On Division Number Three of the Los Muertos ranch the wheat had already been cut, and S. Behrman on a certain morning in the first week of August drove across the open expanse of stubble toward the southwest, his eyes searching the horizon for the feather of smoke that would mark the location of the steam harvester. However, he saw nothing. The stubble extended onward apparently to the very margin of the world.

At length, S. Behrman halted his buggy and brought out his field glasses from beneath the seat. He stood up in his place and, adjusting the lenses, swept the prospect to the south and west. It was the same as though the sea of land were, in reality, the ocean, and he, lost in an open boat, were scanning the waste through his glasses, looking for the smoke of a steamer, hull down, below the horizon. “Wonder,” he muttered, “if they\'re working on Four this morning?”

At length, he murmured an “Ah” of satisfaction. Far to the south into the white sheen of sky, immediately over the horizon, he made out a faint smudge—the harvester beyond doubt.

Thither S. Behrman turned his horse\'s head. It was all of an hour\'s drive over the uneven ground and through the crackling stubble, but at length he reached the harvester. He found, however, that it had been halted. The sack sewers, together with the header-man, were stretched on the ground in the shade of the machine, while the engineer and separator-man were pottering about a portion of the works.

“What\'s the matter, Billy?” demanded S. Behrman reining up.

The engineer turned about.

“The grain is heavy in here. We thought we\'d better increase the speed of the cup-carrier, and pulled up to put in a smaller sprocket.”

S. Behrman nodded to say that was all right, and added a question.

“How is she going?”

“Anywheres from twenty-five to thirty sacks to the acre right along here; nothing the matter with THAT I guess.”

“Nothing in the world, Bill.”

One of the sack sewers interposed:

“For the last half hour we\'ve been throwing off three bags to the minute.”

“That\'s good, that\'s good.”

It was more than good; it was “bonanza,” and all that division of the great ranch was thick with just such wonderful wheat. Never had Los Muertos been more generous, never a season more successful. S. Behrman drew a long breath of satisfaction. He knew just how great was his share in the lands which had just been absorbed by the corporation he served, just how many thousands of bushels of this marvellous crop were his property. Through all these years of confusion, bickerings, open hostility and, at last, actual warfare he had waited, nursing his patience, calm with the firm assurance of ultimate success. The end, at length, had come; he had entered into his reward and saw himself at last installed in the place he had so long, so silently coveted; saw himself chief of a principality, the Master of the Wheat.

The sprocket adjusted, the engineer called up the gang and the men took their places. The fireman stoked vigorously, the two sack sewers resumed their posts on the sacking platform, putting on the goggles that kept the chaff from their eyes. The separator-man and header-man gripped their levers.

The harvester, shooting a column of thick smoke straight upward, vibrating to the top of the stack, hissed, clanked, and lurched forward. Instantly, motion sprang to life in all its component parts; the header knives, cutting a thirty-six foot swath, gnashed like teeth; beltings slid and moved like smooth flowing streams; the separator whirred, the agitator jarred and crashed; cylinders, augers, fans, seeders and elevators, drapers and chaff-carriers clattered, rumbled, buzzed, and clanged. The steam hissed and rasped; the ground reverberated a hollow note, and the thousands upon thousands of wheat stalks sliced and slashed in the clashing shears of the header, rattled like dry rushes in a hurricane, as they fell inward, and were caught up by an endless belt, to disappear into the bowels of the vast brute that devoured them.

It was that and no less. It was the feeding of some prodigious monster, insatiable, with iron teeth, gnashing and threshing into the fields of standing wheat; devouring always, never glutted, never satiated, swallowing an entire harvest, snarling and slobbering in a welter of warm vapour, acrid smoke, and blinding, pungent clouds of chaff. It moved belly-deep in the standing grain, a hippopotamus, half-mired in river ooze, gorging rushes, snorting, sweating; a dinosaur wallowing through thick, hot grasses, floundering there, crouching, grovelling there as its vast jaws crushed and tore, and its enormous gullet swallowed, incessant, ravenous, and inordinate.

