by Frank Norris
“The rate is five cents,” declared the clerk doggedly.
“Well, that ruins me,” shouted Dyke. “Do you understand? I won’t make fifty cents. MAKE! Why, I will OWE, — I’ll be — be — That ruins me, do you understand?”
The other, raised a shoulder.
“We don’t force you to ship. You can do as you like. The rate is five cents.”
“Well — but — damn you, I’m under contract to deliver. What am I going to do? Why, you told me — you promised me a two-cent rate.”
“I don’t remember it,” said the clerk. “I don’t know anything about that. But I know this; I know that hops have gone up. I know the German crop was a failure and that the crop in New York wasn’t worth the hauling. Hops have gone up to nearly a dollar. You don’t suppose we don’t know that, do you, Mr. Dyke?”
“What’s the price of hops got to do with you?”
“It’s got THIS to do with us,” returned the other with a sudden aggressiveness, “that the freight rate has gone up to meet the price. We’re not doing business for our health. My orders are to raise your rate to five cents, and I think you are getting off easy.”
Dyke stared in blank astonishment. For the moment, the audacity of the affair was what most appealed to him. He forgot its personal application.
“Good Lord,” he murmured, “good Lord! What will you people do next? Look here. What’s your basis of applying freight rates, anyhow?” he suddenly vociferated with furious sarcasm. “What’s your rule? What are you guided by?”
But at the words, S. Behrman, who had kept silent during the heat of the discussion, leaned abruptly forward. For the only time in his knowledge, Dyke saw his face inflamed with anger and with the enmity and contempt of all this farming element with whom he was contending.
“Yes, what’s your rule? What’s your basis?” demanded Dyke, turning swiftly to him.
S. Behrman emphasised each word of his reply with a tap of one forefinger on the counter before him:
“All — the — traffic — will — bear.”
The ex-engineer stepped back a pace, his fingers on the ledge of the counter, to steady himself. He felt himself grow pale, his heart became a mere leaden weight in his chest, inert, refusing to beat.
In a second the whole affair, in all its bearings, went speeding before the eye of his imagination like the rapid unrolling of a panorama. Every cent of his earnings was sunk in this hop business of his. More than that, he had borrowed money to carry it on, certain of success — borrowed of S. Behrman, offering his crop and his little home as security. Once he failed to meet his obligations, S. Behrman would foreclose. Not only would the Railroad devour every morsel of his profits, but also it would take from him his home; at a blow he would be left penniless and without a home. What would then become of his mother — and what would become of the little tad? She, whom he had been planning to educate like a veritable lady. For all that year he had talked of his ambition for his little daughter to every one he met. All Bonneville knew of it. What a mark for gibes he had made of himself. The workingman turned farmer! What a target for jeers — he who had fancied he could elude the Railroad! He remembered he had once said the great Trust had overlooked his little enterprise, disdaining to plunder such small fry. He should have known better than that. How had he ever imagined the Road would permit him to make any money?
Anger was not in him yet; no rousing of the blind, white-hot wrath that leaps to the attack with prehensile fingers, moved him. The blow merely crushed, staggered, confused.
He stepped aside to give place to a coatless man in a pink shirt, who entered, carrying in his hands an automatic door-closing apparatus.
“Where does this go?” inquired the man.
Dyke sat down for a moment on a seat that had been removed from a worn-out railway car to do duty in Ruggles’s office. On the back of a yellow envelope he made some vague figures with a stump of blue pencil, multiplying, subtracting, perplexing himself with many errors.
S. Behrman, the clerk, and the man with the door-closing apparatus involved themselves in a long argument, gazing intently at the top panel of the door. The man who had come to fix the apparatus was unwilling to guarantee it, unless a sign was put on the outside of the door, warning incomers that the door was self-closing. This sign would cost fifteen cents extra.
“But you didn’t say anything about this when the thing was ordered,” declared S. Behrman. “No, I won’t pay it, my friend. It’s an overcharge.”
“You needn’t think,” observed the clerk, “that just because you are dealing with the Railroad you are going to work us.”
