The Octopus by Frank Norris (best e reader for academics TXT) 📖

But he no longer occupied himself with the landscape. His only concern was to get on as fast as possible. He had looked forward to spending nearly the whole day on the crest of the wooded hills in the northern corner of the Quien Sabe ranch, reading, idling, smoking his pipe. But now he would do well if he arrived there by the middle of the afternoon. In a few moments he had reached the line fence that marked the limits of the ranch. Here were the railroad tracks, and just beyond—a huddled mass of roofs, with here and there an adobe house on its outskirts—the little town of Guadalajara. Nearer at hand, and directly in front of Presley, were the freight and passenger depots of the P. and S. W., painted in the grey and white, which seemed to be the official colours of all the buildings owned by the corporation. The station was deserted. No trains passed at this hour. From the direction of the ticket window, Presley heard the unsteady chittering of the telegraph key. In the shadow of one of the baggage trucks upon the platform, the great yellow cat that belonged to the agent dozed complacently, her paws tucked under her body. Three flat cars, loaded with bright-painted farming machines, were on the siding above the station, while, on the switch below, a huge freight engine that lacked its cow-catcher sat back upon its monstrous driving-wheels, motionless, solid, drawing long breaths that were punctuated by the subdued sound of its steam-pump clicking at exact intervals.

But evidently it had been decreed that Presley should be stopped at every point of his ride that day, for, as he was pushing his bicycle across the tracks, he was surprised to hear his name called. “Hello, there, Mr. Presley. What’s the good word?”

Presley looked up quickly, and saw Dyke, the engineer, leaning on his folded arms from the cab window of the freight engine. But at the prospect of this further delay, Presley was less troubled. Dyke and he were well acquainted and the best of friends. The picturesqueness of the engineer’s life was always attractive to Presley, and more than once he had ridden on Dyke’s engine between Guadalajara and Bonneville. Once, even, he had made the entire run between the latter town and San Francisco in the cab.

Dyke’s home was in Guadalajara. He lived in one of the remodelled ‘dobe cottages, where his mother kept house for him. His wife had died some five years before this time, leaving him a little daughter, Sidney, to bring up as best he could. Dyke himself was a heavy built, well-looking fellow, nearly twice the weight of Presley, with great shoulders and massive, hairy arms, and a tremendous, rumbling voice.

“Hello, old man,” answered Presley, coming up to the engine. “What are you doing about here at this time of day? I thought you were on the night service this month.”

“We’ve changed about a bit,” answered the other. “Come up here and sit down, and get out of the sun. They’ve held us here to wait orders,” he explained, as Presley, after leaning his bicycle against the tender, climbed to the fireman’s seat of worn green leather. “They are changing the run of one of the crack passenger engines down below, and are sending her up to Fresno. There was a smash of some kind on the Bakersfield division, and she’s to hell and gone behind her time. I suppose when she comes, she’ll come a-humming. It will be stand clear and an open track all the way to Fresno. They have held me here to let her go by.”

He took his pipe, an old T. D. clay, but coloured to a beautiful shiny black, from the pocket of his jumper and filled and lit it.

“Well, I don’t suppose you object to being held here,” observed Presley. “Gives you a chance to visit your mother and the little girl.”

“And precisely they choose this day to go up to Sacramento,” answered Dyke. “Just my luck. Went up to visit my brother’s people. By the way, my brother may come down here—locate here, I mean—and go into the hop-raising business. He’s got an option on five hundred acres just back of the town here. He says there is going to be money in hops. I don’t know; may be I’ll go in with him.”

“Why, what’s the matter with railroading?”

Dyke drew a couple of puffs on his pipe, and fixed Presley with a glance.

“There’s this the matter with it,” he said; “I’m fired.”

“Fired! You!” exclaimed Presley, turning abruptly toward him. “That’s what I’m telling you,” returned Dyke grimly.

“You don’t mean it. Why, what for, Dyke?”

