ently been abandoned
long since. Weeds were already choking the vines. Everywhere the poles
sagged and drooped. Many had even fallen, dragging the vines with them,
spreading them over the ground in an inextricable tangle of dead
leaves, decaying tendrils, and snarled string. The fence was broken;
the unfinished storehouse, which never was to see completion, was a
lamentable spectacle of gaping doors and windows--a melancholy skeleton.
Last of all, Presley had caught a glimpse of Dyke himself, seated in
his rocking chair on the porch, his beard and hair unkempt, motionless,
looking with vague eyes upon his hands that lay palm upwards and idle in
his lap.

Magnus on his way to San Francisco was joined at Bonneville by Osterman.
Upon seating himself in front of the master of Los Muertos in the
smoking-car of the train, this latter, pushing back his hat and
smoothing his bald head, observed:

"Governor, you look all frazeled out. Anything wrong these days?"

The other answered in the negative, but, for all that, Osterman was
right. The Governor had aged suddenly. His former erectness was
gone, the broad shoulders stooped a little, the strong lines of his
thin-lipped mouth were relaxed, and his hand, as it clasped over the
yellowed ivory knob of his cane, had an unwonted tremulousness not
hitherto noticeable. But the change in Magnus was more than physical.
At last, in the full tide of power, President of the League, known and
talked of in every county of the State, leader in a great struggle,
consulted, deferred to as the "Prominent Man," at length attaining that
position, so long and vainly sought for, he yet found no pleasure in
his triumph, and little but bitterness in life. His success had come by
devious methods, had been reached by obscure means.

He was a briber. He could never forget that. To further his ends,
disinterested, public-spirited, even philanthropic as those were, he
had connived with knavery, he, the politician of the old school, of such
rigorous integrity, who had abandoned a "career" rather than compromise
with honesty. At this eleventh hour, involved and entrapped in the
fine-spun web of a new order of things, bewildered by Osterman's
dexterity, by his volubility and glibness, goaded and harassed beyond
the point of reason by the aggression of the Trust he fought, he had at
last failed. He had fallen he had given a bribe. He had thought that,
after all, this would make but little difference with h