The Octopus : A Story of California

It was, no doubt, this jarring sound that at length roused Presley from his lethargy. The two friends rose; Solotari very sleepily came forward; they paid for the luncheon, and stepping out into the heat and glare of the streets of the town, passed on through it and took the road that led northward across a corner of Dyke’s hop fields. They were bound for the hills in the northeastern corner of Quien Sabe. It was the same walk which Presley had taken on the previous occasion when he had first met Vanamee herding the sheep. This encompassing detour around the whole country-side was a favorite pastime of his and he was anxious that Vanamee should share his pleasure in it.

But soon after leaving Guadalajara, they found themselves upon the land that Dyke had bought and upon which he was to raise his famous crop of hops. Dyke’s house was close at hand, a very pleasant little cottage, painted white, with green blinds and deep porches, while near it and yet in process of construction, were two great storehouses and a drying and curing house, where the hops were to be stored and treated. All about were evidences that the former engineer had already been hard at work. The ground had been put in readiness to receive the crop and a bewildering, innumerable multitude of poles, connected with a maze of wire and twine, had been set out. Farther on at a turn of the road, they came upon Dyke himself, driving a farm wagon loaded with more poles. He was in his shirt sleeves, his massive, hairy arms bare to the elbow, glistening with sweat, red with heat. In his bell-like, rumbling voice, he was calling to his foreman and a boy at work in stringing the poles together. At sight of Presley and Vanamee he hailed them jovially, addressing them as “boys,” and insisting that they should get into the wagon with him and drive to the house for a glass of beer. His mother had only the day before returned from Marysville, where she had been looking up a seminary for the little tad. She would be delighted to see the two boys; besides, Vanamee must see how the little tad had grown since he last set eyes on her; wouldn’t know her for the same little girl; and the beer had been on ice since morning. Presley and Vanamee could not well refuse.

They climbed into the wagon and jolted over the uneven ground through the bare forest of hop-poles to the house. Inside they found Mrs. Dyke, an old lady with a very gentle face, who wore a cap and a very old-fashioned gown with hoop skirts, dusting the what-not in a corner of the parlor. The two men were presented and the beer was had from off the ice.

“Mother,” said Dyke, as he wiped the froth from his great blond beard, “ain’t Sid anywheres about? I want Mr. Vanamee to see how she has grown. Smartest little tad in Tulare County, boys. Can recite the whole of ‘Snow Bound,’ end to end, without skipping or looking at the book. Maybe you don’t believe that. Mother, ain’t I right—without skipping a line, hey?”

Mrs. Dyke nodded to say that it was so, but explained that Sidney was in Guadalajara. In putting on her new slippers for the first time the morning before, she had found a dime in the toe of one of them and had had the whole house by the ears ever since till she could spend it.

“Was it for licorice to make her licorice water?” inquired Dyke gravely.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Dyke. “I made her tell me what she was going to get before she went, and it was licorice.”

Dyke, though his mother protested that he was foolish and that Presley and Vanamee had no great interest in “young ones,” insisted upon showing the visitors Sidney’s copy-books. They were monuments of laborious, elaborate neatness, the trite moralities and ready-made aphorisms of the philanthropists and publicists, repeated from page to page with wearying insistence. “I, too, am an American Citizen. S. D.,” “As the Twig is Bent the Tree is Inclined,” “Truth Crushed to Earth Will Rise Again,” “As for Me, Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death,” and last of all, a strange intrusion amongst the mild, well-worn phrases, two legends. “My motto—Public Control of Public Franchises,” and “The P. and S. W. is an Enemy of the State.”

“I see,” commented Presley, “you mean the little tad to understand ‘the situation’ early.”

“I told him he was foolish to give that to Sid to copy,” said Mrs. Dyke, with indulgent remonstrance. “What can she understand of public franchises?”

“Never mind,” observed Dyke, “she’ll remember it when she grows up and when the seminary people have rubbed her up a bit, and then she’ll begin to ask questions and understand. And don’t you make any mistake, mother,” he went on, “about the little tad not knowing who her dad’s enemies are. What do you think, boys? Listen, here. Precious little I’ve ever told her of the railroad or how I was turned off, but the other day I was working down by the fence next the railroad tracks and Sid was there. She’d brought her doll rags down and she was playing house behind a pile of hop poles. Well, along comes a through freight—mixed train from Missouri points and a string of empties from New Orleans,—and when it had passed, what do you suppose the tad did? SHE didn’t know I was watching her. She goes to the fence and spits a little spit after the caboose and puts out her little head and, if you’ll believe me, HISSES at the train; and mother says she does that same every time she sees a train go by, and never crosses the tracks that she don’t spit her little spit on ‘em. What do you THINK of THAT?”

