint of a tragedy long past, but yet a living issue. Presley told
himself that it was impossible to look long into Vanamee's eyes without
knowing that here was a man whose whole being had been at one time
shattered and riven to its lowest depths, whose life had suddenly
stopped at a certain moment of its development.

The two friends sat down upon the ledge of the watering-trough, their
eyes wandering incessantly toward the slow moving herd, grazing on the
wheat stubble, moving southward as they grazed.

“Where have you come from this time?” Presley had asked. “Where have you
kept yourself?”

The other swept the horizon to the south and east with a vague gesture.

“Off there, down to the south, very far off. So many places that I can't
remember. I went the Long Trail this time; a long, long ways. Arizona,
The Mexicos, and, then, afterwards, Utah and Nevada, following the
horizon, travelling at hazard. Into Arizona first, going in by Monument
Pass, and then on to the south, through the country of the Navajos, down
by the Aga Thia Needle--a great blade of red rock jutting from out the
desert, like a knife thrust. Then on and on through The Mexicos, all
through the Southwest, then back again in a great circle by Chihuahua
and Aldama to Laredo, to Torreon, and Albuquerque. From there across
the Uncompahgre plateau into the Uintah country; then at last due west
through Nevada to California and to the valley of the San Joaquin.” His
voice lapsed to a monotone, his eyes becoming fixed; he continued to
speak as though half awake, his thoughts elsewhere, seeing again in the
eye of his mind the reach of desert and red hill, the purple mountain,
the level stretch of alkali, leper white, all the savage, gorgeous
desolation of the Long Trail.

He ignored Presley for the moment, but, on the other hand, Presley
himself gave him but half his attention. The return of Vanamee had
stimulated the poet's memory. He recalled the incidents of Vanamee's
life, reviewing again that terrible drama which had uprooted his soul,
which had driven him forth a wanderer, a shunner of men, a sojourner in
waste places. He was, strangely enough, a college graduate and a man of
wide reading and great intelligence, but he had chosen to lead his own
life, which was that of a recluse.

Of a temperament similar in many ways to Presley's, there were
capabilities in Vanamee that were not ordinarily to be found in the
rank and file of men. Living close to nature, a poet by instinct, where
Presley was but a poet by training, there developed in him a great
sensitiveness to beauty and an almost abnormal capacity for great
happiness and great sorrow; he felt things intensely, deeply. He never
forgot. It was when he was eighteen or nineteen, at the formative and
most impressionable period of his life, that he had met Angele Varian.
Presley barely remembered her as a girl of sixteen, beautiful almost
beyond expression, who lived with an aged aunt on the Seed ranch back of
the Mission. At this moment he was trying to recall how she looked, with
her hair of gold hanging in two straight plaits on either side of her
face, making three-cornered her round, white forehead; her wonderful
eyes, violet blue, heavy lidded, with their astonishing upward slant
toward the temples, the slant that gave a strange, oriental cast to her
face, perplexing, enchanting. He remembered the Egyptian fulness of the
lips, the strange balancing movement of her head upon her slender neck,
the same movement that one sees in a snake at poise. Never had he seen a
girl more radiantly beautiful, never a beauty so strange, so troublous,
so out of all accepted standards. It was small wonder that Vanamee had
loved her, and less wonder, still, that his love had been so intense, so
passionate, so part of himself. Angele had loved him with a love no
less than his own. It was one of those legendary passions that sometimes
occur, idyllic, untouched by civilisation, spontaneous as the growth of
trees, natural as dew-fall, strong as the firm-seated mountains.

At the time of his meeting with Angele, Vanamee was living on the Los
Muertos ranch. It was there he had chosen to spend one of his college
vacations. But he preferred to pass it in out-of-door work, sometimes
herding cattle, sometimes pitching hay, sometimes working with pick
and dynamite-stick on the ditches in the fourth division of the ranch,
riding the range, mending breaks in the wire fences, making himself
generally useful. College bred though he was, the life pleased him. He
was, as he desired, close to nature, living the full measure of life, a
worker among workers, taking enjoyment in simple pleasures, healthy in
mind and body. He believed in an existence passed in this fashion in the
country, working hard, eating full, drinking deep, sleeping dreamlessly.

But every night, after supper, he saddled his pony and rode over to the
garden of the old Mission. The 'dobe dividing wall on that side, which
once had separated the Mission garden and the Seed ranch, had long since
crumbled away, and the boundary between the two pieces of ground was
marked only by a line of venerable pear trees. Here, under these trees,
he found Angele awaiting him, and there the two would sit through the
hot, still evening, their arms about each other, watching the moon
rise over the foothills, listening to the trickle of the water in the
moss-encrusted fountain in the garden, and the steady croak of the great
frogs that lived in the damp north corner of the enclosure. Through all
one summer the enchantment of that new-found, wonderful love, pure and
untainted, filled the lives of each of them with its sweetness. The
summer passed, the harvest moon came and went. The nights were very
dark. In the deep shade of the pear trees they could no longer see each
other. When they met at the rendezvous, Vanamee found her only with his
groping hands. They did not speak, mere words were useless between them.
Silently as his reaching hands touched her warm body, he took her in his
arms, searching for her lips with his. Then one night the tragedy had
suddenly leaped from out the shadow with the abruptness of an explosion.

It was impossible afterwards to reconstruct the manner of its
occurrence. To Angele's mind--what there was left of it--the matter
always remained a hideous blur, a blot, a vague, terrible confusion.
No doubt they two had been watched; the plan succeeded too well for any
other supposition. One moonless night, Angele, arriving under the
black shadow of the pear trees a little earlier than usual, found the
apparently familiar figure waiting for her. All unsuspecting she gave
herself to the embrace of a strange pair of arms, and Vanamee arriving
but a score of moments later, stumbled over her prostrate body, inert
and unconscious, in the shadow of the overspiring trees.

Who was the Other? Angele was carried to her home on the Seed ranch,
delirious, all but raving, and Vanamee, with knife and revolver ready,
ranged the country-side like a wolf. He was not alone. The whole county
rose, raging, horror-struck. Posse after posse was formed, sent out, and
returned, without so much as a clue. Upon no one could even the shadow
of suspicion be thrown. The Other had withdrawn into an impenetrable
mystery. There he remained. He never was found; he never was so much
as heard of. A legend arose about him, this prowler of the night, this
strange, fearful figure, with an unseen face, swooping in there from
out the darkness, come and gone in an instant, but leaving behind him a
track of terror and death and rage and undying grief. Within the year,
in giving birth to the child, Angele had died.

The little babe was taken by Angele's parents, and Angele was buried
in the Mission garden near to the aged, grey sun dial. Vanamee stood by
during the ceremony, but half conscious of what was going forward. At
the last moment he had stepped forward, looked long into the dead face
framed in its plaits of gold hair, the hair that made three-cornered
the round, white forehead; looked again at the closed eyes, with their
perplexing upward slant toward the temples, oriental, bizarre; at the
lips with their Egyptian fulness; at the sweet, slender neck; the long,
slim hands; then abruptly turned about. The last clods were filling the
grave at a time when he was already far away, his horse's head turned
toward the desert.

For two years no syllable was heard of him. It was believed that he had
killed himself. But Vanamee had no thought of that. For two years he
wandered through Arizona, living in the desert, in the wilderness, a
recluse, a nomad, an ascetic. But, doubtless, all his heart was in the
little coffin in the Mission garden. Once in so often he must come
back thither. One day he was seen again in the San Joaquin. The priest,
Father Sarria, returning from a visit to the sick at Bonneville, met him
on the Upper Road. Eighteen years had passed since Angele had died, but
the thread of Vanamee's life had been snapped. Nothing remained now
but the tangled ends. He had never forgotten. The long, dull ache, the
poignant grief had now become a part of him. Presley knew this to be so.

While Presley had been reflecting upon all this, Vanamee had continued
to speak. Presley, however, had not been wholly inattentive. While
his memory was busy reconstructing the details of the drama of the
shepherd's life, another part of his brain had been swiftly registering
picture after picture that Vanamee's monotonous flow of words struck
off, as it were, upon a steadily moving scroll. The music of the
unfamiliar names that occurred in his recital was a stimulant to the
poet's imagination. Presley had the poet's passion for expressive,
sonorous names. As these came and went in Vanamee's monotonous
undertones, like little notes of harmony in a musical progression, he
listened, delighted with their resonance.--Navajo, Quijotoa, Uintah,
Sonora, Laredo, Uncompahgre--to him they were so many symbols. It was
his West that passed, unrolling there before the eye of his mind:
the open, heat-scourged round of desert; the mesa, like a vast altar,
shimmering purple in the royal sunset; the still, gigantic mountains,
heaving into the sky from out the canyons; the strenuous, fierce life
of isolated towns, lost and forgotten, down there, far off, below the
horizon. Abruptly his great poem, his Song of the West, leaped up again
in his imagination. For the moment, he all but held it. It was there,
close at hand. In another instant he would grasp it.

“Yes, yes,” he exclaimed, “I can see it all. The desert, the mountains,
all wild, primordial, untamed. How I should have loved to have been with
you. Then, perhaps, I should have got hold of my idea.”

“Your idea?”

“The great poem of the West. It's that which I want to write. Oh, to
put it all into hexameters; strike the great iron note; sing the vast,
terrible song; the song of the People; the forerunners of empire!”

Vanamee understood him perfectly. He nodded gravely.

“Yes, it is there. It is Life, the primitive, simple, direct Life,
passionate, tumultuous. Yes, there is an epic there.”

Presley caught at the word. It had never before occurred to him.

“Epic, yes, that's it. It is the epic I'm searching for. And HOW I
search for it. You don't know. It is sometimes almost an agony. Often
and often I can feel it right there, there, at my finger-tips, but I
never quite catch it. It always eludes me. I was born too late. Ah, to
get back to that first clear-eyed view of things, to see as Homer saw,
as Beowulf saw, as the Nibelungen poets saw. The life is here, the same
as then; the Poem is here; my West is here; the primeval, epic life
is here, here under our hands, in the desert, in the mountain, on the
ranch, all over here, from Winnipeg to Guadalupe. It is the man who is
lacking, the poet; we have been educated away from it all. We are out of
touch. We are out of tune.”

Vanamee heard him to the end, his grave, sad face thoughtful and
attentive. Then he rose.

“I am going over to the Mission,” he said, “to see Father Sarria. I have
not seen him yet.”

“How about the sheep?”

“The dogs will keep them in hand, and I shall not be gone long. Besides
that, I have a boy here to help. He is over yonder on the other side of
the herd. We can't see him from here.”

Presley wondered at the heedlessness of leaving the sheep so slightly
guarded, but made no comment, and the two started off across the field
in the direction of the Mission church.

“Well, yes, it is there--your epic,” observed Vanamee, as they went
along. “But why write? Why not LIVE in it? Steep oneself in the heat of
the desert, the glory of the sunset, the blue haze of the mesa and the
canyon.”

“As you have done, for instance?”

Vanamee nodded.

“No, I could not do that,” declared Presley; “I want to go back, but not
so far as you. I feel that I must compromise. I must find expression.
I could not lose myself like that in your desert. When its vastness
overwhelmed me, or its beauty dazzled me, or its loneliness weighed down
upon me, I should have to record my impressions. Otherwise, I should
suffocate.”

“Each to his own life,” observed Vanamee.

The Mission of San Juan, built of brown 'dobe blocks, covered with
yellow plaster, that at many points had dropped away from the walls,
stood on the crest of a low rise of the ground, facing to the south. A
covered colonnade, paved with round, worn bricks, from whence opened the
doors of the abandoned cells, once used by the monks, adjoined it on the
left. The roof was of tiled half-cylinders, split longitudinally, and
laid in alternate rows, now concave, now convex. The main body of the
church itself was at right angles to the colonnade, and at the point of
intersection rose the belfry tower, an ancient campanile, where swung
the three cracked bells, the gift of the King of Spain. Beyond the
church was the Mission garden and the graveyard that overlooked the Seed
ranch in a little hollow beyond.

Presley and Vanamee went down the long colonnade to the last door next
the belfry tower, and Vanamee pulled the leather thong that hung from
a hole in the door, setting a little bell jangling somewhere in the
interior. The place, but for this noise, was shrouded in a Sunday
stillness, an absolute repose. Only at intervals, one heard the trickle
of the unseen fountain, and the liquid cooing of doves in the garden.

Father Sarria opened the door. He was a small man, somewhat stout, with
a smooth and shiny face. He wore a frock coat that was rather dirty,
slippers, and an old yachting cap of blue cloth, with a broken leather
vizor. He was smoking a cheap cigar, very fat and black.

But instantly he recognised Vanamee. His face went all alight with
pleasure and astonishment. It seemed as if he would never have finished
shaking both his hands; and, as it was, he released but one of them,
patting him affectionately on the shoulder with the other. He was
voluble in his welcome, talking partly in Spanish, partly in English. So
he had come back again, this great fellow, tanned as an Indian, lean as
an Indian, with an Indian's long, black hair. But he had not changed,
not in the very least. His beard had not grown an inch. Aha! The rascal,
never to give warning, to drop down, as it were, from out the sky. Such
a hermit! To live in the desert! A veritable Saint Jerome. Did a lion
feed him down there in Arizona, or was it a raven, like Elijah? The good
God had not fattened him, at any rate, and, apropos, he was just about
to dine himself. He had made a salad from his own lettuce. The two would
dine with him, eh? For this, my son, that was lost is found again.

But Presley excused himself. Instinctively, he felt that Sarria and
Vanamee wanted to talk of things concerning which he was an outsider. It
was not at all unlikely that Vanamee would spend half the night before
the high altar in the church.

He took himself away, his mind still busy with Vanamee's extraordinary
life and character. But, as he descended the hill, he was startled by
a prolonged and raucous cry, discordant, very harsh, thrice repeated at
exact intervals, and, looking up, he saw one of Father Sarria's peacocks
balancing himself upon the topmost wire of the fence, his long tail
trailing, his neck outstretched, filling the air with his stupid outcry,
for no reason than the desire to make a noise.

About an hour later, toward four in the afternoon, Presley reached the
spring at the head of the little canyon in the northeast corner of the
Quien Sabe ranch, the point toward which he had been travelling since
early in the forenoon. The place was not without its charm. Innumerable
live-oaks overhung the canyon, and Broderson Creek--there a mere
rivulet, running down from the spring--gave a certain coolness to the
air. It was one of the few spots thereabouts that had survived the
dry season of the last year. Nearly all the other springs had dried
completely, while Mission Creek on Derrick's ranch was nothing better
than a dusty cutting in the ground, filled with brittle, concave flakes
of dried and sun-cracked mud.

Presley climbed to the summit of one of the hills--the highest--that
rose out of the canyon, from the crest of which he could see for thirty,
fifty, sixty miles down the valley, and, filling his pipe, smoked lazily
for upwards of an hour, his head empty of thought, allowing himself to
succumb to a pleasant, gentle inanition, a little drowsy comfortable in
his place, prone upon the ground, warmed just enough by such sunlight
as filtered through the live-oaks, soothed by the good tobacco and the
prolonged murmur of the spring and creek. By degrees, the sense of his
own personality became blunted, the little wheels and cogs of thought
moved slower and slower; consciousness dwindled to a point, the animal
in him stretched itself, purring. A delightful numbness invaded his mind
and his body. He was not asleep, he was not awake, stupefied merely,
lapsing back to the state of the faun, the satyr.

