The Octopus - Frank Norris (novel24 .TXT) 📗

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 middleman—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 horseback, 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 goodbye 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 saloonkeeper 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 hawklike 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 goodbye, 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 goodbye.”

“Goodbye?” Magnus bent his brows, “what are you saying goodbye 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 goodbye. 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