The Octopus, Frank Norris [books you need to read txt] 📗

the land that Dyke had bought and upon which he was to raise his famous crop of hops. Dyke’s house was close at hand, a very pleasant little cottage, painted white, with green blinds and deep porches, while near it and yet in process of construction, were two great storehouses and a drying and curing house, where the hops were to be stored and treated. All about were evidences that the former engineer had already been hard at work. The ground had been put in readiness to receive the crop and a bewildering, innumerable multitude of poles, connected with a maze of wire and twine, had been set out. Farther on at a turn of the road, they came upon Dyke himself, driving a farm wagon loaded with more poles. He was in his shirt sleeves, his massive, hairy arms bare to the elbow, glistening with sweat, red with heat. In his bell-like, rumbling voice, he was calling to his foreman and a boy at work in stringing the poles together. At sight of Presley and Vanamee he hailed them jovially, addressing them as “boys,” and insisting that they should get into the wagon with him and drive to the house for a glass of beer. His mother had only the day before returned from Marysville, where she had been looking up a seminary for the little tad. She would be delighted to see the two boys; besides, Vanamee must see how the little tad had grown since he last set eyes on her; wouldn’t know her for the same little girl; and the beer had been on ice since morning. Presley and Vanamee could not well refuse.

They climbed into the wagon and jolted over the uneven ground through the bare forest of hop-poles to the house. Inside they found Mrs. Dyke, an old lady with a very gentle face, who wore a cap and a very old-fashioned gown with hoop skirts, dusting the what-not in a corner of the parlor. The two men were presented and the beer was had from off the ice.

“Mother,” said Dyke, as he wiped the froth from his great blond beard, “ain’t Sid anywheres about? I want Mr. Vanamee to see how she has grown. Smartest little tad in Tulare County, boys. Can recite the whole of ‘Snow Bound,’ end to end, without skipping or looking at the book. Maybe you don’t believe that. Mother, ain’t I right—without skipping a line, hey?”

Mrs. Dyke nodded to say that it was so, but explained that Sidney was in Guadalajara. In putting on her new slippers for the first time the morning before, she had found a dime in the toe of one of them and had had the whole house by the ears ever since till she could spend it.

“Was it for licorice to make her licorice water?” inquired Dyke gravely.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Dyke. “I made her tell me what she was going to get before she went, and it was licorice.”

Dyke, though his mother protested that he was foolish and that Presley and Vanamee had no great interest in “young ones,” insisted upon showing the visitors Sidney’s copy-books. They were monuments of laborious, elaborate neatness, the trite moralities and ready-made aphorisms of the philanthropists and publicists, repeated from page to page with wearying insistence. “I, too, am an American Citizen. S. D.,” “As the Twig is Bent the Tree is Inclined,” “Truth Crushed to Earth Will Rise Again,” “As for Me, Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death,” and last of all, a strange intrusion amongst the mild, well-worn phrases, two legends. “My motto—Public Control of Public Franchises,” and ” The P. and S. W. is an Enemy of the State.”

“I see,” commented Presley, “you mean the little tad to understand ‘the situation’ early.”

“I told him he was foolish to give that to Sid to copy,” said Mrs. Dyke, with indulgent remonstrance. “What can she understand of public franchises?”

“Never mind,” observed Dyke, “she’ll remember it when she grows up and when the seminary people have rubbed her up a bit, and then she’ll begin to ask questions and understand. And don’t you make any mistake, mother,” he went on, “about the little tad not knowing who her dad’s enemies are. What do you think, boys? Listen, here. Precious little I’ve ever told her of the railroad or how I was turned off, but the other day I was working down by the fence next the railroad tracks and Sid was there. She’d brought her doll rags down and she was playing house behind a pile of hop poles. Well, along comes a through freight—mixed train from Missouri points and a string of empties from New Orleans,—and when it had passed, what do you suppose the tad did? SHE didn’t know I was watching her. She goes to the fence and spits a little spit after the caboose and puts out her little head and, if you’ll believe me, HISSES at the train; and mother says she does that same every time she sees a train go by, and never crosses the tracks that she don’t spit her little spit on ‘em. What do you THINK of THAT?”