After a while, rousing himself a little, he shifted his position and,
drawing from the pocket of his shooting coat his little tree-calf
edition of the Odyssey, read far into the twenty-first book, where,
after the failure of all the suitors to bend Ulysses's bow, it is
finally put, with mockery, into his own hands. Abruptly the drama of
the story roused him from all his languor. In an instant he was the
poet again, his nerves tingling, alive to every sensation, responsive
to every impression. The desire of creation, of composition, grew big
within him. Hexameters of his own clamoured, tumultuous, in his brain.
Not for a long time had he “felt his poem,” as he called this sensation,
so poignantly. For an instant he told himself that he actually held it.

It was, no doubt, Vanamee's talk that had stimulated him to this
point. The story of the Long Trail, with its desert and mountain, its
cliff-dwellers, its Aztec ruins, its colour, movement, and romance,
filled his mind with picture after picture. The epic defiled before his
vision like a pageant. Once more, he shot a glance about him, as if in
search of the inspiration, and this time he all but found it. He rose to
his feet, looking out and off below him.

As from a pinnacle, Presley, from where he now stood, dominated the
entire country. The sun had begun to set, everything in the range of his
vision was overlaid with a sheen of gold.

First, close at hand, it was the Seed ranch, carpeting the little hollow
behind the Mission with a spread of greens, some dark, some vivid,
some pale almost to yellowness. Beyond that was the Mission itself,
its venerable campanile, in whose arches hung the Spanish King's bells,
already glowing ruddy in the sunset. Farther on, he could make out
Annixter's ranch house, marked by the skeleton-like tower of the
artesian well, and, a little farther to the east, the huddled, tiled
roofs of Guadalajara. Far to the west and north, he saw Bonneville very
plain, and the dome of the courthouse, a purple silhouette against the
glare of the sky. Other points detached themselves, swimming in a golden
mist, projecting blue shadows far before them; the mammoth live-oak by
Hooven's, towering superb and magnificent; the line of eucalyptus trees,
behind which he knew was the Los Muertos ranch house--his home; the
watering-tank, the great iron-hooped tower of wood that stood at the
joining of the Lower Road and the County Road; the long wind-break of
poplar trees and the white walls of Caraher's saloon on the County Road.

But all this seemed to be only foreground, a mere array of
accessories--a mass of irrelevant details. Beyond Annixter's, beyond
Guadalajara, beyond the Lower Road, beyond Broderson Creek, on to the
south and west, infinite, illimitable, stretching out there under the
sheen of the sunset forever and forever, flat, vast, unbroken, a huge
scroll, unrolling between the horizons, spread the great stretches of
the ranch of Los Muertos, bare of crops, shaved close in the recent
harvest. Near at hand were hills, but on that far southern horizon only
the curve of the great earth itself checked the view. Adjoining Los
Muertos, and widening to the west, opened the Broderson ranch. The
Osterman ranch to the northwest carried on the great sweep of landscape;
ranch after ranch. Then, as the imagination itself expanded under the
stimulus of that measureless range of vision, even those great ranches
resolved themselves into mere foreground, mere accessories, irrelevant
details. Beyond the fine line of the horizons, over the curve of the
globe, the shoulder of the earth, were other ranches, equally vast, and
beyond these, others, and beyond these, still others, the immensities
multiplying, lengthening out vaster and vaster. The whole gigantic
sweep of the San Joaquin expanded, Titanic, before the eye of the mind,
flagellated with heat, quivering and shimmering under the sun's red eye.
At long intervals, a faint breath of wind out of the south passed slowly
over the levels of the baked and empty earth, accentuating the silence,
marking off the stillness. It seemed to exhale from the land itself, a
prolonged sigh as of deep fatigue. It was the season after the harvest,
and the great earth, the mother, after its period of reproduction, its
pains of labour, delivered of the fruit of its loins, slept the sleep
of exhaustion, the infinite repose of the colossus, benignant, eternal,
strong, the nourisher of nations, the feeder of an entire world. Ha!
there it was, his epic, his inspiration, his West, his thundering
progression of hexameters. A sudden uplift, a sense of exhilaration, of
physical exaltation appeared abruptly to sweep Presley from his feet. As
from a point high above the world, he seemed to dominate a universe, a
whole order of things. He was dizzied, stunned, stupefied, his morbid
supersensitive mind reeling, drunk with the intoxication of mere
immensity. Stupendous ideas for which there were no names drove headlong
through his brain. Terrible, formless shapes, vague figures, gigantic,
monstrous, distorted, whirled at a gallop through his imagination.

He started homeward, still in his dream, descending from the hill,
emerging from the canyon, and took the short cut straight across the
Quien Sabe ranch, leaving Guadalajara far to his left. He tramped
steadily on through the wheat stubble, walking fast, his head in a
whirl.

Never had he so nearly grasped his inspiration as at that moment on the
hilltop. Even now, though the sunset was fading, though the wide reach
of valley was shut from sight, it still kept him company. Now the
details came thronging back--the component parts of his poem, the signs
and symbols of the West. It was there, close at hand, he had been in
touch with it all day. It was in the centenarian's vividly coloured
reminiscences--De La Cuesta, holding his grant from the Spanish crown,
with his power of life and death; the romance of his marriage; the white
horse with its pillion of red leather and silver bridle mountings; the
bull-fights in the Plaza; the gifts of gold dust, and horses and tallow.
It was in Vanamee's strange history, the tragedy of his love; Angele
Varian, with her marvellous loveliness; the Egyptian fulness of her
lips, the perplexing upward slant of her violet eyes, bizarre, oriental;
her white forehead made three cornered by her plaits of gold hair; the
mystery of the Other; her death at the moment of her child's birth.
It was in Vanamee's flight into the wilderness; the story of the Long
Trail, the sunsets behind the altar-like mesas, the baking desolation of
the deserts; the strenuous, fierce life of forgotten towns, down there,
far off, lost below the horizons of the southwest; the sonorous music of
unfamiliar names--Quijotoa, Uintah, Sonora, Laredo, Uncompahgre. It
was in the Mission, with its cracked bells, its decaying walls, its
venerable sun dial, its fountain and old garden, and in the Mission
Fathers themselves, the priests, the padres, planting the first wheat
and oil and wine to produce the elements of the Sacrament--a trinity of
great industries, taking their rise in a religious rite.

Abruptly, as if in confirmation, Presley heard the sound of a bell from
the direction of the Mission itself. It was the de Profundis, a note
of the Old World; of the ancient regime, an echo from the hillsides
of mediaeval Europe, sounding there in this new land, unfamiliar and
strange at this end-of-the-century time.

By now, however, it was dark. Presley hurried forward. He came to the
line fence of the Quien Sabe ranch. Everything was very still. The stars
were all out. There was not a sound other than the de Profundis, still
sounding from very far away. At long intervals the great earth sighed
dreamily in its sleep. All about, the feeling of absolute peace
and quiet and security and untroubled happiness and content seemed
descending from the stars like a benediction. The beauty of his poem,
its idyl, came to him like a caress; that alone had been lacking. It was
that, perhaps, which had left it hitherto incomplete. At last he was
to grasp his song in all its entity. But suddenly there was an
interruption. Presley had climbed the fence at the limit of the
Quien Sabe ranch. Beyond was Los Muertos, but between the two ran the
railroad. He had only time to jump back upon the embankment when, with
a quivering of all the earth, a locomotive, single, unattached, shot
by him with a roar, filling the air with the reek of hot oil, vomiting
smoke and sparks; its enormous eye, cyclopean, red, throwing a glare far
in advance, shooting by in a sudden crash of confused thunder; filling
the night with the terrific clamour of its iron hoofs.

Abruptly Presley remembered. This must be the crack passenger engine
of which Dyke had told him, the one delayed by the accident on the
Bakersfield division and for whose passage the track had been opened all
the way to Fresno.

Before Presley could recover from the shock of the irruption, while the
earth was still vibrating, the rails still humming, the engine was far
away, flinging the echo of its frantic gallop over all the valley. For a
brief instant it roared with a hollow diapason on the Long Trestle over
Broderson Creek, then plunged into a cutting farther on, the quivering
glare of its fires losing itself in the night, its thunder abruptly
diminishing to a subdued and distant humming. All at once this ceased.
The engine was gone.

But the moment the noise of the engine lapsed, Presley--about to start
forward again--was conscious of a confusion of lamentable sounds that
rose into the night from out the engine's wake. Prolonged cries of
agony, sobbing wails of infinite pain, heart-rending, pitiful.

The noises came from a little distance. He ran down the track, crossing
the culvert, over the irrigating ditch, and at the head of the long
reach of track--between the culvert and the Long Trestle--paused
abruptly, held immovable at the sight of the ground and rails all about
him.

In some way, the herd of sheep--Vanamee's herd--had found a breach in
the wire fence by the right of way and had wandered out upon the tracks.
A band had been crossing just at the moment of the engine's passage. The
pathos of it was beyond expression. It was a slaughter, a massacre of
innocents. The iron monster had charged full into the midst, merciless,
inexorable. To the right and left, all the width of the right of way,
the little bodies had been flung; backs were snapped against the fence
posts; brains knocked out. Caught in the barbs of the wire, wedged in,
the bodies hung suspended. Under foot it was terrible. The black blood,
winking in the starlight, seeped down into the clinkers between the ties
with a prolonged sucking murmur.

Presley turned away, horror-struck, sick at heart, overwhelmed with a
quick burst of irresistible compassion for this brute agony he could not
relieve. The sweetness was gone from the evening, the sense of peace,
of security, and placid contentment was stricken from the landscape. The
hideous ruin in the engine's path drove all thought of his poem from his
mind. The inspiration vanished like a mist. The de Profundis had ceased
to ring.

He hurried on across the Los Muertos ranch, almost running, even putting
his hands over his ears till he was out of hearing distance of that
all but human distress. Not until he was beyond ear-shot did he pause,
looking back, listening. The night had shut down again. For a moment the
silence was profound, unbroken.

Then, faint and prolonged, across the levels of the ranch, he heard the
engine whistling for Bonneville. Again and again, at rapid intervals in
its flying course, it whistled for road crossings, for sharp curves, for
trestles; ominous notes, hoarse, bellowing, ringing with the accents of
menace and defiance; and abruptly Presley saw again, in his imagination,
the galloping monster, the terror of steel and steam, with its single
eye, cyclopean, red, shooting from horizon to horizon; but saw it now
as the symbol of a vast power, huge, terrible, flinging the echo of
its thunder over all the reaches of the valley, leaving blood and
destruction in its path; the leviathan, with tentacles of steel
clutching into the soil, the soulless Force, the iron-hearted Power, the
monster, the Colossus, the Octopus.




CHAPTER II


On the following morning, Harran Derrick was up and about by a little
after six o'clock, and a quarter of an hour later had breakfast in the
kitchen of the ranch house, preferring not to wait until the Chinese
cook laid the table in the regular dining-room. He scented a hard
day's work ahead of him, and was anxious to be at it betimes. He was
practically the manager of Los Muertos, and, with the aid of his foreman
and three division superintendents, carried forward nearly the entire
direction of the ranch, occupying himself with the details of his
father's plans, executing his orders, signing contracts, paying bills,
and keeping the books.

For the last three weeks little had been done. The crop--such as
it was--had been harvested and sold, and there had been a general
relaxation of activity for upwards of a month. Now, however, the fall
was coming on, the dry season was about at its end; any time after the
twentieth of the month the first rains might be expected, softening the
ground, putting it into condition for the plough. Two days before this,
Harran had notified his superintendents on Three and Four to send in
such grain as they had reserved for seed. On Two the wheat had not even
shown itself above the ground, while on One, the Home ranch, which was
under his own immediate supervision, the seed had already been graded
and selected.

It was Harran's intention to commence blue-stoning his seed that day, a
delicate and important process which prevented rust and smut appearing
in the crop when the wheat should come up. But, furthermore, he wanted
to find time to go to Guadalajara to meet the Governor on the morning
train. His day promised to be busy.

But as Harran was finishing his last cup of coffee, Phelps, the foreman
on the Home ranch, who also looked after the storage barns where the
seed was kept, presented himself, cap in hand, on the back porch by the
kitchen door.

“I thought I'd speak to you about the seed from Four, sir,” he said.
“That hasn't been brought in yet.”

Harran nodded.

“I'll see about it. You've got all the blue-stone you want, have you,
Phelps?” and without waiting for an answer he added, “Tell the stableman
I shall want the team about nine o'clock to go to Guadalajara. Put them
in the buggy. The bays, you understand.” When the other had gone,
Harran drank off the rest of his coffee, and, rising, passed through the
dining-room and across a stone-paved hallway with a glass roof into the
office just beyond.

The office was the nerve-centre of the entire ten thousand acres of
Los Muertos, but its appearance and furnishings were not in the least
suggestive of a farm. It was divided at about its middle by a wire
railing, painted green and gold, and behind this railing were the
high desks where the books were kept, the safe, the letter-press and
letter-files, and Harran's typewriting machine. A great map of Los
Muertos with every water-course, depression, and elevation, together
with indications of the varying depths of the clays and loams in the
soil, accurately plotted, hung against the wall between the windows,
while near at hand by the safe was the telephone.

But, no doubt, the most significant object in the office was the
ticker. This was an innovation in the San Joaquin, an idea of shrewd,
quick-witted young Annixter, which Harran and Magnus Derrick had been
quick to adopt, and after them Broderson and Osterman, and many others
of the wheat growers of the county. The offices of the ranches were
thus connected by wire with San Francisco, and through that city with
Minneapolis, Duluth, Chicago, New York, and at last, and most important
of all, with Liverpool. Fluctuations in the price of the world's crop
during and after the harvest thrilled straight to the office of Los
Muertos, to that of the Quien Sabe, to Osterman's, and to Broderson's.
During a flurry in the Chicago wheat pits in the August of that year,
which had affected even the San Francisco market, Harran and Magnus had
sat up nearly half of one night watching the strip of white tape jerking
unsteadily from the reel. At such moments they no longer felt their
individuality. The ranch became merely the part of an enormous whole,
a unit in the vast agglomeration of wheat land the whole world round,
feeling the effects of causes thousands of miles distant--a drought on
the prairies of Dakota, a rain on the plains of India, a frost on the
Russian steppes, a hot wind on the llanos of the Argentine.

Harran crossed over to the telephone and rang six bells, the call for
the division house on Four. It was the most distant, the most isolated
point on all the ranch, situated at its far southeastern extremity,
where few people ever went, close to the line fence, a dot, a speck,
lost in the immensity of the open country. By the road it was eleven
miles distant from the office, and by the trail to Hooven's and the
Lower Road all of nine.

“How about that seed?” demanded Harran when he had got Cutter on the
line.

The other made excuses for an unavoidable delay, and was adding that he
was on the point of starting out, when Harran cut in with:

“You had better go the trail. It will save a little time and I am in
a hurry. Put your sacks on the horses' backs. And, Cutter, if you see
Hooven when you go by his place, tell him I want him, and, by the way,
take a look at the end of the irrigating ditch when you get to it. See
how they are getting along there and if Billy wants anything. Tell him
we are expecting those new scoops down to-morrow or next day and to get
along with what he has until then.... How's everything on Four? ...
All right, then. Give your seed to Phelps when you get here if I am not
about. I am going to Guadalajara to meet the Governor. He's coming down
to-day. And that makes me think; we lost the case, you know. I had a
letter from the Governor yesterday.... Yes, hard luck. S. Behrman did
us up. Well, good-bye, and don't lose any time with that seed. I want to
blue-stone to-day.”