“But I correct her every time,” protested Mrs. Dyke seriously. “Where she picked up the trick of hissing I don’t know. No, it’s not funny. It seems dreadful to see a little girl who’s as sweet and gentle as can be in every other way, so venomous. She says the other little girls at school and the boys, too, are all the same way. Oh, dear,” she sighed, “why will the General Office be so unkind and unjust? Why, I couldn’t be happy, with all the money in the world, if I thought that even one little child hated me—hated me so that it would spit and hiss at me. And it’s not one child, it’s all of them, so Sidney says; and think of all the grown people who hate the road, women and men, the whole county, the whole State, thousands and thousands of people. Don’t the managers and the directors of the road ever think of that? Don’t they ever think of all the hate that surrounds them, everywhere, everywhere, and the good people that just grit their teeth when the name of the road is mentioned? Why do they want to make the people hate them? No,” she murmured, the tears starting to her eyes, “No, I tell you, Mr. Presley, the men who own the railroad are wicked, bad-hearted men who don’t care how much the poor people suffer, so long as the road makes its eighteen million a year. They don’t care whether the people hate them or love them, just so long as they are afraid of them. It’s not right and God will punish them sooner or later.”

A little after this the two young men took themselves away, Dyke obligingly carrying them in the wagon as far as the gate that opened into the Quien Sabe ranch. On the way, Presley referred to what Mrs. Dyke had said and led Dyke, himself, to speak of the P. and S. W.

“Well,” Dyke said, “it’s like this, Mr. Presley. I, personally, haven’t got the right to kick. With you wheat-growing people I guess it’s different, but hops, you see, don’t count for much in the State. It’s such a little business that the road don’t want to bother themselves to tax it. It’s the wheat growers that the road cinches. The rates on hops ARE FAIR. I’ve got to admit that; I was in to Bonneville a while ago to find out. It’s two cents a pound, and Lord love you, that’s reasonable enough to suit any man. No,” he concluded, “I’m on the way to make money now. The road sacking me as they did was, maybe, a good thing for me, after all. It came just at the right time. I had a bit of money put by and here was the chance to go into hops with the certainty that hops would quadruple and quintuple in price inside the year. No, it was my chance, and though they didn’t mean it by a long chalk, the railroad people did me a good turn when they gave me my time—and the tad’ll enter the seminary next fall.”

About a quarter of an hour after they had said goodbye to the one-time engineer, Presley and Vanamee, tramping briskly along the road that led northward through Quien Sabe, arrived at Annixter’s ranch house. At once they were aware of a vast and unwonted bustle that revolved about the place. They stopped a few moments looking on, amused and interested in what was going forward.

The colossal barn was finished. Its freshly white-washed sides glared intolerably in the sun, but its interior was as yet innocent of paint and through the yawning vent of the sliding doors came a delicious odour of new, fresh wood and shavings. A crowd of men—Annixter’s farm hands—were swarming all about it. Some were balanced on the topmost rounds of ladders, hanging festoons of Japanese lanterns from tree to tree, and all across the front of the barn itself. Mrs. Tree, her daughter Hilma and another woman were inside the barn cutting into long strips bolt after bolt of red, white and blue cambric and directing how these strips should be draped from the ceiling and on the walls; everywhere resounded the tapping of tack hammers. A farm wagon drove up loaded to overflowing with evergreens and with great bundles of palm leaves, and these were immediately seized upon and affixed as supplementary decorations to the tri-coloured cambric upon the inside walls of the barn. Two of the larger evergreen trees were placed on either side the barn door and their tops bent over to form an arch. In the middle of this arch it was proposed to hang a mammoth pasteboard escutcheon with gold letters, spelling the word WELCOME. Piles of chairs, rented from I.O.O.F. hall in Bonneville, heaped themselves in an apparently hopeless entanglement on the ground; while at the far extremity of the barn a couple of carpenters clattered about the impromptu staging which was to accommodate the band.