Genslinger came in, accompanied by Delaney. S. Behrman and the clerk, abruptly dismissing the man with the door-closing machine, put themselves behind the counter and engaged in conversation with these two. Genslinger introduced Delaney. The buster had a string of horses he was shipping southward. No doubt he had come to make arrangements with the Railroad in the matter of stock cars. The conference of the four men was amicable in the extreme.
Dyke, studying the figures on the back of the envelope, came forward again. Absorbed only in his own distress, he ignored the editor and the cow-puncher.
“Say,” he hazarded, “how about this? I make out ——
“We’ve told you what our rates are, Mr. Dyke,” exclaimed the clerk angrily. “That’s all the arrangement we will make. Take it or leave it.” He turned again to Genslinger, giving the ex-engineer his back.
Dyke moved away and stood for a moment in the centre of the room, staring at the figures on the envelope.
“I don’t see,” he muttered, “just what I’m going to do. No, I don’t see what I’m going to do at all.”
Ruggles came in, bringing with him two other men in whom Dyke recognised dummy buyers of the Los Muertos and Osterman ranchos. They brushed by him, jostling his elbow, and as he went out of the door he heard them exchange jovial greetings with Delaney, Genslinger, and S. Behrman.
Dyke went down the stairs to the street and proceeded onward aimlessly in the direction of the Yosemite House, fingering the yellow envelope and looking vacantly at the sidewalk.
There was a stoop to his massive shoulders. His great arms dangled loosely at his sides, the palms of his hands open.
As he went along, a certain feeling of shame touched him. Surely his predicament must be apparent to every passer-by. No doubt, every one recognised the unsuccessful man in the very way he slouched along. The young girls in lawns, muslins, and garden hats, returning from the Post Office, their hands full of letters, must surely see in him the type of the failure, the bankrupt.
Then brusquely his tardy rage flamed up. By God, NO, it was not his fault; he had made no mistake. His energy, industry, and foresight had been sound. He had been merely the object of a colossal trick, a sordid injustice, a victim of the insatiate greed of the monster, caught and choked by one of those millions of tentacles suddenly reaching up from below, from out the dark beneath his feet, coiling around his throat, throttling him, strangling him, sucking his blood. For a moment he thought of the courts, but instantly laughed at the idea. What court was immune from the power of the monster? Ah, the rage of helplessness, the fury of impotence! No help, no hope, — ruined in a brief instant — he a veritable giant, built of great sinews, powerful, in the full tide of his manhood, having all his health, all his wits. How could he now face his home? How could he tell his mother of this catastrophe? And Sidney — the little tad; how could he explain to her this wretchedness — how soften her disappointment? How keep the tears from out her eyes — how keep alive her confidence in him — her faith in his resources?
Bitter, fierce, ominous, his wrath loomed up in his heart. His fists gripped tight together, his teeth clenched. Oh, for a moment to have his hand upon the throat of S. Behrman, wringing the breath from him, wrenching out the red life of him — staining the street with the blood sucked from the veins of the People!
To the first friend that he met,
Dyke told the tale of the tragedy, and to the next, and to the next. The affair went from mouth to mouth, spreading with electrical swiftness, overpassing and running ahead of Dyke himself, so that by the time he reached the lobby of the Yosemite House, he found his story awaiting him. A group formed about him. In his immediate vicinity business for the instant was suspended. The group swelled. One after another of his friends added themselves to it. Magnus Derrick joined it, and Annixter. Again and again, Dyke recounted the matter, beginning with the time when he was discharged from the same corporation’s service for refusing to accept an unfair wage. His voice quivered with exasperation; his heavy frame shook with rage; his eyes were injected, bloodshot; his face flamed vermilion, while his deep bass rumbled throughout the running comments of his auditors like the thunderous reverberation of diapason.
From all points of view, the story was discussed by those who listened to him, now in the heat of excitement, now calmly, judicially. One verdict, however, prevailed. It was voiced by Annixter: “You’re stuck. You can roar till you’re black in the face, but you can’t buck against the Railroad. There’s nothing to be done.” “You can shoot the ruffian, you can shoot S. Behrman,” clamoured one of the group. “Yes, sir; by the Lord, you can shoot him.”
