第2章

"Say, no, no," he continued."Me, I wanta stay bei der place;seven yahr I hef stay.Mist'r Derrick, he doand want dot Ishould be ge-sacked.Who, den, will der ditch ge-tend? Say, you tell 'um Bismarck hef gotta sure stay bei der place.Say, you hef der pull mit der Governor.You speak der gut word for me.""Harran is the man that has the pull with his father, Bismarck,"answered Presley."You get Harran to speak for you, and you're all right.""Sieben yahr I hef stay," protested Hooven, "and who will der ditch ge-tend, und alle dem cettles drive?""Well, Harran's your man," answered Presley, preparing to mount his bicycle.

"Say, you hef hear about dose ting?"

"I don't hear about anything, Bismarck.I don't know the first thing about how the ranch is run.""UND DER PIPE-LINE GE-MEND," Hooven burst out, suddenly remembering a forgotten argument.He waved an arm."Ach, der pipe-line bei der Mission Greek, und der waater-hole for dose cettles.Say, he doand doo ut HIMSELLUF, berhaps, I doand tink.""Well, talk to Harran about it."

"Say, he doand farm der whole demn rench bei hisseluf.Me, Igotta stay."

But on a sudden the water in the cart gushed over the sides from the vent in the top with a smart sound of splashing.Hooven was forced to turn his attention to it.Presley got his wheel under way.

"I hef some converzations mit Herran," Hooven called after him.

"He doand doo ut bei hisseluf, den, Mist'r Derrick; ach, no.Istay bei der rench to drive dose cettles."He climbed back to his seat under the wagon umbrella, and, as he started his team again with great cracks of his long whip, turned to the painters still at work upon the sign and declared with some defiance:

"Sieben yahr; yais, sir, seiben yahr I hef been on dis rench.

Git oop, you mule you, hoop!"

Meanwhile Presley had turned into the Lower Road.He was now on Derrick's land, division No.I, or, as it was called, the Home ranch, of the great Los Muertos Rancho.The road was better here, the dust laid after the passage of Hooven's watering-cart, and, in a few minutes, he had come to the ranch house itself, with its white picket fence, its few flower beds, and grove of eucalyptus trees.On the lawn at the side of the house.he saw Harran in the act of setting out the automatic sprinkler.In the shade of the house, by the porch, were two or three of the greyhounds, part of the pack that were used to hunt down jack-rabbits, and Godfrey, Harran's prize deerhound.

Presley wheeled up the driveway and met Harran by the horse-block.Harran was Magnus Derrick's youngest son, a very well-looking young fellow of twenty-three or twenty-five.He had the fine carriage that marked his father, and still further resembled him in that he had the Derrick nose--hawk-like and prominent, such as one sees in the later portraits of the Duke of Wellington.He was blond, and incessant exposure to the sun had, instead of tanning him brown, merely heightened the colour of his cheeks.His yellow hair had a tendency to curl in a forward direction, just in front of the ears.

Beside him, Presley made the sharpest of contrasts.Presley seemed to have come of a mixed origin; appeared to have a nature more composite, a temperament more complex.Unlike Harran Derrick, he seemed more of a character than a type.The sun had browned his face till it was almost swarthy.His eyes were a dark brown, and his forehead was the forehead of the intellectual, wide and high, with a certain unmistakable lift about it that argued education, not only of himself, but of his people before him.The impression conveyed by his mouth and chin was that of a delicate and highly sensitive nature, the lips thin and loosely shut together, the chin small and rather receding.

One guessed that Presley's refinement had been gained only by a certain loss of strength.One expected to find him nervous, introspective, to discover that his mental life was not at all the result of impressions and sensations that came to him from without, but rather of thoughts and reflections germinating from within.Though morbidly sensitive to changes in his physical surroundings, he would be slow to act upon such sensations, would not prove impulsive, not because he was sluggish, but because he was merely irresolute.It could be foreseen that morally he was of that sort who avoid evil through good taste, lack of decision, and want of opportunity.His temperament was that of the poet;when he told himself he had been thinking, he deceived himself.

He had, on such occasions, been only brooding.

Some eighteen months before this time, he had been threatened with consumption, and, taking advantage of a standing invitation on the part of Magnus Derrick, had come to stay in the dry, even climate of the San Joaquin for an indefinite length of time.He was thirty years old, and had graduated and post-graduated with high honours from an Eastern college, where he had devoted himself to a passionate study of literature, and, more especially, of poetry.

It was his insatiable ambition to write verse.But up to this time, his work had been fugitive, ephemeral, a note here and there, heard, appreciated, and forgotten.He was in search of a subject; something magnificent, he did not know exactly what;some vast, tremendous theme, heroic, terrible, to be unrolled in all the thundering progression of hexameters.

But whatever he wrote, and in whatever fashion, Presley was determined that his poem should be of the West, that world's frontier of Romance, where a new race, a new people--hardy, brave, and passionate--were building an empire; where the tumultuous life ran like fire from dawn to dark, and from dark to dawn again, primitive, brutal, honest, and without fear.