That Annixter had been overwhelmed with business all through the winter was an inexpressible relief to Hilma. His affairs took him away from the ranch continually. He was absent sometimes for weeks, making trips to San Francisco, or to Sacramento, or to Bonneville. Perhaps he was forgetting her, overlooking her; and while, at first, she told herself that she asked nothing better, the idea of it began to occupy her mind. She began to wonder if it was really so.
She knew his trouble. Everybody did. The news of the sudden forward movement of the Railroad’s forces, inaugurating the campaign, had flared white-hot and blazing all over the countryside. To Hilma’s notion, Annixter’s attitude was heroic beyond all expression. His courage in facing the Railroad, as he had faced Delaney in the barn, seemed to her the pitch of sublimity. She refused to see any auxiliaries aiding him in his fight. To her imagination, the great League, which all the ranchers were joining, was a mere form. Single-handed, Annixter fronted the monster. But for him the corporation would gobble Quien Sabe, as a whale would a minnow. He was a hero who stood between them all and destruction. He was a protector of her family. He was her champion. She began to mention him in her prayers every night, adding a further petition to the effect that he would become a good man, and that he should not swear so much, and that he should never meet Delaney again.
However, as Hilma still debated the idea of bathing her feet in the creek, a train did actually thunder past overhead—the regular evening Overland—the through express, that never stopped between Bakersfield and Fresno. It stormed by with a deafening clamour, and a swirl of smoke, in a long succession of way-coaches, and chocolate coloured Pullmans, grimy with the dust of the great deserts of the Southwest. The quivering of the trestle’s supports set a tremble in the ground underfoot. The thunder of wheels drowned all sound of the flowing of the creek, and also the noise of the buckskin mare’s hoofs descending from the trail upon the gravel about the creek, so that Hilma, turning about after the passage of the train, saw Annixter close at hand, with the abruptness of a vision.
He was looking at her, smiling as he rarely did, the firm line of his outthrust lower lip relaxed good-humouredly. He had taken off his campaign hat to her, and though his stiff, yellow hair was twisted into a bristling mop, the little persistent tuft on the crown, usually defiantly erect as an Apache’s scalp-lock, was nowhere in sight.
“Hello, it’s you, is it, Miss Hilma?” he exclaimed, getting down from the buckskin, and allowing her to drink.
Hilma nodded, scrambling to her feet, dusting her skirt with nervous pats of both hands.
Annixter sat down on a great rock close by and, the loop of the bridle over his arm, lit a cigar, and began to talk. He complained of the heat of the day, the bad condition of the Lower Road, over which he had come on his way from a committee meeting of the League at Los Muertos; of the slowness of the work on the irrigating ditch, and, as a matter of course, of the general hard times.
“Miss Hilma,” he said abruptly, “never you marry a ranchman. He’s never out of trouble.”
Hilma gasped, her eyes widening till the full round of the pupil was disclosed. Instantly, a certain, inexplicable guiltiness overpowered her with incredible confusion. Her hands trembled as she pressed the bundle of cresses into a hard ball between her palms.
Annixter continued to talk. He was disturbed and excited himself at this unexpected meeting. Never through all the past winter months of strenuous activity, the fever of political campaigns, the harrowing delays and ultimate defeat in one law court after another, had he forgotten the look in Hilma’s face as he stood with one arm around her on the floor of his barn, in peril of his life from the buster’s revolver. That dumb confession of Hilma’s wide-open eyes had been enough for him. Yet, somehow, he never had had a chance to act upon it. During the short period when he could be on his ranch Hilma had always managed to avoid him. Once, even, she had spent a month, about Christmas time, with her mother’s father, who kept a hotel in San Francisco.
Now, today, however, he had her all to himself. He would put an end to the situation that troubled him, and vexed him, day after day, month after month. Beyond question, the moment had come for something definite, he could not say precisely what. Readjusting his cigar between his teeth, he resumed his speech. It suited his humour to take the girl into his confidence, following an instinct which warned him that this would bring about a certain closeness of their relations, a certain intimacy.
“What do you think of this row, anyways, Miss Hilma—this railroad fuss in general? Think Shelgrim and his rushers are going to jump Quien Sabe—are going to run us off the ranch?”
“Oh, no, sir,” protested Hilma, still breathless. “Oh, no, indeed not.”
“Well, what then?”
Hilma made a little uncertain movement of ignorance.
“I don’t know what.”
“Well, the League agreed today that if the test cases were lost in the Supreme Court—you know we’ve appealed to the Supreme Court, at Washington—we’d fight.”
“Fight?”
“Yes, fight.”
“Fight like—like you and Mr. Delaney that time with—oh, dear—with guns?”
“I don’t know,” grumbled Annixter vaguely. “What do you think?”
Hilma’s low-pitched, almost husky voice trembled a little as she replied, “Fighting—with guns—that’s so terrible. Oh, those revolvers in the barn! I can hear
