The Octopus [A California Story]
by Frank Norris
Hypertext Meanings and Commentaries
from the Encyclopedia of the Self
by Mark Zimmerman
Go to Part 2 of 2

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 ahout 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 eves 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 he?" exclaimed Osterman, interested at once.
"Where did he hear that?"

"Where does a railroad paper get its news? From the General
Office, I suppose."

"I hope he didn't get it straight from headquarters that the land
was to be graded at twenty dollars an acre," murmured Broderson.

"What's that?" demanded Osterman. "Twenty dollars! Here, put me
on, somebody. What's all up? What did Genslinger say?"

"Oh, you needn't get scared," said Annixter. "Genslinger don't
know, that's all. He thinks there was no understanding that the
price of the land should not be advanced when the P. and S. W.
came to sell to us."

"Oh," muttered Osterman relieved. Magnus, who had gone out into
the office on the other side of the glass-roofed hallway,
returned with a long, yellow envelope in his hand, stuffed with
newspaper clippings and thin, closely printed pamphlets.

"Here is the circular," he remarked, drawing out one of the
pamphlets. "The conditions of settlement to which the railroad
obligated itself are very explicit."

He ran over the pages of the circular, then read aloud:

"'The Company invites settlers to go upon its lands before
patents are issued or the road is completed, and intends in such
cases to sell to them in preference to any other applicants and
at a price based upon the value of the land without
improvements,' and on the other page here," he remarked, "they
refer to this again. 'In ascertaining the value of the lands,
any improvements that a settler or any other person may have on
the lands will not be taken into consideration, neither will the
price be increased in consequence thereof.... Settlers are thus
insured that in addition to being accorded the first privilege of
purchase, at the graded price, they will also be protected in
their improvements.'  And here," he commented, "in Section IX. it
reads, 'The lands are not uniform in price, but are offered at
various figures from $2.50 upward per acre. Usually land covered
with tall timber is held at $5.00 per acre, and that with pine at
$10.00. Most is for sale at $2.50 and $5.00."

"When you come to read that carefully," hazarded old Broderson,
"it--it's not so VERY REASSURING. 'MOST is for sale at two-fifty
an acre,' it says. That don't mean 'ALL,' that only means SOME.
I wish now that I had secured a more iron-clad agreement from the
P. and S. W. when I took up its sections on my ranch, and--and
Genslinger is in a position to know the intentions of the
railroad. At least, he--he--he is in TOUCH with them. All
newspaper men are. Those, I mean, who are subsidised by the
General Office. But, perhaps, Genslinger isn't subsidised, I
don't know. I--I am not sure. Maybe--perhaps"

"Oh, you don't know and you do know, and maybe and perhaps, and
you're not so sure," vociferated Annixter. "How about ignoring
the value of our improvements? Nothing hazy about THAT
statement, I guess. It says in so many words that any
improvements we make will not be considered when the land is
appraised and that's the same thing, isn't it? The unimproved
land is worth two-fifty an acre; only timber land is worth more
and there's none too much timber about here."

"Well, one thing at a time," said Harran. "The thing for us now
is to get into this primary election and the convention and see
if we can push our men for Railroad Commissioners."

"Right," declared Annixter. He rose, stretching his arms above
his head. "I've about talked all the wind out of me," he said.
"Think I'll be moving along. It's pretty near midnight."

But when Magnus's guests turned their attention to the matter of
returning to their different ranches, they abruptly realised that
the downpour had doubled and trebled in its volume since earlier
in the evening. The fields and roads were veritable seas of
viscid mud, the night absolutely black-dark; assuredly not a
night in which to venture out. Magnus insisted that the three
ranchers should put up at Los Muertos. Osterman accepted at
once, Annixter, after an interminable discussion, allowed himself
to be persuaded, in the end accepting as though granting a
favour. Broderson protested that his wife, who was not well,
would expect him to return that night and would, no doubt, fret
if he did not appear. Furthermore, he lived close by, at the
junction of the County and Lower Road. He put a sack over his
head and shoulders, persistently declining Magnus's offered
umbrella and rubber coat, and hurried away, remarking that he had
no foreman on his ranch and had to be up and about at five the
next morning to put his men to work.

"Fool!" muttered Annixter when the old man had gone. "Imagine
farming a ranch the size of his without a foreman."

Harran showed Osterman and Annixter where they were to sleep, in
adjoining rooms. Magnus soon afterward retired.

Osterman found an excuse for going to bed, but Annixter and
Harran remained in the latter's room, in a haze of blue tobacco
smoke, talking, talking. But at length, at the end of all
argument, Annixter got up, remarking:

"Well, I'm going to turn in. It's nearly two o'clock."

He went to his room, closing the door, and Harran, opening his
window to clear out the tobacco smoke, looked out for a moment
across the country toward the south.

The darkness was profound, impenetrable; the rain fell with an
uninterrupted roar. Near at hand one could hear the sound of
dripping eaves and foliage and the eager, sucking sound of the
drinking earth, and abruptly while Harran stood looking out, one
hand upon the upraised sash, a great puff of the outside air
invaded the room, odourous with the reek of the soaking earth,
redolent with fertility, pungent, heavy, tepid. He closed the
window again and sat for a few moments on the edge of the bed,
one shoe in his hand, thoughtful and absorbed, wondering if his
father would involve himself in this new scheme, wondering if,
after all, he wanted him to.

But suddenly he was aware of a commotion, issuing from the
direction of Annixter's room, and the voice of Annixter himself
upraised in expostulation and exasperation. The door of the room
to which Annixter had been assigned opened with a violent wrench
and an angry voice exclaimed to anybody who would listen:

"Oh, yes, funny, isn't it? In a way, it's funny, and then,
again, in a way it isn't."

The door banged to so that all the windows of the house rattled
in their frames.

Harran hurried out into the dining-room and there met Presley and
his father, who had been aroused as well by Annixter's clamour.
Osterman was there, too, his bald head gleaming like a bulb of
ivory in the light of the lamp that Magnus carried.

"What's all up?" demanded Osterman. "Whatever in the world is
the matter with Buck?"

Confused and terrible sounds came from behind the door of
Annixter's room. A prolonged monologue of grievance, broken by
explosions of wrath and the vague noise of some one in a furious
hurry. All at once and before Harran had a chance to knock on
the door, Annixter flung it open. His face was blazing with
anger, his outthrust lip more prominent than ever, his wiry,
yellow hair in disarray, the tuft on the crown sticking straight
into the air like the upraised hackles of an angry hound.
Evidently he had been dressing himself with the most headlong
rapidity; he had not yet put on his coat and vest, but carried
them over his arm, while with his disengaged hand he kept
hitching his suspenders over his shoulders with a persistent and
hypnotic gesture. Without a moment's pause he gave vent to his
indignation in a torrent of words.

"Ah, yes, in my bed, sloop, aha! I know the man who put it
there," he went on, glaring at Osterman, "and that man is a PIP.
Sloop! Slimy, disgusting stuff; you heard me say I didn't like
it when the Chink passed it to me at dinner--and just for that
reason you put it in my bed, and I stick my feet into it when I
turn in. Funny, isn't it?  Oh, yes, too funny for any use. I'd
laugh a little louder if I was you."

"Well, Buck," protested Harran, as he noticed the hat in
Annixter's hand, "you're not going home just for----"

Annixter turned on him with a shout.

"I'll get plumb out of here," he trumpeted. "I won't stay here
another minute."

He swung into his waistcoat and coat, scrabbling at the buttons
in the violence of his emotions. "And I don't know but what it
will make me sick again to go out in a night like this. NO, I
won't stay. Some things are funny, and then, again, there are
some things that are not. Ah, yes, sloop! Well, that's all
right. I can be funny, too, when you come to that. You don't
get a cent of money out of me. You can do your dirty bribery in
your own dirty way. I won't come into this scheme at all. I
wash my hands of the whole business. It's rotten and it's wild-
eyed; it's dirt from start to finish; and you'll all land in
State's prison. You can count me out."

"But, Buck, look here, you crazy fool," cried Harran, "I don't
know who put that stuff in your bed, but I'm not going; to let
you go back to Quien Sabe in a rain like this."

"I know who put it in," clamoured the other, shaking his fists,
"and don't call me Buck and I'll do as I please. I WILL go back
home. I'll get plumb out of here. Sorry I came. Sorry I ever
lent myself to such a disgusting, dishonest, dirty bribery game
as this all to-night. I won't put a dime into it, no, not a
penny."

He stormed to the door leading out upon the porch, deaf to all
reason. Harran and Presley followed him, trying to dissuade him
from going home at that time of night and in such a storm, but
Annixter was not to be placated. He stamped across to the barn
where his horse and buggy had been stabled, splashing through the
puddles under foot, going out of his way to drench himself,
refusing even to allow Presley and Harran to help him harness the
horse.

"What's the use of making a fool of yourself, Annixter?"
remonstrated Presley, as Annixter backed the horse from the
stall. "You act just like a ten-year-old boy. If Osterman wants
to play the goat, why should you help him out?"

"He's a PIP," vociferated Annixter. "You don't understand,
Presley. It runs in my family to hate anything sticky. It's--
it's--it's heredity. How would you like to get into bed at two
in the morning and jam your feet down into a slimy mess like
that?  Oh, no. It's not so funny then. And you mark my words,
Mr. Harran Derrick," he continued, as he climbed into the buggy,
shaking the whip toward Harran, "this business we talked over to-
night--I'm OUT of it. It's yellow. It's too CURSED dishonest."

He cut the horse across the back with the whip and drove out into
the pelting rain. In a few seconds the sound of his buggy wheels
was lost in the muffled roar of the downpour.

Harran and Presley closed the barn and returned to the house,
sheltering themselves under a tarpaulin carriage cover. Once
inside, Harran went to remonstrate with Osterman, who was still
up. Magnus had again retired. The house had fallen quiet again.

As Presley crossed the dining-room on the way to his own
apartment in the second story of the house, he paused for a
moment, looking about him. In the dull light of the lowered
lamps, the redwood panelling of the room showed a dark crimson as
though stained with blood. On the massive slab of the dining
table the half-emptied glasses and bottles stood about in the
confusion in which they had been left, reflecting themselves deep
into the polished wood; the glass doors of the case of stuffed
birds was a subdued shimmer; the many-coloured Navajo blanket
over the couch seemed a mere patch of brown.

Around the table the chairs in which the men had sat throughout
the evening still ranged themselves in a semi-circle, vaguely
suggestive of the conference of the past few hours, with all its
possibilities of good and evil, its significance of a future big
with portent. The room was still. Only on the cushions of the
chair that Annixter had occupied, the cat, Princess Nathalie, at
last comfortably settled in her accustomed place, dozed
complacently, her paws tucked under her breast, filling the
deserted room with the subdued murmur of her contented purr.

CHAPTER IV

On the Quien Sabe ranch, in one of its western divisions, near
the line fence that divided it from the Osterman holding, Vanamee
was harnessing the horses to the plough to which he had been
assigned two days before, a stable-boy from the division barn
helping him.

Promptly discharged from the employ of the sheep-raisers after
the lamentable accident near the Long Trestle, Vanamee had
presented himself to Harran, asking for employment. The season
was beginning; on all the ranches work was being resumed. The
rain had put the ground into admirable condition for ploughing,
and Annixter, Broderson, and Osterman all had their gangs at
work. Thus, Vanamee was vastly surprised to find Los Muertos
idle, the horses still in the barns, the men gathering in the
shade of the bunk-house and eating-house, smoking, dozing, or
going aimlessly about, their arms dangling. The ploughs for
which Magnus and Harran were waiting in a fury of impatience had
not yet arrived, and since the management of Los Muertos had
counted upon having these in hand long before this time, no
provision had been made for keeping the old stock in repair; many
of these old ploughs were useless, broken, and out of order; some
had been sold. It could not be said definitely when the new
ploughs would arrive. Harran had decided to wait one week
longer, and then, in case of their non-appearance, to buy a
consignment of the old style of plough from the dealers in
Bonneville. He could afford to lose the money better than he
could afford to lose the season.

Failing of work on Los Muertos, Vanamee had gone to Quien Sabe.
Annixter, whom he had spoken to first, had sent him across the
ranch to one of his division superintendents, and this latter,
after assuring himself of Vanamee's familiarity with horses and
his previous experience--even though somewhat remote--on Los
Muertos, had taken him on as a driver of one of the gang ploughs,
then at work on his division.

The evening before, when the foreman had blown his whistle at six
o'clock, the long line of ploughs had halted upon the instant,
and the drivers, unharnessing their teams, had taken them back to
the division barns--leaving the ploughs as they were in the
furrows. But an hour after daylight the next morning the work
was resumed. After breakfast, Vanamee, riding one horse and
leading the others, had returned to the line of ploughs together
with the other drivers. Now he was busy harnessing the team. At
the division blacksmith shop--temporarily put up--he had been
obliged to wait while one of his lead horses was shod, and he had
thus been delayed quite five minutes. Nearly all the other teams
were harnessed, the drivers on their seats, waiting for the
foreman's signal.

"All ready here?" inquired the foreman, driving up to Vanamee's
team in his buggy.

"All ready, sir," answered Vanamee, buckling the last strap.

He climbed to his seat, shaking out the reins, and turning about,
looked back along the line, then all around him at the landscape
inundated with the brilliant glow of the early morning.

The day was fine. Since the first rain of the season, there had
been no other. Now the sky was without a cloud, pale blue,
delicate, luminous, scintillating with morning. The great brown
earth turned a huge flank to it, exhaling the moisture of the
early dew. The atmosphere, washed clean of dust and mist, was
translucent as crystal. Far off to the east, the hills on the
other side of Broderson Creek stood out against the pallid
saffron of the horizon as flat and as sharply outlined as if
pasted on the sky. The campanile of the ancient Mission of San
Juan seemed as fine as frost work. All about between the
horizons, the carpet of the land unrolled itself to infinity.
But now it was no longer parched with heat, cracked and warped by
a merciless sun, powdered with dust. The rain had done its work;
not a clod that was not swollen with fertility, not a fissure
that did not exhale the sense of fecundity. One could not take a
dozen steps upon the ranches without the brusque sensation that
underfoot the land was alive; roused at last from its sleep,
palpitating with the desire of reproduction. Deep down there in
the recesses of the soil, the great heart throbbed once more,
thrilling with passion, vibrating with desire, offering itself to
the caress of the plough, insistent, eager, imperious. Dimly one
felt the deep-seated trouble of the earth, the uneasy agitation
of its members, the hidden tumult of its womb, demanding to be
made fruitful, to reproduce, to disengage the eternal renascent
germ of Life that stirred and struggled in its loins.

The ploughs, thirty-five in number, each drawn by its team of
ten, stretched in an interminable line, nearly a quarter of a
mile in length, behind and ahead of Vanamee. They were arranged,
as it were, en echelon, not in file--not one directly behind the
other, but each succeeding plough its own width farther in the
field than the one in front of it. Each of these ploughs held
five shears, so that when the entire company was in motion, one
hundred and seventy-five furrows were made at the same instant.
At a distance, the ploughs resembled a great column of field
artillery. Each driver was in his place, his glance alternating
between his horses and the foreman nearest at hand. Other
foremen, in their buggies or buckboards, were at intervals along
the line, like battery lieutenants. Annixter himself, on
horseback, in boots and campaign hat, a cigar in his teeth,
overlooked the scene.

The division superintendent, on the opposite side of the line,
galloped past to a position at the head. For a long moment there
was a silence. A sense of preparedness ran from end to end of
the column. All things were ready, each man in his place. The
day's work was about to begin.

Suddenly, from a distance at the head of the line came the shrill
trilling of a whistle. At once the foreman nearest Vanamee
repeated it, at the same time turning down the line, and waving
one arm. The signal was repeated, whistle answering whistle,
till the sounds lost themselves in the distance. At once the
line of ploughs lost its immobility, moving forward, getting
slowly under way, the horses straining in the traces. A
prolonged movement rippled from team to team, disengaging in its
passage a multitude of sounds---the click of buckles, the creak
of straining leather, the subdued clash of machinery, the
cracking of whips, the deep breathing of nearly four hundred
horses, the abrupt commands and cries of the drivers, and, last
of all, the prolonged, soothing murmur of the thick brown earth
turning steadily from the multitude of advancing shears.

The ploughing thus commenced, continued. The sun rose higher.
Steadily the hundred iron hands kneaded and furrowed and stroked
the brown, humid earth, the hundred iron teeth bit deep into the
Titan's flesh. Perched on his seat, the moist living reins
slipping and tugging in his hands, Vanamee, in the midst of this
steady confusion of constantly varying sensation, sight
interrupted by sound, sound mingling with sight, on this swaying,
vibrating seat, quivering with the prolonged thrill of the earth,
lapsed to a sort of pleasing numbness, in a sense, hypnotised by
the weaving maze of things in which he found himself involved.
To keep his team at an even, regular gait, maintaining the
precise interval, to run his furrows as closely as possible to
those already made by the plough in front--this for the moment
was the entire sum of his duties. But while one part of his
brain, alert and watchful, took cognisance of these matters, all
the greater part was lulled and stupefied with the long monotony
of the affair.

The ploughing, now in full swing, enveloped him in a vague, slow-
moving whirl of things. Underneath him was the jarring, jolting,
trembling machine; not a clod was turned, not an obstacle
encountered, that he did not receive the swift impression of it
through all his body, the very friction of the damp soil, sliding
incessantly from the shiny surface of the shears, seemed to
reproduce itself in his finger-tips and along the back of his
head. He heard the horse-hoofs by the myriads crushing down
easily, deeply, into the loam, the prolonged clinking of trace-
chains, the working of the smooth brown flanks in the harness,
the clatter of wooden hames, the champing of bits, the click of
iron shoes against pebbles, the brittle stubble of the surface
ground crackling and snapping as the furrows turned, the
sonorous, steady breaths wrenched from the deep, labouring
chests, strap-bound, shining with sweat, and all along the line
the voices of the men talking to the horses. Everywhere there
were visions of glossy brown backs, straining, heaving, swollen
with muscle; harness streaked with specks of froth, broad, cup-
shaped hoofs, heavy with brown loam, men's faces red with tan,
blue overalls spotted with axle-grease; muscled hands, the
knuckles whitened in their grip on the reins, and through it all
the ammoniacal smell of the horses, the bitter reek of
perspiration of beasts and men, the aroma of warm leather, the
scent of dead stubble--and stronger and more penetrating than
everything else, the heavy, enervating odour of the upturned,
living earth.