S. Behrman, very much amused, changed places with one of the sack sewers, allowing him to hold his horse while he mounted the sacking platform and took his place. The trepidation and jostling of the machine shook him till his teeth chattered in his head. His ears were shocked and assaulted by a myriad-tongued clamour, clashing steel, straining belts, jarring woodwork, while the impalpable chaff powder from the separators settled like dust in his hair, his ears, eyes, and mouth.

Directly in front of where he sat on the platform was the chute from the cleaner, and from this into the mouth of a half-full sack spouted an unending gush of grain, winnowed, cleaned, threshed, ready for the mill.

The pour from the chute of the cleaner had for S. Behrman an immense satisfaction. Without an instant\'s pause, a thick rivulet of wheat rolled and dashed tumultuous into the sack. In half a minute—sometimes in twenty seconds—the sack was full, was passed over to the second sewer, the mouth reeved up, and the sack dumped out upon the ground, to be picked up by the wagons and hauled to the railroad.

S. Behrman, hypnotised, sat watching that river of grain. All that shrieking, bellowing machinery, all that gigantic organism, all the months of labour, the ploughing, the planting, the prayers for rain, the years of preparation, the heartaches, the anxiety, the foresight, all the whole business of the ranch, the work of horses, of steam, of men and boys, looked to this spot—the grain chute from the harvester into the sacks. Its volume was the index of failure or success, of riches or poverty. And at this point, the labour of the rancher ended. Here, at the lip of the chute, he parted company with his grain, and from here the wheat streamed forth to feed the world. The yawning mouths of the sacks might well stand for the unnumbered mouths of the People, all agape for food; and here, into these sacks, at first so lean, so flaccid, attenuated like starved stomachs, rushed the living stream of food, insistent, interminable, filling the empty, fattening the shrivelled, making it sleek and heavy and solid.

Half an hour later, the harvester stopped again. The men on the sacking platform had used up all the sacks. But S. Behrman\'s foreman, a new man on Los Muertos, put in an appearance with the report that the wagon bringing a fresh supply was approaching.

“How is the grain elevator at Port Costa getting on, sir?”

“Finished,” replied S. Behrman.

The new master of Los Muertos had decided upon accumulating his grain in bulk in a great elevator at the tide-water port, where the grain ships for Liverpool and the East took on their cargoes. To this end, he had bought and greatly enlarged a building at Port Costa, that was already in use for that purpose, and to this elevator all the crop of Los Muertos was to be carried. The P. and S. W. made S. Behrman a special rate.

“By the way,” said S. Behrman to his superintendent, “we\'re in luck. Fallon\'s buyer was in Bonneville yesterday. He\'s buying for Fallon and for Holt, too. I happened to run into him, and I\'ve sold a ship load.”

“A ship load!”

“Of Los Muertos wheat. He\'s acting for some Indian Famine Relief Committee—lot of women people up in the city—and wanted a whole cargo. I made a deal with him. There\'s about fifty thousand tons of disengaged shipping in San Francisco Bay right now, and ships are fighting for charters. I wired McKissick and got a long distance telephone from him this morning. He got me a barque, the \'Swanhilda.\' She\'ll dock day after to-morrow, and begin loading.”

“Hadn\'t I better take a run up,” observed the superintendent, “and keep an eye on things?”

“No,” answered S. Behrman, “I want you to stop down here, and see that those carpenters hustle the work in the ranch house. Derrick will be out by then. You see this deal is peculiar. I\'m not selling to any middle-man—not to Fallon\'s buyer. He only put me on to the thing. I\'m acting direct with these women people, and I\'ve got to have some hand in shipping this stuff myself. But I made my selling figure cover the price of a charter. It\'s a queer, mixed-up deal, and I don\'t fancy it much, but there\'s boodle in it. I\'ll go to Port Costa myself.”

