Underneath the Long Trestle where Broderson Creek cut the line of the railroad and the Upper Road, the ground was low and covered with a second growth of grey green willows. Along the borders of the creek were occasional marshy spots, and now and then Hilma Tree came here to gather water-cresses, which she made into salads.
The place was picturesque, secluded, an oasis of green shade in all the limitless, flat monotony of the surrounding wheat lands. The creek had eroded deep into the little gully, and no matter how hot it was on the baking, shimmering levels of the ranches above, down here one always found one\'s self enveloped in an odorous, moist coolness. From time to time, the incessant murmur of the creek, pouring over and around the larger stones, was interrupted by the thunder of trains roaring out upon the trestle overhead, passing on with the furious gallop of their hundreds of iron wheels, leaving in the air a taint of hot oil, acrid smoke, and reek of escaping steam.
On a certain afternoon, in the spring of the year, Hilma was returning to Quien Sabe from Hooven\'s by the trail that led from Los Muertos to Annixter\'s ranch houses, under the trestle. She had spent the afternoon with Minna Hooven, who, for the time being, was kept indoors because of a wrenched ankle. As Hilma descended into the gravel flats and thickets of willows underneath the trestle, she decided that she would gather some cresses for her supper that night. She found a spot around the base of one of the supports of the trestle where the cresses grew thickest, and plucked a couple of handfuls, washing them in the creek and pinning them up in her handkerchief. It made a little, round, cold bundle, and Hilma, warm from her walk, found a delicious enjoyment in pressing the damp ball of it to her cheeks and neck.
For all the change that Annixter had noted in her upon the occasion of the barn dance, Hilma remained in many things a young child. She was never at loss for enjoyment, and could always amuse herself when left alone. Just now, she chose to drink from the creek, lying prone on the ground, her face half-buried in the water, and this, not because she was thirsty, but because it was a new way to drink. She imagined herself a belated traveller, a poor girl, an outcast, quenching her thirst at the wayside brook, her little packet of cresses doing duty for a bundle of clothes. Night was coming on. Perhaps it would storm. She had nowhere to go. She would apply at a hut for shelter.
Abruptly, the temptation to dabble her feet in the creek presented itself to her. Always she had liked to play in the water. What a delight now to take off her shoes and stockings and wade out into the shallows near the bank! She had worn low shoes that afternoon, and the dust of the trail had filtered in above the edges. At times, she felt the grit and grey sand on the soles of her feet, and the sensation had set her teeth on edge. What a delicious alternative the cold, clean water suggested, and how easy it would be to do as she pleased just then, if only she were a little girl. In the end, it was stupid to be grown up.
Sitting upon the bank, one finger tucked into the heel of her shoe, Hilma hesitated. Suppose a train should come! She fancied she could see the engineer leaning from the cab with a great grin on his face, or the brakeman shouting gibes at her from the platform. Abruptly she blushed scarlet. The blood throbbed in her temples. Her heart beat. Since the famous evening of the barn dance, Annixter had spoken to her but twice. Hilma no longer looked after the ranch house these days. The thought of setting foot within Annixter\'s dining-room and bed-room terrified her, and in the end her mother had taken over that part of her work. Of the two meetings with the master of Quien Sabe, one had been a mere exchange of good mornings as the two happened to meet over by the artesian well; the other, more complicated, had occurred in the dairy-house again, Annixter, pretending to look over the new cheese press, asking about details of her work. When this had happened on that previous occasion, ending with Annixter\'s attempt to kiss her, Hilma had been talkative enough, chattering on from one subject to another, never at a loss for a theme. But this last time was a veritable ordeal. No sooner had Annixter appeared than her heart leaped and quivered like that of the hound-harried doe. Her speech failed her. Throughout the whole brief interview she had been miserably tongue-tied, stammering monosyllables, confused, horribly awkward, and when Annixter had gone away, she had fled to her little room, and bolting the door, had flung herself face downward on the bed and wept as though her heart were breaking, she did not know why.
That Annixter had been overwhelmed with business all through the winter was an inexpressible relief to Hilma. His affairs took him away from the ranch continually. He was absent sometimes for weeks, making trips to San Francisco, or to Sacramento, or to Bonneville. Perhaps he was forgetting her, overlooking her; and while, at first, she told herself that she asked nothing better, the idea of it began to occupy her mind. She began to wonder if it was really so.
