“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