“Poor fool,” commented Annixter, turning away.
Nothing to be done. No, there was nothing to be done — not one thing. Dyke, at last alone and driving his team out of the town, turned the business confusedly over in his mind from end to end. Advice, suggestion, even offers of financial aid had been showered upon him from all directions. Friends were not wanting who heatedly presented to his consideration all manner of ingenious plans, wonderful devices. They were worthless. The tentacle held fast. He was stuck.
By degrees, as his wagon carried him farther out into the country, and open empty fields, his anger lapsed, and the numbness of bewilderment returned. He could not look one hour ahead into the future; could formulate no plans even for the next day. He did not know what to do. He was stuck.
With the limpness and inertia of a sack of sand, the reins slipping loosely in his dangling fingers, his eyes fixed, staring between the horses’ heads, he allowed himself to be carried aimlessly along. He resigned himself. What did he care? What was the use of going on? He was stuck.
The team he was driving had once belonged to the Los Muertos stables and unguided as the horses were, they took the county road towards Derrick’s ranch house. Dyke, all abroad, was unaware of the fact till, drawn by the smell of water, the horses halted by the trough in front of Caraher’s saloon.
The ex-engineer dismounted, looking about him, realising where he was. So much the worse; it did not matter. Now that he had come so far it was as short to go home by this route as to return on his tracks. Slowly he unchecked the horses and stood at their heads, watching them drink.
“I don’t see,” he muttered, “just what I am going to do.”
Caraher appeared at the door of his place, his red face, red beard, and flaming cravat standing sharply out from the shadow of the doorway. He called a welcome to Dyke.
“Hello, Captain.”
Dyke looked up, nodding his head listlessly.
“Hello, Caraher,” he answered.
“Well,” continued the saloonkeeper, coming forward a step, “what’s the news in town?”
Dyke told him. Caraher’s red face suddenly took on a darker colour. The red glint in his eyes shot from under his eyebrows. Furious, he vented a rolling explosion of oaths.
“And now it’s your turn,” he vociferated. “They ain’t after only the big wheat-growers, the rich men. By God, they’ll even pick the poor man’s pocket. Oh, they’ll get their bellies full some day. It can’t last forever. They’ll wake up the wrong kind of man some morning, the man that’s got guts in him, that will hit back when he’s kicked and that will talk to ’em with a torch in one hand and a stick of dynamite in the other.” He raised his clenched fists in the air. “So help me, God,” he cried, “when I think it all over I go crazy, I see red. Oh, if the people only knew their strength. Oh, if I could wake ’em up. There’s not only Shelgrim, but there’s others. All the magnates, all the butchers, all the blood-suckers, by the thousands. Their day will come, by God, it will.”
By now, the ex-engineer and the bar-keeper had retired to the saloon back of the grocery to talk over the details of this new outrage. Dyke, still a little dazed, sat down by one of the tables, preoccupied, saying but little, and Caraher as a matter of course set the whiskey bottle at his elbow.
It happened that at this same moment, Presley, returning to Los Muertos from Bonneville, his pockets full of mail, stopped in at the grocery to buy some black lead for his bicycle. In the saloon, on the other side of the narrow partition, he overheard the conversation between Dyke and Caraher. The door was open. He caught every word distinctly.
“Tell us all about it, Dyke,” urged Caraher.
For the fiftieth time Dyke told the story. Already it had crystallised into a certain form. He used the same phrases with each repetition, the same sentences, the same words. In his mind it became set. Thus he would tell it to any one who would listen from now on, week after week, year after year, all the rest of his life— “And I based my calculations on a two-cent rate. So soon as they saw I was to make money they doubled the tariff — all the traffic would bear — and I mortgaged to S. Behrman — ruined me with a turn of the hand — stuck, cinched, and not one thing to be done.”
As he talked, he drank glass after glass of whiskey, and the honest rage, the open, above-board fury of his mind coagulated, thickened, and sunk to a dull, evil hatred, a wicked, oblique malevolence. Caraher, sure now of winning a disciple, replenished his glass.
