tell him I told him to pay you off and then clear
out. And, you hear me," he concluded, with a menacing outthrust of his
lower jaw, "you hear me, if I catch you hanging around the ranch house
after this, or if I so much as see you on Quien Sabe, I'll show you the
way off of it, my friend, at the toe of my boot. Now, then, get out of
the way and let me pass."

Angry beyond the power of retort, Delaney drove the spurs into the
buckskin and passed the buggy in a single bound. Annixter gathered up
the reins and drove on muttering to himself, and occasionally looking
back to observe the buckskin flying toward the ranch house in a
spattering shower of mud, Delaney urging her on, his head bent down
against the falling rain.

"Huh," grunted Annixter with grim satisfaction, a certain sense of good
humour at length returning to him, "that just about takes the saleratus
out of YOUR dough, my friend."

A little farther on, Annixter got out of the buggy a second time to open
another gate that let him out upon the Upper Road, not far distant from
Guadalajara. It was the road that connected that town with Bonneville
and that ran parallel with the railroad tracks. On the other side of the
track he could see the infinite extension of the brown, bare land of
Los Muertos, turning now to a soft, moist welter of fertility under
the insistent caressing of the rain. The hard, sun-baked clods were
decomposing, the crevices between drinking the wet with an eager,
sucking noise. But the prospect was dreary; the distant horizons were
blotted under drifting mists of rain; the eternal monotony of the earth
lay open to the sombre low sky without a single adornment, without a
single variation from its melancholy flatness. Near at hand the wires
between the telegraph poles vibrated with a faint humming under the
multitudinous fingering of the myriad of falling drops, striking among
them and dripping off steadily from one to another. The poles themselves
were dark and swollen and glistening with wet, while the little cones of
glass on the transverse bars reflected the dull grey light of the end of
the afternoon.

As Annixter was about to drive on, a freight train passed, coming
from Guadalajara, going northward toward Bonneville, Fresno and San
Francisco. It was a long train, moving slowly, methodically, with a
measured coughing of its locomotive and a rhythmic cadence of its trucks
over the interstices of the rails. On two or three of the flat car