She knew his trouble. Everybody did. The news of the sudden forward movement of the Railroad\'s forces, inaugurating the campaign, had flared white-hot and blazing all over the country side. To Hilma\'s notion, Annixter\'s attitude was heroic beyond all expression. His courage in facing the Railroad, as he had faced Delaney in the barn, seemed to her the pitch of sublimity. She refused to see any auxiliaries aiding him in his fight. To her imagination, the great League, which all the ranchers were joining, was a mere form. Single-handed, Annixter fronted the monster. But for him the corporation would gobble Quien Sabe, as a whale would a minnow. He was a hero who stood between them all and destruction. He was a protector of her family. He was her champion. She began to mention him in her prayers every night, adding a further petition to the effect that he would become a good man, and that he should not swear so much, and that he should never meet Delaney again.
However, as Hilma still debated the idea of bathing her feet in the creek, a train did actually thunder past overhead—the regular evening Overland,—the through express, that never stopped between Bakersfield and Fresno. It stormed by with a deafening clamour, and a swirl of smoke, in a long succession of way-coaches, and chocolate coloured Pullmans, grimy with the dust of the great deserts of the Southwest. The quivering of the trestle\'s supports set a tremble in the ground underfoot. The thunder of wheels drowned all sound of the flowing of the creek, and also the noise of the buckskin mare\'s hoofs descending from the trail upon the gravel about the creek, so that Hilma, turning about after the passage of the train, saw Annixter close at hand, with the abruptness of a vision.
He was looking at her, smiling as he rarely did, the firm line of his out-thrust lower lip relaxed good-humouredly. He had taken off his campaign hat to her, and though his stiff, yellow hair was twisted into a bristling mop, the little persistent tuft on the crown, usually defiantly erect as an Apache\'s scalp-lock, was nowhere in sight.
“Hello, it\'s you, is it, Miss Hilma?” he exclaimed, getting down from the buckskin, and allowing her to drink.
Hilma nodded, scrambling to her feet, dusting her skirt with nervous pats of both hands.
Annixter sat down on a great rock close by and, the loop of the bridle over his arm, lit a cigar, and began to talk. He complained of the heat of the day, the bad condition of the Lower Road, over which he had come on his way from a committee meeting of the League at Los Muertos; of the slowness of the work on the irrigating ditch, and, as a matter of course, of the general hard times.
“Miss Hilma,” he said abruptly, “never you marry a ranchman. He\'s never out of trouble.”
Hilma gasped, her eyes widening till the full round of the pupil was disclosed. Instantly, a certain, inexplicable guiltiness overpowered her with incredible confusion. Her hands trembled as she pressed the bundle of cresses into a hard ball between her palms.
Annixter continued to talk. He was disturbed and excited himself at this unexpected meeting. Never through all the past winter months of strenuous activity, the fever of political campaigns, the harrowing delays and ultimate defeat in one law court after another, had he forgotten the look in Hilma\'s face as he stood with one arm around her on the floor of his barn, in peril of his life from the buster\'s revolver. That dumb confession of Hilma\'s wide-open eyes had been enough for him. Yet, somehow, he never had had a chance to act upon it. During the short period when he could be on his ranch Hilma had always managed to avoid him. Once, even, she had spent a month, about Christmas time, with her mother\'s father, who kept a hotel in San Francisco.
Now, to-day, however, he had her all to himself. He would put an end to the situation that troubled him, and vexed him, day after day, month after month. Beyond question, the moment had come for something definite, he could not say precisely what. Readjusting his cigar between his teeth, he resumed his speech. It suited his humour to take the girl into his confidence, following an instinct which warned him that this would bring about a certain closeness of their relations, a certain intimacy.
“What do you think of this row, anyways, Miss Hilma,—this railroad fuss in general? Think Shelgrim and his rushers are going to jump Quien Sabe—are going to run us off the ranch?”
“Oh, no, sir,” protested Hilma, still breathless. “Oh, no, indeed not.”
“Well, what then?”
Hilma made a little uncertain movement of ignorance.
“I don\'t know what.”
“Well, the League agreed to-day that if the test cases were lost in the Supreme Court—you know we\'ve appealed to the Supreme Court, at Washington—we\'d fight.”
“Fight?”
“Yes, fight.”
“Fight like—like you and Mr. Delaney that time with—oh, dear—with guns?”