At intervals, from the tops of one of the rare, low swells of the
land, Vanamee overlooked a wider horizon. On the other divisions
of Quien Sabe the same work was in progress. Occasionally he
could see another column of ploughs in the adjoining division--
sometimes so close at hand that the subdued murmur of its
movements reached his ear; sometimes so distant that it resolved
itself into a long, brown streak upon the grey of the ground.
Farther off to the west on the Osterman ranch other columns came
and went, and, once, from the crest of the highest swell on his
division, Vanamee caught a distant glimpse of the Broderson
ranch. There, too, moving specks indicated that the ploughing
was under way. And farther away still, far off there beyond the
fine line of the horizons, over the curve of the globe, the
shoulder of the earth, he knew were other ranches, and beyond
these others, and beyond these still others, the immensities
multiplying to infinity.

Everywhere throughout the great San Joaquin, unseen and unheard,
a thousand ploughs up-stirred the land, tens of thousands of
shears clutched deep into the warm, moist soil.

It was the long stroking caress, vigorous, male, powerful, for
which the Earth seemed panting. The heroic embrace of a
multitude of iron hands, gripping deep into the brown, warm flesh
of the land that quivered responsive and passionate under this
rude advance, so robust as to be almost an assault, so violent as
to be veritably brutal. There, under the sun and under the
speckless sheen of the sky, the wooing of the Titan began, the
vast primal passion, the two world-forces, the elemental Male and
Female, locked in a colossal embrace, at grapples in the throes
of an infinite desire, at once terrible and divine, knowing no
law, untamed, savage, natural, sublime.

From time to time the gang in which Vanamee worked halted on the
signal from foreman or overseer. The horses came to a
standstill, the vague clamour of the work lapsed away. Then the
minutes passed. The whole work hung suspended. All up and down
the line one demanded what had happened. The division
superintendent galloped past, perplexed and anxious. For the
moment, one of the ploughs was out of order, a bolt had slipped,
a lever refused to work, or a machine had become immobilised in
heavy ground, or a horse had lamed himself. Once, even, toward
noon, an entire plough was taken out of the line, so out of gear
that a messenger had to be sent to the division forge to summon
the machinist.

Annixter had disappeared. He had ridden farther on to the other
divisions of his ranch, to watch the work in progress there. At
twelve o'clock, according to his orders, all the division
superintendents put themselves in communication with him by means
of the telephone wires that connected each of the division
houses, reporting the condition of the work, the number of acres
covered, the prospects of each plough traversing its daily
average of twenty miles.

At half-past twelve, Vanamee and the rest of the drivers ate
their lunch in the field, the tin buckets having been distributed
to them that morning after breakfast. But in the evening, the
routine of the previous day was repeated, and Vanamee,
unharnessing his team, riding one horse and leading the others,
returned to the division barns and bunk-house.

It was between six and seven o'clock. The half hundred men of
the gang threw themselves upon the supper the Chinese cooks had
set out in the shed of the eating-house, long as a bowling alley,
unpainted, crude, the seats benches, the table covered with oil
cloth. Overhead a half-dozen kerosene lamps flared and smoked.

The table was taken as if by assault; the clatter of iron knives
upon the tin plates was as the reverberation of hail upon a metal
roof. The ploughmen rinsed their throats with great draughts of
wine, and, their elbows wide, their foreheads flushed, resumed
the attack upon the beef and bread, eating as though they would
never have enough. All up and down the long table, where the
kerosene lamps reflected themselves deep in the oil-cloth cover,
one heard the incessant sounds of mastication, and saw the
uninterrupted movement of great jaws. At every moment one or
another of the men demanded a fresh portion of beef, another pint
of wine, another half-loaf of bread. For upwards of an hour the
gang ate. It was no longer a supper. It was a veritable
barbecue, a crude and primitive feasting, barbaric, homeric.

But in all this scene Vanamee saw nothing repulsive. Presley
would have abhorred it--this feeding of the People, this gorging
of the human animal, eager for its meat. Vanamee, simple,
uncomplicated, living so close to nature and the rudimentary
life, understood its significance. He knew very well that within
a short half-hour after this meal the men would throw themselves
down in their bunks to sleep without moving, inert and stupefied
with fatigue, till the morning. Work, food, and sleep, all life
reduced to its bare essentials, uncomplex, honest, healthy. They
were strong, these men, with the strength of the soil they
worked, in touch with the essential things, back again to the
starting point of civilisation, coarse, vital, real, and sane.

For a brief moment immediately after the meal, pipes were lit,
and the air grew thick with fragrant tobacco smoke. On a corner
of the dining-room table, a game of poker was begun. One of the
drivers, a Swede, produced an accordion; a group on the steps of
the bunk-house listened, with alternate gravity and shouts of
laughter, to the acknowledged story-teller of the gang. But soon
the men began to turn in, stretching themselves at full length on
the horse blankets in the racklike bunks. The sounds of heavy
breathing increased steadily, lights were put out, and before the
afterglow had faded from the sky, the gang was asleep.

Vanamee, however, remained awake. The night was fine, warm; the
sky silver-grey with starlight. By and by there would be a moon.
In the first watch after the twilight, a faint puff of breeze
came up out of the south. From all around, the heavy penetrating
smell of the new-turned earth exhaled steadily into the darkness.
After a while, when the moon came up, he could see the vast brown
breast of the earth turn toward it. Far off, distant objects
came into view: The giant oak tree at Hooven's ranch house near
the irrigating ditch on Los Muertos, the skeleton-like tower of
the windmill on Annixter's Home ranch, the clump of willows along
Broderson Creek close to the Long Trestle, and, last of all, the
venerable tower of the Mission of San Juan on the high ground
beyond the creek.

Thitherward, like homing pigeons, Vanamee's thoughts turned
irresistibly. Near to that tower, just beyond, in the little
hollow, hidden now from his sight, was the Seed ranch where
Angele Varian had lived. Straining his eyes, peering across the
intervening levels, Vanamee fancied he could almost see the line
of venerable pear trees in whose shadow she had been accustomed
to wait for him. On many such a night as this he had crossed the
ranches to find her there. His mind went back to that wonderful
time of his life sixteen years before this, when Angele was
alive, when they two were involved in the sweet intricacies of a
love so fine, so pure, so marvellous that it seemed to them a
miracle, a manifestation, a thing veritably divine, put into the
life of them and the hearts of them by God Himself. To that they
had been born. For this love's sake they had come into the
world, and the mingling of their lives was to be the Perfect
Life, the intended, ordained union of the soul of man with the
soul of woman, indissoluble, harmonious as music, beautiful
beyond all thought, a foretaste of Heaven, a hostage of
immortality.

No, he, Vanamee, could never, never forget, never was the edge of
his grief to lose its sharpness, never would the lapse of time
blunt the tooth of his pain. Once more, as he sat there, looking
off across the ranches, his eyes fixed on the ancient campanile
of the Mission church, the anguish that would not die leaped at
his throat, tearing at his heart, shaking him and rending him
with a violence as fierce and as profound as if it all had been
but yesterday. The ache returned to his heart a physical keen
pain; his hands gripped tight together, twisting, interlocked,
his eyes filled with tears, his whole body shaken and riven from
head to heel.

He had lost her. God had not meant it, after all. The whole
matter had been a mistake. That vast, wonderful love that had
come upon them had been only the flimsiest mockery. Abruptly
Vanamee rose. He knew the night that was before him. At
intervals throughout the course of his prolonged wanderings, in
the desert, on the mesa, deep in the canon, lost and forgotten on
the flanks of unnamed mountains, alone under the stars and under
the moon's white eye, these hours came to him, his grief
recoiling upon him like the recoil of a vast and terrible engine.
Then he must fight out the night, wrestling with his sorrow,
praying sometimes, incoherent, hardly conscious, asking "Why" of
the night and of the stars.

Such another night had come to him now. Until dawn he knew he
must struggle with his grief, torn with memories, his imagination
assaulted with visions of a vanished happiness. If this paroxysm
of sorrow was to assail him again that night, there was but one
place for him to be. He would go to the Mission--he would see
Father Sarria; he would pass the night in the deep shadow of the
aged pear trees in the Mission garden.

He struck out across Quien Sabe, his face, the face of an
ascetic, lean, brown, infinitely sad, set toward the Mission
church. In about an hour he reached and crossed the road that
led northward from Guadalajara toward the Seed ranch, and, a
little farther on, forded Broderson Creek where it ran through
one corner of the Mission land. He climbed the hill and halted,
out of breath from his brisk wall, at the end of the colonnade of
the Mission itself.

Until this moment Vanamee had not trusted himself to see the
Mission at night. On the occasion of his first daytime visit
with Presley, he had hurried away even before the twilight had
set in, not daring for the moment to face the crowding phantoms
that in his imagination filled the Mission garden after dark. In
the daylight, the place had seemed strange to him. None of his
associations with the old building and its surroundings were
those of sunlight and brightness. Whenever, during his long
sojourns in the wilderness of the Southwest, he had called up the
picture in the eye of his mind, it had always appeared to him in
the dim mystery of moonless nights, the venerable pear trees
black with shadow, the fountain a thing to be heard rather than
seen.

But as yet he had not entered the garden. That lay on the other
side of the Mission. Vanamee passed down the colonnade, with its
uneven pavement of worn red bricks, to the last door by the
belfry tower, and rang the little bell by pulling the leather
thong that hung from a hole in the door above the knob.

But the maid-servant, who, after a long interval opened the door,
blinking and confused at being roused from her sleep, told
Vanamee that Sarria was not in his room. Vanamee, however, was
known to her as the priest's protege and great friend, and she
allowed him to enter, telling him that, no doubt, he would find
Sarria in the church itself. The servant led the way down the
cool adobe passage to a larger room that occupied the entire
width of the bottom of the belfry tower, and whence a flight of
aged steps led upward into the dark. At the foot of the stairs
was a door opening into the church. The servant admitted
Vanamee, closing the door behind her.

The interior of the Mission, a great oblong of white-washed adobe
with a flat ceiling, was lighted dimly by the sanctuary lamp that
hung from three long chains just over the chancel rail at the far
end of the church, and by two or three cheap kerosene lamps in
brackets of imitation bronze. All around the walls was the
inevitable series of pictures representing the Stations of the
Cross. They were of a hideous crudity of design and composition,
yet were wrought out with an innocent, unquestioning sincerity
that was not without its charm. Each picture framed alike in
gilt, bore its suitable inscription in staring black letters.
"Simon, The Cyrenean, Helps Jesus to Carry His Cross."  "Saint
Veronica Wipes the Face of Jesus."  "Jesus Falls for the Fourth
Time," and so on. Half-way up the length of the church the pews
began, coffin-like boxes of blackened oak, shining from years of
friction, each with its door; while over them, and built out from
the wall, was the pulpit, with its tarnished gilt sounding-board
above it, like the raised cover of a great hat-box. Between the
pews, in the aisle, the violent vermilion of a strip of ingrain
carpet assaulted the eye. Farther on were the steps to the
altar, the chancel rail of worm-riddled oak, the high altar, with
its napery from the bargain counters of a San Francisco store,
the massive silver candlesticks, each as much as one man could
lift, the gift of a dead Spanish queen, and, last, the pictures
of the chancel, the Virgin in a glory, a Christ in agony on the
cross, and St. John the Baptist, the patron saint of the Mission,
the San Juan Bautista, of the early days, a gaunt grey figure, in
skins, two fingers upraised in the gesture of benediction.

The air of the place was cool and damp, and heavy with the flat,
sweet scent of stale incense smoke. It was of a vault-like
stillness, and the closing of the door behind Vanamee reechoed
from corner to corner with a prolonged reverberation of thunder.

However, Father Sarria was not in the church. Vanamee took a
couple of turns the length of the aisle, looking about into the
chapels on either side of the chancel. But the building was
deserted. The priest had been there recently, nevertheless, for
the altar furniture was in disarray, as though he had been
rearranging it but a moment before. On both sides of the church
and half-way up their length, the walls were pierced by low
archways, in which were massive wooden doors, clamped with iron
bolts. One of these doors, on the pulpit side of the church,
stood ajar, and stepping to it and pushing it wide open, Vanamee
looked diagonally across a little patch of vegetables--beets,
radishes, and lettuce--to the rear of the building that had once
contained the cloisters, and through an open window saw Father
Sarria diligently polishing the silver crucifix that usually
stood on the high altar. Vanamee did not call to the priest.
Putting a finger to either temple, he fixed his eyes steadily
upon him for a moment as he moved about at his work. In a few
seconds he closed his eyes, but only part way. The pupils
contracted; his forehead lowered to an expression of poignant
intensity. Soon afterward he saw the priest pause abruptly in
the act of drawing the cover over the crucifix, looking about him
from side to side. He turned again to his work, and again came
to a stop, perplexed, curious. With uncertain steps, and
evidently wondering why he did so, he came to the door of the
room and opened it, looking out into the night. Vanamee, hidden
in the deep shadow of the archway, did not move, but his eyes
closed, and the intense expression deepened on his face. The
priest hesitated, moved forward a step, turned back, paused
again, then came straight across the garden patch, brusquely
colliding with Vanamee, still motionless in the recess of the
archway.

Sarria gave a great start, catching his breath.

"Oh--oh, it's you. Was it you I heard calling?  No, I could not
have heard--I remember now. What a strange power! I am not sure
that it is right to do this thing, Vanamee. I--I HAD to come. I
do not know why. It is a great force--a power--I don't like it.
Vanamee, sometimes it frightens me."

Vanamee put his chin in the air.

"If I had wanted to, sir, I could have made you come to me from
back there in the Quien Sabe ranch."

The priest shook his head.

"It troubles me," he said, "to think that my own will can count
for so little. Just now I could not resist. If a deep river had
been between us, I must have crossed it. Suppose I had been
asleep now?"
"It would have been all the easier," answered Vanamee. "I
understand as little of these things as you. But I think if you
had been asleep, your power of resistance would have been so much
the more weakened."

"Perhaps I should not have waked. Perhaps I should have come to
you in my sleep."

"Perhaps."

Sarria crossed himself. "It is occult," he hazarded. "No; I do
not like it. Dear fellow," he put his hand on Vanamee's
shoulder, "don't--call me that way again; promise. See," he held
out his hand, "I am all of a tremble. There, we won't speak of
it further. Wait for me a moment. I have only to put the cross
in its place, and a fresh altar cloth, and then I am done. To-
morrow is the feast of The Holy Cross, and I am preparing against
it. The night is fine. We will smoke a cigar in the cloister
garden."

A few moments later the two passed out of the door on the other
side of the church, opposite the pulpit, Sarria adjusting a silk
skull cap on his tonsured head. He wore his cassock now, and was
far more the churchman in appearance than when Vanamee and
Presley had seen him on a former occasion.

They were now in the cloister garden. The place was charming.
Everywhere grew clumps of palms and magnolia trees. A grapevine,
over a century old, occupied a trellis in one angle of the walls
which surrounded the garden on two sides. Along the third side
was the church itself, while the fourth was open, the wall having
crumbled away, its site marked only by a line of eight great pear
trees, older even than the grapevine, gnarled, twisted, bearing
no fruit. Directly opposite the pear trees, in the south wall of
the garden, was a round, arched portal, whose gate giving upon
the esplanade in front of the Mission was always closed. Small
gravelled walks, well kept, bordered with mignonette, twisted
about among the flower beds, and underneath the magnolia trees.
In the centre was a little fountain in a stone basin green with
moss, while just beyond, between the fountain and the pear trees,
stood what was left of a sun dial, the bronze gnomon, green with
the beatings of the weather, the figures on the half-circle of
the dial worn away, illegible.

But on the other side of the fountain, and directly opposite the
door of the Mission, ranged against the wall, were nine graves--
three with headstones, the rest with slabs. Two of Sarria's
predecessors were buried here; three of the graves were those of
Mission Indians. One was thought to contain a former alcalde of
Guadalajara; two more held the bodies of De La Cuesta and his
young wife (taking with her to the grave the illusion of her
husband's love), and the last one, the ninth, at the end of the
line, nearest the pear trees, was marked by a little headstone,
the smallest of any, on which, together with the proper dates--
only sixteen years apart--was cut the name "Angele Varian."

But the quiet, the repose, the isolation of the little cloister
garden was infinitely delicious. It was a tiny corner of the
great valley that stretched in all directions around it--shut
off, discreet, romantic, a garden of dreams, of enchantments, of
illusions. Outside there, far off, the great grim world went
clashing through its grooves, but in here never an echo of the
grinding of its wheels entered to jar upon the subdued modulation
of the fountain's uninterrupted murmur.

Sarria and Vanamee found their way to a stone bench against the
side wall of the Mission, near the door from which they had just
issued, and sat down, Sarria lighting a cigar, Vanamee rolling
and smoking cigarettes in Mexican fashion.

All about them widened the vast calm night. All the stars were
out. The moon was coming up. There was no wind, no sound. The
insistent flowing of the fountain seemed only as the symbol of
the passing of time, a thing that was understood rather than
heard, inevitable, prolonged. At long intervals, a faint breeze,
hardly more than a breath, found its way into the garden over the
enclosing walls, and passed overhead, spreading everywhere the
delicious, mingled perfume of magnolia blossoms, of mignonette,
of moss, of grass, and all the calm green life silently teeming
within the enclosure of the walls.

From where he sat, Vanamee, turning his head, could look out
underneath the pear trees to the north. Close at hand, a little
valley lay between the high ground on which the Mission was
built, and the line of low hills just beyond Broderson Creek on
the Quien Sabe. In here was the Seed ranch, which Angele's
people had cultivated, a unique and beautiful stretch of five
hundred acres, planted thick with roses, violets, lilies, tulips,
iris, carnations, tube-roses, poppies, heliotrope--all manner and
description of flowers, five hundred acres of them, solid, thick,
exuberant; blooming and fading, and leaving their seed or slips
to be marketed broadcast all over the United States. This had
been the vocation of Angele's parents--raising flowers for their
seeds. All over the country the Seed ranch was known. Now it
was arid, almost dry, but when in full flower, toward the middle
of summer, the sight of these half-thousand acres royal with
colour--vermilion, azure, flaming yellow--was a marvel. When an
east wind blew, men on the streets of Bonneville, nearly twelve
miles away, could catch the scent of this valley of flowers, this
chaos of perfume.