A little later on in the day, when S. Behrman had satisfied himself that his harvesting was going forward favourably, he reentered his buggy and driving to the County Road turned southward towards the Los Muertos ranch house. He had not gone far, however, before he became aware of a familiar figure on horse-back, jogging slowly along ahead of him. He recognised Presley; he shook the reins over his horse\'s back and very soon ranging up by the side of the young man passed the time of day with him.

“Well, what brings you down here again, Mr. Presley?” he observed. “I thought we had seen the last of you.”

“I came down to say good-bye to my friends,” answered Presley shortly.

“Going away?”

“Yes—to India.”

“Well, upon my word. For your health, hey?”

“Yes.”

“You LOOK knocked up,” asserted the other. “By the way,” he added, “I suppose you\'ve heard the news?”

Presley shrank a little. Of late the reports of disasters had followed so swiftly upon one another that he had begun to tremble and to quail at every unexpected bit of information.

“What news do you mean?” he asked.

“About Dyke. He has been convicted. The judge sentenced him for life.”

For life! Riding on by the side of this man through the ranches by the County Road, Presley repeated these words to himself till the full effect of them burst at last upon him.

Jailed for life! No outlook. No hope for the future. Day after day, year after year, to tread the rounds of the same gloomy monotony. He saw the grey stone walls, the iron doors; the flagging of the “yard” bare of grass or trees—the cell, narrow, bald, cheerless; the prison garb, the prison fare, and round all the grim granite of insuperable barriers, shutting out the world, shutting in the man with outcasts, with the pariah dogs of society, thieves, murderers, men below the beasts, lost to all decency, drugged with opium, utter reprobates. To this, Dyke had been brought, Dyke, than whom no man had been more honest, more courageous, more jovial. This was the end of him, a prison; this was his final estate, a criminal.

Presley found an excuse for riding on, leaving S. Behrman behind him. He did not stop at Caraher\'s saloon, for the heat of his rage had long since begun to cool, and dispassionately, he saw things in their true light. For all the tragedy of his wife\'s death, Caraher was none the less an evil influence among the ranchers, an influence that worked only to the inciting of crime. Unwilling to venture himself, to risk his own life, the anarchist saloon-keeper had goaded Dyke and Presley both to murder; a bad man, a plague spot in the world of the ranchers, poisoning the farmers\' bodies with alcohol and their minds with discontent.

At last, Presley arrived at the ranch house of Los Muertos. The place was silent; the grass on the lawn was half dead and over a foot high; the beginnings of weeds showed here and there in the driveway. He tied his horse to a ring in the trunk of one of the larger eucalyptus trees and entered the house.

Mrs. Derrick met him in the dining-room. The old look of uneasiness, almost of terror, had gone from her wide-open brown eyes. There was in them instead, the expression of one to whom a contingency, long dreaded, has arrived and passed. The stolidity of a settled grief, of an irreparable calamity, of a despair from which there was no escape was in her look, her manner, her voice. She was listless, apathetic, calm with the calmness of a woman who knows she can suffer no further.

“We are going away,” she told Presley, as the two sat down at opposite ends of the dining table. “Just Magnus and myself—all there is left of us. There is very little money left; Magnus can hardly take care of himself, to say nothing of me. I must look after him now. We are going to Marysville.”

“Why there?”

“You see,” she explained, “it happens that my old place is vacant in the Seminary there. I am going back to teach—literature.” She smiled wearily. “It is beginning all over again, isn\'t it? Only there is nothing to look forward to now. Magnus is an old man already, and I must take care of him.”

“He will go with you, then,” Presley said, “that will be some comfort to you at least.”

“I don\'t know,” she said slowly, “you have not seen Magnus lately.”

“Is he—how do you mean? Isn\'t he any better?”

“Would you like to see him? He is in the office. You can go right in.”

Presley rose. He hesitated a moment, then:

“Mrs. Annixter,” he asked, “Hilma—is she still with you? I should like to see her before I go.” “Go in and see Magnus,” said Mrs. Derrick. “I will tell her you are here.”

Presley stepped across the stone-paved hallway with the glass roof, and after knocking three times at the office door pushed it open and entered.