“I don\'t know,” grumbled Annixter vaguely. “What do YOU think?”
Hilma\'s low-pitched, almost husky voice trembled a little as she replied, “Fighting—with guns—that\'s so terrible. Oh, those revolvers in the barn! I can hear them yet. Every shot seemed like the explosion of tons of powder.”
“Shall we clear out, then? Shall we let Delaney have possession, and S. Behrman, and all that lot? Shall we give in to them?”
“Never, never,” she exclaimed, her great eyes flashing.
“YOU wouldn\'t like to be turned out of your home, would you, Miss Hilma, because Quien Sabe is your home isn\'t it? You\'ve lived here ever since you were as big as a minute. You wouldn\'t like to have S. Behrman and the rest of \'em turn you out?”
“N-no,” she murmured. “No, I shouldn\'t like that. There\'s mamma and——”
“Well, do you think for one second I\'m going to let \'em?” cried Annixter, his teeth tightening on his cigar. “You stay right where you are. I\'ll take care of you, right enough. Look here,” he demanded abruptly, “you\'ve no use for that roaring lush, Delaney, have you?” “I think he is a wicked man,” she declared. “I know the Railroad has pretended to sell him part of the ranch, and he lets Mr. S. Behrman and Mr. Ruggles just use him.”
“Right. I thought you wouldn\'t be keen on him.”
There was a long pause. The buckskin began blowing among the pebbles, nosing for grass, and Annixter shifted his cigar to the other corner of his mouth.
“Pretty place,” he muttered, looking around him. Then he added: “Miss Hilma, see here, I want to have a kind of talk with you, if you don\'t mind. I don\'t know just how to say these sort of things, and if I get all balled up as I go along, you just set it down to the fact that I\'ve never had any experience in dealing with feemale girls; understand? You see, ever since the barn dance—yes, and long before then—I\'ve been thinking a lot about you. Straight, I have, and I guess you know it. You\'re about the only girl that I ever knew well, and I guess,” he declared deliberately, “you\'re about the only one I want to know. It\'s my nature. You didn\'t say anything that time when we stood there together and Delaney was playing the fool, but, somehow, I got the idea that you didn\'t want Delaney to do for me one little bit; that if he\'d got me then you would have been sorrier than if he\'d got any one else. Well, I felt just that way about you. I would rather have had him shoot any other girl in the room than you; yes, or in the whole State. Why, if anything should happen to you, Miss Hilma—well, I wouldn\'t care to go on with anything. S. Behrman could jump Quien Sabe, and welcome. And Delaney could shoot me full of holes whenever he got good and ready. I\'d quit. I\'d lay right down. I wouldn\'t care a whoop about anything any more. You are the only girl for me in the whole world. I didn\'t think so at first. I didn\'t want to. But seeing you around every day, and seeing how pretty you were, and how clever, and hearing your voice and all, why, it just got all inside of me somehow, and now I can\'t think of anything else. I hate to go to San Francisco, or Sacramento, or Visalia, or even Bonneville, for only a day, just because you aren\'t there, in any of those places, and I just rush what I\'ve got to do so as I can get back here. While you were away that Christmas time, why, I was as lonesome as—oh, you don\'t know anything about it. I just scratched off the days on the calendar every night, one by one, till you got back. And it just comes to this, I want you with me all the time. I want you should have a home that\'s my home, too. I want to take care of you, and have you all for myself, you understand. What do you say?”
Hilma, standing up before him, retied a knot in her handkerchief bundle with elaborate precaution, blinking at it through her tears.
“What do you say, Miss Hilma?” Annixter repeated. “How about that? What do you say?”
Just above a whisper, Hilma murmured:
“I—I don\'t know.”
“Don\'t know what? Don\'t you think we could hit it off together?”
“I don\'t know.”
“I know we could, Hilma. I don\'t mean to scare you. What are you crying for?” “I don\'t know.”