And into this life of flowers, this world of colour, this
atmosphere oppressive and clogged and cloyed and thickened with
sweet odour, Angele had been born. There she had lived her
sixteen years. There she had died. It was not surprising that
Vanamee, with his intense, delicate sensitiveness to beauty, his
almost abnormal capacity for great happiness, had been drawn to
her, had loved her so deeply.

She came to him from out of the flowers, the smell of the roses
in her hair of gold, that hung in two straight plaits on either
side of her face; the reflection of the violets in the profound
dark blue of her eyes, perplexing, heavy-lidded, almond-shaped,
oriental; the aroma and the imperial red of the carnations in her
lips, with their almost Egyptian fulness; the whiteness of the
lilies, the perfume of the lilies, and the lilies' slender
balancing grace in her neck. Her hands disengaged the odour of
the heliotropes. The folds of her dress gave off the enervating
scent of poppies. Her feet were redolent of hyacinths.

For a long time after sitting down upon the bench, neither the
priest nor Vanamee spoke. But after a while Sarria took his
cigar from his lips, saying:

"How still it is! This is a beautiful old garden, peaceful, very
quiet. Some day I shall be buried here. I like to remember
that; and you, too, Vanamee."

"Quien sabe?"

"Yes, you, too. Where else?  No, it is better here, yonder, by
the side of the little girl."

"I am not able to look forward yet, sir. The things that are to
be are somehow nothing to me at all. For me they amount to
nothing."

"They amount to everything, my boy."

"Yes, to one part of me, but not to the part of me that belonged
to Angele--the best part. Oh, you don't know," he exclaimed with
a sudden movement, "no one can understand. What is it to me when
you tell me that sometime after I shall die too, somewhere, in a
vague place you call Heaven, I shall see her again? Do you think
that the idea of that ever made any one's sorrow easier to bear?
Ever took the edge from any one's grief?"

"But you believe that----"

"Oh, believe, believe!" echoed the other. "What do I believe?
I don't know. I believe, or I don't believe. I can remember
what she WAS, but I cannot hope what she will be. Hope, after
all, is only memory seen reversed. When I try to see her in
another life--whatever you call it--in Heaven--beyond the grave--
this vague place of yours; when I try to see her there, she comes
to my imagination only as what she was, material, earthly, as I
loved her. Imperfect, you say; but that is as I saw her, and as
I saw her, I loved her; and as she WAS, material, earthly,
imperfect, she loved me. It's that, that I want," he exclaimed.
"I don't want her changed. I don't want her spiritualised,
exalted, glorified, celestial. I want HER. I think it is only
this feeling that has kept me from killing myself. I would
rather be unhappy in the memory of what she actually was, than be
happy in the realisation of her transformed, changed, made
celestial. I am only human. Her soul! That was beautiful, no
doubt. But, again, it was something very vague, intangible,
hardly more than a phrase. But the touch of her hand was real,
the sound of her voice was real, the clasp of her arms about my
neck was real. Oh," he cried, shaken with a sudden wrench of
passion, "give those back to me. Tell your God to give those
back to me--the sound of her voice, the touch of her hand, the
clasp of her dear arms, REAL, REAL, and then you may talk to me
of Heaven."

Sarria shook his head. "But when you meet her again," he
observed, "in Heaven, you, too, will be changed. You will see
her spiritualised, with spiritual eyes. As she is now, she does
not appeal to you. I understand that. It is because, as you
say, you are only human, while she is divine. But when you come
to be like her, as she is now, you will know her as she really
is, not as she seemed to be, because her voice was sweet, because
her hair was pretty, because her hand was warm in yours.
Vanamee, your talk is that of a foolish child. You are like one
of the Corinthians to whom Paul wrote. Do you remember? Listen
now. I can recall the words, and such words, beautiful and
terrible at the same time, such a majesty. They march like
soldiers with trumpets. 'But some man will say'--as you have
said just now--'How are the dead raised up? And with what body
do they come? Thou fool! That which thou sowest is not
quickened except it die, and that which thou sowest, thou sowest
not that body that shall be, but bare grain. It may chance of
wheat, or of some other grain. But God giveth it a body as it
hath pleased him, and to every seed his own body.... It is sown a
natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.' It is because you
are a natural body that you cannot understand her, nor wish for
her as a spiritual body, but when you are both spiritual, then
you shall know each other as you are--know as you never knew
before. Your grain of wheat is your symbol of immortality. You
bury it in the earth. It dies, and rises again a thousand times
more beautiful. Vanamee, your dear girl was only a grain of
humanity that we have buried here, and the end is not yet. But
all this is so old, so old. The world learned it a thousand
years ago, and yet each man that has ever stood by the open grave
of any one he loved must learn it all over again from the
beginning."

Vanamee was silent for a moment, looking off with unseeing eyes
between the trunks of the pear trees, over the little valley.

"That may all be as you say," he answered after a while. "I have
not learned it yet, in any case. Now, I only know that I love
her--oh, as if it all were yesterday--and that I am suffering,
suffering, always."

He leaned forward, his head supported on his clenched fists, the
infinite sadness of his face deepening like a shadow, the tears
brimming in his deep-set eyes. A question that he must ask,
which involved the thing that was scarcely to be thought of,
occurred to him at this moment. After hesitating for a long
moment, he said:

"I have been away a long time, and I have had no news of this
place since I left. Is there anything to tell, Father? Has any
discovery been made, any suspicion developed, as to--the Other?"

The priest shook his head.

"Not a word, not a whisper. It is a mystery. It always will
be."

Vanamee clasped his head between his clenched fists, rocking
himself to and fro.

"Oh, the terror of it," he murmured. "The horror of it. And
she--think of it, Sarria, only sixteen, a little girl; so
innocent, that she never knew what wrong meant, pure as a little
child is pure, who believed that all things were good; mature
only in her love. And to be struck down like that, while your
God looked down from Heaven and would not take her part."  All at
once he seemed to lose control of himself. One of those furies
of impotent grief and wrath that assailed him from time to time,
blind, insensate, incoherent, suddenly took possession of him. A
torrent of words issued from his lips, and he flung out an arm,
the fist clenched, in a fierce, quick gesture, partly of despair,
partly of defiance, partly of supplication.
"No, your God would not take her part. Where was God's mercy in
that? Where was Heaven's protection in that? Where was the
loving kindness you preach about? Why did God give her life if
it was to be stamped out? Why did God give her the power of love
if it was to come to nothing? Sarria, listen to me. Why did God
make her so divinely pure if He permitted that abomination? Ha!"
he exclaimed bitterly, "your God! Why, an Apache buck would have
been more merciful. Your God! There is no God. There is only
the Devil. The Heaven you pray to is only a joke, a wretched
trick, a delusion. It is only Hell that is real."

Sarria caught him by the arm.

"You are a fool and a child," he exclaimed, "and it is blasphemy
that you are saying. I forbid it. You understand? I forbid
it."

Vanamee turned on him with a sudden cry.
"Then, tell your God to give her back to me!"

Sarria started away from him, his eyes widening in astonishment,
surprised out of all composure by the other's outburst.
Vanamee's swarthy face was pale, the sunken cheeks and deep-set
eyes were marked with great black shadows. The priest no longer
recognised him. The face, that face of the ascetic, lean, framed
in its long black hair and pointed beard, was quivering with the
excitement of hallucination. It was the face of the inspired
shepherds of the Hebraic legends, living close to nature, the
younger prophets of Israel, dwellers in the wilderness, solitary,
imaginative, believing in the Vision, having strange delusions,
gifted with strange powers. In a brief second of thought, Sarria
understood. Out into the wilderness, the vast arid desert of the
Southwest, Vanamee had carried his grief. For days, for weeks,
months even, he had been alone, a solitary speck lost in the
immensity of the horizons; continually he was brooding, haunted
with his sorrow, thinking, thinking, often hard put to it for
food. The body was ill-nourished, and the mind, concentrated
forever upon one subject, had recoiled upon itself, had preyed
upon the naturally nervous temperament, till the imagination had
become exalted, morbidly active, diseased, beset with
hallucinations, forever in search of the manifestation, of the
miracle. It was small wonder that, bringing a fancy so distorted
back to the scene of a vanished happiness, Vanamee should be
racked with the most violent illusions, beset in the throes of a
veritable hysteria.

"Tell your God to give her back to me," he repeated with fierce
insistence.

It was the pitch of mysticism, the imagination harassed and
goaded beyond the normal round, suddenly flipping from the
circumference, spinning off at a tangent, out into the void,
where all things seemed possible, hurtling through the dark
there, groping for the supernatural, clamouring for the miracle.
And it was also the human, natural protest against the
inevitable, the irrevocable; the spasm of revolt under the sting
of death, the rebellion of the soul at the victory of the grave.

"He can give her back to me if He only will," Vanamee cried.
"Sarria, you must help me. I tell you--I warn you, sir, I can't
last much longer under it. My head is all wrong with it--I've no
more hold on my mind. Something must happen or I shall lose my
senses. I am breaking down under it all, my body and my mind
alike. Bring her to me; make God show her to me. If all tales
are true, it would not be the first time. If I cannot have her,
at least let me see her as she was, real, earthly, not her
spirit, her ghost. I want her real self, undefiled again. If
this is dementia, then let me be demented. But help me, you and
your God; create the delusion, do the miracle."

"Stop!" cried the priest again, shaking him roughly by the
shoulder. "Stop. Be yourself. This is dementia; but I shall
NOT let you be demented. Think of what you are saying. Bring
her back to you! Is that the way of God? I thought you were a
man; this is the talk of a weak-minded girl."

Vanamee stirred abruptly in his place, drawing a long breath and
looking about him vaguely, as if he came to himself.

"You are right," he muttered. "I hardly know what I am saying at
times. But there are moments when my whole mind and soul seem to
rise up in rebellion against what has happened; when it seems to
me that I am stronger than death, and that if I only knew how to
use the strength of my will, concentrate my power of thought--
volition--that I could--I don't know--not call her back--but--
something----"

"A diseased and distorted mind is capable of hallucinations, if
that is what you mean," observed Sarria.

"Perhaps that is what I mean. Perhaps I want only the delusion,
after all."

Sarria did not reply, and there was a long silence. In the damp
south corners of the walls a frog began to croak at exact
intervals. The little fountain rippled monotonously, and a
magnolia flower dropped from one of the trees, falling straight
as a plummet through the motionless air, and settling upon the
gravelled walk with a faint rustling sound. Otherwise the
stillness was profound.

A little later, the priest's cigar, long since out, slipped from
his fingers to the ground. He began to nod gently. Vanamee
touched his arm.

"Asleep, sir?"

The other started, rubbing his eyes.

"Upon my word, I believe I was."

"Better go to bed, sir. I am not tired. I think I shall sit out
here a little longer."

"Well, perhaps I would be better off in bed. YOUR bed is always
ready for you here whenever you want to use it."

"No--I shall go back to Quien Sabe--later. Good-night, sir."

"Good-night, my boy."

Vanamee was left alone. For a long time he sat motionless in his
place, his elbows on his knees, his chin propped in his hands.
The minutes passed--then the hours. The moon climbed steadily
higher among the stars. Vanamee rolled and smoked cigarette
after cigarette, the blue haze of smoke hanging motionless above
his head, or drifting in slowly weaving filaments across the open
spaces of the garden.

But the influence of the old enclosure, this corner of romance
and mystery, this isolated garden of dreams, savouring of the
past, with its legends, its graves, its crumbling sun dial, its
fountain with its rime of moss, was not to be resisted. Now that
the priest had left him, the same exaltation of spirit that had
seized upon Vanamee earlier in the evening, by degrees grew big
again in his mind and imagination. His sorrow assaulted him like
the flagellations of a fine whiplash, and his love for Angele
rose again in his heart, it seemed to him never so deep, so
tender, so infinitely strong. No doubt, it was his familiarity
with the Mission garden, his clear-cut remembrance of it, as it
was in the days when he had met Angele there, tallying now so
exactly with the reality there under his eyes, that brought her
to his imagination so vividly. As yet he dared not trust himself
near her grave, but, for the moment, he rose and, his hands
clasped behind him, walked slowly from point to point amid the
tiny gravelled walks, recalling the incidents of eighteen years
ago. On the bench he had quitted he and Angele had often sat.
Here by the crumbling sun dial, he recalled the night when he had
kissed her for the first time. Here, again, by the rim of the
fountain, with its fringe of green, she once had paused, and,
baring her arm to the shoulder, had thrust it deep into the
water, and then withdrawing it, had given it to him to kiss, all
wet and cool; and here, at last, under the shadow of the pear
trees they had sat, evening after evening, looking off over the
little valley below them, watching the night build itself, dome-
like, from horizon to zenith.

Brusquely Vanamee turned away from the prospect. The Seed ranch
was dark at this time of the year, and flowerless. Far off
toward its centre, he had caught a brief glimpse of the house
where Angele had lived, and a faint light burning in its window.
But he turned from it sharply. The deep-seated travail of his
grief abruptly reached the paroxysm. With long strides he
crossed the garden and reentered the Mission church itself,
plunging into the coolness of its atmosphere as into a bath.
What he searched for he did not know, or, rather, did not define.
He knew only that he was suffering, that a longing for Angele,
for some object around which his great love could enfold itself,
was tearing at his heart with iron teeth. He was ready to be
deluded; craved the hallucination; begged pitifully for the
illusion; anything rather than the empty, tenantless night, the
voiceless silence, the vast loneliness of the overspanning arc of
the heavens.

Before the chancel rail of the altar, under the sanctuary lamp,
Vanamee sank upon his knees, his arms folded upon the rail, his
head bowed down upon them. He prayed, with what words he could
not say for what he did not understand--for help, merely, for
relief, for an Answer to his cry.

It was upon that, at length, that his disordered mind
concentrated itself, an Answer--he demanded, he implored an
Answer. Not a vague visitation of Grace, not a formless sense of
Peace; but an Answer, something real, even if the reality were
fancied, a voice out of the night, responding to his, a hand in
the dark clasping his groping fingers, a breath, human, warm,
fragrant, familiar, like a soft, sweet caress on his shrunken
cheeks. Alone there in the dim half-light of the decaying
Mission, with its crumbling plaster, its naive crudity of
ornament and picture, he wrestled fiercely with his desires--
words, fragments of sentences, inarticulate, incoherent, wrenched
from his tight-shut teeth.

But the Answer was not in the church. Above him, over the high
altar, the Virgin in a glory, with downcast eyes and folded
hands, grew vague and indistinct in the shadow, the colours
fading, tarnished by centuries of incense smoke. The Christ in
agony on the Cross was but a lamentable vision of tormented
anatomy, grey flesh, spotted with crimson. The St. John, the San
Juan Bautista, patron saint of the Mission, the gaunt figure in
skins, two fingers upraised in the gesture of benediction, gazed
stolidly out into the half-gloom under the ceiling, ignoring the
human distress that beat itself in vain against the altar rail
below, and Angele remained as before--only a memory, far distant,
intangible, lost.

Vanamee rose, turning his back upon the altar with a vague
gesture of despair. He crossed the church, and issuing from the
low-arched door opposite the pulpit, once more stepped out into
the garden. Here, at least, was reality. The warm, still air
descended upon him like a cloak, grateful, comforting, dispelling
the chill that lurked in the damp mould of plaster and crumbling
adobe.

But now he found his way across the garden on the other side of
the fountain, where, ranged against the eastern wall, were nine
graves. Here Angele was buried, in the smallest grave of them
all, marked by the little headstone, with its two dates, only
sixteen years apart. To this spot, at last, he had returned,
after the years spent in the desert, the wilderness--after all
the wanderings of the Long Trail. Here, if ever, he must have a
sense of her nearness. Close at hand, a short four feet under
that mound of grass, was the form he had so often held in the
embrace of his arms; the face, the very face he had kissed, that
face with the hair of gold making three-cornered the round white
forehead, the violet-blue eyes, heavy-lidded, with their strange
oriental slant upward toward the temples; the sweet full lips,
almost Egyptian in their fulness--all that strange, perplexing,
wonderful beauty, so troublous, so enchanting, so out of all
accepted standards.

He bent down, dropping upon one knee, a hand upon the headstone,
and read again the inscription. Then instinctively his hand left
the stone and rested upon the low mound of turf, touching it with
the softness of a caress; and then, before he was aware of it, he
was stretched at full length upon the earth, beside the grave,
his arms about the low mound, his lips pressed against the grass
with which it was covered. The pent-up grief of nearly twenty
years rose again within his heart, and overflowed, irresistible,
violent, passionate. There was no one to see, no one to hear.
Vanamee had no thought of restraint. He no longer wrestled with
his pain--strove against it. There was even a sense of relief in
permitting himself to be overcome. But the reaction from this
outburst was equally violent. His revolt against the inevitable,
his protest against the grave, shook him from head to foot,
goaded him beyond all bounds of reason, hounded him on and into
the domain of hysteria, dementia. Vanamee was no longer master
of himself--no longer knew what he was doing.

At first, he had been content with merely a wild, unreasoned cry
to Heaven that Angele should be restored to him, but the vast
egotism that seems to run through all forms of disordered
intelligence gave his fancy another turn. He forgot God. He no
longer reckoned with Heaven. He arrogated their powers to
himself--struggled to be, of his own unaided might, stronger than
death, more powerful than the grave. He had demanded of Sarria
that God should restore Angele to him, but now he appealed
directly to Angele herself. As he lay there, his arms clasped
about her grave, she seemed so near to him that he fancied she
MUST hear. And suddenly, at this moment, his recollection of his
strange compelling power--the same power by which he had called
Presley to him half-way across the Quien Sabe ranch, the same
power which had brought Sarria to his side that very evening--
recurred to him. Concentrating his mind upon the one object with
which it had so long been filled, Vanamee, his eyes closed, his
face buried in his arms, exclaimed:

"Come to me--Angele--don't you hear? Come to me."

But the Answer was not in the Grave. Below him the voiceless
Earth lay silent, moveless, withholding the secret, jealous of
that which it held so close in its grip, refusing to give up that
which had been confided to its keeping, untouched by the human
anguish that above there, on its surface, clutched with
despairing hands at a grave long made. The Earth that only that
morning had been so eager, so responsive to the lightest summons,
so vibrant with Life, now at night, holding death within its
embrace, guarding inviolate the secret of the Grave, was deaf to
all entreaty, refused the Answer, and Angele remained as before,
only a memory, far distant, intangible, lost.

