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Updated: June 2, 2025
"Act quickly! How?" demanded Annixter. "Good Lord! what can you do? We're cinched already. You, yourself, Derrick, have just lost your grain-rate case. S. Behrman did you up. Shelgrim owns the courts. He's got men like Ulsteen in his pocket. He's got the Railroad Commission in his pocket. He's got the Governor of the State in his pocket.
"I wrote that poem," hazarded Presley, "at a time when I was terribly upset. I live," he concluded, "or did live on the Los Muertos ranch in Tulare County Magnus Derrick's ranch." "The Railroad's ranch LEASED to Mr. Derrick," observed Shelgrim. Presley spread out his hands with a helpless, resigned gesture.
You know I am one of the lady members of the subscription committee for our Fair, and you know we approached Mr. Shelgrim for a donation to help along. Oh, such a liberal patron, a real Lorenzo di' Medici. In the name of the Pacific and Southwestern he has subscribed, think of it, five thousand dollars; and yet they will talk of the meanness of the railroad."
You didn't get something for nothing. It would cost them all a good deal more if they sat like lumps on a log and played tiddledy-winks while Shelgrim sold out from under them. Then there was this, too: the P. and S. W. were hard up just then. The shortage on the State's wheat crop for the last two years had affected them, too. They were retrenching in expenditures all along the line.
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.
The other members of the League, present at the time, shook hands all around and spoke of opening a few bottles on the strength of the occasion. Annixter alone was recalcitrant. "It's too easy," he declared. "No, I'm not satisfied. Where's Shelgrim in all this? Why don't he show his hand, damn his soul? The thing is yellow, I tell you. There's a big fish in these waters somewheres.
The "Mercury," Annixter was persuaded, received a subsidy from the Pacific and Southwestern Railroad, and was hardly better than the mouthpiece by which Shelgrim and the General Office spoke to ranchers about Bonneville.
What he had expected to find in Shelgrim, he could not have exactly said. But he had been prepared to come upon an ogre, a brute, a terrible man of blood and iron, and instead had discovered a sentimentalist and an art critic.
"If there is, it is in Shelgrim's pocket. Who owns the courts in California? Ain't it Shelgrim?" "God damn him." "Well, how long are you going to stand it? How long before you'll settle up accounts with six inches of plugged gas-pipe?" "And our contracts, the solemn pledges of the corporation to sell to us first of all " "And now the land is for sale to anybody."
If there is any rain at all this winter, we'll have a bonanza year, and just at this very moment when we've got our chance a chance to pay off our mortgages and get clear of debt and make a strike here is Shelgrim making a deal to cinch us and put up rates. And now here's the primaries coming off and a new Railroad Commission going in. That's why Shelgrim chose this time to make his deal.
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