“There’s your rain,” announced the stableman. “The first of the season.”
“And I got to be out in it,” fumed Annixter, “and I suppose those swine will quit work on the big barn now.”
When the buggy was finally ready, he put on his rubber coat, climbed in, and without waiting for the stableman to raise the top, drove out into the rain, a new-lit cigar in his teeth. As he passed the dairy-house, he saw Hilma standing in the doorway, holding out her hand to the rain, her face turned upward toward the grey sky, amused and interested at this first shower of the wet season. She was so absorbed that she did not see Annixter, and his clumsy nod in her direction passed unnoticed.
“She did it on purpose,” Annixter told himself, chewing fiercely on his cigar. “Cuts me now, hey? Well, this DOES settle it. She leaves this ranch before I’m a day older.”
He decided that he would put off his tour of inspection till the next day. Travelling in the buggy as he did, he must keep to the road which led to Derrick’s, in very roundabout fashion, by way of Guadalajara. This rain would reduce the thick dust of the road to two feet of viscid mud. It would take him quite three hours to reach the ranch house on Los Muertos. He thought of Delaney and the buckskin and ground his teeth. And all this trouble, if you please, because of a fool feemale girl. A fine way for him to waste his time. Well, now he was done with it. His decision was taken now. She should pack.
Steadily the rain increased. There was no wind. The thick veil of wet descended straight from sky to earth, blurring distant outlines, spreading a vast sheen of grey over all the landscape. Its volume became greater, the prolonged murmuring note took on a deeper tone. At the gate to the road which led across Dyke’s hop-fields toward Guadalajara, Annixter was obliged to descend and raise the top of the buggy. In doing so he caught the flesh of his hand in the joint of the iron elbow that supported the top and pinched it cruelly. It was the last misery, the culmination of a long train of wretchedness. On the instant he hated Hilma Tree so fiercely that his sharply set teeth all but bit his cigar in two.
While he was grabbing and wrenching at the buggy-top, the water from his hat brim dripping down upon his nose, the horse, restive under the drench of the rain, moved uneasily.
“Yah-h-h you!” he shouted, inarticulate with exasperation. “You—you—Gor-r-r, wait till I get hold of you. WHOA, you!”
But there was an interruption. Delaney, riding the buckskin, came around a bend in the road at a slow trot and Annixter, getting into the buggy again, found himself face to face with him.
“Why, hello, Mr. Annixter,” said he, pulling up. “Kind of sort of wet, isn’t it?”
Annixter, his face suddenly scarlet, sat back in his place abruptly, exclaiming:
“Oh—oh, there you are, are you?”
“I’ve been down there,” explained Delaney, with a motion of his head toward the railroad, “to mend that break in the fence by the Long Trestle and I thought while I was about it I’d follow down along the fence toward Guadalajara to see if there were any more breaks. But I guess it’s all right.”
“Oh, you guess it’s all right, do you?” observed Annixter through his teeth.
“Why—why—yes,” returned the other, bewildered at the truculent ring in Annixter’s voice. “I mended that break by the Long Trestle just now and–
“Well, why didn’t you mend it a week ago?” shouted Annixter wrathfully. “I’ve been looking for you all the morning, I have, and who told you you could take that buckskin? And the sheep were all over the right of way last night because of that break, and here that filthy pip, S. Behrman, comes down here this morning and wants to make trouble for me.” Suddenly he cried out, “What do I FEED you for? What do I keep you around here for? Think it’s just to fatten up your carcass, hey?”
“Why, Mr. Annixter–” began Delaney.
“And don’t TALK to me,” vociferated the other, exciting himself with his own noise. “Don’t you say a word to me even to apologise. If I’ve spoken to you once about that break, I’ve spoken fifty times.”
“Why, sir,” declared Delaney, beginning to get indignant, “the sheep did it themselves last night.”
“I told you not to TALK to me,” clamoured Annixter.
“But, say, look here–”
“Get off the ranch. You get off the ranch. And taking that buckskin against my express orders. I won’t have your kind about the place, not much. I’m easy-going enough, Lord knows, but I don’t propose to be imposed on ALL the time. Pack off, you understand and do it lively. Go to the foreman and tell him I told him to pay you off and then clear out. And, you hear me,” he concluded, with a menacing outthrust of his lower jaw, “you hear me, if I catch you hanging around the ranch house after this, or if I so much as see you on Quien Sabe, I’ll show you the way off of it, my friend, at the toe of my boot. Now, then, get out of the way and let me pass.”
Angry beyond the power of retort, Delaney drove the spurs into the buckskin and passed the buggy in a single bound. Annixter gathered up the reins and drove on muttering to himself, and occasionally looking back to observe the buckskin flying toward the ranch house in a spattering shower of mud, Delaney urging her on, his head bent down against the falling rain.
“Huh,” grunted Annixter with grim satisfaction, a certain sense of good humour at length returning to him, “that just about takes the saleratus out of YOUR dough, my friend.”
A little farther on, Annixter got out of the buggy a second time to open another gate that let him out upon the Upper Road, not far distant from Guadalajara. It was the road that connected that town with Bonneville and that ran parallel with the railroad tracks. On the other side of the track he could see the infinite extension of the brown, bare land of Los Muertos, turning now to a soft, moist welter of fertility under the insistent caressing of the rain. The hard, sun-baked clods were decomposing, the crevices between drinking the wet with an eager, sucking noise. But the prospect was dreary; the distant horizons were blotted under drifting mists of rain; the eternal monotony of the earth lay open to the sombre low sky without a single adornment, without a single variation from its melancholy flatness. Near at hand the wires between the telegraph poles vibrated with a faint humming under the multitudinous fingering of the myriad of falling drops, striking among them and dripping off steadily from one to another. The poles themselves were dark and swollen and glistening with wet, while the little cones of glass on the transverse bars reflected the dull grey light of the end of the afternoon.
As Annixter was about to drive on, a freight train passed, coming from Guadalajara, going northward toward Bonneville, Fresno and San Francisco. It was a long train, moving slowly, methodically, with a measured coughing of its locomotive and a rhythmic cadence of its trucks over the interstices of the rails. On two or three of the flat cars near its end, Annixter plainly saw Magnus Derrick’s ploughs, their bright coating of red and green paint setting a single brilliant note in all this array of grey and brown.
Annixter halted, watching the train file past, carrying Derrick’s ploughs away from his ranch, at this very time of the first rain, when they would be most needed. He watched it, silent, thoughtful, and without articulate comment. Even after it passed he sat in his place a long time, watching it lose itself slowly in the distance, its prolonged rumble diminishing to a faint murmur. Soon he heard the engine sounding its whistle for the Long Trestle.
But the moving train no longer carried with it that impression of terror and destruction that had so thrilled Presley’s imagination the night before. It passed slowly on its way with a mournful roll of wheels, like the passing of a cortege, like a file of artillery-caissons charioting dead bodies; the engine’s smoke enveloping it in a mournful veil, leaving a sense of melancholy in its wake, moving past there, lugubrious, lamentable, infinitely sad under the grey sky and under the grey mist of rain which continued to fall with a subdued, rustling sound, steady, persistent, a vast monotonous murmur that seemed to come from all quarters of the horizon at