There was a strenuous gayety in the air; everybody was in the best of spirits. Notes of laughter continually interrupted the conversation on every hand. At every moment a group of men involved themselves in uproarious horse-play. They passed oblique jokes behind their hands to each other—grossly veiled double-meanings meant for the women—and bellowed with laughter thereat, stamping on the ground. The relations between the sexes grew more intimate, the women and girls pushing the young fellows away from their sides with vigorous thrusts of their elbows. It was passed from group to group that Adela Vacca, a division superintendent’s wife, had lost her garter; the daughter of the foreman of the Home ranch was kissed behind the door of the dairy-house.

Annixter, in execrable temper, appeared from time to time, hatless, his stiff yellow hair in wild disorder. He hurried between the barn and the ranch house, carrying now a wickered demijohn, now a case of wine, now a basket of lemons and pineapples. Besides general supervision, he had elected to assume the responsibility of composing the punch—something stiff, by jingo, a punch that would raise you right out of your boots; a regular hairlifter.

The harness room of the barn he had set apart for: himself and intimates. He had brought a long table down from the house and upon it had set out boxes of cigars, bottles of whiskey and of beer and the great china bowls for the punch. It would be no fault of his, he declared, if half the number of his men friends were not uproarious before they left. His barn dance would be the talk of all Tulare County for years to come. For this one day he had resolved to put all thoughts of business out of his head. For the matter of that, things were going well enough. Osterman was back from Los Angeles with a favourable report as to his affair with Disbrow and Darrell. There had been another meeting of the committee. Harran Derrick had attended. Though he had taken no part in the discussion, Annixter was satisfied. The Governor had consented to allow Harran to “come in,” if he so desired, and Harran had pledged himself to share one-sixth of the campaign expenses, providing these did not exceed a certain figure.

As Annixter came to the door of the barn to shout abuse at the distraught Chinese cook who was cutting up lemons in the kitchen, he caught sight of Presley and Vanamee and hailed them.

“Hello, Pres,” he called. “Come over here and see how she looks;” he indicated the barn with a movement of his head. “Well, we’re getting ready for you tonight,” he went on as the two friends came up. “But how we are going to get straightened out by eight o’clock I don’t know. Would you believe that pip Caraher is short of lemons—at this last minute and I told him I’d want three cases of ‘em as much as a month ago, and here, just when I want a good lively saddle horse to get around on, somebody hikes the buckskin out the corral. STOLE her, by jingo. I’ll have the law on that thief if it breaks me—and a sixty-dollar saddle ‘n’ head-stall gone with her; and only about half the number of Jap lanterns that I ordered have shown up and not candles enough for those. It’s enough to make a dog sick. There’s nothing done that you don’t do yourself, unless you stand over these loafers with a club. I’m sick of the whole business—and I’ve lost my hat; wish to God I’d never dreamed of givin’ this rotten fool dance. Clutter the whole place up with a lot of feemales. I sure did lose my presence of mind when I got THAT idea.”

Then, ignoring the fact that it was he, himself, who had called the young men to him, he added:

“Well, this is my busy day. Sorry I can’t stop and talk to you longer.”

He shouted a last imprecation at the Chinaman and turned back into the barn. Presley and Vanamee went on, but Annixter, as he crossed the floor of the barn, all but collided with Hilma Tree, who came out from one of the stalls, a box of candles in her arms.

Gasping out an apology, Annixter reentered the harness room, closing the door behind him, and forgetting all the responsibility of the moment, lit a cigar and sat down in one of the hired chairs, his hands in his pockets, his feet on the table, frowning thoughtfully through the blue smoke.

Annixter was at last driven to confess to himself that he could not get the thought of Hilma Tree out of his mind. Finally she had “got a hold on him.” The thing that of all others he most dreaded had happened. A feemale girl had got a hold on him, and now there was no longer for him any such thing as peace of mind. The idea of the young woman was with him continually. He went to bed with it; he got up with it. At every moment of the day he was pestered with it. It interfered with his work, got mixed up in his business. What a miserable confession for a man to make; a fine way to waste his time. Was it possible that only the other day he had stood in front of the music store in Bonneville and seriously considered making Hilma a present of a music-box? Even now, the very thought of it made him flush with shame, and this after she had told him plainly that she did not like him. He was running after her—he, Annixter! He ripped out a furious oath, striking the table with his boot heel. Again and again he had resolved to put the whole affair from out his mind. Once he had been able to do so, but of late it was becoming harder and harder with every successive day. He had only to close his eyes to see her as plain as if she stood before him; he saw her in a glory of sunlight that set a fine tinted lustre of pale carnation and gold on the silken sheen of her white skin, her hair sparkled with it, her thick, strong neck, sloping to her shoulders with beautiful, full curves, seemed to radiate the light; her eyes, brown, wide, innocent in expression, disclosing the full disc of the pupil upon the slightest provocation, flashed in this sunlight like diamonds.