Magnus sat in the chair before the desk and did not look up as Presley entered. He had the appearance of a man nearer eighty than sixty. All the old-time erectness was broken and bent. It was as though the muscles that once had held the back rigid, the chin high, had softened and stretched. A certain fatness, the obesity of inertia, hung heavy around the hips and abdomen, the eye was watery and vague, the cheeks and chin unshaven and unkempt, the grey hair had lost its forward curl towards the temples and hung thin and ragged around the ears. The hawk-like nose seemed hooked to meet the chin; the lips were slack, the mouth half-opened.

Where once the Governor had been a model of neatness in his dress, the frock coat buttoned, the linen clean, he now sat in his shirt sleeves, the waistcoat open and showing the soiled shirt. His hands were stained with ink, and these, the only members of his body that yet appeared to retain their activity, were busy with a great pile of papers,—oblong, legal documents, that littered the table before him. Without a moment\'s cessation, these hands of the Governor\'s came and went among the papers, deft, nimble, dexterous.

Magnus was sorting papers. From the heap upon his left hand he selected a document, opened it, glanced over it, then tied it carefully, and laid it away upon a second pile on his right hand. When all the papers were in one pile, he reversed the process, taking from his right hand to place upon his left, then back from left to right again, then once more from right to left. He spoke no word, he sat absolutely still, even his eyes did not move, only his hands, swift, nervous, agitated, seemed alive.

“Why, how are you, Governor?” said Presley, coming forward. Magnus turned slowly about and looked at him and at the hand in which he shook his own.

“Ah,” he said at length, “Presley...yes.”

Then his glance fell, and he looked aimlessly about upon the floor. “I\'ve come to say good-bye, Governor,” continued Presley, “I\'m going away.”

“Going away...yes, why it\'s Presley. Good-day, Presley.”

“Good-day, Governor. I\'m going away. I\'ve come to say good-bye.”

“Good-bye?” Magnus bent his brows, “what are you saying good-bye for?”

“I\'m going away, sir.”

The Governor did not answer. Staring at the ledge of the desk, he seemed lost in thought. There was a long silence. Then, at length, Presley said:

“How are you getting on, Governor?”

Magnus looked up slowly.

“Why it\'s Presley,” he said. “How do you do, Presley.”

“Are you getting on all right, sir?”

“Yes,” said Magnus after a while, “yes, all right. I am going away. I\'ve come to say good-bye. No—” He interrupted himself with a deprecatory smile, “YOU said THAT, didn\'t you?”

“Well, you are going away, too, your wife tells me.”

“Yes, I\'m going away. I can\'t stay on...” he hesitated a long time, groping for the right word, “I can\'t stay on—on—what\'s the name of this place?”

“Los Muertos,” put in Presley.

“No, it isn\'t. Yes, it is, too, that\'s right, Los Muertos. I don\'t know where my memory has gone to of late.”

“Well, I hope you will be better soon, Governor.”

As Presley spoke the words, S. Behrman entered the room, and the Governor sprang up with unexpected agility and stood against the wall, drawing one long breath after another, watching the railroad agent with intent eyes.

S. Behrman saluted both men affably and sat down near the desk, drawing the links of his heavy watch chain through his fat fingers.

“There wasn\'t anybody outside when I knocked, but I heard your voice in here, Governor, so I came right in. I wanted to ask you, Governor, if my carpenters can begin work in here day after to-morrow. I want to take down that partition there, and throw this room and the next into one. I guess that will be O. K., won\'t it? You\'ll be out of here by then, won\'t you?”

There was no vagueness about Magnus\'s speech or manner now. There was that same alertness in his demeanour that one sees in a tamed lion in the presence of its trainer.

“Yes, yes,” he said quickly, “you can send your men here. I will be gone by to-morrow.”

“I don\'t want to seem to hurry you, Governor.” “No, you will not hurry me. I am ready to go now.”

“Anything I can do for you, Governor?”

“Nothing.”