“Now, YOU tell me what for,” growled the other savagely. “Boy and man, I’ve worked for the P. and S. W. for over ten years, and never one yelp of a complaint did I ever hear from them. They know damn well they’ve not got a steadier man on the road. And more than that, more than that, I don’t belong to the Brotherhood. And when the strike came along, I stood by them— stood by the company. You know that. And you know, and they know, that at Sacramento that time, I ran my train according to schedule, with a gun in each hand, never knowing when I was going over a mined culvert, and there was talk of giving me a gold watch at the time. To hell with their gold watches! I want ordinary justice and fair treatment. And now, when hard times come along, and they are cutting wages, what do they do? Do they make any discrimination in my case? Do they remember the man that stood by them and risked his life in their service? No. They cut my pay down just as off-hand as they do the pay of any dirty little wiper in the yard. Cut me along with—listen to this—cut me along with men that they had BLACK-LISTED; strikers that they took back because they were short of hands.” He drew fiercely on his pipe. “I went to them, yes, I did; I went to the General Office, and ate dirt. I told them I was a family man, and that I didn’t see how I was going to get along on the new scale, and I reminded them of my service during the strike. The swine told me that it wouldn’t be fair to discriminate in favour of one man, and that the cut must apply to all their employees alike. Fair!” he shouted with laughter. “Fair! Hear the P. and S. W. talking about fairness and discrimination. That’s good, that is. Well, I got furious. I was a fool, I suppose. I told them that, in justice to myself, I wouldn’t do first-class work for third-class pay. And they said, ‘Well, Mr. Dyke, you know what you can do.’ Well, I did know. I said, ‘I’ll ask for my time, if you please,’ and they gave it to me just as if they were glad to be shut of me. So there you are, Presley. That’s the P. & S. W. Railroad Company of California. I am on my last run now.”

“Shameful,” declared Presley, his sympathies all aroused, now that the trouble concerned a friend of his. “It’s shameful, Dyke. But,” he added, an idea occurring to him, “that don’t shut you out from work. There are other railroads in the State that are not controlled by the P. and S. W.”

Dyke smote his knee with his clenched fist.

“NAME ONE.”

Presley was silent. Dyke’s challenge was unanswerable. There was a lapse in their talk, Presley drumming on the arm of the seat, meditating on this injustice; Dyke looking off over the fields beyond the town, his frown lowering, his teeth rasping upon his pipestem. The station agent came to the door of the depot, stretching and yawning. On ahead of the engine, the empty rails of the track, reaching out toward the horizon, threw off visible layers of heat. The telegraph key clicked incessantly.

“So I’m going to quit,” Dyke remarked after a while, his anger somewhat subsided. “My brother and I will take up this hop ranch. I’ve saved a good deal in the last ten years, and there ought to be money in hops.”

Presley went on, remounting his bicycle, wheeling silently through the deserted streets of the decayed and dying Mexican town. It was the hour of the siesta. Nobody was about. There was no business in the town. It was too close to Bonneville for that. Before the railroad came, and in the days when the raising of cattle was the great industry of the country, it had enjoyed a fierce and brilliant life. Now it was moribund. The drug store, the two barrooms, the hotel at the corner of the old Plaza, and the shops where Mexican “curios” were sold to those occasional Eastern tourists who came to visit the Mission of San Juan, sufficed for the town’s activity.

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. In a corner of the room, during the whole course of his dinner, two young Mexicans (one of whom was astonishingly handsome, after the melodramatic fashion of his race) and an old fellow! the centenarian of the town, decrepit beyond belief, sang an interminable love-song to the accompaniment of a guitar and an accordion.

These Spanish-Mexicans, decayed, picturesque, vicious, and romantic, never failed to interest Presley. A few of them still remained in Guadalajara, drifting from the saloon to the restaurant, and from the restaurant to the Plaza, relics of a former generation, standing for a different order of things, absolutely idle, living God knew how, happy with their cigarette, their guitar, their glass of mescal, and their siesta. The centenarian remembered Fremont and Governor Alvarado, and the bandit Jesus Tejeda, and the days when Los Muertos was a Spanish grant, a veritable principality, leagues in extent, and when there was never a fence from Visalia to Fresno. Upon this occasion, Presley offered the old man a drink of mescal, and excited him to talk of the things he remembered. Their talk was in Spanish, a language with which Presley was familiar.

“De La Cuesta held the grant of Los Muertos in those days,” the centenarian said; “a grand man. He had the power of life and death over his people, and there was no law but his word. There was no thought of wheat then, you may believe. It was all cattle in those days, sheep, horses—steers, not so many—and if money was scarce, there was always plenty to eat, and clothes enough for all, and wine, ah, yes, by the vat, and oil too; the Mission Fathers had that. Yes, and there was wheat as well, now that I come to think; but a very little—in the field north of the Mission where now it is the Seed ranch; wheat fields were there, and also a vineyard, all on Mission grounds. Wheat, olives, and the vine; the Fathers planted those, to provide the elements of the Holy Sacrament—bread, oil, and wine, you understand. It was like that, those industries began in California—from the Church; and now,” he put his chin in the air, “what would Father Ullivari have said to such a crop as Senor Derrick plants these days? Ten thousand acres of wheat! Nothing but wheat from the Sierra to the Coast Range. I remember when De La Cuesta was married. He had never seen the young lady, only her miniature portrait, painted”—he raised a shoulder—“I do not know by whom, small, a little thing to be held in the palm. But he fell in love with that, and marry her he