The Octopus | Page 6

him the
packet of letters and papers.
"Here's the mail. I think I shall go on."
"But dinner is ready," said Harran; "we are just sitting down."
Presley shook his head. "No, I'm in a hurry. Perhaps I shall have
something to eat at Guadalajara. I shall be gone all day."
He delayed a few moments longer, tightening a loose nut on his
forward wheel, while Harran, recognising his father's handwriting on
one of the envelopes, slit it open and cast his eye rapidly over its pages.
"The Governor is coming home," he exclaimed, "to-morrow morning
on the early train; wants me to meet him with the team at Guadalajara;
AND," he cried between his clenched teeth, as he continued to read,
"we've lost the case."
"What case? Oh, in the matter of rates?"
Harran nodded, his eyes flashing, his face growing suddenly scarlet.
"Ulsteen gave his decision yesterday," he continued, reading from his
father's letter. "He holds, Ulsteen does, that 'grain rates as low as the
new figure would amount to confiscation of property, and that, on such
a basis, the railroad could not be operated at a legitimate profit. As he is
powerless to legislate in the matter, he can only put the rates back at
what they originally were before the commissioners made the cut, and
it is so ordered.' That's our friend S. Behrman again," added Harran,
grinding his teeth. "He was up in the city the whole of the time the new
schedule was being drawn, and he and Ulsteen and the Railroad
Commission were as thick as thieves. He has been up there all this last

week, too, doing the railroad's dirty work, and backing Ulsteen up.
'Legitimate profit, legitimate profit,'" he broke out. "Can we raise wheat
at a legitimate profit with a tariff of four dollars a ton for moving it two
hundred miles to tide-water, with wheat at eighty-seven cents? Why not
hold us up with a gun in our faces, and say, 'hands up,' and be done
with it?"
He dug his boot-heel into the ground and turned away to the house
abruptly, cursing beneath his breath.
"By the way," Presley called after him, "Hooven wants to see you. He
asked me about this idea of the Governor's of getting along without the
tenants this year. Hooven wants to stay to tend the ditch and look after
the stock. I told him to see you."
Harran, his mind full of other things, nodded to say he understood.
Presley only waited till he had disappeared indoors, so that he might
not seem too indifferent to his trouble; then, remounting, struck at once
into a brisk pace, and, turning out from the carriage gate, held on
swiftly down the Lower Road, going in the direction of Guadalajara.
These matters, these eternal fierce bickerings between the farmers of
the San Joaquin and the Pacific and Southwestern Railroad irritated
him and wearied him. He cared for none of these things. They did not
belong to his world. In the picture of that huge romantic West that he
saw in his imagination, these dissensions made the one note of harsh
colour that refused to enter into the great scheme of harmony. It was
material, sordid, deadly commonplace. But, however he strove to shut
his eyes to it or his ears to it, the thing persisted and persisted. The
romance seemed complete up to that point. There it broke, there it
failed, there it became realism, grim, unlovely, unyielding. To be
true--and it was the first article of his creed to be unflinchingly true--he
could not ignore it. All the noble poetry of the ranch--the
valley--seemed in his mind to be marred and disfigured by the presence
of certain immovable facts. Just what he wanted, Presley hardly knew.
On one hand, it was his ambition to portray life as he saw it--directly,
frankly, and through no medium of personality or temperament. But, on
the other hand, as well, he wished to see everything through a

rose-coloured mist--a mist that dulled all harsh outlines, all crude and
violent colours. He told himself that, as a part of the people, he loved
the people and sympathised with their hopes and fears, and joys and
griefs; and yet Hooven, grimy and perspiring, with his perpetual
grievance and his contracted horizon, only revolted him. He had set
himself the task of giving true, absolutely true, poetical expression to
the life of the ranch, and yet, again and again, he brought up against the
railroad, that stubborn iron barrier against which his romance shattered
itself to froth and disintegrated, flying spume. His heart went out to the
people, and his groping hand met that of a slovenly little Dutchman,
whom it was impossible to consider seriously. He searched for the True
Romance, and,