After telephoning Cutter, Harran put on his hat, went over to the barns,
and found Phelps. Phelps had already cleaned out the vat which was to
contain the solution of blue-stone, and was now at work regrading the
seed. Against the wall behind him ranged the row of sacks. Harran cut
the fastenings of these and examined the contents carefully, taking
handfuls of wheat from each and allowing it to run through his fingers,
or nipping the grains between his nails, testing their hardness.

The seed was all of the white varieties of wheat and of a very high
grade, the berries hard and heavy, rigid and swollen with starch.

“If it was all like that, sir, hey?” observed Phelps.

Harran put his chin in the air.

“Bread would be as good as cake, then,” he answered, going from sack
to sack, inspecting the contents and consulting the tags affixed to the
mouths.

“Hello,” he remarked, “here's a red wheat. Where did this come from?”

“That's that red Clawson we sowed to the piece on Four, north the
Mission Creek, just to see how it would do here. We didn't get a very
good catch.”

“We can't do better than to stay by White Sonora and Propo,” remarked
Harran. “We've got our best results with that, and European millers like
it to mix with the Eastern wheats that have more gluten than ours. That
is, if we have any wheat at all next year.”

A feeling of discouragement for the moment bore down heavily upon him.
At intervals this came to him and for the moment it was overpowering.
The idea of “what's-the-use” was upon occasion a veritable oppression.
Everything seemed to combine to lower the price of wheat. The extension
of wheat areas always exceeded increase of population; competition was
growing fiercer every year. The farmer's profits were the object of
attack from a score of different quarters. It was a flock of vultures
descending upon a common prey--the commission merchant, the elevator
combine, the mixing-house ring, the banks, the warehouse men, the
labouring man, and, above all, the railroad. Steadily the Liverpool
buyers cut and cut and cut. Everything, every element of the world's
markets, tended to force down the price to the lowest possible figure at
which it could be profitably farmed. Now it was down to eighty-seven.
It was at that figure the crop had sold that year; and to think that the
Governor had seen wheat at two dollars and five cents in the year of the
Turko-Russian War!

He turned back to the house after giving Phelps final directions,
gloomy, disheartened, his hands deep in his pockets, wondering what was
to be the outcome. So narrow had the margin of profit shrunk that a
dry season meant bankruptcy to the smaller farmers throughout all the
valley. He knew very well how widespread had been the distress the last
two years. With their own tenants on Los Muertos, affairs had reached
the stage of desperation. Derrick had practically been obliged to
“carry” Hooven and some of the others. The Governor himself had made
almost nothing during the last season; a third year like the last, with
the price steadily sagging, meant nothing else but ruin.

But here he checked himself. Two consecutive dry seasons in California
were almost unprecedented; a third would be beyond belief, and the
complete rest for nearly all the land was a compensation. They had
made no money, that was true; but they had lost none. Thank God, the
homestead was free of mortgage; one good season would more than make up
the difference.

He was in a better mood by the time he reached the driveway that led up
to the ranch house, and as he raised his eyes toward the house itself,
he could not but feel that the sight of his home was cheering. The ranch
house was set in a great grove of eucalyptus, oak, and cypress, enormous
trees growing from out a lawn that was as green, as fresh, and as
well-groomed as any in a garden in the city. This lawn flanked all one
side of the house, and it was on this side that the family elected to
spend most of its time. The other side, looking out upon the Home ranch
toward Bonneville and the railroad, was but little used. A deep porch
ran the whole length of the house here, and in the lower branches of a
live-oak near the steps Harran had built a little summer house for his
mother. To the left of the ranch house itself, toward the County Road,
was the bunk-house and kitchen for some of the hands. From the steps of
the porch the view to the southward expanded to infinity. There was not
so much as a twig to obstruct the view. In one leap the eye reached
the fine, delicate line where earth and sky met, miles away. The flat
monotony of the land, clean of fencing, was broken by one spot only, the
roof of the Division Superintendent's house on Three--a mere speck, just
darker than the ground. Cutter's house on Four was not even in sight.
That was below the horizon.

As Harran came up he saw his mother at breakfast. The table had been set
on the porch and Mrs. Derrick, stirring her coffee with one hand, held
open with the other the pages of Walter Pater's “Marius.” At her feet,
Princess Nathalie, the white Angora cat, sleek, over-fed, self-centred,
sat on her haunches, industriously licking at the white fur of her
breast, while near at hand, by the railing of the porch, Presley
pottered with a new bicycle lamp, filling it with oil, adjusting the
wicks.

Harran kissed his mother and sat down in a wicker chair on the porch,
removing his hat, running his fingers through his yellow hair.

Magnus Derrick's wife looked hardly old enough to be the mother of two
such big fellows as Harran and Lyman Derrick. She was not far into the
fifties, and her brown hair still retained much of its brightness. She
could yet be called pretty. Her eyes were large and easily assumed a
look of inquiry and innocence, such as one might expect to see in a
young girl. By disposition she was retiring; she easily obliterated
herself. She was not made for the harshness of the world, and yet she
had known these harshnesses in her younger days. Magnus had married her
when she was twenty-one years old, at a time when she was a graduate
of some years' standing from the State Normal School and was teaching
literature, music, and penmanship in a seminary in the town of
Marysville. She overworked herself here continually, loathing the strain
of teaching, yet clinging to it with a tenacity born of the knowledge
that it was her only means of support. Both her parents were dead; she
was dependent upon herself. Her one ambition was to see Italy and
the Bay of Naples. The “Marble Faun,” Raphael's “Madonnas” and “Il
Trovatore” were her beau ideals of literature and art. She dreamed of
Italy, Rome, Naples, and the world's great “art-centres.” There was no
doubt that her affair with Magnus had been a love-match, but Annie Payne
would have loved any man who would have taken her out of the droning,
heart-breaking routine of the class and music room. She had followed his
fortunes unquestioningly. First at Sacramento, during the turmoil of
his political career, later on at Placerville in El Dorado County, after
Derrick had interested himself in the Corpus Christi group of mines, and
finally at Los Muertos, where, after selling out his fourth interest
in Corpus Christi, he had turned rancher and had “come in” on the new
tracts of wheat land just thrown open by the railroad. She had lived
here now for nearly ten years. But never for one moment since the time
her glance first lost itself in the unbroken immensity of the ranches
had she known a moment's content. Continually there came into her
pretty, wide-open eyes--the eyes of a young doe--a look of uneasiness,
of distrust, and aversion. Los Muertos frightened her. She remembered
the days of her young girlhood passed on a farm in eastern Ohio--five
hundred acres, neatly partitioned into the water lot, the cow pasture,
the corn lot, the barley field, and wheat farm; cosey, comfortable,
home-like; where the farmers loved their land, caressing it, coaxing it,
nourishing it as though it were a thing almost conscious; where the seed
was sown by hand, and a single two-horse plough was sufficient for the
entire farm; where the scythe sufficed to cut the harvest and the grain
was thrashed with flails.

But this new order of things--a ranch bounded only by the horizons,
where, as far as one could see, to the north, to the east, to the south
and to the west, was all one holding, a principality ruled with iron and
steam, bullied into a yield of three hundred and fifty thousand bushels,
where even when the land was resting, unploughed, unharrowed, and
unsown, the wheat came up--troubled her, and even at times filled her
with an undefinable terror. To her mind there was something inordinate
about it all; something almost unnatural. The direct brutality of ten
thousand acres of wheat, nothing but wheat as far as the eye could see,
stunned her a little. The one-time writing-teacher of a young ladies'
seminary, with her pretty deer-like eyes and delicate fingers, shrank
from it. She did not want to look at so much wheat. There was something
vaguely indecent in the sight, this food of the people, this elemental
force, this basic energy, weltering here under the sun in all the
unconscious nakedness of a sprawling, primordial Titan.

The monotony of the ranch ate into her heart hour by hour, year by year.
And with it all, when was she to see Rome, Italy, and the Bay of Naples?
It was a different prospect truly. Magnus had given her his promise
that once the ranch was well established, they two should travel. But
continually he had been obliged to put her off, now for one reason, now
for another; the machine would not as yet run of itself, he must still
feel his hand upon the lever; next year, perhaps, when wheat should go
to ninety, or the rains were good. She did not insist. She obliterated
herself, only allowing, from time to time, her pretty, questioning eyes
to meet his. In the meantime she retired within herself. She surrounded
herself with books. Her taste was of the delicacy of point lace. She
knew her Austin Dobson by heart. She read poems, essays, the ideas
of the seminary at Marysville persisting in her mind. “Marius the
Epicurean,” “The Essays of Elia,” “Sesame and Lilies,” “The Stones of
Venice,” and the little toy magazines, full of the flaccid banalities of
the “Minor Poets,” were continually in her hands.

When Presley had appeared on Los Muertos, she had welcomed his arrival
with delight. Here at last was a congenial spirit. She looked forward
to long conversations with the young man on literature, art, and ethics.
But Presley had disappointed her. That he--outside of his few chosen
deities--should care little for literature, shocked her beyond words.
His indifference to “style,” to elegant English, was a positive affront.
His savage abuse and open ridicule of the neatly phrased rondeaux and
sestinas and chansonettes of the little magazines was to her mind
a wanton and uncalled-for cruelty. She found his Homer, with its
slaughters and hecatombs and barbaric feastings and headstrong passions,
violent and coarse. She could not see with him any romance, any poetry
in the life around her; she looked to Italy for that. His “Song of the
West,” which only once, incoherent and fierce, he had tried to explain
to her, its swift, tumultous life, its truth, its nobility and savagery,
its heroism and obscenity had revolted her.

“But, Presley,” she had murmured, “that is not literature.”

“No,” he had cried between his teeth, “no, thank God, it is not.”

A little later, one of the stablemen brought the buggy with the team of
bays up to the steps of the porch, and Harran, putting on a different
coat and a black hat, took himself off to Guadalajara. The morning was
fine; there was no cloud in the sky, but as Harran's buggy drew away
from the grove of trees about the ranch house, emerging into the open
country on either side of the Lower Road, he caught himself looking
sharply at the sky and the faint line of hills beyond the Quien Sabe
ranch. There was a certain indefinite cast to the landscape that to
Harran's eye was not to be mistaken. Rain, the first of the season, was
not far off.

“That's good,” he muttered, touching the bays with the whip, “we can't
get our ploughs to hand any too soon.”

These ploughs Magnus Derrick had ordered from an Eastern manufacturer
some months before, since he was dissatisfied with the results obtained
from the ones he had used hitherto, which were of local make. However,
there had been exasperating and unexpected delays in their shipment.
Magnus and Harran both had counted upon having the ploughs in their
implement barns that very week, but a tracer sent after them had only
resulted in locating them, still en route, somewhere between The Needles
and Bakersfield. Now there was likelihood of rain within the week.
Ploughing could be undertaken immediately afterward, so soon as the
ground was softened, but there was a fair chance that the ranch would
lie idle for want of proper machinery.

It was ten minutes before train time when Harran reached the depot at
Guadalajara. The San Francisco papers of the preceding day had arrived
on an earlier train. He bought a couple from the station agent and
looked them over till a distant and prolonged whistle announced the
approach of the down train.

In one of the four passengers that alighted from the train, he
recognised his father. He half rose in his seat, whistling shrilly
between his teeth, waving his hand, and Magnus Derrick, catching sight
of him, came forward quickly.

Magnus--the Governor--was all of six feet tall, and though now well
toward his sixtieth year, was as erect as an officer of cavalry. He was
broad in proportion, a fine commanding figure, imposing an immediate
respect, impressing one with a sense of gravity, of dignity and a
certain pride of race. He was smooth-shaven, thin-lipped, with a
broad chin, and a prominent hawk-like nose--the characteristic of
the family--thin, with a high bridge, such as one sees in the later
portraits of the Duke of Wellington. His hair was thick and iron-grey,
and had a tendency to curl in a forward direction just in front of his
ears. He wore a top-hat of grey, with a wide brim, and a frock coat, and
carried a cane with a yellowed ivory head.

As a young man it had been his ambition to represent his native
State--North Carolina--in the United States Senate. Calhoun was his
“great man,” but in two successive campaigns he had been defeated.
His career checked in this direction, he had come to California in the
fifties. He had known and had been the intimate friend of such men as
Terry, Broderick, General Baker, Lick, Alvarado, Emerich, Larkin, and,
above all, of the unfortunate and misunderstood Ralston. Once he had
been put forward as the Democratic candidate for governor, but failed
of election. After this Magnus had definitely abandoned politics and had
invested all his money in the Corpus Christi mines. Then he had sold
out his interest at a small profit--just in time to miss his chance of
becoming a multi-millionaire in the Comstock boom--and was looking
for reinvestments in other lines when the news that “wheat had been
discovered in California” was passed from mouth to mouth. Practically
it amounted to a discovery. Dr. Glenn's first harvest of wheat in
Colusa County, quietly undertaken but suddenly realised with dramatic
abruptness, gave a new matter for reflection to the thinking men of the
New West. California suddenly leaped unheralded into the world's market
as a competitor in wheat production. In a few years her output of wheat
exceeded the value of her out-put of gold, and when, later on, the
Pacific and Southwestern Railroad threw open to settlers the rich lands
of Tulare County--conceded to the corporation by the government as a
bonus for the construction of the road--Magnus had been quick to seize
the opportunity and had taken up the ten thousand acres of Los Muertos.
Wherever he had gone, Magnus had taken his family with him. Lyman had
been born at Sacramento during the turmoil and excitement of Derrick's
campaign for governor, and Harran at Shingle Springs, in El Dorado
County, six years later.

But Magnus was in every sense the “prominent man.” In whatever circle he
moved he was the chief figure. Instinctively other men looked to him
as the leader. He himself was proud of this distinction; he assumed the
grand manner very easily and carried it well. As a public speaker he was
one of the last of the followers of the old school of orators. He even
carried the diction and manner of the rostrum into private life. It was
said of him that his most colloquial conversation could be taken down
in shorthand and read off as an admirable specimen of pure, well-chosen
English. He loved to do things upon a grand scale, to preside, to
dominate. In his good humour there was something Jovian. When angry,
everybody around him trembled. But he had not the genius for detail,
was not patient. The certain grandiose lavishness of his disposition
occupied itself more with results than with means. He was always ready
to take chances, to hazard everything on the hopes of colossal returns.
In the mining days at Placerville there was no more redoubtable poker
player in the county. He had been as lucky in his mines as in his
gambling, sinking shafts and tunnelling in violation of expert theory
and finding “pay” in every case. Without knowing it, he allowed himself
to work his ranch much as if he was still working his mine. The
old-time spirit of '49, hap-hazard, unscientific, persisted in his mind.
Everything was a gamble--who took the greatest chances was most apt to
be the greatest winner. The idea of manuring Los Muertos, of husbanding
his great resources, he would have scouted as niggardly, Hebraic,
ungenerous.