Annixter got up, cast away his cigar, and dropping the buckskin\'s bridle, came and stood beside her, putting a hand on her shoulder. Hilma did not move, and he felt her trembling. She still plucked at the knot of the handkerchief. “I can\'t do without you, little girl,” Annixter continued, “and I want you. I want you bad. I don\'t get much fun out of life ever. It, sure, isn\'t my nature, I guess. I\'m a hard man. Everybody is trying to down me, and now I\'m up against the Railroad. I\'m fighting \'em all, Hilma, night and day, lock, stock, and barrel, and I\'m fighting now for my home, my land, everything I have in the world. If I win out, I want somebody to be glad with me. If I don\'t—I want somebody to be sorry for me, sorry with me,—and that somebody is you. I am dog-tired of going it alone. I want some one to back me up. I want to feel you alongside of me, to give me a touch of the shoulder now and then. I\'m tired of fighting for THINGS—land, property, money. I want to fight for some PERSON—somebody beside myself. Understand? want to feel that it isn\'t all selfishness—that there are other interests than mine in the game—that there\'s some one dependent on me, and that\'s thinking of me as I\'m thinking of them—some one I can come home to at night and put my arm around—like this, and have her put her two arms around me—like—” He paused a second, and once again, as it had been in that moment of imminent peril, when he stood with his arm around her, their eyes met,—“put her two arms around me,” prompted Annixter, half smiling, “like—like what, Hilma?”
“I don\'t know.”
“Like what, Hilma?” he insisted.
“Like—like this?” she questioned. With a movement of infinite tenderness and affection she slid her arms around his neck, still crying a little.
The sensation of her warm body in his embrace, the feeling of her smooth, round arm, through the thinness of her sleeve, pressing against his cheek, thrilled Annixter with a delight such as he had never known. He bent his head and kissed her upon the nape of her neck, where the delicate amber tint melted into the thick, sweet smelling mass of her dark brown hair. She shivered a little, holding him closer, ashamed as yet to look up. Without speech, they stood there for a long minute, holding each other close. Then Hilma pulled away from him, mopping her tear-stained cheeks with the little moist ball of her handkerchief.
“What do you say? Is it a go?” demanded Annixter jovially.
“I thought I hated you all the time,” she said, and the velvety huskiness of her voice never sounded so sweet to him.
“And I thought it was that crockery smashing goat of a lout of a cow-puncher.”
“Delaney? The idea! Oh, dear! I think it must always have been you.”
“Since when, Hilma?” he asked, putting his arm around her. “Ah, but it is good to have you, my girl,” he exclaimed, delighted beyond words that she permitted this freedom. “Since when? Tell us all about it.”
“Oh, since always. It was ever so long before I came to think of you—to, well, to think about—I mean to remember—oh, you know what I mean. But when I did, oh, THEN!”
“Then what?”
“I don\'t know—I haven\'t thought—that way long enough to know.”
“But you said you thought it must have been me always.”
“I know; but that was different—oh, I\'m all mixed up. I\'m so nervous and trembly now. Oh,” she cried suddenly, her face overcast with a look of earnestness and great seriousness, both her hands catching at his wrist, “Oh, you WILL be good to me, now, won\'t you? I\'m only a little, little child in so many ways, and I\'ve given myself to you, all in a minute, and I can\'t go back of it now, and it\'s for always. I don\'t know how it happened or why. Sometimes I think I didn\'t wish it, but now it\'s done, and I am glad and happy. But NOW if you weren\'t good to me—oh, think of how it would be with me. You are strong, and big, and rich, and I am only a servant of yours, a little nobody, but I\'ve given all I had to you—myself—and you must be so good to me now. Always remember that. Be good to me and be gentle and kind to me in LITTLE things,—in everything, or you will break my heart.”
Annixter took her in his arms. He was speechless. No words that he had at his command seemed adequate. All he could say was:
“That\'s all right, little girl. Don\'t you be frightened. I\'ll take care of you. That\'s all right, that\'s all right.”
For a long time they sat there under the shade of the great trestle, their arms about each other, speaking only at intervals. An hour passed. The buckskin, finding no feed to her taste, took the trail stablewards, the bridle dragging. Annixter let her go. Rather than to take his arm from around Hilma\'s waist he would have lost his whole stable. At last, however, he bestirred himself and began to talk. He thought it time to formulate some plan of action.
“Well, now, Hilma, what are we going to do?”
“Do?” she repeated. “Why, must we do anything? Oh, isn\'t this enough?”
“There\'s better ahead,” he went on. “I want to fix you up somewhere where you can have a bit of a home all to yourself. Let\'s see; Bonneville wouldn\'t do. There\'s always a lot of yaps about there that know us, and they would begin to cackle first off. How about San Francisco. We might go up next week and have a look around. I would find rooms you could take somewheres, and we would fix \'em up as lovely as how-do-you-do.”