Vanamee lifted his head, looking about him with unseeing eyes,
trembling with the exertion of his vain effort. But he could not
as yet allow himself to despair. Never before had that curious
power of attraction failed him. He felt himself to be so strong
in this respect that he was persuaded if he exerted himself to
the limit of his capacity, something--he could not say what--must
come of it. If it was only a self-delusion, an hallucination, he
told himself that he would be content.

Almost of its own accord, his distorted mind concentrated itself
again, every thought, all the power of his will riveting
themselves upon Angele. As if she were alive, he summoned her to
him. His eyes, fixed upon the name cut into the headstone,
contracted, the pupils growing small, his fists shut tight, his
nerves braced rigid.

For a few seconds he stood thus, breathless, expectant, awaiting
the manifestation, the Miracle. Then, without knowing why,
hardly conscious of what was transpiring, he found that his
glance was leaving the headstone, was turning from the grave.
Not only this, but his whole body was following the direction of
his eyes. Before he knew it, he was standing with his back to
Angele's grave, was facing the north, facing the line of pear
trees and the little valley where the Seed ranch lay. At first,
he thought this was because he had allowed his will to weaken,
the concentrated power of his mind to grow slack. And once more
turning toward the grave, he banded all his thoughts together in
a consummate effort, his teeth grinding together, his hands
pressed to his forehead. He forced himself to the notion that
Angele was alive, and to this creature of his imagination he
addressed himself:

"Angele!" he cried in a low voice; "Angele, I am calling you--do
you hear? Come to me--come to me now, now."

Instead of the Answer he demanded, that inexplicable counter-
influence cut across the current of his thought. Strive as he
would against it, he must veer to the north, toward the pear
trees. Obeying it, he turned, and, still wondering, took a step
in that direction, then another and another. The next moment he
came abruptly to himself, in the black shadow of the pear trees
themselves, and, opening his eyes, found himself looking off over
the Seed ranch, toward the little house in the centre where
Angele had once lived.

Perplexed, he returned to the grave, once more calling upon the
resources of his will, and abruptly, so soon as these reached a
certain point, the same cross-current set in. He could no longer
keep his eyes upon the headstone, could no longer think of the
grave and what it held. He must face the north; he must be drawn
toward the pear trees, and there left standing in their shadow,
looking out aimlessly over the Seed ranch, wondering, bewildered.
Farther than this the influence never drew him, but up to this
point--the line of pear trees--it was not to be resisted.

For a time the peculiarity of the affair was of more interest to
Vanamee than even his own distress of spirit, and once or twice
he repeated the attempt, almost experimentally, and invariably
with the same result: so soon as he seemed to hold Angele in the
grip of his mind, he was moved to turn about toward the north,
and hurry toward the pear trees on the crest of the hill that
over-looked the little valley.

But Vanamee's unhappiness was too keen this night for him to
dwell long upon the vagaries of his mind. Submitting at length,
and abandoning the grave, he flung himself down in the black
shade of the pear trees, his chin in his hands, and resigned
himself finally and definitely to the inrush of recollection and
the exquisite grief of an infinite regret.

To his fancy, she came to him again. He put himself back many
years. He remembered the warm nights of July and August,
profoundly still, the sky encrusted with stars, the little
Mission garden exhaling the mingled perfumes that all through the
scorching day had been distilled under the steady blaze of a
summer's sun. He saw himself as another person, arriving at
this, their rendezvous. All day long she had been in his mind.
All day long he had looked forward to this quiet hour that
belonged to her. It was dark. He could see nothing, but, by and
by, he heard a step, a gentle rustle of the grass on the slope of
the hill pressed under an advancing foot. Then he saw the faint
gleam of pallid gold of her hair, a barely visible glow in the
starlight, and heard the murmur of her breath in the lapse of the
over-passing breeze. And then, in the midst of the gentle
perfumes of the garden, the perfumes of the magnolia flowers, of
the mignonette borders, of the crumbling walls, there expanded a
new odour, or the faint mingling of many odours, the smell of the
roses that lingered in her hair, of the lilies that exhaled from
her neck, of the heliotrope that disengaged itself from her hands
and arms, and of the hyacinths with which her little feet were
redolent, And then, suddenly, it was herself--her eyes, heavy-
lidded, violet blue, full of the love of him; her sweet full lips
speaking his name; her hands clasping his hands, his shoulders,
his neck--her whole dear body giving itself into his embrace; her
lips against his; her hands holding his head, drawing his face
down to hers.

Vanamee, as he remembered all this, flung out an arm with a cry
of pain, his eyes searching the gloom, all his mind in strenuous
mutiny against the triumph of Death. His glance shot swiftly out
across the night, unconsciously following the direction from
which Angele used to come to him.

"Come to me now," he exclaimed under his breath, tense and rigid
with the vast futile effort of his will. "Come to me now, now.
Don't you hear me, Angele? You must, you must come."

Suddenly Vanamee returned to himself with the abruptness of a
blow. His eyes opened. He half raised himself from the ground.
Swiftly his scattered wits readjusted themselves. Never more
sane, never more himself, he rose to his feet and stood looking
off into the night across the Seed ranch.

"What was it?" he murmured, bewildered.

He looked around him from side to side, as if to get in touch
with reality once more. He looked at his hands, at the rough
bark of the pear tree next which he stood, at the streaked and
rain-eroded walls of the Mission and garden. The exaltation of
his mind calmed itself; the unnatural strain under which he
laboured slackened. He became thoroughly master of himself
again, matter-of-fact, practical, keen.

But just so sure as his hands were his own, just so sure as the
bark of the pear tree was rough, the mouldering adobe of the
Mission walls damp--just so sure had Something occurred. It was
vague, intangible, appealing only to some strange, nameless sixth
sense, but none the less perceptible. His mind, his imagination,
sent out from him across the night, across the little valley
below him, speeding hither and thither through the dark, lost,
confused, had suddenly paused, hovering, had found Something. It
had not returned to him empty-handed. It had come back, but now
there was a change--mysterious, illusive. There were no words
for this that had transpired. But for the moment, one thing only
was certain. The night was no longer voiceless, the dark was no
longer empty. Far off there, beyond the reach of vision,
unlocalised, strange, a ripple had formed on the still black pool
of the night, had formed, flashed one instant to the stars, then
swiftly faded again. The night shut down once more. There was
no sound--nothing stirred.

For the moment, Vanamee stood transfixed, struck rigid in his
place, stupefied, his eyes staring, breathless with utter
amazement. Then, step by step, he shrank back into the deeper
shadow, treading with the infinite precaution of a prowling
leopard. A qualm of something very much like fear seized upon
him. But immediately on the heels of this first impression came
the doubt of his own senses. Whatever had happened had been so
ephemeral, so faint, so intangible, that now he wondered if he
had not deceived himself, after all. But the reaction followed.
Surely, there had been Something. And from that moment began for
him the most poignant uncertainty of mind. Gradually he drew
back into the garden, holding his breath, listening to every
faintest sound, walking upon tiptoe. He reached the fountain,
and wetting his hands, passed them across his forehead and eyes.
Once more he stood listening. The silence was profound.

Troubled, disturbed, Vanamee went away, passing out of the
garden, descending the hill. He forded Broderson Creek where it
intersected the road to Guadalajara, and went on across Quien
Sabe, walking slowly, his head bent down, his hands clasped
behind his back, thoughtful, perplexed.

CHAPTER V

At seven o'clock, in the bedroom of his ranch house, in the
white-painted iron bedstead with its blue-grey army blankets and
red counterpane, Annixter was still asleep, his face red, his
mouth open, his stiff yellow hair in wild disorder. On the
wooden chair at the bed-head, stood the kerosene lamp, by the
light of which he had been reading the previous evening. Beside
it was a paper bag of dried prunes, and the limp volume of
"Copperfield," the place marked by a slip of paper torn from the
edge of the bag.

Annixter slept soundly, making great work of the business, unable
to take even his rest gracefully. His eyes were shut so tight
that the skin at their angles was drawn into puckers. Under his
pillow, his two hands were doubled up into fists. At intervals,
he gritted his teeth ferociously, while, from time to time, the
abrupt sound of his snoring dominated the brisk ticking of the
alarm clock that hung from the brass knob of the bed-post, within
six inches of his ear.

But immediately after seven, this clock sprung its alarm with the
abruptness of an explosion, and within the second, Annixter had
hurled the bed-clothes from him and flung himself up to a sitting
posture on the edge of the bed, panting and gasping, blinking at
the light, rubbing his head, dazed and bewildered, stupefied at
the hideous suddenness with which he had been wrenched from his
sleep.

His first act was to take down the alarm clock and stifle its
prolonged whirring under the pillows and blankets. But when this
had been done, he continued to sit stupidly on the edge of the
bed, curling his toes away from the cold of the floor; his half-
shut eyes, heavy with sleep, fixed and vacant, closing and
opening by turns. For upwards of three minutes he alternately
dozed and woke, his head and the whole upper half of his body
sagging abruptly sideways from moment to moment. But at length,
coming more to himself, he straightened up, ran his fingers
through his hair, and with a prodigious yawn, murmured vaguely:

"Oh, Lord! Oh-h, LORD!"

He stretched three or four times, twisting about in his place,
curling and uncurling his toes, muttering from time to time
between two yawns:

"Oh, Lord! Oh, Lord!"

He stared about the room, collecting his thoughts, readjusting
himself for the day's work.

The room was barren, the walls of tongue-and-groove sheathing--
alternate brown and yellow boards--like the walls of a stable,
were adorned with two or three unframed lithographs, the
Christmas "souvenirs" of weekly periodicals, fastened with great
wire nails; a bunch of herbs or flowers, lamentably withered and
grey with dust, was affixed to the mirror over the black walnut
washstand by the window, and a yellowed photograph of Annixter's
combined harvester--himself and his men in a group before it--
hung close at hand. On the floor, at the bedside and before the
bureau, were two oval rag-carpet rugs. In the corners of the
room were muddy boots, a McClellan saddle, a surveyor's transit,
an empty coal-hod and a box of iron bolts and nuts. On the wall
over the bed, in a gilt frame, was Annixter's college diploma,
while on the bureau, amid a litter of hair-brushes, dirty
collars, driving gloves, cigars and the like, stood a broken
machine for loading shells.

It was essentially a man's room, rugged, uncouth, virile, full of
the odours of tobacco, of leather, of rusty iron; the bare floor
hollowed by the grind of hob-nailed boots, the walls marred by
the friction of heavy things of metal. Strangely enough,
Annixter's clothes were disposed of on the single chair with the
precision of an old maid. Thus he had placed them the night
before; the boots set carefully side by side, the trousers, with
the overalls still upon them, neatly folded upon the seat of the
chair, the coat hanging from its back.

The Quien Sabe ranch house was a six-room affair, all on one
floor. By no excess of charity could it have been called a home.
Annixter was a wealthy man; he could have furnished his dwelling
with quite as much elegance as that of Magnus Derrick. As it
was, however, he considered his house merely as a place to eat,
to sleep, to change his clothes in; as a shelter from the rain,
an office where business was transacted--nothing more.

When he was sufficiently awake, Annixter thrust his feet into a
pair of wicker slippers, and shuffled across the office adjoining
his bedroom, to the bathroom just beyond, and stood under the icy
shower a few minutes, his teeth chattering, fulminating oaths at
the coldness of the water. Still shivering, he hurried into his
clothes, and, having pushed the button of the electric bell to
announce that he was ready for breakfast, immediately plunged
into the business of the day. While he was thus occupied, the
butcher's cart from Bonneville drove into the yard with the day's
supply of meat. This cart also brought the Bonneville paper and
the mail of the previous night. In the bundle of correspondence
that the butcher handed to Annixter that morning, was a telegram
from Osterman, at that time on his second trip to Los Angeles.
It read:

"Flotation of company in this district assured. Have secured
services of desirable party. Am now in position to sell you your
share stock, as per original plan."

Annixter grunted as he tore the despatch into strips.
"Well," he muttered, "that part is settled, then."

He made a little pile of the torn strips on the top of the
unlighted stove, and burned them carefully, scowling down into
the flicker of fire, thoughtful and preoccupied.

He knew very well what Osterman referred to by "Flotation of
company," and also who was the "desirable party" he spoke of.

Under protest, as he was particular to declare, and after
interminable argument, Annixter had allowed himself to be
reconciled with Osterman, and to be persuaded to reenter the
proposed political "deal."  A committee had been formed to
finance the affair--Osterman, old Broderson, Annixter himself,
and, with reservations, hardly more than a looker-on, Harran
Derrick. Of this committee, Osterman was considered chairman.
Magnus Derrick had formally and definitely refused his adherence
to the scheme. He was trying to steer a middle course. His
position was difficult, anomalous. If freight rates were cut
through the efforts of the members of the committee, he could not
very well avoid taking advantage of the new schedule. He would
be the gainer, though sharing neither the risk nor the expense.
But, meanwhile, the days were passing; the primary elections were
drawing nearer. The committee could not afford to wait, and by
way of a beginning, Osterman had gone to Los Angeles, fortified
by a large sum of money--a purse to which Annixter, Broderson and
himself had contributed. He had put himself in touch with
Disbrow, the political man of the Denver, Pueblo and Mojave road,
and had had two interviews with him. The telegram that Annixter
received that morning was to say that Disbrow had been bought
over, and would adopt Parrell as the D., P. and M. candidate for
Railroad Commissioner from the third district.

One of the cooks brought up Annixter's breakfast that morning,
and he went through it hastily, reading his mail at the same time
and glancing over the pages of the "Mercury," Genslinger's paper.
The "Mercury," Annixter was persuaded, received a subsidy from
the Pacific and Southwestern Railroad, and was hardly better than
the mouthpiece by which Shelgrim and the General Office spoke to
ranchers about Bonneville.

An editorial in that morning's issue said:

"It would not be surprising to the well-informed, if the long-
deferred re-grade of the value of the railroad sections included
in the Los Muertos, Quien Sabe, Osterman and Broderson properties
was made before the first of the year. Naturally, the tenants of
these lands feel an interest in the price which the railroad will
put upon its holdings, and it is rumoured they expect the land
will be offered to them for two dollars and fifty cents per acre.
It needs no seventh daughter of a seventh daughter to foresee
that these gentlemen will be disappointed."

"Rot!" vociferated Annixter to himself as he finished. He rolled
the paper into a wad and hurled it from him.

"Rot! rot! What does Genslinger know about it?  I stand on my
agreement with the P. and S. W.--from two fifty to five dollars
an acre--there it is in black and white. The road IS obligated.
And my improvements! I made the land valuable by improving it,
irrigating it, draining it, and cultivating it. Talk to ME. I
know better."

The most abiding impression that Genslinger's editorial made upon
him was, that possibly the "Mercury" was not subsidised by the
corporation after all. If it was; Genslinger would not have been
led into making his mistake as to the value of the land. He
would have known that the railroad was under contract to sell at
two dollars and a half an acre, and not only this, but that when
the land was put upon the market, it was to be offered to the
present holders first of all. Annixter called to mind the
explicit terms of the agreement between himself and the railroad,
and dismissed the matter from his mind. He lit a cigar, put on
his hat and went out.

The morning was fine, the air nimble, brisk. On the summit of
the skeleton-like tower of the artesian well, the windmill was
turning steadily in a breeze from the southwest. The water in
the irrigating ditch was well up. There was no cloud in the sky.
Far off to the east and west, the bulwarks of the valley, the
Coast Range and the foothills of the Sierras stood out, pale
amethyst against the delicate pink and white sheen of the
horizon. The sunlight was a veritable flood, crystal, limpid,
sparkling, setting a feeling of gayety in the air, stirring up an
effervescence in the blood, a tumult of exuberance in the veins.

But on his way to the barns, Annixter was obliged to pass by the
open door of the dairy-house. Hilma Tree was inside, singing at
her work; her voice of a velvety huskiness, more of the chest
than of the throat, mingling with the liquid dashing of the milk
in the vats and churns, and the clear, sonorous clinking of the
cans and pans. Annixter turned into the dairy-house, pausing on
the threshold, looking about him. Hilma stood bathed from head
to foot in the torrent of sunlight that poured in upon her from
the three wide-open windows. She was charming, delicious,
radiant of youth, of health, of well-being. Into her eyes, wide
open, brown, rimmed with their fine, thin line of intense black
lashes, the sun set a diamond flash; the same golden light glowed
all around her thick, moist hair, lambent, beautiful, a sheen of
almost metallic lustre, and reflected itself upon her wet lips,
moving with the words of her singing. The whiteness of her skin
under the caress of this hale, vigorous morning light was
dazzling, pure, of a fineness beyond words. Beneath the sweet
modulation of her chin, the reflected light from the burnished
copper vessel she was carrying set a vibration of pale gold.
Overlaying the flush of rose in her cheeks, seen only when she
stood against the sunlight, was a faint sheen of down, a lustrous
floss, delicate as the pollen of a flower, or the impalpable
powder of a moth's wing. She was moving to and fro about her
work, alert, joyous, robust; and from all the fine, full
amplitude of her figure, from her thick white neck, sloping
downward to her shoulders, from the deep, feminine swell of her
breast, the vigorous maturity of her hips, there was disengaged a
vibrant note of gayety, of exuberant animal life, sane, honest,
strong. She wore a skirt of plain blue calico and a shirtwaist
of pink linen, clean, trim; while her sleeves turned back to her
shoulders, showed her large, white arms, wet with milk, redolent
and fragrant with milk, glowing and resplendent in the early
morning light.

On the threshold, Annixter took off his hat.

"Good morning, Miss Hilma."

Hilma, who had set down the copper can on top of the vat, turned
about quickly.

"Oh, GOOD morning, sir;" and, unconsciously, she made a little
gesture of salutation with her hand, raising it part way toward
her head, as a man would have done.

"Well," began Annixter vaguely, "how are you getting along down
here?"

"Oh, very fine. To-day, there is not so much to do. We drew the
whey hours ago, and now we are just done putting the curd to
press. I have been cleaning. See my pans. Wouldn't they do for
mirrors, sir? And the copper things. I have scrubbed and
scrubbed. Oh, you can look into the tiniest corners, everywhere,
you won't find so much as the littlest speck of dirt or grease.
I love CLEAN things, and this room is my own particular place.
Here I can do just as I please, and that is, to keep the cement
floor, and the vats, and the churns and the separators, and
especially the cans and coppers, clean; clean, and to see that
the milk is pure, oh, so that a little baby could drink it; and
to have the air always sweet, and the sun--oh, lots and lots of
sun, morning, noon and afternoon, so that everything shines. You
know, I never see the sun set that it don't make me a little sad;
yes, always, just a little. Isn't it funny? I should want it to
be day all the time. And when the day is gloomy and dark, I am
just as sad as if a very good friend of mine had left me. Would
you believe it? Just until within a few years, when I was a big
girl, sixteen and over, mamma had to sit by my bed every night
before I could go to sleep. I was afraid in the dark. Sometimes
I am now. Just imagine, and now I am nineteen--a young lady."