“But I correct her every time,” protested Mrs. Dyke seriously. “Where she picked up the trick of hissing I don’t know. No, it’s not funny. It seems dreadful to see a little girl who’s as sweet and gentle as can be in every other way, so venomous. She says the other little girls at school and the boys, too, are all the same way. Oh, dear,” she sighed, “why will the General Office be so unkind and unjust? Why, I couldn’t be happy, with all the money in the world, if I thought that even one little child hated me—hated me so that it would spit and hiss at me. And it’s not one child, it’s all of them, so Sidney says; and think of all the grown people who hate the road, women and men, the whole county, the whole State, thousands and thousands of people. Don’t the managers and the directors of the road ever think of that? Don’t they ever think of all the hate that surrounds them, everywhere, everywhere, and the good people that just grit their teeth when the name of the road is mentioned? Why do they want to make the people hate them? No,” she murmured, the tears starting to her eyes, “No, I tell you, Mr. Presley, the men who own the railroad are wicked, bad-hearted men who don’t care how much the poor people suffer, so long as the road makes its eighteen million a year. They don’t care whether the people hate them or love them, just so long as they are afraid of them. It’s not right and God will punish them sooner or later.”

A little after this the two young men took themselves away, Dyke obligingly carrying them in the wagon as far as the gate that opened into the Quien Sabe ranch. On the way, Presley referred to what Mrs. Dyke had said and led Dyke, himself, to speak of the P. and S. W.

“Well,” Dyke said, “it’s like this, Mr. Presley. I, personally, haven’t got the right to kick. With you wheat-growing people I guess it’s different, but hops, you see, don’t count for much in the State. It’s such a little business that the road don’t want to bother themselves to tax it. It’s the wheat growers that the road cinches. The rates on hops ARE FAIR. I’ve got to admit that; I was in to Bonneville a while ago to find out. It’s two cents a pound, and Lord love you, that’s reasonable enough to suit any man. No,” he concluded, “I’m on the way to make money now. The road sacking me as they did was, maybe, a good thing for me, after all. It came just at the right time. I had a bit of money put by and here was the chance to go into hops with the certainty that hops would quadruple and quintuple in price inside the year. No, it was my chance, and though they didn’t mean it by a long chalk, the railroad people did me a good turn when they gave me my time—and the tad’ll enter the seminary next fall.”

About a quarter of an hour after they had said goodbye to the one-time engineer, Presley and Vanamee, tramping briskly along the road that led northward through Quien Sabe, arrived at Annixter’s ranch house. At once they were aware of a vast and unwonted bustle that revolved about the place. They stopped a few moments looking on, amused and interested in what was going forward.

The colossal barn was finished. Its freshly white-washed sides glared intolerably in the sun, but its interior was as yet innocent of paint and through the yawning vent of the sliding doors came a delicious odour of new, fresh wood and shavings. A crowd of men—Annixter’s farm hands—were swarming all about it. Some were balanced on the topmost rounds of ladders, hanging festoons of Japanese lanterns from tree to tree, and all across the front of the barn itself. Mrs. Tree, her daughter Hilma and another woman were inside the barn cutting into long strips bolt after bolt of red, white and blue cambric and directing how these strips should be draped from the ceiling and on the walls; everywhere resounded the tapping of tack hammers. A farm wagon drove up loaded to overflowing with evergreens and with great bundles of palm leaves, and these were immediately seized upon and affixed as supplementary decorations to the tri-coloured cambric upon the inside walls of the barn. Two of the larger evergreen trees were placed on either side the barn door and their tops bent over to form an arch. In the middle of this arch it was proposed to hang a mammoth pasteboard escutcheon with gold letters, spelling the word WELCOME. Piles of chairs, rented from I.O.O.F. hall in Bonneville, heaped themselves in an apparently hopeless entanglement on the ground; while at the far extremity of the barn a couple of carpenters clattered about the impromptu staging which was to accommodate the band.

There was a strenuous gayety in the air; everybody was in the best of spirits. Notes of laughter continually interrupted the conversation on every hand. At every moment a group of men involved themselves in uproarious horse-play. They passed oblique jokes behind their hands to each other—grossly veiled double-meanings meant for the women—and bellowed with laughter thereat, stamping on the ground. The relations between the sexes grew more intimate, the women and girls pushing the young fellows away from their sides with vigorous thrusts of their elbows. It was passed from group to group that Adela Vacca, a division superintendent’s wife, had lost her garter; the daughter of the foreman of the Home ranch was kissed behind the door of the dairy-house.

Annixter, in execrable temper, appeared from time to time, hatless, his stiff yellow hair in wild disorder. He hurried between the barn and the ranch house, carrying now a wickered demijohn, now a case of wine, now a basket of lemons and pineapples. Besides general supervision, he had elected to assume the responsibility of composing the punch—something stiff, by jingo, a punch that would raise you right out of your boots; a regular hairlifter.

The harness room of the barn he had set apart for: himself and intimates. He had brought a long table down from the house and upon it had set out boxes of cigars, bottles of whiskey and of beer and the great china bowls for the punch. It would be no fault of his, he declared, if half the number of his men friends were not uproarious before they left. His barn dance would be the talk of all Tulare County for years to come. For this one day