“Do you blame us now,” he cried, “us others, the Reds? Ah, yes, it’s all very well for your middle class to preach moderation. I could do it, too. You could do it, too, if your belly was fed, if your property was safe, if your wife had not been murdered if your children were not starving. Easy enough then to preach law-abiding methods, legal redress, and all such rot. But how about US?” he vociferated. “Ah, yes, I’m a loud-mouthed rum-seller, ain’t I? I’m a wild-eyed striker, ain’t I? I’m a blood-thirsty anarchist, ain’t I? Wait till you’ve seen your wife brought home to you with the face you used to kiss smashed in by a horse’s hoof — killed by the Trust, as it happened to me. Then talk about moderation! And you, Dyke, black-listed engineer, discharged employee, ruined agriculturist, wait till you see your little tad and your mother turned out of doors when S. Behrman forecloses. Wait till you see ’em getting thin and white, and till you hear your little girl ask you why you all don’t eat a little more and that she wants her dinner and you can’t give it to her. Wait till you see — at the same time that your family is dying for lack of bread — a hundred thousand acres of wheat — millions of bushels of food — grabbed and gobbled by the Railroad Trust, and then talk of moderation. That talk is just what the Trust wants to hear. It ain’t frightened of that. There’s one thing only it does listen to, one thing it is frightened of — the people with dynamite in their hands, — six inches of plugged gaspipe. THAT talks.”
Dyke did not reply. He filled another pony of whiskey and drank it in two gulps. His frown had lowered to a scowl, his face was a dark red, his head had sunk, bull-like, between his massive shoulders; without winking he gazed long and with troubled eyes at his knotted, muscular hands, lying open on the table before him, idle, their occupation gone.
Presley forgot his black lead. He listened to Caraher. Through the open door he caught a glimpse of Dyke’s back, broad, muscled, bowed down, the great shoulders stooping.
The whole drama of the doubled freight rate leaped salient and distinct in the eye of his mind. And this was but one instance, an isolated case. Because he was near at hand he happened to see it. How many others were there, the length and breadth of the State? Constantly this sort of thing must occur — little industries choked out in their very beginnings, the
air full of the death rattles of little enterprises, expiring unobserved in far-off counties, up in canyons and arroyos of the foothills, forgotten by every one but the monster who was daunted by the magnitude of no business, however great, who overlooked no opportunity of plunder, however petty, who with one tentacle grabbed a hundred thousand acres of wheat, and with another pilfered a pocketful of growing hops.
He went away without a word, his head bent, his hands clutched tightly on the cork grips of the handle bars of his bicycle. His lips were white. In his heart a blind demon of revolt raged tumultuous, shrieking blasphemies.
At Los Muertos, Presley overtook Annixter. As he guided his wheel up the driveway to Derrick’s ranch house, he saw the master of Quien Sabe and Harran in conversation on the steps of the porch. Magnus stood in the doorway, talking to his wife.
Occupied with the press of business and involved in the final conference with the League’s lawyers on the eve of the latter’s departure for Washington, Annixter had missed the train that was to take him back to Guadalajara and Quien Sabe. Accordingly, he had accepted the Governor’s invitation to return with him on his buck-board to Los Muertos, and before leaving Bonneville had telephoned to his ranch to have young Vacca bring the buckskin, by way of the Lower Road, to meet him at Los Muertos. He found her waiting there for him, but before going on, delayed a few moments to tell Harran of Dyke’s affair.
“I wonder what he will do now?” observed Harran when his first outburst of indignation had subsided.
“Nothing,” declared Annixter. “He’s stuck.”
“That eats up every cent of Dyke’s earnings,” Harran went on. “He has been ten years saving them. Oh, I told him to make sure of the Railroad when he first spoke to me about growing hops.”
“I’ve just seen him,” said Presley, as he joined the others. “He was at Caraher’s. I only saw his back. He was drinking at a table and his back was towards me. But the man looked broken — absolutely crushed. It is terrible, terrible.”