“No,” he answered. “I must go. Even if I had all my health, I could not bring myself to stay in California just now. If you can introduce me to one of your captains—”
“With pleasure. When do you want to go? You may have to wait a few weeks. Our first ship won’t clear till the end of the month.”
“That would do very well. Thank you, sir.”
But Cedarquist was still interested in the land troubles of the Bonneville farmers, and took the first occasion to ask:
“So, the Railroad are in possession on most of the ranches?”
“On all of them,” returned Presley. “The League went all to pieces, so soon as Magnus was forced to resign. The old story—they got quarrelling among themselves. Somebody started a compromise party, and upon that issue a new president was elected. Then there were defections. The Railroad offered to lease the lands in question to the ranchers—the ranchers who owned them,” he exclaimed bitterly, “and because the terms were nominal—almost nothing—plenty of the men took the chance of saving themselves. And, of course, once signing the lease, they acknowledged the Railroad’s title. But the road would not lease to Magnus. S. Behrman takes over Los Muertos in a few weeks now.”
“No doubt, the road made over their title in the property to him,” observed Cedarquist, “as a reward of his services.”
“No doubt,” murmured Presley wearily. He rose to go.
“By the way,” said Cedarquist, “what have you on hand for, let us say, Friday evening? Won’t you dine with us then? The girls are going to the country Monday of next week, and you probably won’t see them again for some time if you take that ocean voyage of yours.”
“I’m afraid I shall be very poor company, sir,” hazarded Presley. “There’s no ’go,’ no life in me at all these days. I am like a clock with a broken spring.”
“Not broken, Pres, my boy;” urged the other, “only run down. Try and see if we can’t wind you up a bit. Say that we can expect you. We dine at seven.”
“Thank you, sir. Till Friday at seven, then.”
Regaining the street, Presley sent his valise to his club (where he had engaged a room) by a messenger boy, and boarded a Castro Street car. Before leaving Bonneville, he had ascertained, by strenuous enquiry, Mrs. Hooven’s address in the city, and thitherward he now directed his steps.
When Presley had told Cedarquist that he was ill, that he was jaded, worn out, he had only told half the truth. Exhausted he was, nerveless, weak, but this apathy was still invaded from time to time with fierce incursions of a spirit of unrest and revolt, reactions, momentary returns of the blind, undirected energy that at one time had prompted him to a vast desire to acquit himself of some terrible deed of readjustment, just what, he could not say, some terrifying martyrdom, some awe-inspiring immolation, consummate, incisive, conclusive. He fancied himself to be fired with the purblind, mistaken heroism of the anarchist, hurling his victim to destruction with full knowledge that the catastrophe shall sweep him also into the vortex it creates.
But his constitutional irresoluteness obstructed his path continually; brainsick, weak of will, emotional, timid even, he temporised, procrastinated, brooded; came to decisions in the dark hours of the night, only to abandon them in the morning.
Once only he had acted. And at this moment, as he was carried through the windy, squalid streets, he trembled at the remembrance of it. The horror of “what might have been” incompatible with the vengeance whose minister he fancied he was, oppressed him. The scene perpetually reconstructed itself in his imagination. He saw himself under the shade of the encompassing trees and shrubbery, creeping on his belly toward the house, in the suburbs of Bonneville, watching his chances, seizing opportunities, spying upon the lighted windows where the raised curtains afforded a view of the interior. Then had come the appearance in the glare of the gas of the figure of the man for whom he waited. He saw himself rise and run forward. He remembered the feel and weight in his hand of Caraher’s bomb—the six inches of plugged gas pipe. His upraised arm shot forward. There was a shiver of smashed windowpanes, then—a void—a red whirl of confusion, the air rent, the ground rocking, himself flung headlong, flung off the spinning circumference of things out into a place of terror and vacancy and darkness. And then after a long time the return of reason, the consciousness that his feet were set upon the road to Los Muertos, and that he was fleeing terror-stricken, gasping, all but insane with hysteria. Then the never-to-be-forgotten night that ensued, when he descended into the pit, horrified at what he supposed he had done, at one moment ridden with remorse, at another raging against his own feebleness, his lack of courage, his wretched, vacillating spirit. But morning had come, and with it the knowledge that he had failed, and the baser assurance that he was not even remotely suspected. His own escape had been no less miraculous than that of his enemy, and he had fallen on his knees in inarticulate prayer, weeping, pouring out his thanks to God for the deliverance from the gulf to the very brink of which his feet had been drawn.
After this, however, there had come to Presley a deep-rooted suspicion that he was—of all human beings, the most wretched—a failure. Everything to which he had set his mind failed—his great epic, his efforts to help the people who surrounded him, even his attempted destruction of the enemy, all these had come to nothing. Girding his shattered strength together, he resolved upon one last attempt to live up to the best that was in him, and to that end had set himself to lift out of the despair into which they had been thrust, the bereaved family of the German, Hooven.
After all was over, and Hooven, together with the
