The Octopus | Page 7

in the end, found grain rates and unjust freight tariffs.
"But the stuff is HERE," he muttered, as he sent his wheel rumbling
across the bridge over Broderson Creek. "The romance, the real
romance, is here somewhere. I'll get hold of it yet."
He shot a glance about him as if in search of the inspiration. By now he
was not quite half way across the northern and narrowest corner of Los
Muertos, at this point some eight miles wide. He was still on the Home
ranch. A few miles to the south he could just make out the line of wire
fence that separated it from the third division; and to the north, seen
faint and blue through the haze and shimmer of the noon sun, a long
file of telegraph poles showed the line of the railroad and marked
Derrick's northeast boundary. The road over which Presley was
travelling ran almost diametrically straight. In front of him, but at a
great distance, he could make out the giant live-oak and the red roof of
Hooven's barn that stood near it.
All about him the country was flat. In all directions he could see for
miles. The harvest was just over. Nothing but stubble remained on the
ground. With the one exception of the live-oak by Hooven's place,
there was nothing green in sight. The wheat stubble was of a dirty
yellow; the ground, parched, cracked, and dry, of a cheerless brown. By
the roadside the dust lay thick and grey, and, on either hand, stretching
on toward the horizon, losing itself in a mere smudge in the distance,
ran the illimitable parallels of the wire fence. And that was all; that and

the burnt-out blue of the sky and the steady shimmer of the heat.
The silence was infinite. After the harvest, small though that harvest
had been, the ranches seemed asleep. It was as though the earth, after
its period of reproduction, its pains of labour, had been delivered of the
fruit of its loins, and now slept the sleep of exhaustion.
It was the period between seasons, when nothing was being done, when
the natural forces seemed to hang suspended. There was no rain, there
was no wind, there was no growth, no life; the very stubble had no
force even to rot. The sun alone moved.
Toward two o'clock, Presley reached Hooven's place, two or three
grimy frame buildings, infested with a swarm of dogs. A hog or two
wandered aimlessly about. Under a shed by the barn, a broken-down
seeder lay rusting to its ruin. But overhead, a mammoth live-oak, the
largest tree in all the country-side, towered superb and magnificent.
Grey bunches of mistletoe and festoons of trailing moss hung from its
bark. From its lowest branch hung Hooven's meat-safe, a square box,
faced with wire screens.
What gave a special interest to Hooven's was the fact that here was the
intersection of the Lower Road and Derrick's main irrigating ditch, a
vast trench not yet completed, which he and Annixter, who worked the
Quien Sabe ranch, were jointly constructing. It ran directly across the
road and at right angles to it, and lay a deep groove in the field between
Hooven's and the town of Guadalajara, some three miles farther on.
Besides this, the ditch was a natural boundary between two divisions of
the Los Muertos ranch, the first and fourth.
Presley now had the choice of two routes. His objective point was the
spring at the headwaters of Broderson Creek, in the hills on the eastern
side of the Quien Sabe ranch. The trail afforded him a short cut
thitherward. As he passed the house, Mrs. Hooven came to the door,
her little daughter Hilda, dressed in a boy's overalls and clumsy boots,
at her skirts. Minna, her oldest daughter, a very pretty girl, whose love
affairs were continually the talk of all Los Muertos, was visible through
a window of the house, busy at the week's washing. Mrs. Hooven was a

faded, colourless woman, middle-aged and commonplace, and offering
not the least characteristic that would distinguish her from a thousand
other women of her class and kind. She nodded to Presley, watching
him with a stolid gaze from under her arm, which she held across her
forehead to shade her eyes.
But now Presley exerted himself in good earnest. His bicycle flew. He
resolved that after all he would go to Guadalajara. He crossed the
bridge over the irrigating ditch with a brusque spurt of hollow sound,
and shot forward down the last stretch of the Lower Road that yet
intervened between Hooven's and the town. He was on the fourth
division of the ranch now, the only one whereon the wheat had been
successful, no doubt because of the Little Mission