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 bar-rooms, 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
Guad