"You were, hey?" observed Annixter, for the sake of saying
something. "Afraid in the dark? What of--ghosts?"

"N-no; I don't know what. I wanted the light, I wanted----" She
drew a deep breath, turning towards the window and spreading her
pink finger-tips to the light. "Oh, the SUN. I love the sun.
See, put your hand there--here on the top of the vat--like that.
Isn't it warm? Isn't it fine? And don't you love to see it
coming in like that through the windows, floods of it; and all
the little dust in it shining? Where there is lots of sunlight,
I think the people must be very good. It's only wicked people
that love the dark. And the wicked things are always done and
planned in the dark, I think. Perhaps, too, that's why I hate
things that are mysterious--things that I can't see, that happen
in the dark."  She wrinkled her nose with a little expression of
aversion. "I hate a mystery. Maybe that's why I am afraid in
the dark--or was. I shouldn't like to think that anything could
happen around me that I couldn't see or understand or explain."

She ran on from subject to subject, positively garrulous, talking
in her low-pitched voice of velvety huskiness for the mere
enjoyment of putting her ideas into speech, innocently assuming
that they were quite as interesting to others as to herself. She
was yet a great child, ignoring the fact that she had ever grown
up, taking a child's interest in her immediate surroundings,
direct, straightforward, plain. While speaking, she continued
about her work, rinsing out the cans with a mixture of hot water
and soda, scouring them bright, and piling them in the sunlight
on top of the vat.

Obliquely, and from between his narrowed lids, Annixter
scrutinised her from time to time, more and more won over by her
adorable freshness, her clean, fine youth. The clumsiness that
he usually experienced in the presence of women was wearing off.
Hilma Tree's direct simplicity put him at his ease. He began to
wonder if he dared to kiss Hilma, and if he did dare, how she
would take it. A spark of suspicion flickered up in his mind.
Did not her manner imply, vaguely, an invitation? One never
could tell with feemales. That was why she was talking so much,
no doubt, holding him there, affording the opportunity. Aha!
She had best look out, or he would take her at her word.

"Oh, I had forgotten," suddenly exclaimed Hilma, "the very thing
I wanted to show you--the new press. You remember I asked for
one last month? This is it. See, this is how it works. Here is
where the curds go; look. And this cover is screwed down like
this, and then you work the lever this way."  She grasped the
lever in both hands, throwing her weight upon it, her smooth,
bare arm swelling round and firm with the effort, one slim foot,
in its low shoe set off with the bright, steel buckle, braced
against the wall.

"My, but that takes strength," she panted, looking up at him and
smiling. "But isn't it a fine press? Just what we needed."

"And," Annixter cleared his throat, "and where do you keep the
cheeses and the butter?" He thought it very likely that these
were in the cellar of the dairy.

"In the cellar," answered Hilma. "Down here, see?" She raised
the flap of the cellar door at the end of the room. "Would you
like to see? Come down; I'll show you."

She went before him down into the cool obscurity underneath,
redolent of new cheese and fresh butter. Annixter followed, a
certain excitement beginning to gain upon him. He was almost
sure now that Hilma wanted him to kiss her. At all events, one
could but try. But, as yet, he was not absolutely sure. Suppose
he had been mistaken in her; suppose she should consider herself
insulted and freeze him with an icy stare. Annixter winced at
the very thought of it. Better let the whole business go, and
get to work. He was wasting half the morning. Yet, if she DID
want to give him the opportunity of kissing her, and he failed to
take advantage of it, what a ninny she would think him; she would
despise him for being afraid. He afraid! He, Annixter, afraid
of a fool, feemale girl. Why, he owed it to himself as a man to
go as far as he could. He told himself that that goat Osterman
would have kissed Hilma Tree weeks ago. To test his state of
mind, he imagined himself as having decided to kiss her, after
all, and at once was surprised to experience a poignant qualm of
excitement, his heart beating heavily, his breath coming short.
At the same time, his courage remained with him. He was not
afraid to try. He felt a greater respect for himself because of
this. His self-assurance hardened within him, and as Hilma
turned to him, asking him to taste a cut from one of the ripe
cheeses, he suddenly stepped close to her, throwing an arm about
her shoulders, advancing his head.

But at the last second, he bungled, hesitated; Hilma shrank from
him, supple as a young reed; Annixter clutched harshly at her
arm, and trod his full weight upon one of her slender feet, his
cheek and chin barely touching the delicate pink lobe of one of
her ears, his lips brushing merely a fold of her shirt waist
between neck and shoulder. The thing was a failure, and at once
he realised that nothing had been further from Hilma's mind than
the idea of his kissing her.

She started back from him abruptly, her hands nervously clasped
against her breast, drawing in her breath sharply and holding it
with a little, tremulous catch of the throat that sent a
quivering vibration the length of her smooth, white neck. Her
eyes opened wide with a childlike look, more of astonishment than
anger. She was surprised, out of all measure, discountenanced,
taken all aback, and when she found her breath, gave voice to a
great "Oh" of dismay and distress.

For an instant, Annixter stood awkwardly in his place,
ridiculous, clumsy, murmuring over and over again:

"Well--well--that's all right--who's going to hurt you? You
needn't be afraid--who's going to hurt you--that's all right."

Then, suddenly, with a quick, indefinite gesture of one arm, he
exclaimed:

"Good-bye, I--I'm sorry."

He turned away, striding up the stairs, crossing the dairy-room,
and regained the open air, raging and furious. He turned toward
the barns, clapping his hat upon his head, muttering the while
under his breath:

"Oh, you goat! You beastly fool PIP. Good LORD, what an ass
you've made of yourself now!"

Suddenly he resolved to put Hilma Tree out of his thoughts. The
matter was interfering with his work. This kind of thing was
sure not earning any money. He shook himself as though freeing
his shoulders of an irksome burden, and turned his entire
attention to the work nearest at hand.

The prolonged rattle of the shinglers' hammers upon the roof of
the big barn attracted him, and, crossing over between the ranch
house and the artesian well, he stood for some time absorbed in
the contemplation of the vast building, amused and interested
with the confusion of sounds--the clatter of hammers, the
cadenced scrape of saws, and the rhythmic shuffle of planes--that
issued from the gang of carpenters who were at that moment
putting the finishing touches upon the roof and rows of stalls.
A boy and two men were busy hanging the great sliding door at the
south end, while the painters--come down from Bonneville early
that morning--were engaged in adjusting the spray and force
engine, by means of which Annixter had insisted upon painting the
vast surfaces of the barn, condemning the use of brushes and pots
for such work as old-fashioned and out-of-date.

He called to one of the foremen, to ask when the barn would be
entirely finished, and was told that at the end of the week the
hay and stock could be installed.

"And a precious long time you've been at it, too," Annixter
declared.

"Well, you know the rain----"

"Oh, rot the rain! I work in the rain. You and your unions make
me sick."

"But, Mr. Annixter, we couldn't have begun painting in the rain.
The job would have been spoiled."

"Hoh, yes, spoiled. That's all very well. Maybe it would, and
then, again, maybe it wouldn't."

But when the foreman had left him, Annixter could not forbear a
growl of satisfaction. It could not be denied that the barn was
superb, monumental even. Almost any one of the other barns in
the county could be swung, bird-cage fashion, inside of it, with
room to spare. In every sense, the barn was precisely what
Annixter had hoped of it. In his pleasure over the success of
his idea, even Hilma for the moment was forgotten.

"And, now," murmured Annixter, "I'll give that dance in it. I'll
make 'em sit up."

It occurred to him that he had better set about sending out the
invitations for the affair. He was puzzled to decide just how
the thing should be managed, and resolved that it might be as
well to consult Magnus and Mrs. Derrick.

"I want to talk of this telegram of the goat's with Magnus,
anyhow," he said to himself reflectively, "and there's things I
got to do in Bonneville before the first of the month."

He turned about on his heel with a last look at the barn, and set
off toward the stable. He had decided to have his horse saddled
and ride over to Bonneville by way of Los Muertos. He would make
a day of it, would see Magnus, Harran, old Broderson and some of
the business men of Bonneville.

A few moments later, he rode out of the barn and the stable-yard,
a fresh cigar between his teeth, his hat slanted over his face
against the rays of the sun, as yet low in the east. He crossed
the irrigating ditch and gained the trail--the short cut over
into Los Muertos, by way of Hooven's. It led south and west into
the low ground overgrown by grey-green willows by Broderson
Creek, at this time of the rainy season a stream of considerable
volume, farther on dipping sharply to pass underneath the Long
Trestle of the railroad. On the other side of the right of way,
Annixter was obliged to open the gate in Derrick's line fence.
He managed this without dismounting, swearing at the horse the
while, and spurring him continually. But once inside the gate he
cantered forward briskly.

This part of Los Muertos was Hooven's holding, some five hundred
acres enclosed between the irrigating ditch and Broderson Creek,
and half the way across, Annixter came up with Hooven himself,
busily at work replacing a broken washer in his seeder. Upon one
of the horses hitched to the machine, her hands gripped tightly
upon the harness of the collar, Hilda, his little daughter, with
her small, hob-nailed boots and boy's canvas overalls, sat,
exalted and petrified with ecstasy and excitement, her eyes wide
opened, her hair in a tangle.

"Hello, Bismarck," said Annixter, drawing up beside him. "What
are YOU doing here? I thought the Governor was going to manage
without his tenants this year."

"Ach, Meest'r Ennixter," cried the other, straightening up.
"Ach, dat's you, eh? Ach, you bedt he doand menege mitout me.
Me, I gotta stay. I talk der straighd talk mit der Governor. I
fix 'em. Ach, you bedt. Sieben yahr I hef bei der rench ge-
stopped; yais, sir. Efery oder sohn-of-a-guhn bei der plaice ged
der sach bud me. Eh? Wat you tink von dose ting?"

"I think that's a crazy-looking monkey-wrench you've got there,"
observed Annixter, glancing at the instrument in Hooven's hand.

"Ach, dot wrainch," returned Hooven. "Soh! Wail, I tell you
dose ting now whair I got 'em. Say, you see dot wrainch. Dat's
not Emericen wrainch at alle. I got 'em at Gravelotte der day we
licked der stuffun oudt der Frainch, ach, you bedt. Me, I pelong
to der Wurtemberg redgimend, dot dey use to suppord der batterie
von der Brince von Hohenlohe. Alle der day we lay down bei der
stomach in der feildt behindt der batterie, und der schells von
der Frainch cennon hef eggsblode--ach, donnerwetter!--I tink
efery schell eggsblode bei der beckside my neck. Und dat go on
der whole day, noddun else, noddun aber der Frainch schell, b-r-
r, b-r-r b-r-r, b-r-AM, und der smoag, und unzer batterie, dat go
off slow, steady, yoost like der glock, eins, zwei, boom! eins,
zwei, boom! yoost like der glock, ofer und ofer again, alle der
day. Den vhen der night come dey say we hev der great victorie
made. I doand know. Vhat do I see von der bettle? Noddun. Den
we gedt oop und maerch und maerch alle night, und in der morgen
we hear dose cennon egain, hell oaf der way, far-off, I doand
know vhair. Budt, nef'r mindt. Bretty qnick, ach, Gott--" his
face flamed scarlet, "Ach, du lieber Gott! Bretty zoon, dere
wass der Kaiser, glose bei, und Fritz, Unzer Fritz. Bei Gott,
den I go grazy, und yell, ach, you bedt, der whole redgimend:
'Hoch der Kaiser! Hoch der Vaterland!' Und der dears come to der
eyes, I doand know because vhy, und der mens gry und shaike der
hend, und der whole redgimend maerch off like dat, fairy broudt,
bei Gott, der head oop high, und sing 'Die Wacht am Rhein.' Dot
wass Gravelotte."

"And the monkey-wrench?"

"Ach, I pick 'um oop vhen der batterie go. Der cennoniers hef
forgedt und leaf 'um. I carry 'um in der sack. I tink I use 'um
vhen I gedt home in der business. I was maker von vagons in
Carlsruhe, und I nef'r gedt home again. Vhen der war hef godt
over, I go beck to Ulm und gedt marriet, und den I gedt demn sick
von der armie. Vhen I gedt der release, I clair oudt, you bedt.
I come to Emerica. First, New Yor-ruk; den Milwaukee; den
Sbringfieldt-Illinoy; den Galifornie, und heir I stay."

"And the Fatherland? Ever want to go back?"

"Wail, I tell you dose ting, Meest'r Ennixter. Alle-ways, I tink
a lot oaf Shairmany, und der Kaiser, und nef'r I forgedt
Gravelotte. Budt, say, I tell you dose ting. Vhair der wife is,
und der kinder--der leedle girl Hilda--DERE IS DER VATERLAND.
Eh? Emerica, dat's my gountry now, und dere," he pointed behind
him to the house under the mammoth oak tree on the Lower Road,
"dat's my home. Dat's goot enough Vaterland for me."

Annixter gathered up the reins, about to go on.

"So you like America, do you, Bismarck?" he said. "Who do you
vote for?"

"Emerica? I doand know," returned the other, insistently.
"Dat's my home yonder. Dat's my Vaterland. Alle von we
Shairmens yoost like dot. Shairmany, dot's hell oaf some fine
plaice, sure. Budt der Vaterland iss vhair der home und der wife
und kinder iss. Eh?  Yes?  Voad?  Ach, no. Me, I nef'r voad.
I doand bodder der haid mit dose ting. I maig der wheat grow,
und ged der braid fur der wife und Hilda, dot's all. Dot's me;
dot's Bismarck."

"Good-bye," commented Annixter, moving off.

Hooven, the washer replaced, turned to his work again, starting
up the horses. The seeder advanced, whirring.

"Ach, Hilda, leedle girl," he cried, "hold tight bei der shdrap
on. Hey MULE! Hoop! Gedt oop, you."

Annixter cantered on. In a few moments, he had crossed Broderson
Creek and had entered upon the Home ranch of Los Muertos. Ahead
of him, but so far off that the greater portion of its bulk was
below the horizon, he could see the Derricks' home, a roof or two
between the dull green of cypress and eucalyptus. Nothing else
was in sight. The brown earth, smooth, unbroken, was as a
limitless, mud-coloured ocean. The silence was profound.

Then, at length, Annixter's searching eye made out a blur on the
horizon to the northward; the blur concentrated itself to a
speck; the speck grew by steady degrees to a spot, slowly moving,
a note of dull colour, barely darker than the land, but an inky
black silhouette as it topped a low rise of ground and stood for
a moment outlined against the pale blue of the sky. Annixter
turned his horse from the road and rode across the ranch land to
meet this new object of interest. As the spot grew larger, it
resolved itself into constituents, a collection of units; its
shape grew irregular, fragmentary. A disintegrated, nebulous
confusion advanced toward Annixter, preceded, as he discovered on
nearer approach, by a medley of faint sounds. Now it was no
longer a spot, but a column, a column that moved, accompanied by
spots. As Annixter lessened the distance, these spots resolved
themselves into buggies or men on horseback that kept pace with
the advancing column. There were horses in the column itself.
At first glance, it appeared as if there were nothing else, a
riderless squadron tramping steadily over the upturned plough
land of the ranch. But it drew nearer. The horses were in
lines, six abreast, harnessed to machines. The noise increased,
defined itself. There was a shout or two; occasionally a horse
blew through his nostrils with a prolonged, vibrating snort. The
click and clink of metal work was incessant, the machines
throwing off a continual rattle of wheels and cogs and clashing
springs. The column approached nearer; was close at hand. The
noises mingled to a subdued uproar, a bewildering confusion; the
impact of innumerable hoofs was a veritable rumble. Machine
after machine appeared; and Annixter, drawing to one side,
remained for nearly ten minutes watching and interested, while,
like an array of chariots--clattering, jostling, creaking,
clashing, an interminable procession, machine succeeding machine,
six-horse team succeeding six-horse team--bustling, hurried--
Magnus Derrick's thirty-three grain drills, each with its eight
hoes, went clamouring past, like an advance of military, seeding
the ten thousand acres of the great ranch; fecundating the living
soil; implanting deep in the dark womb of the Earth the germ of
life, the sustenance of a whole world, the food of an entire
People.

When the drills had passed, Annixter turned and rode back to the
Lower Road, over the land now thick with seed. He did not wonder
that the seeding on Los Muertos seemed to be hastily conducted.
Magnus and Harran Derrick had not yet been able to make up the
time lost at the beginning of the season, when they had waited so
long for the ploughs to arrive. They had been behindhand all the
time. On Annixter's ranch, the land had not only been harrowed,
as well as seeded, but in some cases, cross-harrowed as well.
The labour of putting in the vast crop was over. Now there was
nothing to do but wait, while the seed silently germinated;
nothing to do but watch for the wheat to come up.

When Annixter reached the ranch house of Los Muertos, under the
shade of the cypress and eucalyptus trees, he found Mrs. Derrick
on the porch, seated in a long wicker chair. She had been
washing her hair, and the light brown locks that yet retained so
much of their brightness, were carefully spread in the sun over
the back of her chair. Annixter could not but remark that,
spite of her more than fifty years, Annie Derrick was yet rather
pretty. Her eyes were still those of a young girl, just touched
with an uncertain expression of innocence and inquiry, but as her
glance fell upon him, he found that that expression changed to
one of uneasiness, of distrust, almost of aversion.

The night before this, after Magnus and his wife had gone to bed,
they had lain awake for hours, staring up into the dark, talking,
talking. Magnus had not long been able to keep from his wife the
news of the coalition that was forming against the railroad, nor
the fact that this coalition was determined to gain its ends by
any means at its command. He had told her of Osterman's scheme
of a fraudulent election to seat a Board of Railroad
Commissioners, who should be nominees of the farming interests.
Magnus and his wife had talked this matter over and over again;
and the same discussion, begun immediately after supper the
evening before, had lasted till far into the night.

