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One started to follow the highwayman's trail towards the stable corral, but the other, quartering over the road with lightning swiftness, suddenly picked up the new scent leading on towards Guadalajara. He tossed his head in the air, and Presley abruptly shut his hands over his ears. Ah, that terrible cry! deep-toned, reverberating like the bourdon of a great bell.
"Say, how about those paintings, Pres?" inquired Annixter a little uneasily. "I don't know whether they're good or not. They were painted by a three-fingered Chinaman in Monterey, and I got the lot for thirty dollars, frames thrown in. Why, I think the frames alone are worth thirty dollars." "Well, so do I," declared Presley. He hastened to change the subject.
"Thank you," exclaimed Presley fervidly. "I had begun to mistrust myself." "Now," observed Vanamee, "I presume you will rush it into print. To have formulated a great thought, simply to have accomplished, is not enough." "I think I am sincere," objected Presley. "If it is good it will do good to others. You said yourself it was a Message.
Living close to nature, a poet by instinct, where Presley was but a poet by training, there developed in him a great sensitiveness to beauty and an almost abnormal capacity for great happiness and great sorrow; he felt things intensely, deeply. He never forgot. It was when he was eighteen or nineteen, at the formative and most impressionable period of his life, that he had met Angele Varian.
Presley hesitated for a moment, then he asked: "Shall you go back to the garden again? Make the test again?" "I don't know." "Strange enough," commented Presley, wondering. Vanamee sank back in his chair, his eyes growing vacant again: "Strange enough," he murmured. There was a long silence. Neither spoke nor moved.
Watch it and its doings long enough, and you'll come over to my way of thinking, too." It was about half-past seven when Presley reached Bonneville. The business part of the town was as yet hardly astir; he despatched his manuscript, and then hurried to the office of the "Mercury."
"He might be at Guadalajara, or he might be up at Osterman's, or he might be a hundred miles away from either place. I know where he ought to be, Mr. Presley, but that ain't saying where the crazy gesabe is. He OUGHT to be range-riding over east of Four, at the head waters of Mission Creek." "I'll try for him there, at all events," answered Presley.
The phrases were quoted, were used as texts for revolutionary sermons, reactionary speeches. It was parodied; it was distorted so as to read as an advertisement for patented cereals and infants' foods. Finally, the editor of an enterprising monthly magazine reprinted the poem, supplementing it by a photograph and biography of Presley himself. Presley was stunned, bewildered.
But none the less, Presley had not been mistaken. The girl whom he had tried to follow had been indeed Minna Hooven. When Minna, a week before this time, had returned to the lodging house on Castro Street, after a day's unsuccessful effort to find employment, and was told that her mother and Hilda had gone, she was struck speechless with surprise and dismay.
"Possibly it is to his interest," murmured Presley. "The fairs and festivals bring people to the city over his railroad." But the others turned on him, expostulating. "Ah, you Philistine," declared Mrs. Cedarquist. "And this from YOU!, Presley; to attribute such base motives " "If the poets become materialised, Mr. Presley," declared Hartrath, "what can we say to the people?"
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