Magnus climbed into the buggy, helping himself with Harran's
outstretched hand which he still held. The two were immensely fond
of each other, proud of each other. They were constantly together and
Magnus kept no secrets from his favourite son.

“Well, boy.”

“Well, Governor.”

“I am very pleased you came yourself, Harran. I feared that you might be
too busy and send Phelps. It was thoughtful.”

Harran was about to reply, but at that moment Magnus caught sight of the
three flat cars loaded with bright-painted farming machines which still
remained on the siding above the station. He laid his hands on the reins
and Harran checked the team.

“Harran,” observed Magnus, fixing the machinery with a judicial frown,
“Harran, those look singularly like our ploughs. Drive over, boy.”

The train had by this time gone on its way and Harran brought the team
up to the siding.

“Ah, I was right,” said the Governor. “'Magnus Derrick, Los Muertos,
Bonneville, from Ditson & Co., Rochester.' These are ours, boy.”

Harran breathed a sigh of relief.


“At last,” he answered, “and just in time, too. We'll have rain before
the week is out. I think, now that I am here, I will telephone Phelps to
send the wagon right down for these. I started blue-stoning to-day.”

Magnus nodded a grave approval.

“That was shrewd, boy. As to the rain, I think you are well informed; we
will have an early season. The ploughs have arrived at a happy moment.”

“It means money to us, Governor,” remarked Harran.

But as he turned the horses to allow his father to get into the buggy
again, the two were surprised to hear a thick, throaty voice wishing
them good-morning, and turning about were aware of S. Behrman, who had
come up while they were examining the ploughs. Harran's eyes flashed
on the instant and through his nostrils he drew a sharp, quick breath,
while a certain rigour of carriage stiffened the set of Magnus Derrick's
shoulders and back. Magnus had not yet got into the buggy, but stood
with the team between him and S. Behrman, eyeing him calmly across the
horses' backs. S. Behrman came around to the other side of the buggy and
faced Magnus.

He was a large, fat man, with a great stomach; his cheek and the upper
part of his thick neck ran together to form a great tremulous jowl,
shaven and blue-grey in colour; a roll of fat, sprinkled with sparse
hair, moist with perspiration, protruded over the back of his collar.
He wore a heavy black moustache. On his head was a round-topped hat of
stiff brown straw, highly varnished. A light-brown linen vest, stamped
with innumerable interlocked horseshoes, covered his protuberant
stomach, upon which a heavy watch chain of hollow links rose and fell
with his difficult breathing, clinking against the vest buttons of
imitation mother-of-pearl.

S. Behrman was the banker of Bonneville. But besides this he was many
other things. He was a real estate agent. He bought grain; he dealt in
mortgages. He was one of the local political bosses, but more important
than all this, he was the representative of the Pacific and Southwestern
Railroad in that section of Tulare County. The railroad did little
business in that part of the country that S. Behrman did not supervise,
from the consignment of a shipment of wheat to the management of a
damage suit, or even to the repair and maintenance of the right of
way. During the time when the ranchers of the county were fighting the
grain-rate case, S. Behrman had been much in evidence in and about
the San Francisco court rooms and the lobby of the legislature in
Sacramento. He had returned to Bonneville only recently, a decision
adverse to the ranchers being foreseen. The position he occupied on
the salary list of the Pacific and Southwestern could not readily be
defined, for he was neither freight agent, passenger agent, attorney,
real-estate broker, nor political servant, though his influence in all
these offices was undoubted and enormous. But for all that, the ranchers
about Bonneville knew whom to look to as a source of trouble. There was
no denying the fact that for Osterman, Broderson, Annixter and Derrick,
S. Behrman was the railroad.

“Mr. Derrick, good-morning,” he cried as he came up. “Good-morning,
Harran. Glad to see you back, Mr. Derrick.” He held out a thick hand.

Magnus, head and shoulders above the other, tall, thin, erect, looked
down upon S. Behrman, inclining his head, failing to see his extended
hand.

“Good-morning, sir,” he observed, and waited for S. Behrman's further
speech.

“Well, Mr. Derrick,” continued S. Behrman, wiping the back of his neck
with his handkerchief, “I saw in the city papers yesterday that our case
had gone against you.”

“I guess it wasn't any great news to YOU,” commented Harran, his face
scarlet. “I guess you knew which way Ulsteen was going to jump after
your very first interview with him. You don't like to be surprised in
this sort of thing, S. Behrman.”

“Now, you know better than that, Harran,” remonstrated S. Behrman
blandly. “I know what you mean to imply, but I ain't going to let it
make me get mad. I wanted to say to your Governor--I wanted to say to
you, Mr. Derrick--as one man to another--letting alone for the minute
that we were on opposite sides of the case--that I'm sorry you didn't
win. Your side made a good fight, but it was in a mistaken cause. That's
the whole trouble. Why, you could have figured out before you ever went
into the case that such rates are confiscation of property. You must
allow us--must allow the railroad--a fair interest on the investment.
You don't want us to go into the receiver's hands, do you now, Mr.
Derrick?”

“The Board of Railroad Commissioners was bought,” remarked Magnus
sharply, a keen, brisk flash glinting in his eye.

“It was part of the game,” put in Harran, “for the Railroad Commission
to cut rates to a ridiculous figure, far below a REASONABLE figure, just
so that it WOULD be confiscation. Whether Ulsteen is a tool of yours or
not, he had to put the rates back to what they were originally.”

“If you enforced those rates, Mr. Harran,” returned S. Behrman calmly,
“we wouldn't be able to earn sufficient money to meet operating
expenses or fixed charges, to say nothing of a surplus left over to pay
dividends----”

“Tell me when the P. and S. W. ever paid dividends.”

“The lowest rates,” continued S. Behrman, “that the legislature
can establish must be such as will secure us a fair interest on our
investment.”

“Well, what's your standard? Come, let's hear it. Who is to say what's a
fair rate? The railroad has its own notions of fairness sometimes.”

“The laws of the State,” returned S. Behrman, “fix the rate of interest
at seven per cent. That's a good enough standard for us. There is no
reason, Mr. Harran, why a dollar invested in a railroad should not earn
as much as a dollar represented by a promissory note--seven per cent.
By applying your schedule of rates we would not earn a cent; we would be
bankrupt.”

“Interest on your investment!” cried Harran, furious. “It's fine to talk
about fair interest. I know and you know that the total earnings of the
P. and S. W.--their main, branch and leased lines for last year--was
between nineteen and twenty millions of dollars. Do you mean to say that
twenty million dollars is seven per cent. of the original cost of the
road?”

S. Behrman spread out his hands, smiling.

“That was the gross, not the net figure--and how can you tell what was
the original cost of the road?” “Ah, that's just it,” shouted Harran,
emphasising each word with a blow of his fist upon his knee, his eyes
sparkling, “you take cursed good care that we don't know anything about
the original cost of the road. But we know you are bonded for treble
your value; and we know this: that the road COULD have been built
for fifty-four thousand dollars per mile and that you SAY it cost you
eighty-seven thousand. It makes a difference, S. Behrman, on which of
these two figures you are basing your seven per cent.”

“That all may show obstinacy, Harran,” observed S. Behrman vaguely, “but
it don't show common sense.”

“We are threshing out old straw, I believe, gentlemen,” remarked Magnus.
“The question was thoroughly sifted in the courts.”

“Quite right,” assented S. Behrman. “The best way is that the railroad
and the farmer understand each other and get along peaceably. We are
both dependent on each other. Your ploughs, I believe, Mr. Derrick.” S.
Behrman nodded toward the flat cars.

“They are consigned to me,” admitted Magnus.

“It looks a trifle like rain,” observed S. Behrman, easing his neck and
jowl in his limp collar. “I suppose you will want to begin ploughing
next week.”

“Possibly,” said Magnus.

“I'll see that your ploughs are hurried through for you then, Mr.
Derrick. We will route them by fast freight for you and it won't cost
you anything extra.”

“What do you mean?” demanded Harran. “The ploughs are here. We have
nothing more to do with the railroad. I am going to have my wagons down
here this afternoon.”

“I am sorry,” answered S. Behrman, “but the cars are going north,
not, as you thought, coming FROM the north. They have not been to San
Francisco yet.”

Magnus made a slight movement of the head as one who remembers a fact
hitherto forgotten. But Harran was as yet unenlightened.

“To San Francisco!” he answered, “we want them here--what are you
talking about?”

“Well, you know, of course, the regulations,” answered S. Behrman.
“Freight of this kind coming from the Eastern points into the State must
go first to one of our common points and be reshipped from there.”

Harran did remember now, but never before had the matter so struck
home. He leaned back in his seat in dumb amazement for the instant.
Even Magnus had turned a little pale. Then, abruptly, Harran broke out
violent and raging.

“What next? My God, why don't you break into our houses at night? Why
don't you steal the watch out of my pocket, steal the horses out of the
harness, hold us up with a shot-gun; yes, 'stand and deliver; your money
or your life.' Here we bring our ploughs from the East over your lines,
but you're not content with your long-haul rate between Eastern points
and Bonneville. You want to get us under your ruinous short-haul rate
between Bonneville and San Francisco, AND RETURN. Think of it! Here's a
load of stuff for Bonneville that can't stop at Bonneville, where it
is consigned, but has got to go up to San Francisco first BY WAY OF
Bonneville, at forty cents per ton and then be reshipped from San
Francisco back to Bonneville again at FIFTY-ONE cents per ton, the
short-haul rate. And we have to pay it all or go without. Here are the
ploughs right here, in sight of the land they have got to be used
on, the season just ready for them, and we can't touch them. Oh,” he
exclaimed in deep disgust, “isn't it a pretty mess! Isn't it a farce!
the whole dirty business!”

S. Behrman listened to him unmoved, his little eyes blinking under his
fat forehead, the gold chain of hollow links clicking against the pearl
buttons of his waistcoat as he breathed.

“It don't do any good to let loose like that, Harran,” he said at
length. “I am willing to do what I can for you. I'll hurry the ploughs
through, but I can't change the freight regulation of the road.”

“What's your blackmail for this?” vociferated Harran. “How much do you
want to let us go? How much have we got to pay you to be ALLOWED to use
our own ploughs--what's your figure? Come, spit it out.”

“I see you are trying to make me angry, Harran,” returned S. Behrman,
“but you won't succeed. Better give up trying, my boy. As I said, the
best way is to have the railroad and the farmer get along amicably. It
is the only way we can do business. Well, s'long, Governor, I must trot
along. S'long, Harran.” He took himself off.

But before leaving Guadalajara Magnus dropped into the town's small
grocery store to purchase a box of cigars of a certain Mexican brand,
unprocurable elsewhere. Harran remained in the buggy.

While he waited, Dyke appeared at the end of the street, and, seeing
Derrick's younger son, came over to shake hands with him. He explained
his affair with the P. and S. W., and asked the young man what he
thought of the expected rise in the price of hops.

“Hops ought to be a good thing,” Harran told him. “The crop in Germany
and in New York has been a dead failure for the last three years, and
so many people have gone out of the business that there's likely to be a
shortage and a stiff advance in the price. They ought to go to a dollar
next year. Sure, hops ought to be a good thing. How's the old lady and
Sidney, Dyke?”

“Why, fairly well, thank you, Harran. They're up to Sacramento just now
to see my brother. I was thinking of going in with my brother into this
hop business. But I had a letter from him this morning. He may not be
able to meet me on this proposition. He's got other business on hand. If
he pulls out--and he probably will--I'll have to go it alone, but I'll
have to borrow. I had thought with his money and mine we would have
enough to pull off the affair without mortgaging anything. As it is, I
guess I'll have to see S. Behrman.”

“I'll be cursed if I would!” exclaimed Harran.

“Well, S. Behrman is a screw,” admitted the engineer, “and he is
'railroad' to his boots; but business is business, and he would have to
stand by a contract in black and white, and this chance in hops is too
good to let slide. I guess we'll try it on, Harran. I can get a good
foreman that knows all about hops just now, and if the deal pays--well,
I want to send Sid to a seminary up in San Francisco.”

“Well, mortgage the crops, but don't mortgage the homestead, Dyke,” said
Harran. “And, by the way, have you looked up the freight rates on hops?”

“No, I haven't yet,” answered Dyke, “and I had better be sure of that,
hadn't I? I hear that the rate is reasonable, though.”

“You be sure to have a clear understanding with the railroad first about
the rate,” Harran warned him.

When Magnus came out of the grocery store and once more seated himself
in the buggy, he said to Harran, “Boy, drive over here to Annixter's
before we start home. I want to ask him to dine with us to-night.
Osterman and Broderson are to drop in, I believe, and I should like to
have Annixter as well.”

Magnus was lavishly hospitable. Los Muertos's doors invariably stood
open to all the Derricks' neighbours, and once in so often Magnus had a
few of his intimates to dinner.

As Harran and his father drove along the road toward Annixter's ranch
house, Magnus asked about what had happened during his absence.

He inquired after his wife and the ranch, commenting upon the work on
the irrigating ditch. Harran gave him the news of the past week, Dyke's
discharge, his resolve to raise a crop of hops; Vanamee's return, the
killing of the sheep, and Hooven's petition to remain upon the ranch as
Magnus's tenant. It needed only Harran's recommendation that the German
should remain to have Magnus consent upon the instant. “You know more
about it than I, boy,” he said, “and whatever you think is wise shall be
done.”

Harran touched the bays with the whip, urging them to their briskest
pace. They were not yet at Annixter's and he was anxious to get back to
the ranch house to supervise the blue-stoning of his seed.

“By the way, Governor,” he demanded suddenly, “how is Lyman getting on?”

Lyman, Magnus's eldest son, had never taken kindly toward ranch life. He
resembled his mother more than he did Magnus, and had inherited from her
a distaste for agriculture and a tendency toward a profession. At a time
when Harran was learning the rudiments of farming, Lyman was entering
the State University, and, graduating thence, had spent three years
in the study of law. But later on, traits that were particularly his
father's developed. Politics interested him. He told himself he was
a born politician, was diplomatic, approachable, had a talent for
intrigue, a gift of making friends easily and, most indispensable of
all, a veritable genius for putting influential men under obligations to
himself. Already he had succeeded in gaining for himself two important
offices in the municipal administration of San Francisco--where he
had his home--sheriff's attorney, and, later on, assistant district
attorney. But with these small achievements he was by no means
satisfied. The largeness of his father's character, modified in Lyman
by a counter-influence of selfishness, had produced in him an inordinate
ambition. Where his father during his political career had considered
himself only as an exponent of principles he strove to apply, Lyman saw
but the office, his own personal aggrandisement. He belonged to the new
school, wherein objects were attained not by orations before senates
and assemblies, but by sessions of committees, caucuses, compromises
and expedients. His goal was to be in fact what Magnus was only in
name--governor. Lyman, with shut teeth, had resolved that some day he
would sit in the gubernatorial chair in Sacramento.

“Lyman is doing well,” answered Magnus. “I could wish he was more
pronounced in his convictions, less willing to compromise, but I believe
him to be earnest and to have a talent for government and civics. His
ambition does him credit, and if he occupied himself a little more with
means and a little less with ends, he would, I am sure, be the ideal
servant of the people. But I am not afraid. The time will come when the
State will be proud of him.”

As Harran turned the team into the driveway that led up to Annixter's
house, Magnus remarked:

“Harran, isn't that young Annixter himself on the porch?”