“Oh, but why go away from Quien Sabe?” she protested. “And, then, so soon, too. Why must we have a wedding trip, now that you are so busy? Wouldn\'t it be better—oh, I tell you, we could go to Monterey after we were married, for a little week, where mamma\'s people live, and then come back here to the ranch house and settle right down where we are and let me keep house for you. I wouldn\'t even want a single servant.”
Annixter heard and his face grew troubled.
“Hum,” he said, “I see.”
He gathered up a handful of pebbles and began snapping them carefully into the creek. He fell thoughtful. Here was a phase of the affair he had not planned in the least. He had supposed all the time that Hilma took his meaning. His old suspicion that she was trying to get a hold on him stirred again for a moment. There was no good of such talk as that. Always these feemale girls seemed crazy to get married, bent on complicating the situation.
“Isn\'t that best?” said Hilma, glancing at him.
“I don\'t know,” he muttered gloomily.
“Well, then, let\'s not. Let\'s come right back to Quien Sabe without going to Monterey. Anything that you want I want.”
“I hadn\'t thought of it in just that way,” he observed.
“In what way, then?”
“Can\'t we—can\'t we wait about this marrying business?”
“That\'s just it,” she said gayly. “I said it was too soon. There would be so much to do between whiles. Why not say at the end of the summer?”
“Say what?”
“Our marriage, I mean.”
“Why get married, then? What\'s the good of all that fuss about it? I don\'t go anything upon a minister puddling round in my affairs. What\'s the difference, anyhow? We understand each other. Isn\'t that enough? Pshaw, Hilma, I\'M no marrying man.”
She looked at him a moment, bewildered, then slowly she took his meaning. She rose to her feet, her eyes wide, her face paling with terror. He did not look at her, but he could hear the catch in her throat.
“Oh!” she exclaimed, with a long, deep breath, and again “Oh!” the back of her hand against her lips.
It was a quick gasp of a veritable physical anguish. Her eyes brimmed over. Annixter rose, looking at her.
“Well?” he said, awkwardly, “Well?”
Hilma leaped back from him with an instinctive recoil of her whole being, throwing out her hands in a gesture of defence, fearing she knew not what. There was as yet no sense of insult in her mind, no outraged modesty. She was only terrified. It was as though searching for wild flowers she had come suddenly upon a snake.
She stood for an instant, spellbound, her eyes wide, her bosom swelling; then, all at once, turned and fled, darting across the plank that served for a foot bridge over the creek, gaining the opposite bank and disappearing with a brisk rustle of underbrush, such as might have been made by the flight of a frightened fawn.
Abruptly Annixter found himself alone. For a moment he did not move, then he picked up his campaign hat, carefully creased its limp crown and put it on his head and stood for a moment, looking vaguely at the ground on both sides of him. He went away without uttering a word, without change of countenance, his hands in his pockets, his feet taking great strides along the trail in the direction of the ranch house.
He had no sight of Hilma again that evening, and the next morning he was up early and did not breakfast at the ranch house. Business of the League called him to Bonneville to confer with Magnus and the firm of lawyers retained by the League to fight the land-grabbing cases. An appeal was to be taken to the Supreme Court at Washington, and it was to be settled that day which of the cases involved should be considered as test cases.
Instead of driving or riding into Bonneville, as he usually did, Annixter took an early morning train, the Bakersfield-Fresno local at Guadalajara, and went to Bonneville by rail, arriving there at twenty minutes after seven and breakfasting by appointment with Magnus Derrick and Osterman at the Yosemite House, on Main Street.
The conference of the committee with the lawyers took place in a front room of the Yosemite, one of the latter bringing with him his clerk, who made a stenographic report of the proceedings and took carbon copies of all letters written. The conference was long and complicated, the business transacted of the utmost moment, and it was not until two o\'clock that Annixter found himself at liberty.
However, as he and Magnus descended into the lobby of the hotel, they were aware of an excited and interested group collected about the swing doors that opened from the lobby of the Yosemite into the bar of the same name. Dyke was there—even at a distance they could hear the reverberation of his deep-toned voice, uplifted in wrath and furious expostulation. Magnus and Annixter joined the group wondering, and all at once fell full upon the first scene of a drama.
That same morning Dyke\'s mother had awakened him according to his instructions at daybreak. A consignment of his hop poles from the north had arrived at the freight office of the P. and S. W. in Bonneville, and he was to drive in on his farm wagon and bring them out. He would have a busy day.