At once, Annie Derrick had been seized with a sudden terror lest
Magnus, after all, should allow himself to be persuaded; should
yield to the pressure that was every day growing stronger. None
better than she knew the iron integrity of her husband's
character. None better than she remembered how his dearest
ambition, that of political preferment, had been thwarted by his
refusal to truckle, to connive, to compromise with his ideas of
right. Now, at last, there seemed to be a change. Long
continued oppression, petty tyranny, injustice and extortion had
driven him to exasperation. S. Behrman's insults still rankled.
He seemed nearly ready to countenance Osterman's scheme. The
very fact that he was willing to talk of it to her so often and
at such great length, was proof positive that it occupied his
mind. The pity of it, the tragedy of it! He, Magnus, the
"Governor," who had been so staunch, so rigidly upright, so loyal
to his convictions, so bitter in his denunciation of the New
Politics, so scathing in his attacks on bribery and corruption in
high places; was it possible that now, at last, he could be
brought to withhold his condemnation of the devious intrigues of
the unscrupulous, going on there under his very eyes? That
Magnus should not command Harran to refrain from all intercourse
with the conspirators, had been a matter of vast surprise to Mrs.
Derrick. Time was when Magnus would have forbidden his son to so
much as recognise a dishonourable man.

But besides all this, Derrick's wife trembled at the thought of
her husband and son engaging in so desperate a grapple with the
railroad--that great monster, iron-hearted, relentless,
infinitely powerful. Always it had issued triumphant from the
fight; always S. Behrman, the Corporation's champion, remained
upon the field as victor, placid, unperturbed, unassailable. But
now a more terrible struggle than any hitherto loomed menacing
over the rim of the future; money was to be spent like water;
personal reputations were to be hazarded in the issue; failure
meant ruin in all directions, financial ruin, moral ruin, ruin of
prestige, ruin of character. Success, to her mind, was almost
impossible. Annie Derrick feared the railroad. At night, when
everything else was still, the distant roar of passing trains
echoed across Los Muertos, from Guadalajara, from Bonneville, or
from the Long Trestle, straight into her heart. At such moments
she saw very plainly the galloping terror of steam and steel,
with its single eye, cyclopean, red, shooting from horizon to
horizon, symbol of a vast power, huge and terrible; the leviathan
with tentacles of steel, to oppose which meant to be ground to
instant destruction beneath the clashing wheels. No, it was
better to submit, to resign oneself to the inevitable. She
obliterated herself, shrinking from the harshness of the world,
striving, with vain hands, to draw her husband back with her.

Just before Annixter's arrival, she had been sitting, thoughtful,
in her long chair, an open volume of poems turned down upon her
lap, her glance losing itself in the immensity of Los Muertos
that, from the edge of the lawn close by, unrolled itself,
gigantic, toward the far, southern horizon, wrinkled and serrated
after the season's ploughing. The earth, hitherto grey with
dust, was now upturned and brown. As far as the eye could reach,
it was empty of all life, bare, mournful, absolutely still; and,
as she looked, there seemed to her morbid imagination--diseased
and disturbed with long brooding, sick with the monotony of
repeated sensation--to be disengaged from all this immensity, a
sense of a vast oppression, formless, disquieting. The terror of
sheer bigness grew slowly in her mind; loneliness beyond words
gradually enveloped her. She was lost in all these limitless
reaches of space. Had she been abandoned in mid-ocean, in an
open boat, her terror could hardly have been greater. She felt
vividly that certain uncongeniality which, when all is said,
forever remains between humanity and the earth which supports it.
She recognised the colossal indifference of nature, not hostile,
even kindly and friendly, so long as the human ant-swarm was
submissive, working with it, hurrying along at its side in the
mysterious march of the centuries. Let, however, the insect
rebel, strive to make head against the power of this nature, and
at once it became relentless, a gigantic engine, a vast power,
huge, terrible; a leviathan with a heart of steel, knowing no
compunction, no forgiveness, no tolerance; crushing out the human
atom with sound less calm, the agony of destruction sending never
a jar, never the faintest tremour through all that prodigious
mechanism of wheels and cogs.

Such thoughts as these did not take shape distinctly in her mind.
She could not have told herself exactly what it was that
disquieted her. She only received the vague sensation of these
things, as it were a breath of wind upon her face, confused,
troublous, an indefinite sense of hostility in the air.

The sound of hoofs grinding upon the gravel of the driveway
brought her to herself again, and, withdrawing her gaze from the
empty plain of Los Muertos, she saw young Annixter stopping his
horse by the carriage steps. But the sight of him only diverted
her mind to the other trouble. She could not but regard him with
aversion. He was one of the conspirators, was one of the leaders
in the battle that impended; no doubt, he had come to make a
fresh attempt to win over Magnus to the unholy alliance.

However, there was little trace of enmity in her greeting. Her
hair was still spread, like a broad patch of back, and she made
that her excuse for not getting up. In answer to Annixter's
embarrassed inquiry after Magnus, she sent the Chinese cook to
call him from the office; and Annixter, after tying his horse to
the ring driven into the trunk of one of the eucalyptus trees,
came up to the porch, and, taking off his hat, sat down upon the
steps.

"Is Harran anywhere about?" he asked. "I'd like to see Harran,
too."

"No," said Mrs. Derrick, "Harran went to Bonneville early this
morning."

She glanced toward Annixter nervously, without turning her head,
lest she should disturb her outspread hair.

"What is it you want to see Mr. Derrick about?" she inquired
hastily. "Is it about this plan to elect a Railroad Commission?
Magnus does not approve of it," she declared with energy. "He
told me so last night."

Annixter moved about awkwardly where he sat, smoothing down with
his hand the one stiff lock of yellow hair that persistently
stood up from his crown like an Indian's scalp-lock. At once his
suspicions were all aroused. Ah! this feemale woman was trying
to get a hold on him, trying to involve him in a petticoat mess,
trying to cajole him. Upon the instant, he became very crafty;
an excess of prudence promptly congealed his natural impulses.
In an actual spasm of caution, he scarcely trusted himself to
speak, terrified lest he should commit himself to something. He
glanced about apprehensively, praying that Magnus might join them
speedily, relieving the tension.

"I came to see about giving a dance in my new barn," he answered,
scowling into the depths of his hat, as though reading from notes
he had concealed there. "I wanted to ask how I should send out
the invites. I thought of just putting an ad. in the 'Mercury.'"

But as he spoke, Presley had come up behind Annixter in time to
get the drift of the conversation, and now observed:

"That's nonsense, Buck. You're not giving a public ball. You
MUST send out invitations."

"Hello, Presley, you there?" exclaimed Annixter, turning round.
The two shook hands.

"Send out invitations?" repeated Annixter uneasily. "Why must
I?"

"Because that's the only way to do."

"It is, is it?" answered Annixter, perplexed and troubled. No
other man of his acquaintance could have so contradicted Annixter
without provoking a quarrel upon the instant. Why the young
rancher, irascible, obstinate, belligerent, should invariably
defer to the poet, was an inconsistency never to be explained.
It was with great surprise that Mrs. Derrick heard him continue:

"Well, I suppose you know what you're talking about, Pres. Must
have written invites, hey?"

"Of course."

"Typewritten?"

"Why, what an ass you are, Buck," observed Presley calmly.
"Before you get through with it, you will probably insult three-
fourths of the people you intend to invite, and have about a
hundred quarrels on your hands, and a lawsuit or two."

However, before Annixter could reply, Magnus came out on the
porch, erect, grave, freshly shaven. Without realising what he
was doing, Annixter instinctively rose to his feet. It was as
though Magnus was a commander-in-chief of an unseen army, and he
a subaltern. There was some little conversation as to the
proposed dance, and then Annixter found an excuse for drawing the
Governor aside. Mrs. Derrick watched the two with eyes full of
poignant anxiety, as they slowly paced the length of the gravel
driveway to the road gate, and stood there, leaning upon it,
talking earnestly; Magnus tall, thin-lipped, impassive, one hand
in the breast of his frock coat, his head bare, his keen, blue
eyes fixed upon Annixter's face. Annixter came at once to the
main point.

"I got a wire from Osterman this morning, Governor, and, well--
we've got Disbrow. That means that the Denver, Pueblo and Mojave
is back of us. There's half the fight won, first off."

"Osterman bribed him, I suppose," observed Magnus.

Annixter raised a shoulder vexatiously.

"You've got to pay for what you get," he returned. "You don't
get something for nothing, I guess. Governor," he went on, "I
don't see how you can stay out of this business much longer. You
see how it will be. We're going to win, and I don't see how you
can feel that it's right of you to let us do all the work and
stand all the expense. There's never been a movement of any
importance that went on around you that you weren't the leader in
it. All Tulare County, all the San Joaquin, for that matter,
knows you. They want a leader, and they are looking to you. I
know how you feel about politics nowadays. But, Governor,
standards have changed since your time; everybody plays the game
now as we are playing it--the most honourable men. You can't
play it any other way, and, pshaw! if the right wins out in the
end, that's the main thing. We want you in this thing, and we
want you bad. You've been chewing on this affair now a long
time. Have you made up your mind?  Do you come in?  I tell you
what, you've got to look at these things in a large way. You've
got to judge by results. Well, now, what do you think?  Do you
come in?"

Magnus's glance left Annixter's face, and for an instant sought
the ground. His frown lowered, but now it was in perplexity,
rather than in anger. His mind was troubled, harassed with a
thousand dissensions.

But one of Magnus's strongest instincts, one of his keenest
desires, was to be, if only for a short time, the master. To
control men had ever been his ambition; submission of any kind,
his greatest horror. His energy stirred within him, goaded by
the lash of his anger, his sense of indignity, of insult. Oh for
one moment to be able to strike back, to crush his enemy, to
defeat the railroad, hold the Corporation in the grip of his
fist, put down S. Behrman, rehabilitate himself, regain his self-
respect. To be once more powerful, to command, to dominate. His
thin lips pressed themselves together; the nostrils of his
prominent hawk-like nose dilated, his erect, commanding figure
stiffened unconsciously. For a moment, he saw himself
controlling the situation, the foremost figure in his State,
feared, respected, thousands of men beneath him, his ambition at
length gratified; his career, once apparently brought to naught,
completed; success a palpable achievement. What if this were his
chance, after all, come at last after all these years. His
chance! The instincts of the old-time gambler, the most
redoubtable poker player of El Dorado County, stirred at the
word. Chance! To know it when it came, to recognise it as it
passed fleet as a wind-flurry, grip at it, catch at it, blind,
reckless, staking all upon the hazard of the issue, that was
genius. Was this his Chance? All of a sudden, it seemed to him
that it was. But his honour! His cherished, lifelong integrity,
the unstained purity of his principles? At this late date, were
they to be sacrificed? Could he now go counter to all the firm
built fabric of his character? How, afterward, could he bear to
look Harran and Lyman in the face? And, yet--and, yet--back
swung the pendulum--to neglect his Chance meant failure; a life
begun in promise, and ended in obscurity, perhaps in financial
ruin, poverty even. To seize it meant achievement, fame,
influence, prestige, possibly great wealth.

"I am so sorry to interrupt," said Mrs. Derrick, as she came up.
"I hope Mr. Annixter will excuse me, but I want Magnus to open
the safe for me. I have lost the combination, and I must have
some money. Phelps is going into town, and I want him to pay
some bills for me. Can't you come right away, Magnus? Phelps is
ready and waiting."

Annixter struck his heel into the ground with a suppressed oath.
Always these fool feemale women came between him and his plans,
mixing themselves up in his affairs. Magnus had been on the very
point of saying something, perhaps committing himself to some
course of action, and, at precisely the wrong moment, his wife
had cut in. The opportunity was lost. The three returned toward
the ranch house; but before saying good-bye, Annixter had secured
from Magnus a promise to the effect that, before coming to a
definite decision in the matter under discussion, he would talk
further with him.

Presley met him at the porch. He was going into town with
Phelps, and proposed to Annixter that he should accompany them.

"I want to go over and see old Broderson," Annixter objected.

But Presley informed him that Broderson had gone to Bonneville
earlier in the morning. He had seen him go past in his
buckboard. The three men set off, Phelps and Annixter on
horseback, Presley on his bicycle.

When they had gone, Mrs. Derrick sought out her husband in the
office of the ranch house. She was at her prettiest that
morning, her cheeks flushed with excitement, her innocent, wide-
open eyes almost girlish. She had fastened her hair, still
moist, with a black ribbon tied at the back of her head, and the
soft mass of light brown reached to below her waist, making her
look very young.

"What was it he was saying to you just now," she exclaimed, as
she came through the gate in the green-painted wire railing of
the office. "What was Mr. Annixter saying? I know. He was
trying to get you to join him, trying to persuade you to be
dishonest, wasn't that it? Tell me, Magnus, wasn't that it?"

Magnus nodded.

His wife drew close to him, putting a hand on his shoulder.

"But you won't, will you? You won't listen to him again; you
won't so much as allow him--anybody--to even suppose you would
lend yourself to bribery? Oh, Magnus, I don't know what has come
over you these last few weeks. Why, before this, you would have
been insulted if any one thought you would even consider anything
like dishonesty. Magnus, it would break my heart if you joined
Mr. Annixter and Mr. Osterman. Why, you couldn't be the same man
to me afterward; you, who have kept yourself so clean till now.
And the boys; what would Lyman say, and Harran, and every one who
knows you and respects you, if you lowered yourself to be just a
political adventurer!"

For a moment, Derrick leaned his head upon his hand, avoiding her
gaze. At length, he said, drawing a deep breath: "I am troubled,
Annie. These are the evil days. I have much upon my mind."

"Evil days or not," she insisted, "promise me this one thing,
that you will not join Mr. Annixter's scheme."
She had taken his hand in both of hers and was looking into his
face, her pretty eyes full of pleading.

"Promise me," she repeated; "give me your word. Whatever
happens, let me always be able to be proud of you, as I always
have been. Give me your word. I know you never seriously
thought of joining Mr. Annixter, but I am so nervous and
frightened sometimes. Just to relieve my mind, Magnus, give me
your word."

"Why--you are right," he answered. "No, I never thought
seriously of it. Only for a moment, I was ambitious to be--I
don't know what--what I had hoped to be once--well, that is over
now. Annie, your husband is a disappointed man."

"Give me your word," she insisted. "We can talk about other
things afterward."

Again Magnus wavered, about to yield to his better instincts and
to the entreaties of his wife. He began to see how perilously
far he had gone in this business. He was drifting closer to it
every hour. Already he was entangled, already his foot was
caught in the mesh that was being spun. Sharply he recoiled.
Again all his instincts of honesty revolted. No, whatever
happened, he would preserve his integrity. His wife was right.
Always she had influenced his better side. At that moment,
Magnus's repugnance of the proposed political campaign was at its
pitch of intensity. He wondered how he had ever allowed himself
to so much as entertain the idea of joining with the others.
Now, he would wrench free, would, in a single instant of power,
clear himself of all compromising relations. He turned to his
wife. Upon his lips trembled the promise she implored. But
suddenly there came to his mind the recollection of his new-made
pledge to Annixter. He had given his word that before arriving
at a decision he would have a last interview with him. To
Magnus, his given word was sacred. Though now he wanted to, he
could not as yet draw back, could not promise his wife that he
would decide to do right. The matter must be delayed a few days
longer.

Lamely, he explained this to her. Annie Derrick made but little
response when he had done. She kissed his forehead and went out
of the room, uneasy, depressed, her mind thronging with vague
fears, leaving Magnus before his office desk, his head in his
hands, thoughtful, gloomy, assaulted by forebodings.

Meanwhile, Annixter, Phelps, and Presley continued on their way
toward Bonneville. In a short time they had turned into the
County Road by the great watering-tank, and proceeded onward in
the shade of the interminable line of poplar trees, the wind-
break that stretched along the roadside bordering the Broderson
ranch. But as they drew near to Caraher's saloon and grocery,
about half a mile outside of Bonneville, they recognised Harran's
horse tied to the railing in front of it. Annixter left the
others and went in to see Harran.

"Harran," he said, when the two had sat down on either side of
one of the small tables, "you've got to make up your mind one way
or another pretty soon. What are you going to do? Are you going
to stand by and see the rest of the Committee spending money by
the bucketful in this thing and keep your hands in your pockets?
If we win, you'll benefit just as much as the rest of us. I
suppose you've got some money of your own--you have, haven't you?
You are your father's manager, aren't you?"

Disconcerted at Annixter's directness, Harran stammered an
affirmative, adding:

"It's hard to know just what to do. It's a mean position for me,
Buck. I want to help you others, but I do want to play fair. I
don't know how to play any other way. I should like to have a
line from the Governor as to how to act, but there's no getting a
word out of him these days. He seems to want to let me decide
for myself ."

"Well, look here," put in Annixter. "Suppose you keep out of the
thing till it's all over, and then share and share alike with the
Committee on campaign expenses."

Harran fell thoughtful, his hands in his pockets, frowning
moodily at the toe of his boot. There was a silence. Then:

"I don't like to go it blind," he hazarded. "I'm sort of sharing
the responsibility of what you do, then. I'm a silent partner.
And, then--I don't want to have any difficulties with the
Governor. We've always got along well together. He wouldn't
like it, you know, if I did anything like that."
"Say," exclaimed Annixter abruptly, "if the Governor says he will
keep his hands off, and that you can do as you please, will you
come in? For God's sake, let us ranchers act together for once.
Let's stand in with each other in ONE fight."

Without knowing it, Annixter had touched the right spring.

"I don't know but what you're right," Harran murmured vaguely.
His sense of discouragement, that feeling of what's-the-use, was
never more oppressive. All fair means had been tried. The wheat
grower was at last with his back to the wall. If he chose his
own means of fighting, the responsibility must rest upon his
enemies, not on himself.

"It's the only way to accomplish anything," he continued,
"standing in with each other . . . well, . . . go ahead and see
what you can do. If the Governor is willing, I'll come in for my
share of the campaign fund."

"That's some sense," exclaimed Annixter, shaking him by the hand.
"Half the fight is over already. We've got Disbrow you know; and
the next thing is to get hold of some of those rotten San
Francisco bosses. Osterman will----" But Harran interrupted him,
making a quick gesture with his hand.

"Don't tell me about it," he said. "I don't want to know what
you and Osterman are going to do. If I did, I shouldn't come
in."

Yet, for all this, before they said good-bye Annixter had
obtained Harran's promise that he would attend the next meeting
of the Committee, when Osterman should return from Los Angeles
and make his report. Harran went on toward Los Muertos.
Annixter mounted and rode into Bonneville.