“Yes, there is, Governor,” insisted S. Behrman. “I think now that all is over we ought to be good friends. I think I can do something for you. We still want an assistant in the local freight manager\'s office. Now, what do you say to having a try at it? There\'s a salary of fifty a month goes with it. I guess you must be in need of money now, and there\'s always the wife to support; what do you say? Will you try the place?”

Presley could only stare at the man in speechless wonder. What was he driving at? What reason was there back of this new move, and why should it be made thus openly and in his hearing? An explanation occurred to him. Was this merely a pleasantry on the part of S. Behrman, a way of enjoying to the full his triumph; was he testing the completeness of his victory, trying to see just how far he could go, how far beneath his feet he could push his old-time enemy?

“What do you say?” he repeated. “Will you try the place?”

“You—you INSIST?” inquired the Governor.

“Oh, I\'m not insisting on anything,” cried S. Behrman. “I\'m offering you a place, that\'s all. Will you take it?”

“Yes, yes, I\'ll take it.”

“You\'ll come over to our side?”

“Yes, I\'ll come over.”

“You\'ll have to turn \'railroad,\' understand?”

“I\'ll turn railroad.”

“Guess there may be times when you\'ll have to take orders from me.”

“I\'ll take orders from you.”

“You\'ll have to be loyal to railroad, you know. No funny business.”

“I\'ll be loyal to the railroad.”

“You would like the place then?”

“Yes.”

S. Behrman turned from Magnus, who at once resumed his seat and began again to sort his papers.

“Well, Presley,” said the railroad agent: “I guess I won\'t see you again.”

“I hope not,” answered the other.

“Tut, tut, Presley, you know you can\'t make me angry.”

He put on his hat of varnished straw and wiped his fat forehead with his handkerchief. Of late, he had grown fatter than ever, and the linen vest, stamped with a multitude of interlocked horseshoes, strained tight its imitation pearl buttons across the great protuberant stomach.

Presley looked at the man a moment before replying.

But a few weeks ago he could not thus have faced the great enemy of the farmers without a gust of blind rage blowing tempestuous through all his bones. Now, however, he found to his surprise that his fury had lapsed to a profound contempt, in which there was bitterness, but no truculence. He was tired, tired to death of the whole business.

“Yes,” he answered deliberately, “I am going away. You have ruined this place for me. I couldn\'t live here where I should have to see you, or the results of what you have done, whenever I stirred out of doors.”

“Nonsense, Presley,” answered the other, refusing to become angry. “That\'s foolishness, that kind of talk; though, of course, I understand how you feel. I guess it was you, wasn\'t it, who threw that bomb into my house?”

“It was.”

“Well, that don\'t show any common sense, Presley,” returned S. Behrman with perfect aplomb. “What could you have gained by killing me?”

“Not so much probably as you have gained by killing Harran and Annixter. But that\'s all passed now. You\'re safe from me.” The strangeness of this talk, the oddity of the situation burst upon him and he laughed aloud. “It don\'t seem as though you could be brought to book, S. Behrman, by anybody, or by any means, does it? They can\'t get at you through the courts,—the law can\'t get you, Dyke\'s pistol missed fire for just your benefit, and you even escaped Caraher\'s six inches of plugged gas pipe. Just what are we going to do with you?”

“Best give it up, Pres, my boy,” returned the other. “I guess there ain\'t anything can touch me. Well, Magnus,” he said, turning once more to the Governor. “Well, I\'ll think over what you say, and let you know if I can get the place for you in a day or two. You see,” he added, “you\'re getting pretty old, Magnus Derrick.”

Presley flung himself from the room, unable any longer to witness the depths into which Magnus had fallen. What other scenes of degradation were enacted in that room, how much further S. Behrman carried the humiliation, he did not know. He suddenly felt that the air of the office was choking him.

He hurried up to what once had been his own room. On his way he could not but note that much of the house was in disarray, a great packing-up was in progress; trunks, half-full, stood in the hallways, crates and cases in a litter of straw encumbered the rooms. The servants came and went with armfuls of books, ornaments, articles of clothing.