“Hello, hello,” he said, as his mother pulled his ear to arouse him; “morning, mamma.”
“It\'s time,” she said, “after five already. Your breakfast is on the stove.”
He took her hand and kissed it with great affection. He loved his mother devotedly, quite as much as he did the little tad. In their little cottage, in the forest of green hops that surrounded them on every hand, the three led a joyous and secluded life, contented, industrious, happy, asking nothing better. Dyke, himself, was a big-hearted, jovial man who spread an atmosphere of good-humour wherever he went. In the evenings he played with Sidney like a big boy, an older brother, lying on the bed, or the sofa, taking her in his arms. Between them they had invented a great game. The ex-engineer, his boots removed, his huge legs in the air, hoisted the little tad on the soles of his stockinged feet like a circus acrobat, dandling her there, pretending he was about to let her fall. Sidney, choking with delight, held on nervously, with little screams and chirps of excitement, while he shifted her gingerly from one foot to another, and thence, the final act, the great gallery play, to the palm of one great hand. At this point Mrs. Dyke was called in, both father and daughter, children both, crying out that she was to come in and look, look. She arrived out of breath from the kitchen, the potato masher in her hand. “Such children,” she murmured, shaking her head at them, amused for all that, tucking the potato masher under her arm and clapping her hands. In the end, it was part of the game that Sidney should tumble down upon Dyke, whereat he invariably vented a great bellow as if in pain, declaring that his ribs were broken. Gasping, his eyes shut, he pretended to be in the extreme of dissolution—perhaps he was dying. Sidney, always a little uncertain, amused but distressed, shook him nervously, tugging at his beard, pushing open his eyelid with one finger, imploring him not to frighten her, to wake up and be good.
On this occasion, while yet he was half-dressed, Dyke tiptoed into his mother\'s room to look at Sidney fast asleep in her little iron cot, her arm under her head, her lips parted. With infinite precaution he kissed her twice, and then finding one little stocking, hung with its mate very neatly over the back of a chair, dropped into it a dime, rolled up in a wad of paper. He winked all to himself and went out again, closing the door with exaggerated carefulness.
He breakfasted alone, Mrs. Dyke pouring his coffee and handing him his plate of ham and eggs, and half an hour later took himself off in his springless, skeleton wagon, humming a tune behind his beard and cracking the whip over the backs of his staid and solid farm horses.
The morning was fine, the sun just coming up. He left Guadalajara, sleeping and lifeless, on his left, and going across lots, over an angle of Quien Sabe, came out upon the Upper Road, a mile below the Long Trestle. He was in great spirits, looking about him over the brown fields, ruddy with the dawn. Almost directly in front of him, but far off, the gilded dome of the court-house at Bonneville was glinting radiant in the first rays of the sun, while a few miles distant, toward the north, the venerable campanile of the Mission San Juan stood silhouetted in purplish black against the flaming east. As he proceeded, the great farm horses jogging forward, placid, deliberate, the country side waked to another day. Crossing the irrigating ditch further on, he met a gang of Portuguese, with picks and shovels over their shoulders, just going to work. Hooven, already abroad, shouted him a “Goot mornun” from behind the fence of Los Muertos. Far off, toward the southwest, in the bare expanse of the open fields, where a clump of eucalyptus and cypress trees set a dark green note, a thin stream of smoke rose straight into the air from the kitchen of Derrick\'s ranch houses.
But a mile or so beyond the Long Trestle he was surprised to see Magnus Derrick\'s protege, the one-time shepherd, Vanamee, coming across Quien Sabe, by a trail from one of Annixter\'s division houses. Without knowing exactly why, Dyke received the impression that the young man had not been in bed all of that night.
As the two approached each other, Dyke eyed the young fellow. He was distrustful of Vanamee, having the country-bred suspicion of any person he could not understand. Vanamee was, beyond doubt, no part of the life of ranch and country town. He was an alien, a vagabond, a strange fellow who came and went in mysterious fashion, making no friends, keeping to himself. Why did he never wear a hat, why indulge in a fine, black, pointed beard, when either a round beard or a mustache was the invariable custom? Why did he not cut his hair? Above all, why did he prowl about so much at night? As the two passed each other, Dyke, for all his good-nature, was a little blunt in his greeting and looked back at the ex-shepherd over his shoulder.