Bonneville was very lively at all times. It was a little city of
some twenty or thirty thousand inhabitants, where, as yet, the
city hall, the high school building, and the opera house were
objects of civic pride. It was well governed, beautifully clean,
full of the energy and strenuous young life of a new city. An
air of the briskest activity pervaded its streets and sidewalks.
The business portion of the town, centring about Main Street, was
always crowded. Annixter, arriving at the Post Office, found
himself involved in a scene of swiftly shifting sights and
sounds. Saddle horses, farm wagons--the inevitable Studebakers--
buggies grey with the dust of country roads, buckboards with
squashes and grocery packages stowed under the seat, two-wheeled
sulkies and training carts, were hitched to the gnawed railings
and zinc-sheathed telegraph poles along the curb. Here and
there, on the edge of the sidewalk, were bicycles, wedged into
bicycle racks painted with cigar advertisements. Upon the
asphalt sidewalk itself, soft and sticky with the morning's heat,
was a continuous movement. Men with large stomachs, wearing
linen coats but no vests, laboured ponderously up and down.
Girls in lawn skirts, shirt waists, and garden hats, went to and
fro, invariably in couples, coming in and out of the drug store,
the grocery store, and haberdasher's, or lingering in front of
the Post Office, which was on a corner under the I.O.O.F. hall.
Young men, in shirt sleeves, with brown, wicker cuff-protectors
over their forearms, and pencils behind their ears, bustled in
front of the grocery store, anxious and preoccupied. A very old
man, a Mexican, in ragged white trousers and bare feet, sat on a
horse-block in front of the barber shop, holding a horse by a
rope around its neck. A Chinaman went by, teetering under the
weight of his market baskets slung on a pole across his
shoulders. In the neighbourhood of the hotel, the Yosemite
House, travelling salesmen, drummers for jewelry firms of San
Francisco, commercial agents, insurance men, well- dressed,
metropolitan, debonair, stood about cracking jokes, or hurried in
and out of the flapping white doors of the Yosemite barroom. The
Yosemite 'bus and City 'bus passed up the street, on the way from
the morning train, each with its two or three passengers. A very
narrow wagon, belonging to the Cole & Colemore Harvester Works,
went by, loaded with long strips of iron that made a horrible din
as they jarred over the unevenness of the pavement. The electric
car line, the city's boast, did a brisk business, its cars
whirring from end to end of the street, with a jangling of bells
and a moaning plaint of gearing. On the stone bulkheads of the
grass plat around the new City Hall, the usual loafers sat,
chewing tobacco, swapping stories. In the park were the
inevitable array of nursemaids, skylarking couples, and ragged
little boys. A single policeman, in grey coat and helmet, friend
and acquaintance of every man and woman in the town, stood by the
park entrance, leaning an elbow on the fence post, twirling his
club.

But in the centre of the best business block of the street was a
three-story building of rough brown stone, set off with plate
glass windows and gold-lettered signs. One of these latter read,
"Pacific and Southwestern Railroad, Freight and Passenger
Office," while another much smaller, beneath the windows of the
second story bore the inscription, "P. and S. W. Land Office."

Annixter hitched his horse to the iron post in front of this
building, and tramped up to the second floor, letting himself
into an office where a couple of clerks and bookkeepers sat at
work behind a high wire screen. One of these latter recognised
him and came forward.

"Hello," said Annixter abruptly, scowling the while. "Is your
boss in? Is Ruggles in?"

The bookkeeper led Annixter to the private office in an adjoining
room, ushering him through a door, on the frosted glass of which
was painted the name, "Cyrus Blakelee Ruggles."  Inside, a man in
a frock coat, shoestring necktie, and Stetson hat, sat writing at
a roller-top desk. Over this desk was a vast map of the railroad
holdings in the country about Bonneville and Guadalajara, the
alternate sections belonging to the Corporation accurately
plotted.
Ruggles was cordial in his welcome of Annixter. He had a way of
fiddling with his pencil continually while he talked, scribbling
vague lines and fragments of words and names on stray bits of
paper, and no sooner had Annixter sat down than he had begun to
write, in full-bellied script, ANN ANN all over his blotting pad.

"I want to see about those lands of mine--I mean of yours--of the
railroad's," Annixter commenced at once. "I want to know when I
can buy. I'm sick of fooling along like this."

"Well, Mr. Annixter," observed Ruggles, writing a great L before
the ANN, and finishing it off with a flourishing D. "The lands"--
he crossed out one of the N's and noted the effect with a hasty
glance--"the lands are practically yours. You have an option on
them indefinitely, and, as it is, you don't have to pay the
taxes."

"Rot your option! I want to own them," Annixter declared. "What
have you people got to gain by putting off selling them to us.
Here this thing has dragged along for over eight years. When I
came in on Quien Sabe, the understanding was that the lands--your
alternate sections--were to be conveyed to me within a few
months."

"The land had not been patented to us then," answered Ruggles.

"Well, it has been now, I guess," retorted Annixter.

"I'm sure I couldn't tell you, Mr. Annixter."

Annixter crossed his legs weariedly.

"Oh, what's the good of lying, Ruggles?  You know better than to
talk that way to me."

Ruggles's face flushed on the instant, but he checked his answer
and laughed instead.

"Oh, if you know so much about it--" he observed.

"Well, when are you going to sell to me?"

"I'm only acting for the General Office, Mr. Annixter," returned
Ruggles. "Whenever the Directors are ready to take that matter
up, I'll be only too glad to put it through for you."

"As if you didn't know. Look here, you're not talking to old
Broderson. Wake up, Ruggles. What's all this talk in
Genslinger's rag about the grading of the value of our lands this
winter and an advance in the price?"

Ruggles spread out his hands with a deprecatory gesture.

"I don't own the 'Mercury,'" he said.

"Well, your company does."

"If it does, I don't know anything about it."

"Oh, rot! As if you and Genslinger and S. Behrman didn't run the
whole show down here. Come on, let's have it, Ruggles. What
does S. Behrman pay Genslinger for inserting that three-inch ad.
of the P. and S. W. in his paper?  Ten thousand a year, hey?"

"Oh, why not a hundred thousand and be done with it?" returned
the other, willing to take it as a joke.

Instead of replying, Annixter drew his check-book from his inside
pocket.

"Let me take that fountain pen of yours," he said. Holding the
book on his knee he wrote out a check, tore it carefully from the
stub, and laid it on the desk in front of Ruggles.

"What's this?" asked Ruggles.

"Three-fourths payment for the sections of railroad land included
in my ranch, based on a valuation of two dollars and a half per
acre. You can have the balance in sixty-day notes."

Ruggles shook his head, drawing hastily back from the check as
though it carried contamination.

"I can't touch it," he declared. "I've no authority to sell to
you yet."

"I don't understand you people," exclaimed Annixter. "I offered
to buy of you the same way four years ago and you sang the same
song. Why, it isn't business. You lose the interest on your
money. Seven per cent. of that capital for four years--you can
figure it out. It's big money."

"Well, then, I don't see why you're so keen on parting with it.
You can get seven per cent. the same as us."

"I want to own my own land," returned Annixter. "I want to feel
that every lump of dirt inside my fence is my personal property.
Why, the very house I live in now--the ranch house--stands on
railroad ground."

"But, you've an option"

"I tell you I don't want your cursed option. I want ownership;
and it's the same with Magnus Derrick and old Broderson and
Osterman and all the ranchers of the county. We want to own our
land, want to feel we can do as we blame please with it. Suppose
I should want to sell Quien Sabe. I can't sell it as a whole
till I've bought of you. I can't give anybody a clear title.
The land has doubled in value ten times over again since I came
in on it and improved it. It's worth easily twenty an acre now.
But I can't take advantage of that rise in value so long as you
won't sell, so long as I don't own it. You're blocking me."

"But, according to you, the railroad can't take advantage of the
rise in any case. According to you, you can sell for twenty
dollars, but we can only get two and a half."

"Who made it worth twenty?" cried Annixter. "I've improved it up
to that figure. Genslinger seems to have that idea in his nut,
too. Do you people think you can hold that land, untaxed, for
speculative purposes until it goes up to thirty dollars and then
sell out to some one else--sell it over our heads?  You and
Genslinger weren't in office when those contracts were drawn.
You ask your boss, you ask S. Behrman, he knows. The General
Office is pledged to sell to us in preference to any one else,
for two and a half."

"Well," observed Ruggles decidedly, tapping the end of his pencil
on his desk and leaning forward to emphasise his words, "we're
not selling NOW. That's said and signed, Mr. Annixter."

"Why not? Come, spit it out. What's the bunco game this time?"

"Because we're not ready. Here's your check."

"You won't take it?"

"No."

"I'll make it a cash payment, money down--the whole of it--
payable to Cyrus Blakelee Ruggles, for the P. and S. W."

"No."

"Third and last time."

"No."

"Oh, go to the devil!"

"I don't like your tone, Mr. Annixter," returned Ruggles,
flushing angrily. "I don't give a curse whether you like it or
not," retorted Annixter, rising and thrusting the check into his
pocket, "but never you mind, Mr. Ruggles, you and S. Behrman and
Genslinger and Shelgrim and the whole gang of thieves of you--
you'll wake this State of California up some of these days by
going just one little bit too far, and there'll be an election of
Railroad Commissioners of, by, and for the people, that'll get a
twist of you, my bunco-steering friend--you and your backers and
cappers and swindlers and thimble-riggers, and smash you, lock,
stock, and barrel. That's my tip to you and be damned to you,
Mr. Cyrus Blackleg Ruggles."

Annixter stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind him,
and Ruggles, trembling with anger, turned to his desk and to the
blotting pad written all over with the words LANDS, TWENTY
DOLLARS, TWO AND A HALF, OPTION, and, over and over again, with
great swelling curves and flourishes, RAILROAD, RAILROAD,
RAILROAD.

But as Annixter passed into the outside office, on the other side
of the wire partition he noted the figure of a man at the counter
in conversation with one of the clerks. There was something
familiar to Annixter's eye about the man's heavy built frame, his
great shoulders and massive back, and as he spoke to the clerk in
a tremendous, rumbling voice, Annixter promptly recognised Dyke.

There was a meeting. Annixter liked Dyke, as did every one else
in and about Bonneville. He paused now to shake hands with the
discharged engineer and to ask about his little daughter, Sidney,
to whom he knew Dyke was devotedly attached.

"Smartest little tad in Tulare County," asserted Dyke. "She's
getting prettier every day, Mr. Annixter. THERE'S a little tad
that was just born to be a lady. Can recite the whole of 'Snow
Bound' without ever stopping. You don't believe that, maybe,
hey? Well, it's true. She'll be just old enough to enter the
Seminary up at Marysville next winter, and if my hop business
pays two per cent. on the investment, there's where she's going
to go."

"How's it coming on?" inquired Annixter.

"The hop ranch?  Prime. I've about got the land in shape, and
I've engaged a foreman who knows all about hops. I've been in
luck. Everybody will go into the business next year when they
see hops go to a dollar, and they'll overstock the market and
bust the price. But I'm going to get the cream of it now. I say
two per cent. Why, Lord love you, it will pay a good deal more
than that. It's got to. It's cost more than I figured to start
the thing, so, perhaps, I may have to borrow somewheres; but then
on such a sure game as this--and I do want to make something out
of that little tad of mine."

"Through here?" inquired Annixter, making ready to move off.

"In just a minute," answered Dyke. "Wait for me and I'll walk
down the street with you."

Annixter grumbled that he was in a hurry, but waited,
nevertheless, while Dyke again approached the clerk.

"I shall want some empty cars of you people this fall," he
explained. "I'm a hop-raiser now, and I just want to make sure
what your rates on hops are. I've been told, but I want to make
sure. Savvy?" There was a long delay while the clerk consulted
the tariff schedules, and Annixter fretted impatiently. Dyke,
growing uneasy, leaned heavily on his elbows, watching the clerk
anxiously. If the tariff was exorbitant, he saw his plans
brought to naught, his money jeopardised, the little tad, Sidney,
deprived of her education. He began to blame himself that he had
not long before determined definitely what the railroad would
charge for moving his hops. He told himself he was not much of a
business man; that he managed carelessly.

"Two cents," suddenly announced the clerk with a certain surly
indifference.

"Two cents a pound?"

"Yes, two cents a pound--that's in car-load lots, of course. I
won't give you that rate on smaller consignments."

"Yes, car-load lots, of course . . . two cents. Well, all
right."

He turned away with a great sigh of relief.

"He sure did have me scared for a minute," he said to Annixter,
as the two went down to the street, "fiddling and fussing so
long. Two cents is all right, though. Seems fair to me. That
fiddling of his was all put on. I know 'em, these railroad
heelers. He knew I was a discharged employee first off, and he
played the game just to make me seem small because I had to ask
favours of him. I don't suppose the General Office tips its
slavees off to act like swine, but there's the feeling through
the whole herd of them. 'Ye got to come to us. We let ye live
only so long as we choose, and what are ye going to do about it?
If ye don't like it, git out.'"

Annixter and the engineer descended to the street and had a drink
at the Yosemite bar, and Annixter went into the General Store
while Dyke bought a little pair of red slippers for Sidney.
Before the salesman had wrapped them up, Dyke slipped a dime into
the toe of each with a wink at Annixter.

"Let the little tad find 'em there," he said behind his hand in a
hoarse whisper. "That'll be one on Sid."

"Where to now?" demanded Annixter as they regained the street.
"I'm going down to the Post Office and then pull out for the
ranch. Going my way?"

Dyke hesitated in some confusion, tugging at the ends of his fine
blonde beard.

"No, no. I guess I'll leave you here. I've got--got other
things to do up the street. So long."

The two separated, and Annixter hurried through the crowd to the
Post Office, but the mail that had come in on that morning's
train was unusually heavy. It was nearly half an hour before it
was distributed. Naturally enough, Annixter placed all the blame
of the delay upon the railroad, and delivered himself of some
pointed remarks in the midst of the waiting crowd. He was
irritated to the last degree when he finally emerged upon the
sidewalk again, cramming his mail into his pockets. One cause of
his bad temper was the fact that in the bundle of Quien Sabe
letters was one to Hilma Tree in a man's handwriting.

"Huh!" Annixter had growled to himself, "that pip Delaney. Seems
now that I'm to act as go-between for 'em. Well, maybe that
feemale girl gets this letter, and then, again, maybe she don't."

But suddenly his attention was diverted. Directly opposite the
Post Office, upon the corner of the street, stood quite the best
business building of which Bonneville could boast. It was built
of Colusa granite, very solid, ornate, imposing. Upon the heavy
plate of the window of its main floor, in gold and red letters,
one read the words: "Loan and Savings Bank of Tulare County."  It
was of this bank that S. Behrman was president. At the street
entrance of the building was a curved sign of polished brass,
fixed upon the angle of the masonry; this sign bore the name, "S.
Behrman," and under it in smaller letters were the words, "Real
Estate, Mortgages."

As Annixter's glance fell upon this building, he was surprised to
see Dyke standing upon the curb in front of it, apparently
reading from a newspaper that he held in his hand. But Annixter
promptly discovered that he was not reading at all. From time to
time the former engineer shot a swift glance out of the corner of
his eye up and down the street. Annixter jumped at a conclusion.
An idea suddenly occurred to him. Dyke was watching to see if he
was observed--was waiting an opportunity when no one who knew him
should be in sight. Annixter stepped back a little, getting a
telegraph pole somewhat between him and the other. Very
interested, he watched what was going on. Pretty soon Dyke
thrust the paper into his pocket and sauntered slowly to the
windows of a stationery store, next the street entrance of S.
Behrman's offices. For a few seconds he stood there, his back
turned, seemingly absorbed in the display, but eyeing the street
narrowly nevertheless; then he turned around, gave a last look
about and stepped swiftly into the doorway by the great brass
sign. He disappeared. Annixter came from behind the telegraph
pole with a flush of actual shame upon his face. There had been
something so slinking, so mean, in the movements and manner of
this great, burly honest fellow of an engineer, that he could not
help but feel ashamed for him. Circumstances were such that a
simple business transaction was to Dyke almost culpable, a
degradation, a thing to be concealed.

"Borrowing money of S. Behrman," commented Annixter, "mortgaging
your little homestead to the railroad, putting your neck in the
halter. Poor fool! The pity of it. Good Lord, your hops must
pay you big, now, old man."

Annixter lunched at the Yosemite Hotel, and then later on, toward
the middle of the afternoon, rode out of the town at a canter by
the way of the Upper Road that paralleled the railroad tracks and
that ran diametrically straight between Bonneville and
Guadalajara. About half-way between the two places he overtook
Father Sarria trudging back to San Juan, his long cassock
powdered with dust. He had a wicker crate in one hand, and in
the other, in a small square valise, the materials for the Holy
Sacrament. Since early morning the priest had covered nearly
fifteen miles on foot, in order to administer Extreme Unction to
a moribund good-for-nothing, a greaser, half Indian, half
Portuguese, who lived in a remote corner of Osterman's stock
range, at the head of a canon there. But he had returned by way
of Bonneville to get a crate that had come for him from San
Diego. He had been notified of its arrival the day before.

Annixter pulled up and passed the time of day with the priest.

"I don't often get up your way," he said, slowing down his horse
to accommodate Sarria's deliberate plodding. Sarria wiped the
perspiration from his smooth, shiny face .

"You?  Well, with you it is different," he answered. "But there
are a great many Catholics in the county--some on your ranch.
And so few come to the Mission. At High Mass on Sundays, there
are a few--Mexicans and Spaniards from Guadalajara mostly; but
weekdays, for matins, vespers, and the like, I often say the
offices to an empty church--'the voice of one crying in the
wilderness.' You Americans are not good churchmen. Sundays you
sleep--you read the newspapers."

"Well, there's Vanamee," observed Annixter. "I suppose he's
there early and late."

Sarria made a sharp movement of interest.

"Ah, Vanamee--a strange lad; a wonderful character, for all that.
If there were only more like him. I am troubled about him. You
know I am a very owl at night. I come and go about the Mission
at all hours. Within the week, three times I have seen Vanamee
in the little garden by the Mission, and at the dead of night.
He had come without asking for me. He did not see me. It was
strange. Once, when I had got up at dawn to ring for early
matins, I saw him stealing away out of the garden. He must have
been there all the night. He is acting queerly. He is pale; his
cheeks are more sunken than ever. There is something wrong with
him. I can't make it out. It is a mystery. Suppose you ask
him?"

"Not I. I've enough to bother myself about. Vanamee is crazy in
the head. Some morning he will turn up missing again, and drop
out of sight for another three years. Best let him alone,
Sarria. He's a crank. How is that greaser of yours up on
Osterman's stock range?"