Harran nodded and remarked:

“By the way, Governor, I wouldn't seem too cordial in your invitation to
Annixter. He will be glad to come, I know, but if you seem to want him
too much, it is just like his confounded obstinacy to make objections.”

“There is something in that,” observed Magnus, as Harran drew up at the
porch of the house. “He is a queer, cross-grained fellow, but in many
ways sterling.”

Annixter was lying in the hammock on the porch, precisely as Presley
had found him the day before, reading “David Copperfield” and stuffing
himself with dried prunes. When he recognised Magnus, however, he got
up, though careful to give evidence of the most poignant discomfort. He
explained his difficulty at great length, protesting that his stomach
was no better than a spongebag. Would Magnus and Harran get down and
have a drink? There was whiskey somewhere about.

Magnus, however, declined. He stated his errand, asking Annixter to come
over to Los Muertos that evening for seven o'clock dinner. Osterman and
Broderson would be there.

At once Annixter, even to Harran's surprise, put his chin in the
air, making excuses, fearing to compromise himself if he accepted too
readily. No, he did not think he could get around--was sure of it, in
fact. There were certain businesses he had on hand that evening. He had
practically made an appointment with a man at Bonneville; then, too,
he was thinking of going up to San Francisco to-morrow and needed his
sleep; would go to bed early; and besides all that, he was a very sick
man; his stomach was out of whack; if he moved about it brought the
gripes back. No, they must get along without him.

Magnus, knowing with whom he had to deal, did not urge the point, being
convinced that Annixter would argue over the affair the rest of the
morning. He re-settled himself in the buggy and Harran gathered up the
reins.

“Well,” he observed, “you know your business best. Come if you can. We
dine at seven.”

“I hear you are going to farm the whole of Los Muertos this season,”
 remarked Annixter, with a certain note of challenge in his voice.

“We are thinking of it,” replied Magnus.

Annixter grunted scornfully.

“Did you get the message I sent you by Presley?” he began.

Tactless, blunt, and direct, Annixter was quite capable of calling even
Magnus a fool to his face. But before he could proceed, S. Behrman in
his single buggy turned into the gate, and driving leisurely up to the
porch halted on the other side of Magnus's team.

“Good-morning, gentlemen,” he remarked, nodding to the two Derricks as
though he had not seen them earlier in the day. “Mr. Annixter, how do
you do?”

“What in hell do YOU want?” demanded Annixter with a stare.

S. Behrman hiccoughed slightly and passed a fat hand over his waistcoat.

“Why, not very much, Mr. Annixter,” he replied, ignoring the
belligerency in the young ranchman's voice, “but I will have to lodge
a protest against you, Mr. Annixter, in the matter of keeping your line
fence in repair. The sheep were all over the track last night, this
side the Long Trestle, and I am afraid they have seriously disturbed our
ballast along there. We--the railroad--can't fence along our right of
way. The farmers have the prescriptive right of that, so we have to look
to you to keep your fence in repair. I am sorry, but I shall have to
protest----” Annixter returned to the hammock and stretched himself out
in it to his full length, remarking tranquilly:

“Go to the devil!”

“It is as much to your interest as to ours that the safety of the
public----”

“You heard what I said. Go to the devil!”

“That all may show obstinacy, Mr. Annixter, but----”

Suddenly Annixter jumped up again and came to the edge of the porch; his
face flamed scarlet to the roots of his stiff yellow hair. He thrust out
his jaw aggressively, clenching his teeth.

“You,” he vociferated, “I'll tell you what you are. You're a--a--a PIP!”

To his mind it was the last insult, the most outrageous calumny. He had
no worse epithet at his command.

“----may show obstinacy,” pursued S. Behrman, bent upon finishing the
phrase, “but it don't show common sense.”

“I'll mend my fence, and then, again, maybe I won't mend my fence,”
 shouted Annixter. “I know what you mean--that wild engine last night.
Well, you've no right to run at that speed in the town limits.”

“How the town limits? The sheep were this side the Long Trestle.”

“Well, that's in the town limits of Guadalajara.” “Why, Mr. Annixter,
the Long Trestle is a good two miles out of Guadalajara.”

Annixter squared himself, leaping to the chance of an argument.

“Two miles! It's not a mile and a quarter. No, it's not a mile. I'll
leave it to Magnus here.”

“Oh, I know nothing about it,” declared Magnus, refusing to be involved.

“Yes, you do. Yes, you do, too. Any fool knows how far it is from
Guadalajara to the Long Trestle. It's about five-eighths of a mile.”

“From the depot of the town,” remarked S. Behrman placidly, “to the head
of the Long Trestle is about two miles.”

“That's a lie and you know it's a lie,” shouted the other, furious at
S. Behrman's calmness, “and I can prove it's a lie. I've walked that
distance on the Upper Road, and I know just how fast I walk, and if I
can walk four miles in one hour.”

Magnus and Harran drove on, leaving Annixter trying to draw S. Behrman
into a wrangle.

When at length S. Behrman as well took himself away, Annixter returned
to his hammock, finished the rest of his prunes and read another chapter
of “Copperfield.” Then he put the book, open, over his face and went to
sleep.

An hour later, toward noon, his own terrific snoring woke him up
suddenly, and he sat up, rubbing his face and blinking at the sunlight.
There was a bad taste in his mouth from sleeping with it wide open, and
going into the dining-room of the house, he mixed himself a drink of
whiskey and soda and swallowed it in three great gulps. He told himself
that he felt not only better but hungry, and pressed an electric button
in the wall near the sideboard three times to let the kitchen--situated
in a separate building near the ranch house--know that he was ready for
his dinner. As he did so, an idea occurred to him. He wondered if Hilma
Tree would bring up his dinner and wait on the table while he ate it.

In connection with his ranch, Annixter ran a dairy farm on a very small
scale, making just enough butter and cheese for the consumption of the
ranch's PERSONNEL. Old man Tree, his wife, and his daughter Hilma looked
after the dairy. But there was not always work enough to keep the three
of them occupied and Hilma at times made herself useful in other ways.
As often as not she lent a hand in the kitchen, and two or three times
a week she took her mother's place in looking after Annixter's house,
making the beds, putting his room to rights, bringing his meals up
from the kitchen. For the last summer she had been away visiting with
relatives in one of the towns on the coast. But the week previous to
this she had returned and Annixter had come upon her suddenly one day
in the dairy, making cheese, the sleeves of her crisp blue shirt waist
rolled back to her very shoulders. Annixter had carried away with him a
clear-cut recollection of these smooth white arms of hers, bare to the
shoulder, very round and cool and fresh. He would not have believed that
a girl so young should have had arms so big and perfect. To his surprise
he found himself thinking of her after he had gone to bed that night,
and in the morning when he woke he was bothered to know whether he had
dreamed about Hilma's fine white arms over night. Then abruptly he
had lost patience with himself for being so occupied with the subject,
raging and furious with all the breed of feemales--a fine way for a
man to waste his time. He had had his experience with the timid little
creature in the glove-cleaning establishment in Sacramento. That was
enough. Feemales! Rot! None of them in HIS, thank you. HE had seen Hilma
Tree give him a look in the dairy. Aha, he saw through her! She was
trying to get a hold on him, was she? He would show her. Wait till
he saw her again. He would send her about her business in a hurry. He
resolved upon a terrible demeanour in the presence of the dairy girl--a
great show of indifference, a fierce masculine nonchalance; and when,
the next morning, she brought him his breakfast, he had been smitten
dumb as soon as she entered the room, glueing his eyes upon his
plate, his elbows close to his side, awkward, clumsy, overwhelmed with
constraint.

While true to his convictions as a woman-hater and genuinely despising
Hilma both as a girl and as an inferior, the idea of her worried him.
Most of all, he was angry with himself because of his inane sheepishness
when she was about. He at first had told himself that he was a fool not
to be able to ignore her existence as hitherto, and then that he was a
greater fool not to take advantage of his position. Certainly he had not
the remotest idea of any affection, but Hilma was a fine looking girl.
He imagined an affair with her.

As he reflected upon the matter now, scowling abstractedly at the button
of the electric bell, turning the whole business over in his mind, he
remembered that to-day was butter-making day and that Mrs. Tree would
be occupied in the dairy. That meant that Hilma would take her place. He
turned to the mirror of the sideboard, scrutinising his reflection with
grim disfavour. After a moment, rubbing the roughened surface of his
chin the wrong way, he muttered to his image in the glass:

“That a mug! Good Lord! what a looking mug!” Then, after a moment's
silence, “Wonder if that fool feemale will be up here to-day.”

He crossed over into his bedroom and peeped around the edge of the
lowered curtain. The window looked out upon the skeleton-like tower of
the artesian well and the cook-house and dairy-house close beside it. As
he watched, he saw Hilma come out from the cook-house and hurry across
toward the kitchen. Evidently, she was going to see about his dinner.
But as she passed by the artesian well, she met young Delaney, one of
Annixter's hands, coming up the trail by the irrigating ditch, leading
his horse toward the stables, a great coil of barbed wire in his gloved
hands and a pair of nippers thrust into his belt. No doubt, he had been
mending the break in the line fence by the Long Trestle. Annixter saw
him take off his wide-brimmed hat as he met Hilma, and the two stood
there for some moments talking together. Annixter even heard Hilma
laughing very gayly at something Delaney was saying. She patted his
horse's neck affectionately, and Delaney, drawing the nippers from his
belt, made as if to pinch her arm with them. She caught at his wrist
and pushed him away, laughing again. To Annixter's mind the pair seemed
astonishingly intimate. Brusquely his anger flamed up.

Ah, that was it, was it? Delaney and Hilma had an understanding between
themselves. They carried on their affair right out there in the open,
under his very eyes. It was absolutely disgusting. Had they no sense
of decency, those two? Well, this ended it. He would stop that sort of
thing short off; none of that on HIS ranch if he knew it. No, sir. He
would pack that girl off before he was a day older. He wouldn't have
that kind about the place. Not much! She'd have to get out. He would
talk to old man Tree about it this afternoon. Whatever happened, HE
insisted upon morality.

“And my dinner!” he suddenly exclaimed. “I've got to wait and go
hungry--and maybe get sick again--while they carry on their disgusting
love-making.”

He turned about on the instant, and striding over to the electric bell,
rang it again with all his might.

“When that feemale gets up here,” he declared, “I'll just find out why
I've got to wait like this. I'll take her down, to the Queen's taste.
I'm lenient enough, Lord knows, but I don't propose to be imposed upon
ALL the time.”

A few moments later, while Annixter was pretending to read the county
newspaper by the window in the dining-room, Hilma came in to set the
table. At the time Annixter had his feet cocked on the window ledge and
was smoking a cigar, but as soon as she entered the room he--without
premeditation--brought his feet down to the floor and crushed out the
lighted tip of his cigar under the window ledge. Over the top of the
paper he glanced at her covertly from time to time.

Though Hilma was only nineteen years old, she was a large girl with
all the development of a much older woman. There was a certain generous
amplitude to the full, round curves of her hips and shoulders that
suggested the precocious maturity of a healthy, vigorous animal life
passed under the hot southern sun of a half-tropical country. She
was, one knew at a glance, warm-blooded, full-blooded, with an even,
comfortable balance of temperament. Her neck was thick, and sloped to
her shoulders, with full, beautiful curves, and under her chin and
under her ears the flesh was as white and smooth as floss satin, shading
exquisitely to a faint delicate brown on her nape at the roots of her
hair. Her throat rounded to meet her chin and cheek, with a soft swell
of the skin, tinted pale amber in the shadows, but blending by barely
perceptible gradations to the sweet, warm flush of her cheek. This
colour on her temples was just touched with a certain blueness where
the flesh was thin over the fine veining underneath. Her eyes were light
brown, and so wide open that on the slightest provocation the full disc
of the pupil was disclosed; the lids--just a fraction of a shade darker
than the hue of her face--were edged with lashes that were almost black.
While these lashes were not long, they were thick and rimmed her eyes
with a fine, thin line. Her mouth was rather large, the lips shut
tight, and nothing could have been more graceful, more charming than the
outline of these full lips of hers, and her round white chin, modulating
downward with a certain delicious roundness to her neck, her throat and
the sweet feminine amplitude of her breast. The slightest movement of
her head and shoulders sent a gentle undulation through all this
beauty of soft outlines and smooth surfaces, the delicate amber shadows
deepening or fading or losing themselves imperceptibly in the pretty
rose-colour of her cheeks, or the dark, warm-tinted shadow of her thick
brown hair.

Her hair seemed almost to have a life of its own, almost Medusa-like,
thick, glossy and moist, lying in heavy, sweet-smelling masses over her
forehead, over her small ears with their pink lobes, and far down upon
her nape. Deep in between the coils and braids it was of a bitumen
brownness, but in the sunlight it vibrated with a sheen like tarnished
gold.

Like most large girls, her movements were not hurried, and this
indefinite deliberateness of gesture, this slow grace, this certain ease
of attitude, was a charm that was all her own.

But Hilma's greatest charm of all was her simplicity--a simplicity that
was not only in the calm regularity of her face, with its statuesque
evenness of contour, its broad surface of cheek and forehead and the
masses of her straight smooth hair, but was apparent as well in the long
line of her carriage, from her foot to her waist and the single deep
swell from her waist to her shoulder. Almost unconsciously she dressed
in harmony with this note of simplicity, and on this occasion wore a
skirt of plain dark blue calico and a white shirt waist crisp from the
laundry.

And yet, for all the dignity of this rigourous simplicity, there were
about Hilma small contradictory suggestions of feminine daintiness,
charming beyond words. Even Annixter could not help noticing that her
feet were narrow and slender, and that the little steel buckles of her
low shoes were polished bright, and that her fingertips and nails were
of a fine rosy pink.

He found himself wondering how it was that a girl in Hilma's position
should be able to keep herself so pretty, so trim, so clean and
feminine, but he reflected that her work was chiefly in the dairy, and
even there of the lightest order. She was on the ranch more for the sake
of being with her parents than from any necessity of employment. Vaguely
he seemed to understand that, in that great new land of the West, in the
open-air, healthy life of the ranches, where the conditions of earning
a livelihood were of the easiest, refinement among the younger women was
easily to be found--not the refinement of education, nor culture, but
the natural, intuitive refinement of the woman, not as yet defiled and
crushed out by the sordid, strenuous life-struggle of over-populated
districts. It was the original, intended and natural delicacy of an
elemental existence, close to nature, close to life, close to the great,
kindly earth.

As Hilma laid the table-spread, her arms opened to their widest reach,
the white cloth setting a little glisten of reflected light underneath
the chin, Annixter stirred in his place uneasily.

“Oh, it's you, is it, Miss Hilma?” he remarked, for the sake of saying
something. “Good-morning. How do you do?”

“Good-morning, sir,” she answered, looking up, resting for a moment on
her outspread palms. “I hope you are better.”

Her voice was low in pitch and of a velvety huskiness, seeming to come
more from her chest than from her throat.

“Well, I'm some better,” growled Annixter. Then suddenly he demanded,
“Where's that dog?”

A decrepit Irish setter sometimes made his appearance in and about the
ranch house, sleeping under the bed and eating when anyone about the
place thought to give him a plate of bread.

