“I’ll be cursed if I would!” exclaimed Harran.
“Well, S. Behrman is a screw,” admitted the engineer, “and he is ‘railroad’ to his boots; but business is business, and he would have to stand by a contract in black and white, and this chance in hops is too good to let slide. I guess we’ll try it on, Harran. I can get a good foreman that knows all about hops just now, and if the deal pays—well, I want to send Sid to a seminary up in San Francisco.”
“Well, mortgage the crops, but don’t mortgage the homestead, Dyke,” said Harran. “And, by the way, have you looked up the freight rates on hops?”
“No, I haven’t yet,” answered Dyke, “and I had better be sure of that, hadn’t I? I hear that the rate is reasonable, though.”
“You be sure to have a clear understanding with the railroad first about the rate,” Harran warned him.
When Magnus came out of the grocery store and once more seated himself in the buggy, he said to Harran, “Boy, drive over here to Annixter’s before we start home. I want to ask him to dine with us tonight. Osterman and Broderson are to drop in, I believe, and I should like to have Annixter as well.”
Magnus was lavishly hospitable. Los Muertos’s doors invariably stood open to all the Derricks’ neighbours, and once in so often Magnus had a few of his intimates to dinner.
As Harran and his father drove along the road toward Annixter’s ranch house, Magnus asked about what had happened during his absence.
He inquired after his wife and the ranch, commenting upon the work on the irrigating ditch. Harran gave him the news of the past week, Dyke’s discharge, his resolve to raise a crop of hops; Vanamee’s return, the killing of the sheep, and Hooven’s petition to remain upon the ranch as Magnus’s tenant. It needed only Harran’s recommendation that the German should remain to have Magnus consent upon the instant.
“You know more about it than I, boy,” he said, “and whatever you think is wise shall be done.”
Harran touched the bays with the whip, urging them to their briskest pace. They were not yet at Annixter’s and he was anxious to get back to the ranch house to supervise the blue-stoning of his seed.
“By the way, Governor,” he demanded suddenly, “how is Lyman getting on?”
Lyman, Magnus’s eldest son, had never taken kindly toward ranch life. He resembled his mother more than he did Magnus, and had inherited from her a distaste for agriculture and a tendency toward a profession. At a time when Harran was learning the rudiments of farming, Lyman was entering the State University, and, graduating thence, had spent three years in the study of law. But later on, traits that were particularly his father’s developed. Politics interested him. He told himself he was a born politician, was diplomatic, approachable, had a talent for intrigue, a gift of making friends easily and, most indispensable of all, a veritable genius for putting influential men under obligations to himself. Already he had succeeded in gaining for himself two important offices in the municipal administration of San Francisco—where he had his home—sheriff’s attorney, and, later on, assistant district attorney. But with these small achievements he was by no means satisfied. The largeness of his father’s character, modified in Lyman by a counter-influence of selfishness, had produced in him an inordinate ambition. Where his father during his political career had considered himself only as an exponent of principles he strove to apply, Lyman saw but the office, his own personal aggrandisement. He belonged to the new school, wherein objects were attained not by orations before senates and assemblies, but by sessions of committees, caucuses, compromises and expedients. His goal was to be in fact what Magnus was only in name—governor. Lyman, with shut teeth, had resolved that some day he would sit in the gubernatorial chair in Sacramento.
“Lyman is doing well,” answered Magnus. “I could wish he was more pronounced in his convictions, less willing to compromise, but I believe him to be earnest and to have a talent for government and civics. His ambition does him credit, and if he occupied himself a little more with means and a little less with ends, he would, I am sure, be the ideal servant of the people. But I am not afraid. The time will come when the State will be proud of him.”
As Harran turned the team into the driveway that led up to Annixter’s house, Magnus remarked:
“Harran, isn’t that young Annixter himself on the porch?”
Harran nodded and remarked:
“By the way, Governor, I wouldn’t seem too cordial in your invitation to Annixter. He will be glad to come, I know, but if you seem to want him too much, it is just like his confounded obstinacy to make objections.”
“There is something in that,” observed Magnus, as Harran drew up at the porch of the house. “He is a queer, cross-grained fellow, but in many ways sterling.”
Annixter was lying in the hammock on the porch, precisely as Presley had found him the day before, reading David Copperfield and stuffing himself with dried prunes. When he recognised Magnus, however, he got up, though careful to give evidence of the most poignant discomfort. He explained his difficulty at great length, protesting that his stomach was no better than a sponge-bag. Would Magnus and Harran get down and have a drink? There was whiskey somewhere about.
Magnus, however, declined. He stated his errand, asking Annixter to come over to Los Muertos that evening for seven o’clock dinner. Osterman and Broderson would be there.
At once