"Ah, the poor fellow--the poor fellow," returned the other, the
tears coming to his eyes. "He died this morning--as you might
say, in my arms, painfully, but in the faith, in the faith. A
good fellow."

"A lazy, cattle-stealing, knife-in-his-boot Dago."

"You misjudge him. A really good fellow on better acquaintance."

Annixter grunted scornfully. Sarria's kindness and good-will
toward the most outrageous reprobates of the ranches was
proverbial. He practically supported some half-dozen families
that lived in forgotten cabins, lost and all but inaccessible, in
the far corners of stock range and canyon. This particular
greaser was the laziest, the dirtiest, the most worthless of the
lot. But in Sarria's mind, the lout was an object of affection,
sincere, unquestioning. Thrice a week the priest, with a basket
of provisions--cold ham, a bottle of wine, olives, loaves of
bread, even a chicken or two--toiled over the interminable
stretch of country between the Mission and his cabin. Of late,
during the rascal's sickness, these visits had been almost daily.
Hardly once did the priest leave the bedside that he did not slip
a half-dollar into the palm of his wife or oldest daughter. And
this was but one case out of many.

His kindliness toward animals was the same. A horde of mange-
corroded curs lived off his bounty, wolfish, ungrateful, often
marking him with their teeth, yet never knowing the meaning of a
harsh word. A burro, over-fed, lazy, incorrigible, browsed on
the hill back of the Mission, obstinately refusing to be
harnessed to Sarria's little cart, squealing and biting whenever
the attempt was made; and the priest suffered him, submitting to
his humour, inventing excuses for him, alleging that the burro
was foundered, or was in need of shoes, or was feeble from
extreme age. The two peacocks, magnificent, proud, cold-hearted,
resenting all familiarity, he served with the timorous,
apologetic affection of a queen's lady-in-waiting, resigned to
their disdain, happy if only they condescended to enjoy the grain
he spread for them.

At the Long Trestle, Annixter and the priest left the road and
took the trail that crossed Broderson Creek by the clumps of
grey-green willows and led across Quien Sabe to the ranch house,
and to the Mission farther on. They were obliged to proceed in
single file here, and Annixter, who had allowed the priest to go
in front, promptly took notice of the wicker basket he carried.
Upon his inquiry, Sarria became confused. "It was a basket that
he had had sent down to him from the city."

"Well, I know--but what's in it?"

"Why--I'm sure--ah, poultry--a chicken or two."

"Fancy breed?"

"Yes, yes, that's it, a fancy breed."  At the ranch house, where
they arrived toward five o'clock, Annixter insisted that the
priest should stop long enough for a glass of sherry. Sarria
left the basket and his small black valise at the foot of the
porch steps, and sat down in a rocker on the porch itself,
fanning himself with his broad-brimmed hat, and shaking the dust
from his cassock. Annixter brought out the decanter of sherry
and glasses, and the two drank to each other's health.

But as the priest set down his glass, wiping his lips with a
murmur of satisfaction, the decrepit Irish setter that had
attached himself to Annixter's house came out from underneath the
porch, and nosed vigorously about the wicker basket. He upset
it. The little peg holding down the cover slipped, the basket
fell sideways, opening as it fell, and a cock, his head enclosed
in a little chamois bag such as are used for gold watches,
struggled blindly out into the open air. A second, similarly
hooded, followed. The pair, stupefied in their headgear, stood
rigid and bewildered in their tracks, clucking uneasily. Their
tails were closely sheared. Their legs, thickly muscled, and
extraordinarily long, were furnished with enormous cruel-looking
spurs. The breed was unmistakable. Annixter looked once at the
pair, then shouted with laughter.

"'Poultry'--'a chicken or two'--'fancy breed'--ho! yes, I should
think so. Game cocks! Fighting cocks! Oh, you old rat! You'll
be a dry nurse to a burro, and keep a hospital for infirm
puppies, but you will fight game cocks. Oh, Lord! Why, Sarria,
this is as good a grind as I ever heard. There's the Spanish
cropping out, after all."

Speechless with chagrin, the priest bundled the cocks into the
basket and catching up the valise, took himself abruptly away,
almost running till he had put himself out of hearing of
Annixter's raillery. And even ten minutes later, when Annixter,
still chuckling, stood upon the porch steps, he saw the priest,
far in the distance, climbing the slope of the high ground, in
the direction of the Mission, still hurrying on at a great pace,
his cassock flapping behind him, his head bent; to Annixter's
notion the very picture of discomfiture and confusion.

As Annixter turned about to reenter the house, he found himself
almost face to face with Hilma Tree. She was just going in at
the doorway, and a great flame of the sunset, shooting in under
the eaves of the porch, enveloped her from her head, with its
thick, moist hair that hung low over her neck, to her slim feet,
setting a golden flash in the little steel buckles of her low
shoes. She had come to set the table for Annixter's supper.
Taken all aback by the suddenness of the encounter, Annixter
ejaculated an abrupt and senseless, "Excuse me."  But Hilma,
without raising her eyes, passed on unmoved into the dining-room,
leaving Annixter trying to find his breath, and fumbling with the
brim of his hat, that he was surprised to find he had taken from
his head. Resolutely, and taking a quick advantage of his
opportunity, he followed her into the dining-room.

"I see that dog has turned up," he announced with brisk
cheerfulness. "That Irish setter I was asking about."

Hilma, a swift, pink flush deepening the delicate rose of her
cheeks, did not reply, except by nodding her head. She flung the
table-cloth out from under her arms across the table, spreading
it smooth, with quick little caresses of her hands. There was a
moment's silence. Then Annixter said:

"Here's a letter for you."  He laid it down on the table near
her, and Hilma picked it up. "And see here, Miss Hilma,"
Annixter continued, "about that--this morning--I suppose you
think I am a first-class mucker. If it will do any good to
apologise, why, I will. I want to be friends with you. I made a
bad mistake, and started in the wrong way. I don't know much
about women people. I want you to forget about that--this
morning, and not think I am a galoot and a mucker. Will you do
it? Will you be friends with me?"

Hilma set the plate and coffee cup by Annixter's place before
answering, and Annixter repeated his question. Then she drew a
deep, quick breath, the flush in her cheeks returning.

"I think it was--it was so wrong of you," she murmured. "Oh!
you don't know how it hurt me. I cried--oh, for an hour."

"Well, that's just it," returned Annixter vaguely, moving his
head uneasily. "I didn't know what kind of a girl you were--I
mean, I made a mistake. I thought it didn't make much
difference. I thought all feemales were about alike."

"I hope you know now," murmured Hilma ruefully. "I've paid
enough to have you find out. I cried--you don't know. Why, it
hurt me worse than anything I can remember. I hope you know
now."
"Well, I do know now," he exclaimed.

"It wasn't so much that you tried to do--what you did," answered
Hilma, the single deep swell from her waist to her throat rising
and falling in her emotion. "It was that you thought that you
could--that anybody could that wanted to--that I held myself so
cheap. Oh!" she cried, with a sudden sobbing catch in her
throat, "I never can forget it, and you don't know what it means
to a girl."

"Well, that's just what I do want," he repeated. "I want you to
forget it and have us be good friends."

In his embarrassment, Annixter could think of no other words. He
kept reiterating again and again during the pauses of the
conversation:

"I want you to forget it. Will you? Will you forget it--that--
this morning, and have us be good friends?"

He could see that her trouble was keen. He was astonished that
the matter should be so grave in her estimation. After all, what
was it that a girl should be kissed? But he wanted to regain his
lost ground.

"Will you forget it, Miss Hilma? I want you to like me."

She took a clean napkin from the sideboard drawer and laid it
down by the plate.

"I--I do want you to like me," persisted Annixter. "I want you
to forget all about this business and like me."

Hilma was silent. Annixter saw the tears in her eyes.

"How about that?  Will you forget it?  Will you--will--will you
LIKE me?"

She shook her head.

"No," she said.

"No what?  You won't like me?  Is that it?"

Hilma, blinking at the napkin through her tears, nodded to say,
Yes, that was it. Annixter hesitated a moment, frowning,
harassed and perplexed.

"You don't like me at all, hey?"

At length Hilma found her speech. In her low voice, lower and
more velvety than ever, she said:

"No--I don't like you at all."

Then, as the tears suddenly overpowered her, she dashed a hand
across her eyes, and ran from the room and out of doors.

Annixter stood for a moment thoughtful, his protruding lower lip
thrust out, his hands in his pocket.

"I suppose she'll quit now," he muttered. "Suppose she'll leave
the ranch--if she hates me like that. Well, she can go--that's
all--she can go. Fool feemale girl," he muttered between his
teeth, "petticoat mess."
He was about to sit down to his supper when his eye fell upon the
Irish setter, on his haunches in the doorway. There was an
expectant, ingratiating look on the dog's face. No doubt, he
suspected it was time for eating.

"Get out--YOU!" roared Annixter in a tempest of wrath.

The dog slunk back, his tail shut down close, his ears drooping,
but instead of running away, he lay down and rolled supinely upon
his back, the very image of submission, tame, abject, disgusting.
It was the one thing to drive Annixter to a fury. He kicked the
dog off the porch in a rolling explosion of oaths, and flung
himself down to his seat before the table, fuming and panting.

"Damn the dog and the girl and the whole rotten business--and
now," he exclaimed, as a sudden fancied qualm arose in his
stomach, "now, it's all made me sick. Might have known it. Oh,
it only lacked that to wind up the whole day. Let her go, I
don't care, and the sooner the better."

He countermanded the supper and went to bed before it was dark,
lighting his lamp, on the chair near the head of the bed, and
opening his "Copperfield" at the place marked by the strip of
paper torn from the bag of prunes. For upward of an hour he read
the novel, methodically swallowing one prune every time he
reached the bottom of a page. About nine o'clock he blew out the
lamp and, punching up his pillow, settled himself for the night.

Then, as his mind relaxed in that strange, hypnotic condition
that comes just before sleep, a series of pictures of the day's
doings passed before his imagination like the roll of a
kinetoscope.

First, it was Hilma Tree, as he had seen her in the dairy-house--
charming, delicious, radiant of youth, her thick, white neck with
its pale amber shadows under the chin; her wide, open eyes rimmed
with fine, black lashes; the deep swell of her breast and hips,
the delicate, lustrous floss on her cheek, impalpable as the
pollen of a flower. He saw her standing there in the
scintillating light of the morning, her smooth arms wet with
milk, redolent and fragrant of milk, her whole, desirable figure
moving in the golden glory of the sun, steeped in a lambent
flame, saturated with it, glowing with it, joyous as the dawn
itself.

Then it was Los Muertos and Hooven, the sordid little Dutchman,
grimed with the soil he worked in, yet vividly remembering a
period of military glory, exciting himself with recollections of
Gravelotte and the Kaiser, but contented now in the country of
his adoption, defining the Fatherland as the place where wife and
children lived. Then came the ranch house of Los Muertos, under
the grove of cypress and eucalyptus, with its smooth, gravelled
driveway and well-groomed lawns; Mrs. Derrick with her wide-
opened eyes, that so easily took on a look of uneasiness, of
innocence, of anxious inquiry, her face still pretty, her brown
hair that still retained so much of its brightness spread over
her chair back, drying in the sun; Magnus, erect as an officer of
cavalry, smooth-shaven, grey, thin-lipped, imposing, with his
hawk-like nose and forward-curling grey hair; Presley with his
dark face, delicate mouth and sensitive, loose lips, in corduroys
and laced boots, smoking cigarettes--an interesting figure,
suggestive of a mixed origin, morbid, excitable, melancholy,
brooding upon things that had no names. Then it was Bonneville,
with the gayety and confusion of Main Street, the whirring
electric cars, the zinc-sheathed telegraph poles, the buckboards
with squashes stowed under the seats; Ruggles in frock coat,
Stetson hat and shoe-string necktie, writing abstractedly upon
his blotting pad; Dyke, the engineer, big-boned. Powerful, deep-
voiced, good-natured, with his fine blonde beard and massive
arms, rehearsing the praises of his little daughter Sidney,
guided only by the one ambition that she should be educated at a
seminary, slipping a dime into the toe of her diminutive slipper,
then, later, overwhelmed with shame, slinking into S. Behrman's
office to mortgage his homestead to the heeler of the corporation
that had discharged him. By suggestion, Annixter saw S. Behrman,
too, fat, with a vast stomach, the check and neck meeting to form
a great, tremulous jowl, the roll of fat over his collar,
sprinkled with sparse, stiff hairs; saw his brown, round-topped
hat of varnished straw, the linen vest stamped with innumerable
interlocked horseshoes, the heavy watch chain, clinking against
the pearl vest buttons; invariably placid, unruffled, never
losing his temper, serene, unassailable, enthroned.

Then, at the end of all, it was the ranch again, seen in a last
brief glance before he had gone to bed; the fecundated earth,
calm at last, nursing the emplanted germ of life, ruddy with the
sunset, the horizons purple, the small clamour of the day lapsing
into quiet, the great, still twilight, building itself, dome-
like, toward the zenith. The barn fowls were roosting in the
trees near the stable, the horses crunching their fodder in the
stalls, the day's work ceasing by slow degrees; and the priest,
the Spanish churchman, Father Sarria, relic of a departed regime,
kindly, benign, believing in all goodness, a lover of his fellows
and of dumb animals, yet, for all that, hurrying away in
confusion and discomfiture, carrying in one hand the vessels of
the Holy Communion and in the other a basket of game cocks.

CHAPTER VI

It was high noon, and the rays of the sun, that hung poised
directly overhead in an intolerable white glory, fell straight as
plummets upon the roofs and streets of Guadalajara. The adobe
walls and sparse brick sidewalks of the drowsing town radiated
the heat in an oily, quivering shimmer. The leaves of the
eucalyptus trees around the Plaza drooped motionless, limp and
relaxed under the scorching, searching blaze. The shadows of
these trees had shrunk to their smallest circumference,
contracting close about the trunks. The shade had dwindled to
the breadth of a mere line. The sun was everywhere. The heat
exhaling from brick and plaster and metal met the heat that
steadily descended blanketwise and smothering, from the pale,
scorched sky. Only the lizards--they lived in chinks of the
crumbling adobe and in interstices of the sidewalk--remained
without, motionless, as if stuffed, their eyes closed to mere
slits, basking, stupefied with heat. At long intervals the
prolonged drone of an insect developed out of the silence,
vibrated a moment in a soothing, somnolent, long note, then
trailed slowly into the quiet again. Somewhere in the interior
of one of the 'dobe houses a guitar snored and hummed sleepily.
On the roof of the hotel a group of pigeons cooed incessantly
with subdued, liquid murmurs, very plaintive; a cat, perfectly
white, with a pink nose and thin, pink lips, dozed complacently
on a fence rail, full in the sun. In a corner of the Plaza three
hens wallowed in the baking hot dust their wings fluttering,
clucking comfortably.

And this was all. A Sunday repose prevailed the whole moribund
town, peaceful, profound. A certain pleasing numbness, a sense
of grateful enervation exhaled from the scorching plaster. There
was no movement, no sound of human business. The faint hum of
the insect, the intermittent murmur of the guitar, the mellow
complainings of the pigeons, the prolonged purr of the white cat,
the contented clucking of the hens--all these noises mingled
together to form a faint, drowsy bourdon, prolonged, stupefying,
suggestive of an infinite quiet, of a calm, complacent life,
centuries old, lapsing gradually to its end under the gorgeous
loneliness of a cloudless, pale blue sky and the steady fire of
an interminable sun.

In Solotari's Spanish-Mexican restaurant, Vanamee and Presley sat
opposite each other at one of the tables near the door, a bottle
of white wine, tortillas, and an earthen pot of frijoles between
them. They were the sole occupants of the place. It was the day
that Annixter had chosen for his barn-dance and, in consequence,
Quien Sabe was in fete and work suspended. Presley and Vanamee
had arranged to spend the day in each other's company, lunching
at Solotari's and taking a long tramp in the afternoon. For the
moment they sat back in their chairs, their meal all but
finished. Solotari brought black coffee and a small carafe of
mescal, and retiring to a corner of the room, went to sleep.

All through the meal Presley had been wondering over a certain
change he observed in his friend. He looked at him again.

Vanamee's lean, spare face was of an olive pallor. His long,
black hair, such as one sees in the saints and evangelists of the
pre-Raphaelite artists, hung over his ears. Presley again
remarked his pointed beard, black and fine, growing from the
hollow cheeks. He looked at his face, a face like that of a
young seer, like a half-inspired shepherd of the Hebraic legends,
a dweller in the wilderness, gifted with strange powers. He was
dressed as when Presley had first met him, herding his sheep, in
brown canvas overalls, thrust into top boots; grey flannel shirt,
open at the throat, showing the breast ruddy with tan; the waist
encircled with a cartridge belt, empty of cartridges.

But now, as Presley took more careful note of him, he was
surprised to observe a certain new look in Vanamee's deep-set
eyes. He remembered now that all through the morning Vanamee had
been singularly reserved. He was continually drifting into
reveries, abstracted, distrait. Indubitably, something of moment
had happened.

At length Vanamee spoke. Leaning back in his chair, his thumbs
in his belt, his bearded chin upon his breast, his voice was the
even monotone of one speaking in his sleep.

He told Presley in a few words what had happened during the first
night he had spent in the garden of the old Mission, of the
Answer, half-fancied, half-real, that had come to him.

"To no other person but you would I speak of this," he said, "but
you, I think, will understand--will be sympathetic, at least, and
I feel the need of unburdening myself of it to some one. At
first I would not trust my own senses. I was sure I had deceived
myself, but on a second night it happened again. Then I was
afraid--or no, not afraid, but disturbed--oh, shaken to my very
heart's core. I resolved to go no further in the matter, never
again to put it to test. For a long time I stayed away from the
Mission, occupying myself with my work, keeping it out of my
mind. But the temptation was too strong. One night I found
myself there again, under the black shadow of the pear trees
calling for Angele, summoning her from out the dark, from out the
night. This time the Answer was prompt, unmistakable. I cannot
explain to you what it was, nor how it came to me, for there was
no sound. I saw absolutely nothing but the empty night. There
was no moon. But somewhere off there over the little valley, far
off, the darkness was troubled; that ME that went out upon my
thought--out from the Mission garden, out over the valley,
calling for her, searching for her, found, I don't know what, but
found a resting place--a companion. Three times since then I
have gone to the Mission garden at night. Last night was the
third time."