Annixter was all bewildered. With the exception of the timid little creature in the glove-cleaning establishment in Sacramento, he had had no acquaintance with any woman. His world was harsh, crude, a world of men only—men who were to be combatted, opposed—his hand was against nearly every one of them. Women he distrusted with the instinctive distrust of the overgrown schoolboy. Now, at length, a young woman had come into his life. Promptly he was struck with discomfiture, annoyed almost beyond endurance, harassed, bedevilled, excited, made angry and exasperated. He was suspicious of the woman, yet desired her, totally ignorant of how to approach her, hating the sex, yet drawn to the individual, confusing the two emotions, sometimes even hating Hilma as a result of this confusion, but at all times disturbed, vexed, irritated beyond power of expression.

At length, Annixter cast his cigar from him and plunged again into the work of the day. The afternoon wore to evening, to the accompaniment of wearying and clamorous endeavour. In some unexplained fashion, the labour of putting the great barn in readiness for the dance was accomplished; the last bolt of cambric was hung in place from the rafters. The last evergreen tree was nailed to the joists of the walls; the last lantern hung, the last nail driven into the musicians’ platform. The sun set. There was a great scurry to have supper and dress. Annixter, last of all the other workers, left the barn in the dusk of twilight. He was alone; he had a saw under one arm, a bag of tools was in his hand. He was in his shirt sleeves and carried his coat over his shoulder; a hammer was thrust into one of his hip pockets. He was in execrable temper. The day’s work had fagged him out. He had not been able to find his hat.

“And the buckskin with sixty dollars’ worth of saddle gone, too,” he groaned. “Oh, ain’t it sweet?”

At his house, Mrs. Tree had set out a cold supper for him, the inevitable dish of prunes serving as dessert. After supper Annixter bathed and dressed. He decided at the last moment to wear his usual town-going suit, a sack suit of black, made by a Bonneville tailor. But his hat was gone. There were other hats he might have worn, but because this particular one was lost he fretted about it all through his dressing and then decided to have one more look around the barn for it.

For over a quarter of an hour he pottered about the barn, going from stall to stall, rummaging the harness room and feed room, all to no purpose. At last he came out again upon the main floor, definitely giving up the search, looking about him to see if everything was in order.

The festoons of Japanese lanterns in and around the barn were not yet lighted, but some half-dozen lamps, with great, tin reflectors, that hung against the walls, were burning low. A dull half light pervaded the vast interior, hollow, echoing, leaving the corners and roof thick with impenetrable black shadows. The barn faced the west and through the open sliding doors was streaming a single bright bar from the after-glow, incongruous and out of all harmony with the dull flare of the kerosene lamps.

As Annixter glanced about him, he saw a figure step briskly out of the shadows of one corner of the building, pause for the fraction of one instant in the bar of light, then, at sight of him, dart back again. There was a sound of hurried footsteps.

Annixter, with recollections of the stolen buckskin in his mind, cried out sharply:

“Who’s there?”

There was no answer. In a second his pistol was in his hand.

“Who’s there? Quick, speak up or I’ll shoot.”

“No, no, no, don’t shoot,” cried an answering voice. “Oh, be careful. It’s I—Hilma Tree.”

Annixter slid the pistol into his pocket with a great qualm of apprehension. He came forward and met Hilma in the doorway.

“Good Lord,” he murmured, “that sure did give me a start. If I HAD shot–”

Hilma stood abashed and confused before him. She was dressed in a white organdie frock of the most rigorous simplicity and wore neither flower nor ornament. The severity of her dress made her look even larger than usual, and even as it was her eyes were on a level with Annixter’s. There was a certain fascination in the contradiction of stature and character of Hilma—a great girl, half-child as yet, but tall as a man for all that.

There was a moment’s awkward silence, then Hilma explained:

“I—I came back to look for my hat. I thought I left it here this afternoon.”

“And I was looking for my hat,” cried Annixter. “Funny enough, hey?”

They laughed at this as heartily as children might have done. The constraint of the situation was a little relaxed and Annixter, with sudden directness, glanced sharply at the young woman and demanded:

“Well, Miss Hilma, hate me as much as ever?”