Annixter had no particular interest in the dog. For weeks at a time he
ignored its existence. It was not his dog. But to-day it seemed as if he
could not let the subject rest. For no reason that he could explain even
to himself, he recurred to it continually. He questioned Hilma minutely
all about the dog. Who owned him? How old did she think he was? Did she
imagine the dog was sick? Where had he got to? Maybe he had crawled
off to die somewhere. He recurred to the subject all through the meal;
apparently, he could talk of nothing else, and as she finally went away
after clearing off the table, he went onto the porch and called after
her:

“Say, Miss Hilma.”

“Yes, sir.”

“If that dog turns up again you let me know.”

“Very well, sir.”

Annixter returned to the dining-room and sat down in the chair he had
just vacated. “To hell with the dog!” he muttered, enraged, he could not
tell why.

When at length he allowed his attention to wander from Hilma Tree, he
found that he had been staring fixedly at a thermometer upon the wall
opposite, and this made him think that it had long been his intention
to buy a fine barometer, an instrument that could be accurately depended
on. But the barometer suggested the present condition of the weather and
the likelihood of rain. In such case, much was to be done in the way of
getting the seed ready and overhauling his ploughs and drills. He had
not been away from the house in two days. It was time to be up and
doing. He determined to put in the afternoon “taking a look around,”
 and have a late supper. He would not go to Los Muertos; he would ignore
Magnus Derrick's invitation. Possibly, though, it might be well to run
over and see what was up.

“If I do,” he said to himself, “I'll ride the buckskin.” The buckskin
was a half-broken broncho that fought like a fiend under the saddle
until the quirt and spur brought her to her senses. But Annixter
remembered that the Trees' cottage, next the dairy-house, looked out
upon the stables, and perhaps Hilma would see him while he was mounting
the horse and be impressed with his courage.

“Huh!” grunted Annixter under his breath, “I should like to see that
fool Delaney try to bust that bronch. That's what I'D like to see.”

However, as Annixter stepped from the porch of the ranch house, he was
surprised to notice a grey haze over all the sky; the sunlight was
gone; there was a sense of coolness in the air; the weather-vane on the
barn--a fine golden trotting horse with flamboyant mane and tail--was
veering in a southwest wind. Evidently the expected rain was close at
hand.

Annixter crossed over to the stables reflecting that he could ride the
buckskin to the Trees' cottage and tell Hilma that he would not be home
to supper. The conference at Los Muertos would be an admirable excuse
for this, and upon the spot he resolved to go over to the Derrick ranch
house, after all.

As he passed the Trees' cottage, he observed with satisfaction that
Hilma was going to and fro in the front room. If he busted the buckskin
in the yard before the stable she could not help but see. Annixter found
the stableman in the back of the barn greasing the axles of the buggy,
and ordered him to put the saddle on the buckskin.

“Why, I don't think she's here, sir,” answered the stableman, glancing
into the stalls. “No, I remember now. Delaney took her out just after
dinner. His other horse went lame and he wanted to go down by the Long
Trestle to mend the fence. He started out, but had to come back.”

“Oh, Delaney got her, did he?”

“Yes, sir. He had a circus with her, but he busted her right enough.
When it comes to horse, Delaney can wipe the eye of any cow-puncher in
the county, I guess.”

“He can, can he?” observed Annixter. Then after a silence, “Well, all
right, Billy; put my saddle on whatever you've got here. I'm going over
to Los Muertos this afternoon.”

“Want to look out for the rain, Mr. Annixter,” remarked Billy. “Guess
we'll have rain before night.”

“I'll take a rubber coat,” answered Annixter. “Bring the horse up to the
ranch house when you're ready.”

Annixter returned to the house to look for his rubber coat in deep
disgust, not permitting himself to glance toward the dairy-house and
the Trees' cottage. But as he reached the porch he heard the telephone
ringing his call. It was Presley, who rang up from Los Muertos. He had
heard from Harran that Annixter was, perhaps, coming over that evening.
If he came, would he mind bringing over his--Presley's--bicycle. He had
left it at the Quien Sabe ranch the day before and had forgotten to come
back that way for it.

“Well,” objected Annixter, a surly note in his voice, “I WAS going to
RIDE over.” “Oh, never mind, then,” returned Presley easily. “I was to
blame for forgetting it. Don't bother about it. I'll come over some of
these days and get it myself.”

Annixter hung up the transmitter with a vehement wrench and stamped out
of the room, banging the door. He found his rubber coat hanging in the
hallway and swung into it with a fierce movement of the shoulders that
all but started the seams. Everything seemed to conspire to thwart him.
It was just like that absent-minded, crazy poet, Presley, to forget his
wheel. Well, he could come after it himself. He, Annixter, would ride
SOME horse, anyhow. When he came out upon the porch he saw the wheel
leaning against the fence where Presley had left it. If it stayed there
much longer the rain would catch it. Annixter ripped out an oath. At
every moment his ill-humour was increasing. Yet, for all that, he went
back to the stable, pushing the bicycle before him, and countermanded
his order, directing the stableman to get the buggy ready. He himself
carefully stowed Presley's bicycle under the seat, covering it with a
couple of empty sacks and a tarpaulin carriage cover.

While he was doing this, the stableman uttered an exclamation and paused
in the act of backing the horse into the shafts, holding up a hand,
listening.

From the hollow roof of the barn and from the thick velvet-like padding
of dust over the ground outside, and from among the leaves of the few
nearby trees and plants there came a vast, monotonous murmur that seemed
to issue from all quarters of the horizon at once, a prolonged and
subdued rustling sound, steady, even, persistent.

“There's your rain,” announced the stableman. “The first of the season.”

“And I got to be out in it,” fumed Annixter, “and I suppose those swine
will quit work on the big barn now.”

When the buggy was finally ready, he put on his rubber coat, climbed in,
and without waiting for the stableman to raise the top, drove out into
the rain, a new-lit cigar in his teeth. As he passed the dairy-house, he
saw Hilma standing in the doorway, holding out her hand to the rain, her
face turned upward toward the grey sky, amused and interested at this
first shower of the wet season. She was so absorbed that she did not see
Annixter, and his clumsy nod in her direction passed unnoticed.

“She did it on purpose,” Annixter told himself, chewing fiercely on his
cigar. “Cuts me now, hey? Well, this DOES settle it. She leaves this
ranch before I'm a day older.”

He decided that he would put off his tour of inspection till the next
day. Travelling in the buggy as he did, he must keep to the road which
led to Derrick's, in very roundabout fashion, by way of Guadalajara.
This rain would reduce the thick dust of the road to two feet of viscid
mud. It would take him quite three hours to reach the ranch house on Los
Muertos. He thought of Delaney and the buckskin and ground his teeth.
And all this trouble, if you please, because of a fool feemale girl. A
fine way for him to waste his time. Well, now he was done with it. His
decision was taken now. She should pack.

Steadily the rain increased. There was no wind. The thick veil of
wet descended straight from sky to earth, blurring distant outlines,
spreading a vast sheen of grey over all the landscape. Its volume became
greater, the prolonged murmuring note took on a deeper tone. At the
gate to the road which led across Dyke's hop-fields toward Guadalajara,
Annixter was obliged to descend and raise the top of the buggy. In doing
so he caught the flesh of his hand in the joint of the iron elbow that
supported the top and pinched it cruelly. It was the last misery, the
culmination of a long train of wretchedness. On the instant he hated
Hilma Tree so fiercely that his sharply set teeth all but bit his cigar
in two.

While he was grabbing and wrenching at the buggy-top, the water from
his hat brim dripping down upon his nose, the horse, restive under the
drench of the rain, moved uneasily.

“Yah-h-h you!” he shouted, inarticulate with exasperation.
“You--you--Gor-r-r, wait till I get hold of you. WHOA, you!”

But there was an interruption. Delaney, riding the buckskin, came around
a bend in the road at a slow trot and Annixter, getting into the buggy
again, found himself face to face with him.

“Why, hello, Mr. Annixter,” said he, pulling up. “Kind of sort of wet,
isn't it?”

Annixter, his face suddenly scarlet, sat back in his place abruptly,
exclaiming:

“Oh--oh, there you are, are you?”

“I've been down there,” explained Delaney, with a motion of his head
toward the railroad, “to mend that break in the fence by the Long
Trestle and I thought while I was about it I'd follow down along the
fence toward Guadalajara to see if there were any more breaks. But I
guess it's all right.”

“Oh, you guess it's all right, do you?” observed Annixter through his
teeth.

“Why--why--yes,” returned the other, bewildered at the truculent ring
in Annixter's voice. “I mended that break by the Long Trestle just now
and----

“Well, why didn't you mend it a week ago?” shouted Annixter wrathfully.
“I've been looking for you all the morning, I have, and who told you you
could take that buckskin? And the sheep were all over the right of way
last night because of that break, and here that filthy pip, S. Behrman,
comes down here this morning and wants to make trouble for me.” Suddenly
he cried out, “What do I FEED you for? What do I keep you around here
for? Think it's just to fatten up your carcass, hey?”

“Why, Mr. Annixter----” began Delaney.

“And don't TALK to me,” vociferated the other, exciting himself with his
own noise. “Don't you say a word to me even to apologise. If I've spoken
to you once about that break, I've spoken fifty times.”

“Why, sir,” declared Delaney, beginning to get indignant, “the sheep did
it themselves last night.”

“I told you not to TALK to me,” clamoured Annixter.

“But, say, look here----”

“Get off the ranch. You get off the ranch. And taking that buckskin
against my express orders. I won't have your kind about the place,
not much. I'm easy-going enough, Lord knows, but I don't propose to be
imposed on ALL the time. Pack off, you understand and do it lively. Go
to the foreman and tell him I told him to pay you off and then clear
out. And, you hear me,” he concluded, with a menacing outthrust of his
lower jaw, “you hear me, if I catch you hanging around the ranch house
after this, or if I so much as see you on Quien Sabe, I'll show you the
way off of it, my friend, at the toe of my boot. Now, then, get out of
the way and let me pass.”

Angry beyond the power of retort, Delaney drove the spurs into the
buckskin and passed the buggy in a single bound. Annixter gathered up
the reins and drove on muttering to himself, and occasionally looking
back to observe the buckskin flying toward the ranch house in a
spattering shower of mud, Delaney urging her on, his head bent down
against the falling rain.

“Huh,” grunted Annixter with grim satisfaction, a certain sense of good
humour at length returning to him, “that just about takes the saleratus
out of YOUR dough, my friend.”

A little farther on, Annixter got out of the buggy a second time to open
another gate that let him out upon the Upper Road, not far distant from
Guadalajara. It was the road that connected that town with Bonneville
and that ran parallel with the railroad tracks. On the other side of the
track he could see the infinite extension of the brown, bare land of
Los Muertos, turning now to a soft, moist welter of fertility under
the insistent caressing of the rain. The hard, sun-baked clods were
decomposing, the crevices between drinking the wet with an eager,
sucking noise. But the prospect was dreary; the distant horizons were
blotted under drifting mists of rain; the eternal monotony of the earth
lay open to the sombre low sky without a single adornment, without a
single variation from its melancholy flatness. Near at hand the wires
between the telegraph poles vibrated with a faint humming under the
multitudinous fingering of the myriad of falling drops, striking among
them and dripping off steadily from one to another. The poles themselves
were dark and swollen and glistening with wet, while the little cones of
glass on the transverse bars reflected the dull grey light of the end of
the afternoon.

As Annixter was about to drive on, a freight train passed, coming
from Guadalajara, going northward toward Bonneville, Fresno and San
Francisco. It was a long train, moving slowly, methodically, with a
measured coughing of its locomotive and a rhythmic cadence of its trucks
over the interstices of the rails. On two or three of the flat cars near
its end, Annixter plainly saw Magnus Derrick's ploughs, their bright
coating of red and green paint setting a single brilliant note in all
this array of grey and brown.

Annixter halted, watching the train file past, carrying Derrick's
ploughs away from his ranch, at this very time of the first rain,
when they would be most needed. He watched it, silent, thoughtful, and
without articulate comment. Even after it passed he sat in his place a
long time, watching it lose itself slowly in the distance, its prolonged
rumble diminishing to a faint murmur. Soon he heard the engine sounding
its whistle for the Long Trestle.

But the moving train no longer carried with it that impression of terror
and destruction that had so thrilled Presley's imagination the night
before. It passed slowly on its way with a mournful roll of wheels, like
the passing of a cortege, like a file of artillery-caissons charioting
dead bodies; the engine's smoke enveloping it in a mournful veil,
leaving a sense of melancholy in its wake, moving past there,
lugubrious, lamentable, infinitely sad under the grey sky and under
the grey mist of rain which continued to fall with a subdued, rustling
sound, steady, persistent, a vast monotonous murmur that seemed to come
from all quarters of the horizon at once.




CHAPTER III


When Annixter arrived at the Los Muertos ranch house that same evening,
he found a little group already assembled in the dining-room. Magnus
Derrick, wearing the frock coat of broadcloth that he had put on for
the occasion, stood with his back to the fireplace. Harran sat close at
hand, one leg thrown over the arm of his chair. Presley lounged on the
sofa, in corduroys and high laced boots, smoking cigarettes. Broderson
leaned on his folded arms at one corner of the dining table, and
Genslinger, editor and proprietor of the principal newspaper of the
county, the “Bonneville Mercury,” stood with his hat and driving gloves
under his arm, opposite Derrick, a half-emptied glass of whiskey and
water in his hand.

As Annixter entered he heard Genslinger observe: “I'll have a leader in
the 'Mercury' to-morrow that will interest you people. There's some talk
of your ranch lands being graded in value this winter. I suppose you
will all buy?”

In an instant the editor's words had riveted upon him the attention of
every man in the room. Annixter broke the moment's silence that followed
with the remark:

“Well, it's about time they graded these lands of theirs.”

The question in issue in Genslinger's remark was of the most vital
interest to the ranchers around Bonneville and Guadalajara. Neither
Magnus Derrick, Broderson, Annixter, nor Osterman actually owned all
the ranches which they worked. As yet, the vast majority of these wheat
lands were the property of the P. and S. W. The explanation of this
condition of affairs went back to the early history of the Pacific and
Southwestern, when, as a bonus for the construction of the road, the
national government had granted to the company the odd numbered sections
of land on either side of the proposed line of route for a distance of
twenty miles. Indisputably, these sections belonged to the P. and S. W.
The even-numbered sections being government property could be and had
been taken up by the ranchers, but the railroad sections, or, as they
were called, the “alternate sections,” would have to be purchased direct
from the railroad itself.

But this had not prevented the farmers from “coming in” upon that part
of the San Joaquin. Long before this the railroad had thrown open these
lands, and, by means of circulars, distributed broadcast throughout the
State, had expressly invited settlement thereon. At that time patents
had not been issued to the railroad for their odd-numbered sections, but
as soon as the land was patented the railroad would grade it in value
and offer it for sale, the first occupants having the first chance of
purchase. The price of these lands was to be fixed by the price the
government put upon its own adjoining lands--about two dollars and a
half per acre.

With cultivation and improvement the ranches must inevitably appreciate
in value. There was every chance to make fortunes. When the railroad
lands about Bonneville had been thrown open, there had been almost a
rush in the matter of settlement, and Broderson, Annixter, Derrick, and
Osterman, being foremost with their claims, had secured the pick of the
country. But the land once settled upon, the P. and S. W. seemed to be
in no hurry as to fixing exactly the value of its sections included in
the various ranches and offering them for sale. The matter dragged along
from year to year, was forgotten for months together, being only brought
to mind on such occasions as this, when the rumour spread that the
General Office was about to take definite action in the affair.

