The Octopus - Frank Norris (novel24 .TXT) 📗

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 outthrust 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