Presley took from his room only a few manuscripts and note-books, and a small valise full of his personal effects; at the doorway he paused and, holding the knob of the door in his hand, looked back into the room a very long time.

He descended to the lower floor and entered the dining-room. Mrs. Derrick had disappeared. Presley stood for a long moment in front of the fireplace, looking about the room, remembering the scenes that he had witnessed there—the conference when Osterman had first suggested the fight for Railroad Commissioner and then later the attack on Lyman Derrick and the sudden revelation of that inconceivable treachery. But as he stood considering these things a door to his right opened and Hilma entered the room.

Presley came forward, holding out his hand, all unable to believe his eyes. It was a woman, grave, dignified, composed, who advanced to meet him. Hilma was dressed in black, the cut and fashion of the gown severe, almost monastic. All the little feminine and contradictory daintinesses were nowhere to be seen. Her statuesque calm evenness of contour yet remained, but it was the calmness of great sorrow, of infinite resignation. Beautiful she still remained, but she was older. The seriousness of one who has gained the knowledge of the world—knowledge of its evil—seemed to envelope her. The calm gravity of a great suffering past, but not forgotten, sat upon her. Not yet twenty-one, she exhibited the demeanour of a woman of forty.

The one-time amplitude of her figure, the fulness of hip and shoulder, the great deep swell from waist to throat were gone. She had grown thinner and, in consequence, seemed unusually, almost unnaturally tall. Her neck was slender, the outline of her full lips and round chin was a little sharp; her arms, those wonderful, beautiful arms of hers, were a little shrunken. But her eyes were as wide open as always, rimmed as ever by the thin, intensely black line of the lashes and her brown, fragrant hair was still thick, still, at times, glittered and coruscated in the sun. When she spoke, it was with the old-time velvety huskiness of voice that Annixter had learned to love so well.

“Oh, it is you,” she said, giving him her hand. “You were good to want to see me before you left. I hear that you are going away.”

She sat down upon the sofa.

“Yes,” Presley answered, drawing a chair near to her, “yes, I felt I could not stay—down here any longer. I am going to take a long ocean voyage. My ship sails in a few days. But you, Mrs. Annixter, what are you going to do? Is there any way I can serve you?”

“No,” she answered, “nothing. Papa is doing well. We are living here now.”

“You are well?”

She made a little helpless gesture with both her hands, smiling very sadly.

“As you see,” she answered.

As he talked, Presley was looking at her intently. Her dignity was a new element in her character and the certain slender effect of her figure, emphasised now by the long folds of the black gown she wore, carried it almost superbly. She conveyed something of the impression of a queen in exile. But she had lost none of her womanliness; rather, the contrary. Adversity had softened her, as well as deepened her. Presley saw that very clearly. Hilma had arrived now at her perfect maturity; she had known great love and she had known great grief, and the woman that had awakened in her with her affection for Annixter had been strengthened and infinitely ennobled by his death. What if things had been different? Thus, as he conversed with her, Presley found himself wondering. Her sweetness, her beautiful gentleness, and tenderness were almost like palpable presences. It was almost as if a caress had been laid softly upon his cheek, as if a gentle hand closed upon his. Here, he knew, was sympathy; here, he knew, was an infinite capacity for love.

Then suddenly all the tired heart of him went out towards her. A longing to give the best that was in him to the memory of her, to be strong and noble because of her, to reshape his purposeless, half-wasted life with her nobility and purity and gentleness for his inspiration leaped all at once within him, leaped and stood firm, hardening to a resolve stronger than any he had ever known.

For an instant he told himself that the suddenness of this new emotion must be evidence of its insincerity. He was perfectly well aware that his impulses were abrupt and of short duration. But he knew that this was not sudden. Without realising it, he had been from the first drawn to Hilma, and all through these last terrible days, since the time he had seen her at Los Muertos, just after the battle at the ditch, she had obtruded continually upon his thoughts. The sight of her to-day, more beautiful than ever, quiet, strong, reserved, had only brought matters to a culmination.

“Ar............