“As soon as the railroad wants to talk business with me,” observed
Annixter, “about selling me their interest in Quien Sabe, I'm ready.
The land has more than quadrupled in value. I'll bet I could sell it
to-morrow for fifteen dollars an acre, and if I buy of the railroad for
two and a half an acre, there's boodle in the game.”

“For two and a half!” exclaimed Genslinger. “You don't suppose the
railroad will let their land go for any such figure as that, do you?
Wherever did you get that idea?”

“From the circulars and pamphlets,” answered Harran, “that the railroad
issued to us when they opened these lands. They are pledged to that.
Even the P. and S. W. couldn't break such a pledge as that. You are new
in the country, Mr. Genslinger. You don't remember the conditions upon
which we took up this land.”

“And our improvements,” exclaimed Annixter. “Why, Magnus and I have
put about five thousand dollars between us into that irrigating ditch
already. I guess we are not improving the land just to make it valuable
for the railroad people. No matter how much we improve the land, or how
much it increases in value, they have got to stick by their agreement on
the basis of two-fifty per acre. Here's one case where the P. and S. W.
DON'T get everything in sight.”

Genslinger frowned, perplexed.

“I AM new in the country, as Harran says,” he answered, “but it seems
to me that there's no fairness in that proposition. The presence of the
railroad has helped increase the value of your ranches quite as much
as your improvements. Why should you get all the benefit of the rise
in value and the railroad nothing? The fair way would be to share it
between you.”

“I don't care anything about that,” declared Annixter. “They agreed to
charge but two-fifty, and they've got to stick to it.”

“Well,” murmured Genslinger, “from what I know of the affair, I don't
believe the P. and S. W. intends to sell for two-fifty an acre, at all.
The managers of the road want the best price they can get for everything
in these hard times.”

“Times aren't ever very hard for the railroad,” hazards old Broderson.

Broderson was the oldest man in the room. He was about sixty-five years
of age, venerable, with a white beard, his figure bent earthwards with
hard work.

He was a narrow-minded man, painfully conscientious in his statements
lest he should be unjust to somebody; a slow thinker, unable to let a
subject drop when once he had started upon it. He had no sooner uttered
his remark about hard times than he was moved to qualify it.

“Hard times,” he repeated, a troubled, perplexed note in his voice;
“well, yes--yes. I suppose the road DOES have hard times, maybe.
Everybody does--of course. I didn't mean that exactly. I believe in
being just and fair to everybody. I mean that we've got to use their
lines and pay their charges good years AND bad years, the P. and S. W.
being the only road in the State. That is--well, when I say the only
road--no, I won't say the ONLY road. Of course there are other roads.
There's the D. P. and M. and the San Francisco and North Pacific, that
runs up to Ukiah. I got a brother-in-law in Ukiah. That's not much of a
wheat country round Ukiah though they DO grow SOME wheat there, come to
think. But I guess it's too far north. Well, of course there isn't MUCH.
Perhaps sixty thousand acres in the whole county--if you include barley
and oats. I don't know; maybe it's nearer forty thousand. I don't
remember very well. That's a good many years ago. I----”

But Annixter, at the end of all patience, turned to Genslinger, cutting
short the old man:

“Oh, rot! Of course the railroad will sell at two-fifty,” he cried.
“We've got the contracts.”

“Look to them, then, Mr. Annixter,” retorted Genslinger significantly,
“look to them. Be sure that you are protected.”

Soon after this Genslinger took himself away, and Derrick's Chinaman
came in to set the table.

“What do you suppose he meant?” asked Broderson, when Genslinger was
gone.

“About this land business?” said Annixter. “Oh, I don't know. Some tom
fool idea. Haven't we got their terms printed in black and white in
their circulars? There's their pledge.”

“Oh, as to pledges,” murmured Broderson, “the railroad is not always TOO
much hindered by those.”

“Where's Osterman?” demanded Annixter, abruptly changing the subject as
if it were not worth discussion. “Isn't that goat Osterman coming down
here to-night?”

“You telephoned him, didn't you, Presley?” inquired Magnus.

Presley had taken Princess Nathalie upon his knee stroking her long,
sleek hair, and the cat, stupefied with beatitude, had closed her eyes
to two fine lines, clawing softly at the corduroy of Presley's trousers
with alternate paws.

“Yes, sir,” returned Presley. “He said he would be here.”

And as he spoke, young Osterman arrived.

He was a young fellow, but singularly inclined to baldness. His ears,
very red and large, stuck out at right angles from either side of his
head, and his mouth, too, was large--a great horizontal slit beneath
his nose. His cheeks were of a brownish red, the cheek bones a little
salient. His face was that of a comic actor, a singer of songs, a man
never at a loss for an answer, continually striving to make a laugh.
But he took no great interest in ranching and left the management of
his land to his superintendents and foremen, he, himself, living in
Bonneville. He was a poser, a wearer of clothes, forever acting a part,
striving to create an impression, to draw attention to himself. He
was not without a certain energy, but he devoted it to small ends, to
perfecting himself in little accomplishments, continually running after
some new thing, incapable of persisting long in any one course. At one
moment his mania would be fencing; the next, sleight-of-hand tricks;
the next, archery. For upwards of one month he had devoted himself to
learning how to play two banjos simultaneously, then abandoning this
had developed a sudden passion for stamped leather work and had made a
quantity of purses, tennis belts, and hat bands, which he presented to
young ladies of his acquaintance. It was his policy never to make an
enemy. He was liked far better than he was respected. People spoke of
him as “that goat Osterman,” or “that fool Osterman kid,” and invited
him to dinner. He was of the sort who somehow cannot be ignored. If only
because of his clamour he made himself important. If he had one abiding
trait, it was his desire of astonishing people, and in some way,
best known to himself, managed to cause the circulation of the most
extraordinary stories wherein he, himself, was the chief actor. He
was glib, voluble, dexterous, ubiquitous, a teller of funny stories, a
cracker of jokes.

Naturally enough, he was heavily in debt, but carried the burden of it
with perfect nonchalance. The year before S. Behrman had held mortgages
for fully a third of his crop and had squeezed him viciously for
interest. But for all that, Osterman and S. Behrman were continually
seen arm-in-arm on the main street of Bonneville. Osterman was
accustomed to slap S. Behrman on his fat back, declaring:

“You're a good fellow, old jelly-belly, after all, hey?”

As Osterman entered from the porch, after hanging his cavalry poncho and
dripping hat on the rack outside, Mrs. Derrick appeared in the door that
opened from the dining-room into the glass-roofed hallway just beyond.
Osterman saluted her with effusive cordiality and with ingratiating
blandness.

“I am not going to stay,” she explained, smiling pleasantly at the group
of men, her pretty, wide-open brown eyes, with their look of inquiry and
innocence, glancing from face to face, “I only came to see if you wanted
anything and to say how do you do.”

She began talking to old Broderson, making inquiries as to his wife, who
had been sick the last week, and Osterman turned to the company, shaking
hands all around, keeping up an incessant stream of conversation.

“Hello, boys and girls. Hello, Governor. Sort of a gathering of the
clans to-night. Well, if here isn't that man Annixter. Hello, Buck. What
do you know? Kind of dusty out to-night.”

At once Annixter began to get red in the face, retiring towards a corner
of the room, standing in an awkward position by the case of stuffed
birds, shambling and confused, while Mrs. Derrick was present, standing
rigidly on both feet, his elbows close to his sides. But he was angry
with Osterman, muttering imprecations to himself, horribly vexed that
the young fellow should call him “Buck” before Magnus's wife. This goat
Osterman! Hadn't he any sense, that fool? Couldn't he ever learn how to
behave before a feemale? Calling him “Buck” like that while Mrs. Derrick
was there. Why a stable-boy would know better; a hired man would have
better manners. All through the dinner that followed Annixter was out of
sorts, sulking in his place, refusing to eat by way of vindicating his
self-respect, resolving to bring Osterman up with a sharp turn if he
called him “Buck” again.

The Chinaman had made a certain kind of plum pudding for dessert, and
Annixter, who remembered other dinners at the Derrick's, had been saving
himself for this, and had meditated upon it all through the meal. No
doubt, it would restore all his good humour, and he believed his stomach
was so far recovered as to be able to stand it.

But, unfortunately, the pudding was served with a sauce that he
abhorred--a thick, gruel-like, colourless mixture, made from plain water
and sugar. Before he could interfere, the Chinaman had poured a quantity
of it upon his plate.

“Faugh!” exclaimed Annixter. “It makes me sick. Such--such SLOOP. Take
it away. I'll have mine straight, if you don't mind.”

“That's good for your stomach, Buck,” observed young Osterman; “makes it
go down kind of sort of slick; don't you see? Sloop, hey? That's a good
name.”

“Look here, don't you call me Buck. You don't seem to have any sense,
and, besides, it ISN'T good for my stomach. I know better. What do YOU
know about my stomach, anyhow? Just looking at sloop like that makes me
sick.”

A little while after this the Chinaman cleared away the dessert and
brought in coffee and cigars. The whiskey bottle and the syphon of
soda-water reappeared. The men eased themselves in their places, pushing
back from the table, lighting their cigars, talking of the beginning
of the rains and the prospects of a rise in wheat. Broderson began an
elaborate mental calculation, trying to settle in his mind the exact
date of his visit to Ukiah, and Osterman did sleight-of-hand tricks with
bread pills. But Princess Nathalie, the cat, was uneasy. Annixter was
occupying her own particular chair in which she slept every night. She
could not go to sleep, but spied upon him continually, watching his
every movement with her lambent, yellow eyes, clear as amber.

Then, at length, Magnus, who was at the head of the table, moved in his
place, assuming a certain magisterial attitude. “Well, gentlemen,” he
observed, “I have lost my case against the railroad, the grain-rate
case. Ulsteen decided against me, and now I hear rumours to the effect
that rates for the hauling of grain are to be advanced.”

When Magnus had finished, there was a moment's silence, each member of
the group maintaining his attitude of attention and interest. It was
Harran who first spoke.

“S. Behrman manipulated the whole affair. There's a big deal of some
kind in the air, and if there is, we all know who is back of it; S.
Behrman, of course, but who's back of him? It's Shelgrim.”

Shelgrim! The name fell squarely in the midst of the conversation,
abrupt, grave, sombre, big with suggestion, pregnant with huge
associations. No one in the group who was not familiar with it; no one,
for that matter, in the county, the State, the whole reach of the West,
the entire Union, that did not entertain convictions as to the man who
carried it; a giant figure in the end-of-the-century finance, a product
of circumstance, an inevitable result of conditions, characteristic,
typical, symbolic of ungovernable forces. In the New Movement, the New
Finance, the reorganisation of capital, the amalgamation of powers,
the consolidation of enormous enterprises--no one individual was more
constantly in the eye of the world; no one was more hated, more dreaded,
no one more compelling of unwilling tribute to his commanding genius, to
the colossal intellect operating the width of an entire continent than
the president and owner of the Pacific and Southwestern.

“I don't think, however, he has moved yet,” said Magnus.

“The thing for us, then,” exclaimed Osterman, “is to stand from under
before he does.”

“Moved yet!” snorted Annixter. “He's probably moved so long ago that
we've never noticed it.”

“In any case,” hazarded Magnus, “it is scarcely probable that the
deal--whatever it is to be--has been consummated. If we act quickly,
there may be a chance.”

“Act quickly! How?” demanded Annixter. “Good Lord! what can you do?
We're cinched already. It all amounts to just this: YOU CAN'T BUCK
AGAINST THE RAILROAD. We've tried it and tried it, and we are stuck
every time. You, yourself, Derrick, have just lost your grain-rate
case. S. Behrman did you up. Shelgrim owns the courts. He's got men like
Ulsteen in his pocket. He's got the Railroad Commission in his
pocket. He's got the Governor of the State in his pocket. He keeps
a million-dollar lobby at Sacramento every minute of the time the
legislature is in session; he's got his own men on the floor of the
United States Senate. He has the whole thing organised like an army
corps. What ARE you going to do? He sits in his office in San Francisco
and pulls the strings and we've got to dance.”

“But--well--but,” hazarded Broderson, “but there's the Interstate
Commerce Commission. At least on long-haul rates they----”

“Hoh, yes, the Interstate Commerce Commission,” shouted Annixter,
scornfully, “that's great, ain't it? The greatest Punch and Judy; show
on earth. It's almost as good as the Railroad Commission. There never
was and there never will be a California Railroad Commission not in the
pay of the P. and S. W.”

“It is to the Railroad Commission, nevertheless,” remarked Magnus, “that
the people of the State must look for relief. That is our only hope.
Once elect Commissioners who would be loyal to the people, and the whole
system of excessive rates falls to the ground.”

“Well, why not HAVE a Railroad Commission of our own, then?” suddenly
declared young Osterman.

“Because it can't be done,” retorted Annixter. “YOU CAN'T BUCK AGAINST
THE RAILROAD and if you could you can't organise the farmers in the San
Joaquin. We tried it once, and it was enough to turn your stomach. The
railroad quietly bought delegates through S. Behrman and did us up.”

“Well, that's the game to play,” said Osterman decisively, “buy
delegates.”

“It's the only game that seems to win,” admitted Harran gloomily. “Or
ever will win,” exclaimed Osterman, a sudden excitement seeming to take
possession of him. His face--the face of a comic actor, with its great
slit of mouth and stiff, red ears--went abruptly pink.

“Look here,” he cried, “this thing is getting desperate. We've fought
and fought in the courts and out and we've tried agitation and--and all
the rest of it and S. Behrman sacks us every time. Now comes the time
when there's a prospect of a big crop; we've had no rain for two years
and the land has had a long rest. If there is any rain at all this
winter, we'll have a bonanza year, and just at this very moment when
we've got our chance--a chance to pay off our mortgages and get clear of
debt and make a strike--here is Shelgrim making a deal to cinch us and
put up rates. And now here's the primaries coming off and a new Railroad
Commission going in. That's why Shelgrim chose this time to make his
deal. If we wait till Shelgrim pulls it off, we're done for, that's
flat. I tell you we're in a fix if we don't keep an eye open. Things are
getting desperate. Magnus has just said that the key to the whole thing
is the Railroad Commission. Well, why not have a Commission of our own?
Never mind how we get it, let's get it. If it's got to be bought, let's
buy it and put our own men on it and dictate what the rates will be.
Suppose it costs a hundred thousand dollars. Well, we'll get back more
than that in cheap rates.”

“Mr. Osterman,” said Magnus, fixing the young man with a swift glance,
“Mr. Osterman, you are proposing a scheme of bribery, sir.”

“I am proposing,” repeated Osterman, “a scheme of bribery. Exactly so.”

“And a crazy, wild-eyed scheme at that,” said Annixter gruffly. “Even
supposing you bought a Railroad Commission and got your schedule of low
rates, what happens? The P. and S. W. crowd get out an injunction and
tie you up.”