Dyke was right in his suspicion. Vanamee\'s bed had not been disturbed for three nights. On the Monday of that week he had passed the entire night in the garden of the Mission, overlooking the Seed ranch, in the little valley. Tuesday evening had found him miles away from that spot, in a deep arroyo in the Sierra foothills to the eastward, while Wednesday he had slept in an abandoned \'dobe on Osterman\'s stock range, twenty miles from his resting place of the night before.
The fact of the matter was that the old restlessness had once more seized upon Vanamee. Something began tugging at him; the spur of some unseen rider touched his flank. The instinct of the wanderer woke and moved. For some time now he had been a part of the Los Muertos staff. On Quien Sabe, as on the other ranches, the slack season was at hand. While waiting for the wheat to come up no one was doing much of anything. Vanamee had come over to Los Muertos and spent most of his days on horseback, riding the range, rounding up and watching the cattle in the fourth division of the ranch. But if the vagabond instinct now roused itself in the strange fellow\'s nature, a counter influence had also set in. More and more Vanamee frequented the Mission garden after nightfall, sometimes remaining there till the dawn began to whiten, lying prone on the ground, his chin on his folded arms, his eyes searching the darkness over the little valley of the Seed ranch, watching, watching. As the days went by, he became more reticent than ever. Presley often came to find him on the stock range, a lonely figure in the great wilderness of bare, green hillsides, but Vanamee no longer took him into his confidence. Father Sarria alone heard his strange stories.
Dyke drove on toward Bonneville, thinking over the whole matter. He knew, as every one did in that part of the country, the legend of Vanamee and Angele, the romance of the Mission garden, the mystery of the Other, Vanamee\'s flight to the deserts of the southwest, his periodic returns, his strange, reticent, solitary character, but, like many another of the country people, he accounted for Vanamee by a short and easy method. No doubt, the fellow\'s wits were turned. That was the long and short of it.
The ex-engineer reached the Post Office in Bonneville towards eleven o\'clock, but he did not at once present his notice of the arrival of his consignment at Ruggles\'s office. It entertained him to indulge in an hour\'s lounging about the streets. It was seldom he got into town, and when he did he permitted himself the luxury of enjoying his evident popularity. He met friends everywhere, in the Post Office, in the drug store, in the barber shop and around the court-house. With each one he held a moment\'s conversation; almost invariably this ended in the same way:
“Come on \'n have a drink.”
“Well, I don\'t care if I do.”
And the friends proceeded to the Yosemite bar, pledging each other with punctilious ceremony. Dyke, however, was a strictly temperate man. His life on the engine had trained him well. Alcohol he never touched, drinking instead ginger ale, sarsaparilla-and-iron—soft drinks.
At the drug store, which also kept a stock of miscellaneous stationery, his eye was caught by a “transparent slate,” a child\'s toy, where upon a little pane of frosted glass one could trace with considerable elaboration outline figures of cows, ploughs, bunches of fruit and even rural water mills that were printed on slips of paper underneath.
“Now, there\'s an idea, Jim,” he observed to the boy behind the soda-water fountain; “I know a little tad that would just about jump out of her skin for that. Think I\'ll have to take it with me.”
“How\'s Sidney getting along?” the other asked, while wrapping up the package.
Dyke\'s enthusiasm had made of his little girl a celebrity throughout Bonneville.
The ex-engineer promptly became voluble, assertive, doggedly emphatic.
“Smartest little tad in all Tulare County, and more fun! A regular whole show in herself.”
“And the hops?” inquired the other.
“Bully,” declared Dyke, with the good-natured man\'s readiness to talk of his private affairs to any one who would listen. “Bully. I\'m dead sure of a bonanza crop by now. The rain came JUST right. I actually don\'t know as I can store the crop in those barns I built, it\'s going to be so big. That foreman of mine was a daisy. Jim, I\'m going to make money in that deal. After I\'ve paid off the mortgage—you know I had to mortgage, yes, crop and homestead both, but I can pay it off and all the interest to boot, lovely,—well, and as I was saying, after all expenses are paid off I\'ll clear big money, m\' son. Yes, sir. I KNEW there was boodle in hops. You know the crop is contracted for already. Sure, the foreman managed that. He\'s a daisy. Chap in San Francisco will take it all and at the advanced price. I wanted to hang on, to see if it wouldn\'t go to six cents, but the foreman said, \'No, that\'s good enough.\' So I signed. Ain\'t it bully, hey?”
