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At Solotari's, the restaurant on the Plaza, diagonally across from the hotel, Presley ate his long-deferred Mexican dinner an omelette in Spanish-Mexican style, frijoles and tortillas, a salad, and a glass of white wine. These Spanish-Mexicans, decayed, picturesque, vicious, and romantic, never failed to interest Presley.
Annixter resumed his shaving, and Presley lit a cigarette. "Any news from Washington?" he queried. "Nothing that's any good," grunted Annixter. "Hello," he added, raising his head, "there's somebody in a hurry for sure." The noise of a horse galloping so fast that the hoof-beats sounded in one uninterrupted rattle, abruptly made itself heard.
That Dyke affair, terrible, terrible; but then Dyke WAS in the wrong driven to it, though; the Railroad did drive him to it. I want to be fair and just to everybody." "There's a team coming up the road from Los Muertos," announced Presley from the door. "Fair and just to everybody," murmured old Broderson, wagging his head, frowning perplexedly.
For your health, hey?" "Yes." "You LOOK knocked up," asserted the other. "By the way," he added, "I suppose you've heard the news?" Presley shrank a little. Of late the reports of disasters had followed so swiftly upon one another that he had begun to tremble and to quail at every unexpected bit of information. "What news do you mean?" he asked. "About Dyke. He has been convicted.
Presley climbed to the summit of one of the hills the highest that rose out of the canyon, from the crest of which he could see for thirty, fifty, sixty miles down the valley, and, filling his pipe, smoked lazily for upwards of an hour, his head empty of thought, allowing himself to succumb to a pleasant, gentle inanition, a little drowsy comfortable in his place, prone upon the ground, warmed just enough by such sunlight as filtered through the live-oaks, soothed by the good tobacco and the prolonged murmur of the spring and creek.
The man was Vanamee beyond all doubt, and a little later Presley, descending the maze of cow-paths and cattle-trails that led down towards the Broderson Creek, overtook his friend. Instantly Presley was aware of an immense change.
Was S. Behrman to swallow Los Muertos? S. Behrman! Presley saw him plainly, huge, rotund, white; saw his jowl tremulous and obese, the roll of fat over his collar sprinkled with sparse hairs, the great stomach with its brown linen vest and heavy watch chain of hollow links, clinking against the buttons of imitation pearl.
Dyke's hand a moment with his; then, slinging his satchel about his shoulders by the long strap with which it was provided, left the house, and mounting his horse rode away from Los Muertos never to return. Presley came out upon the County Road. At a little distance to his left he could see the group of buildings where once Broderson had lived.
The warmth was of the meagerest, and the street lamps, birds of fire in cages of glass, fluttered and danced in the prolonged gusts of the trade wind that threshed and weltered in the city streets from off the ocean. Presley entered the dining-room of the Gerard mansion with little Miss Gerard on his arm. The other guests had preceded them Cedarquist with Mrs.
Caught in the barbs of the wire, wedged in, the bodies hung suspended. Under foot it was terrible. The black blood, winking in the starlight, seeped down into the clinkers between the ties with a prolonged sucking murmur. Presley turned away, horror-struck, sick at heart, overwhelmed with a quick burst of irresistible compassion for this brute agony he could not relieve.
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