“They would tie themselves up, too. Hauling at low rates is better than
no hauling at all. The wheat has got to be moved.” “Oh, rot!” cried
Annixter. “Aren't you ever going to learn any sense? Don't you know
that cheap transportation would benefit the Liverpool buyers and not us?
Can't it be FED into you that you can't buck against the railroad? When
you try to buy a Board of Commissioners don't you see that you'll have
to bid against the railroad, bid against a corporation that can chuck
out millions to our thousands? Do you think you can bid against the P.
and S. W.?”

“The railroad don't need to know we are in the game against them till
we've got our men seated.”

“And when you've got them seated, what's to prevent the corporation
buying them right over your head?”

“If we've got the right kind of men in they could not be bought that
way,” interposed Harran. “I don't know but what there's something in
what Osterman says. We'd have the naming of the Commission and we'd name
honest men.”

Annixter struck the table with his fist in exasperation.

“Honest men!” he shouted; “the kind of men you could get to go into such
a scheme would have to be DIS-honest to begin with.”

Broderson, shifting uneasily in his place, fingering his beard with a
vague, uncertain gesture, spoke again:

“It would be the CHANCE of them--our Commissioners--selling out against
the certainty of Shelgrim doing us up. That is,” he hastened to add,
“ALMOST a certainty; pretty near a certainty.”

“Of course, it would be a chance,” exclaimed Osterman. “But it's come
to the point where we've got to take chances, risk a big stake to make a
big strike, and risk is better than sure failure.”

“I can be no party to a scheme of avowed bribery and corruption, Mr.
Osterman,” declared Magnus, a ring of severity in his voice. “I am
surprised, sir, that you should even broach the subject in my hearing.”

“And,” cried Annixter, “it can't be done.”

“I don't know,” muttered Harran, “maybe it just wants a little spark
like this to fire the whole train.”

Magnus glanced at his son in considerable surprise. He had not
expected this of Harran. But so great was his affection for his son, so
accustomed had he become to listening to his advice, to respecting his
opinions, that, for the moment, after the first shock of surprise and
disappointment, he was influenced to give a certain degree of attention
to this new proposition. He in no way countenanced it. At any moment he
was prepared to rise in his place and denounce it and Osterman both. It
was trickery of the most contemptible order, a thing he believed to be
unknown to the old school of politics and statesmanship to which he was
proud to belong; but since Harran, even for one moment, considered it,
he, Magnus, who trusted Harran implicitly, would do likewise--if it was
only to oppose and defeat it in its very beginnings.

And abruptly the discussion began. Gradually Osterman, by dint of his
clamour, his strident reiteration, the plausibility of his glib, ready
assertions, the ease with which he extricated himself when apparently
driven to a corner, completely won over old Broderson to his way of
thinking. Osterman bewildered him with his volubility, the lightning
rapidity with which he leaped from one subject to another, garrulous,
witty, flamboyant, terrifying the old man with pictures of the swift
approach of ruin, the imminence of danger.

Annixter, who led the argument against him--loving argument though he
did--appeared to poor advantage, unable to present his side effectively.
He called Osterman a fool, a goat, a senseless, crazy-headed jackass,
but was unable to refute his assertions. His debate was the clumsy
heaving of brickbats, brutal, direct. He contradicted everything
Osterman said as a matter of principle, made conflicting assertions,
declarations that were absolutely inconsistent, and when Osterman or
Harran used these against him, could only exclaim:

“Well, in a way it's so, and then again in a way it isn't.”

But suddenly Osterman discovered a new argument. “If we swing this
deal,” he cried, “we've got old jelly-belly Behrman right where we want
him.”

“He's the man that does us every time,” cried Harran. “If there is dirty
work to be done in which the railroad doesn't wish to appear, it is
S. Behrman who does it. If the freight rates are to be 'adjusted' to
squeeze us a little harder, it is S. Behrman who regulates what we can
stand. If there's a judge to be bought, it is S. Behrman who does
the bargaining. If there is a jury to be bribed, it is S. Behrman
who handles the money. If there is an election to be jobbed, it is S.
Behrman who manipulates it. It's Behrman here and Behrman there. It is
Behrman we come against every time we make a move. It is Behrman who has
the grip of us and will never let go till he has squeezed us bone dry.
Why, when I think of it all sometimes I wonder I keep my hands off the
man.”

Osterman got on his feet; leaning across the table, gesturing wildly
with his right hand, his serio-comic face, with its bald forehead
and stiff, red ears, was inflamed with excitement. He took the floor,
creating an impression, attracting all attention to himself, playing to
the gallery, gesticulating, clamourous, full of noise.

“Well, now is your chance to get even,” he vociferated. “It is now or
never. You can take it and save the situation for yourselves and all
California or you can leave it and rot on your own ranches. Buck, I know
you. I know you're not afraid of anything that wears skin. I know you've
got sand all through you, and I know if I showed you how we could put
our deal through and seat a Commission of our own, you wouldn't hang
back. Governor, you're a brave man. You know the advantage of prompt and
fearless action. You are not the sort to shrink from taking chances. To
play for big stakes is just your game--to stake a fortune on the turn
of a card. You didn't get the reputation of being the strongest poker
player in El Dorado County for nothing. Now, here's the biggest gamble
that ever came your way. If we stand up to it like men with guts in us,
we'll win out. If we hesitate, we're lost.”

“I don't suppose you can help playing the goat, Osterman,” remarked
Annixter, “but what's your idea? What do you think we can do? I'm not
saying,” he hastened to interpose, “that you've anyways convinced me by
all this cackling. I know as well as you that we are in a hole. But I
knew that before I came here to-night. YOU'VE not done anything to make
me change my mind. But just what do you propose? Let's hear it.”

“Well, I say the first thing to do is to see Disbrow. He's the political
boss of the Denver, Pueblo, and Mojave road. We will have to get in with
the machine some way and that's particularly why I want Magnus with us.
He knows politics better than any of us and if we don't want to get sold
again we will have to have some one that's in the know to steer us.”

“The only politics I understand, Mr. Osterman,” answered Magnus sternly,
“are honest politics. You must look elsewhere for your political
manager. I refuse to have any part in this matter. If the Railroad
Commission can be nominated legitimately, if your arrangements can be
made without bribery, I am with you to the last iota of my ability.”

“Well, you can't get what you want without paying for it,” contradicted
Annixter.

Broderson was about to speak when Osterman kicked his foot under the
table. He, himself, held his peace. He was quick to see that if he could
involve Magnus and Annixter in an argument, Annixter, for the mere love
of contention, would oppose the Governor and, without knowing it, would
commit himself to his--Osterman's--scheme.

This was precisely what happened. In a few moments Annixter was
declaring at top voice his readiness to mortgage the crop of Quien Sabe,
if necessary, for the sake of “busting S. Behrman.” He could see no
great obstacle in the way of controlling the nominating convention so
far as securing the naming of two Railroad Commissioners was concerned.
Two was all they needed. Probably it WOULD cost money. You didn't get
something for nothing. It would cost them all a good deal more if they
sat like lumps on a log and played tiddledy-winks while Shelgrim sold
out from under them. Then there was this, too: the P. and S. W. were
hard up just then. The shortage on the State's wheat crop for the last
two years had affected them, too. They were retrenching in expenditures
all along the line. Hadn't they just cut wages in all departments? There
was this affair of Dyke's to prove it. The railroad didn't always act as
a unit, either. There was always a party in it that opposed spending too
much money. He would bet that party was strong just now. He was kind of
sick himself of being kicked by S. Behrman. Hadn't that pip turned up on
his ranch that very day to bully him about his own line fence? Next he
would be telling him what kind of clothes he ought to wear. Harran had
the right idea. Somebody had got to be busted mighty soon now and he
didn't propose that it should be he.

“Now you are talking something like sense,” observed Osterman. “I
thought you would see it like that when you got my idea.”

“Your idea, YOUR idea!” cried Annixter. “Why, I've had this idea myself
for over three years.”

“What about Disbrow?” asked Harran, hastening to interrupt. “Why do we
want to see Disbrow?”

“Disbrow is the political man for the Denver, Pueblo, and Mojave,”
 answered Osterman, “and you see it's like this: the Mojave road don't
run up into the valley at all. Their terminus is way to the south of us,
and they don't care anything about grain rates through the San Joaquin.
They don't care how anti-railroad the Commission is, because the
Commission's rulings can't affect them. But they divide traffic with the
P. and S. W. in the southern part of the State and they have a good
deal of influence with that road. I want to get the Mojave road, through
Disbrow, to recommend a Commissioner of our choosing to the P. and S. W.
and have the P. and S. W. adopt him as their own.”

“Who, for instance?”

“Darrell, that Los Angeles man--remember?”

“Well, Darrell is no particular friend of Disbrow,” said Annixter. “Why
should Disbrow take him up?”

“PREE-cisely,” cried Osterman. “We make it worth Disbrow's while to do
it. We go to him and say, 'Mr. Disbrow, you manage the politics for the
Mojave railroad, and what you say goes with your Board of Directors. We
want you to adopt our candidate for Railroad Commissioner for the third
district. How much do you want for doing it?' I KNOW we can buy Disbrow.
That gives us one Commissioner. We need not bother about that any
more. In the first district we don't make any move at all. We let the
political managers of the P. and S. W. nominate whoever they like.
Then we concentrate all our efforts to putting in our man in the second
district. There is where the big fight will come.”

“I see perfectly well what you mean, Mr. Osterman,” observed Magnus,
“but make no mistake, sir, as to my attitude in this business. You may
count me as out of it entirely.”

“Well, suppose we win,” put in Annixter truculently, already
acknowledging himself as involved in the proposed undertaking; “suppose
we win and get low rates for hauling grain. How about you, then? You
count yourself IN then, don't you? You get all the benefit of lower
rates without sharing any of the risks we take to secure them. No,
nor any of the expense, either. No, you won't dirty your fingers with
helping us put this deal through, but you won't be so cursed particular
when it comes to sharing the profits, will you?”

Magnus rose abruptly to his full height, the nostrils of his thin,
hawk-like nose vibrating, his smooth-shaven face paler than ever.

“Stop right where you are, sir,” he exclaimed. “You forget yourself,
Mr. Annixter. Please understand that I tolerate such words as you have
permitted yourself to make use of from no man, not even from my guest. I
shall ask you to apologise.”

In an instant he dominated the entire group, imposing a respect that was
as much fear as admiration. No one made response. For the moment he was
the Master again, the Leader. Like so many delinquent school-boys, the
others cowered before him, ashamed, put to confusion, unable to find
their tongues. In that brief instant of silence following upon Magnus's
outburst, and while he held them subdued and over-mastered, the fabric
of their scheme of corruption and dishonesty trembled to its base. It
was the last protest of the Old School, rising up there in denunciation
of the new order of things, the statesman opposed to the politician;
honesty, rectitude, uncompromising integrity, prevailing for the last
time against the devious manoeuvring, the evil communications, the
rotten expediency of a corrupted institution.

For a few seconds no one answered. Then, Annixter, moving abruptly and
uneasily in his place, muttered:

“I spoke upon provocation. If you like, we'll consider it unsaid. I
don't know what's going to become of us--go out of business, I presume.”

“I understand Magnus all right,” put in Osterman. “He don't have to
go into this thing, if it's against his conscience. That's all right.
Magnus can stay out if he wants to, but that won't prevent us going
ahead and seeing what we can do. Only there's this about it.” He turned
again to Magnus, speaking with every degree of earnestness, every
appearance of conviction. “I did not deny, Governor, from the very start
that this would mean bribery. But you don't suppose that I like the idea
either. If there was one legitimate hope that was yet left untried,
no matter how forlorn it was, I would try it. But there's not. It
is literally and soberly true that every means of help--every honest
means--has been attempted. Shelgrim is going to cinch us. Grain rates
are increasing, while, on the other hand, the price of wheat is sagging
lower and lower all the time. If we don't do something we are ruined.”

Osterman paused for a moment, allowing precisely the right number of
seconds to elapse, then altering and lowering his voice, added:

“I respect the Governor's principles. I admire them. They do him every
degree of credit.” Then, turning directly to Magnus, he concluded with,
“But I only want you to ask yourself, sir, if, at such a crisis, one
ought to think of oneself, to consider purely personal motives in such a
desperate situation as this? Now, we want you with us, Governor; perhaps
not openly, if you don't wish it, but tacitly, at least. I won't ask
you for an answer to-night, but what I do ask of you is to consider this
matter seriously and think over the whole business. Will you do it?”

Osterman ceased definitely to speak, leaning forward across the table,
his eyes fixed on Magnus's face. There was a silence. Outside, the rain
fell continually with an even, monotonous murmur. In the group of men
around the table no one stirred nor spoke. They looked steadily at
Magnus, who, for the moment, kept his glance fixed thoughtfully upon the
table before him. In another moment he raised his head and looked from
face to face around the group. After all, these were his neighbours,
his friends, men with whom he had been upon the closest terms of
association. In a way they represented what now had come to be his
world. His single swift glance took in the men, one after another.
Annixter, rugged, crude, sitting awkwardly and uncomfortably in his
chair, his unhandsome face, with its outthrust lower lip and deeply
cleft masculine chin, flushed and eager, his yellow hair disordered,
the one tuft on the crown standing stiffly forth like the feather in an
Indian's scalp lock; Broderson, vaguely combing at his long beard with a
persistent maniacal gesture, distressed, troubled and uneasy; Osterman,
with his comedy face, the face of a music-hall singer, his head bald
and set off by his great red ears, leaning back in his place, softly
cracking the knuckle of a forefinger, and, last of all and close to his
elbow, his son, his support, his confidant and companion, Harran, so
like himself, with his own erect, fine carriage, his thin, beak-like
nose and his blond hair, with its tendency to curl in a forward
direction in front of the ears, young, strong, courageous, full of the
promise of the future years. His blue eyes looked straight into his
father's with what Magnus could fancy a glance of appeal. Magnus could
see that expression in the faces of the others very plainly. They looked
to him as their natural leader, their chief who was to bring them out
from this abominable trouble which was closing in upon them, and in them
all he saw many types. They--these men around his table on that night
of the first rain of a coming season--seemed to stand in his imagination
for many others--all the farmers, ranchers, and wheat growers of the
great San Joaquin. Their words were the words of a whole community;
their distress, the distress of an entire State, harried beyond the
bounds of endurance, driven to the wall, coerced, exploited, harassed to
the limits of exasperation. “I will think of it,” he said, then hastened
to add, “but I can tell you beforehand that you may expect only a
refusal.”

After Magnus had spoken, there was a prolonged silence. The conference
seemed of itself to have come to an end for that evening. Presley
lighted another cigarette from the butt of the one he had been smoking,
and the cat, Princess Nathalie, disturbed by his movement and by a whiff
of drifting smoke, jumped from his knee to the floor and picking her way
across the room to Annixter, rubbed gently against his legs, her tail
in the air, her back delicately arched. No doubt she thought it time
to settle herself for the night, and as Annixter gave no indication of
vacating his chair, she chose this way of cajoling him into ceding his
place to her. But Annixter was irritated at the Princess's attentions,
misunderstanding their motive.

“Get out!” he exclaimed, lifting his feet to the rung of the chair.
“Lord love me, but I sure do hate a cat.”

“By the way,” observed Osterman, “I passed Genslinger by the gate as I
came in to-night. Had he been here?”

“Yes, he was here,” said Harran, “and--” but Annixter took the words out
of his mouth.

“He says there's some talk of the railroad selling us their sections
this winter.”

“Oh, he did, did 

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