“Then what\'ll you do?”
“Well, I don\'t know. I\'ll have a lay-off for a month or so and take the little tad and mother up and show \'em the city—\'Frisco—until it\'s time for the schools to open, and then we\'ll put Sid in the seminary at Marysville. Catch on?”
“I suppose you\'ll stay right by hops now?”
“Right you are, m\'son. I know a good thing when I see it. There\'s plenty others going into hops next season. I set \'em the example. Wouldn\'t be surprised if it came to be a regular industry hereabouts. I\'m planning ahead for next year already. I can let the foreman go, now that I\'ve learned the game myself, and I think I\'ll buy a piece of land off Quien Sabe and get a bigger crop, and build a couple more barns, and, by George, in about five years time I\'ll have things humming. I\'m going to make MONEY, Jim.”
He emerged once more into the street and went up the block leisurely, planting his feet squarely. He fancied that he could feel he was considered of more importance nowadays. He was no longer a subordinate, an employee. He was his own man, a proprietor, an owner of land, furthering a successful enterprise. No one had helped him; he had followed no one\'s lead. He had struck out unaided for himself, and his success was due solely to his own intelligence, industry, and foresight. He squared his great shoulders till the blue gingham of his jumper all but cracked. Of late, his great blond beard had grown and the work in the sun had made his face very red. Under the visor of his cap—relic of his engineering days—his blue eyes twinkled with vast good-nature. He felt that he made a fine figure as he went by a group of young girls in lawns and muslins and garden hats on their way to the Post Office. He wondered if they looked after him, wondered if they had heard that he was in a fair way to become a rich man.
But the chronometer in the window of the jewelry store warned him that time was passing. He turned about, and, crossing the street, took his way to Ruggles\'s office, which was the freight as well as the land office of the P. and S. W. Railroad.
As he stood for a moment at the counter in front of the wire partition, waiting for the clerk to make out the order for the freight agent at the depot, Dyke was surprised to see a familiar figure in conference with Ruggles himself, by a desk inside the railing.
The figure was that of a middle-aged man, fat, with a great stomach, which he stroked from time to time. As he turned about, addressing a remark to the clerk, Dyke recognised S. Behrman. The banker, railroad agent, and political manipulator seemed to the ex-engineer\'s eyes to be more gross than ever. His smooth-shaven jowl stood out big and tremulous on either side of his face; the roll of fat on the nape of his neck, sprinkled with sparse, stiff hairs, bulged out with greater prominence. His great stomach, covered with a light brown linen vest, stamped with innumerable interlocked horseshoes, protruded far in advance, enormous, aggressive. He wore his inevitable round-topped hat of stiff brown straw, varnished so bright that it reflected the light of the office windows like a helmet, and even from where he stood Dyke could hear his loud breathing and the clink of the hollow links of his watch chain upon the vest buttons of imitation pearl, as his stomach rose and fell.
Dyke looked at him with attention. There was the enemy, the representative of the Trust with which Derrick\'s League was locking horns. The great struggle had begun to invest the combatants with interest. Daily, almost hourly, Dyke was in touch with the ranchers, the wheat-growers. He heard their denunciations, their growls of exasperation and defiance. Here was the other side—this placid, fat man, with a stiff straw hat and linen vest, who never lost his temper, who smiled affably upon his enemies, giving them good advice, commiserating with them in one defeat after another, never ruffled, never excited, sure of his power, conscious that back of him was the Machine, the colossal force, the inexhaustible coffers of a mighty organisation, vomiting millions to the League\'s thousands.
The League was clamorous, ubiquitous, its objects known to every urchin on the streets, but the Trust was silent, its ways inscrutable, the public saw only results. It worked on in the dark, calm, disciplined, irresistible. Abruptly Dyke received the impression of the multitudinous ramifications of the colossus. Under his feet the ground seemed mined; down there below him in the dark the huge tentacles went silently twisting and advancing, spreading out in every direction, sapping the strength of all opposition, quiet, gradual, biding the time to reach up and out and grip with a sudden unleashing of gigantic strength.
“I\'ll be wanting some cars of you people before the summer is out,” observed Dyke to the clerk as he folded up and put away the order that the other had handed him. He remembered perfectly well tha............