holds, Ulsteen does, that 'grain rates as low as
the new figure would amount to confiscation of property, and that, on
such a basis, the railroad could not be operated at a legitimate profit.
As he is powerless to legislate in the matter, he can only put the rates
back at what they originally were before the commissioners made the
cut, and it is so ordered.' That's our friend S. Behrman again," added
Harran, grinding his teeth. "He was up in the city the whole of the time
the new schedule was being drawn, and he and Ulsteen and the Railroad
Commission were as thick as thieves. He has been up there all this last
week, too, doing the railroad's dirty work, and backing Ulsteen up.
'Legitimate profit, legitimate profit,'" he broke out. "Can we raise
wheat at a legitimate profit with a tariff of four dollars a ton for
moving it two hundred miles to tide-water, with wheat at eighty-seven
cents? Why not hold us up with a gun in our faces, and say, 'hands up,'
and be done with it?"

He dug his boot-heel into the ground and turned away to the house
abruptly, cursing beneath his breath.

"By the way," Presley called after him, "Hooven wants to see you. He
asked me about this idea of the Governor's of getting along without the
tenants this year. Hooven wants to stay to tend the ditch and look after
the stock. I told him to see you."

Harran, his mind full of other things, nodded to say he understood.
Presley only waited till he had disappeared indoors, so that he might
not seem too indifferent to his trouble; then, remounting, struck at
once into a brisk pace, and, turning out from the carriage gate, held
on swiftly down the Lower Road, going in the direction of Guadalajara.
These matters, these eternal fierce bickerings between the farmers of
the San Joaquin and the Pacific and Southwestern Railroad irritated him
and wearied him. He cared for none of these things. They did not belong
to his world. In the picture of that huge romantic West that he saw in
his imagination, these dissensions made the one note of harsh colour
that refused to enter into the great scheme of harmony. It was material,
sordid, deadly commonplace. But, however he strove to shut his eyes to
it or his ears to it, the thing persisted and persisted. The romance
seemed complete up to that point. There it broke, there it failed, there
it became realism, grim, unlovely, unyielding. To be true--and it was
the first article of his creed to be unflinchingly true--h