“Oh, no, sir,” she answered, “I never said I hated you.”

“Well,—dislike me, then; I know you said that.”

“I—I disliked what you did—TRIED to do. It made me angry and it hurt me. I shouldn’t have said what I did that time, but it was your fault.”

“You mean you shouldn’t have said you didn’t like me?” asked Annixter. “Why?”

“Well, well,—I don’t—I don’t DISlike anybody,” admitted Hilma.

“Then I can take it that you don’t dislike ME? Is that it?”

“I don’t dislike anybody,” persisted Hilma.

“Well, I asked you more than that, didn’t I?” queried Annixter uneasily. “I asked you to like me, remember, the other day. I’m asking you that again, now. I want you to like me.”

Hilma lifted her eyes inquiringly to his. In her words was an unmistakable ring of absolute sincerity. Innocently she inquired:

“Why?”

Annixter was struck speechless. In the face of such candour, such perfect ingenuousness, he was at a loss for any words.

“Well—well,” he stammered, “well—I don’t know,” he suddenly burst out. “That is,” he went on, groping for his wits, “I can’t quite say why.” The idea of a colossal lie occurred to him, a thing actually royal.

“I like to have the people who are around me like me,” he declared. “I—I like to be popular, understand? Yes, that’s it,” he continued, more reassured. “I don’t like the idea of any one disliking me. That’s the way I am. It’s my nature.”

“Oh, then,” returned Hilma, “you needn’t bother. No, I don’t dislike you.”

“Well, that’s good,” declared Annixter judicially. “That’s good. But hold on,” he interrupted, “I’m forgetting. It’s not enough to not dislike me. I want you to like me. How about THAT?”

Hilma paused for a moment, glancing vaguely out of the doorway toward the lighted window of the dairy-house, her head tilted.

“I don’t know that I ever thought about that,” she said.

“Well, think about it now,” insisted Annixter.

“But I never thought about liking anybody particularly,” she observed. “It’s because I like everybody, don’t you see?”

“Well, you’ve got to like some people more than other people,” hazarded Annixter, “and I want to be one of those ‘some people,’ savvy? Good Lord, I don’t know how to say these fool things. I talk like a galoot when I get talking to feemale girls and I can’t lay my tongue to anything that sounds right. It isn’t my nature. And look here, I lied when I said I liked to have people like me—to be popular. Rot! I don’t care a curse about people’s opinions of me. But there’s a few people that are more to me than most others—that chap Presley, for instance—and those people I DO want to have like me. What they think counts. Pshaw! I know I’ve got enemies; piles of them. I could name you half a dozen men right now that are naturally itching to take a shot at me. How about this ranch? Don’t I know, can’t I hear the men growling oaths under their breath after I’ve gone by? And in business ways, too,” he went on, speaking half to himself, “in Bonneville and all over the county there’s not a man of them wouldn’t howl for joy if they got a chance to down Buck Annixter. Think I care? Why, I LIKE it. I run my ranch to suit myself and I play my game my own way. I’m a ‘driver,’ I know it, and a ‘bully,’ too. Oh, I know what they call me—‘a brute beast, with a twist in my temper that would rile up a new-born lamb,’ and I’m ‘crusty’ and ‘pig-headed’ and ‘obstinate.’ They say all that, but they’ve got to say, too, that I’m cleverer than any man-jack in the running. There’s nobody can get ahead of me.” His eyes snapped. “Let ‘em grind their teeth. They can’t ‘down’ me. When I shut my fist there’s not one of them can open it. No, not with a CHISEL.” He turned to Hilma again. “Well, when a man’s hated as much as that, it stands to reason, don’t it, Miss Hilma, that the few friends he has got he wants to keep? I’m not such an entire swine to the people that know me best—that jackass, Presley, for instance. I’d put my hand in the fire to do him a real service. Sometimes I get kind of lonesome; wonder if you would understand? It’s my fault, but there’s not a horse about the place that don’t lay his ears back when I get on him; there’s not a dog don’t put his tail between his legs as soon as I come near him. The cayuse isn’t foaled yet here on Quien Sabe that can throw me, nor the dog whelped that would dare show his teeth at me. I kick that Irish setter every time I see him—but wonder what I’d do, though, if he didn’t slink so much, if he wagged his tail and was glad to see me? So it all comes to this: I’d like to have you—well, sort of feel that I was a good friend of yours and like me because of it.”