It had come—his fall, his ruin. After so many years of integrity and honest battle, his life had ended here—in an actress’s dressing-room, deserted by his friends, his son murdered, his dishonesty known, an old man, broken, discarded, discredited, and abandoned.
Before nightfall of that day, Bonneville was further excited by an astonishing bit of news. S. Behrman lived in a detached house at some distance from the town, surrounded by a grove of live oak and eucalyptus trees. At a little after half-past six, as he was sitting down to his supper, a bomb was thrown through the window of his dining-room, exploding near the doorway leading into the hall. The room was wrecked and nearly every window of the house shattered. By a miracle, S. Behrman, himself, remained untouched.
VIII
On a certain afternoon in the early part of July, about a month after the fight at the irrigating ditch and the mass meeting at Bonneville, Cedarquist, at the moment opening his mail in his office in San Francisco, was genuinely surprised to receive a visit from Presley.
“Well, upon my word, Pres,” exclaimed the manufacturer, as the young man came in through the door that the office boy held open for him, “upon my word, have you been sick? Sit down, my boy. Have a glass of sherry. I always keep a bottle here.”
Presley accepted the wine and sank into the depths of a great leather chair near by.
“Sick?” he answered. “Yes, I have been sick. I’m sick now. I’m gone to pieces, sir.”
His manner was the extreme of listlessness—the listlessness of great fatigue. “Well, well,” observed the other. “I’m right sorry to hear that. What’s the trouble, Pres?”
“Oh, nerves mostly, I suppose, and my head, and insomnia, and weakness, a general collapse all along the line, the doctor tells me. ‘Over-cerebration,’ he says; ‘over-excitement.’ I fancy I rather narrowly missed brain fever.”
“Well, I can easily suppose it,” answered Cedarquist gravely, “after all you have been through.”
Presley closed his eyes—they were sunken in circles of dark brown flesh—and pressed a thin hand to the back of his head.
“It is a nightmare,” he murmured. “A frightful nightmare, and it’s not over yet. You have heard of it all only through the newspaper reports. But down there, at Bonneville, at Los Muertos—oh, you can have no idea of it, of the misery caused by the defeat of the ranchers and by this decision of the Supreme Court that dispossesses them all. We had gone on hoping to the last that we would win there. We had thought that in the Supreme Court of the United States, at least, we could find justice. And the news of its decision was the worst, last blow of all. For Magnus it was the last—positively the very last.”
“Poor, poor Derrick,” murmured Cedarquist. “Tell me about him, Pres. How does he take it? What is he going to do?”
“It beggars him, sir. He sunk a great deal more than any of us believed in his ranch, when he resolved to turn off most of the tenants and farm the ranch himself. Then the fight he made against the Railroad in the Courts and the political campaign he went into, to get Lyman on the Railroad Commission, took more of it. The money that Genslinger blackmailed him of, it seems, was about all he had left. He had been gambling—you know the Governor—on another bonanza crop this year to recoup him. Well, the bonanza came right enough—just in time for S. Behrman and the Railroad to grab it. Magnus is ruined.”
“What a tragedy! what a tragedy!” murmured the other. “Lyman turning rascal, Harran killed, and now this; and all within so short a time—all at the same time, you might almost say.”
“If it had only killed him,” continued Presley; “but that is the worst of it.”
“How the worst?”
“I’m afraid, honestly, I’m afraid it is going to turn his wits, sir. It’s broken him; oh, you should see him, you should see him. A shambling, stooping, trembling old man, in his dotage already. He sits all day in the dining-room, turning over papers, sorting them, tying them up, opening them again, forgetting them—all fumbling and mumbling and confused. And at table sometimes he forgets to eat. And, listen, you know, from the house we can hear the trains whistling for the Long Trestle. As often as that happens the Governor seems to be—oh, I don’t know, frightened. He will sink his head between his shoulders, as though he were dodging something, and he won’t fetch a long breath again till the train is out of hearing. He seems to have conceived an abject, unreasoned terror of the Railroad.”
“But he will have to leave Los Muertos now, of course?”
“Yes, they will all have to leave. They have a fortnight more. The few tenants that were still on Los Muertos are leaving. That is one thing that brings me to the city. The family of one of the men who was killed—Hooven was his name—have come to the city to find work. I think they are liable to be in great distress, unless they have been wonderfully lucky, and I am trying to find them in order to look after them.”
“You need looking after yourself, Pres.”
“Oh, once away from Bonneville and the sight of the ruin there, I’m better. But I intend to go away. And that makes me think, I came to ask you if you could help me. If you would let me take passage on one of your wheat ships. The Doctor says an ocean voyage would set me up.”
“Why, certainly, Pres,” declared Cedarquist. “But I’m sorry you’ll have to go. We expected to have you down in the country with us this winter.”
Presley
