eserted by his friends, his son murdered, his dishonesty known, an old
man, broken, discarded, discredited, and abandoned. Before nightfall of
that day, Bonneville was further excited by an astonishing bit of news.
S. Behrman lived in a detached house at some distance from the town,
surrounded by a grove of live oak and eucalyptus trees. At a little
after half-past six, as he was sitting down to his supper, a bomb was
thrown through the window of his dining-room, exploding near the doorway
leading into the hall. The room was wrecked and nearly every window
of the house shattered. By a miracle, S. Behrman, himself, remained
untouched.

CHAPTER VIII

On a certain afternoon in the early part of July, about a month after
the fight at the irrigating ditch and the mass meeting at Bonneville,
Cedarquist, at the moment opening his mail in his office in San
Francisco, was genuinely surprised to receive a visit from Presley.

"Well, upon my word, Pres," exclaimed the manufacturer, as the young man
came in through the door that the office boy held open for him, "upon
my word, have you been sick? Sit down, my boy. Have a glass of sherry. I
always keep a bottle here."

Presley accepted the wine and sank into the depths of a great leather
chair near by.

"Sick?" he answered. "Yes, I have been sick. I'm sick now. I'm gone to
pieces, sir."

His manner was the extreme of listlessness--the listlessness of great
fatigue. "Well, well," observed the other. "I'm right sorry to hear
that. What's the trouble, Pres?"

"Oh, nerves mostly, I suppose, and my head, and insomnia, and
weakness, a general collapse all along the line, the doctor tells
me. 'Over-cerebration,' he says; 'over-excitement.' I fancy I rather
narrowly missed brain fever."

"Well, I can easily suppose it," answered Cedarquist gravely, "after all
you have been through."

Presley closed his eyes--they were sunken in circles of dark brown
flesh--and pressed a thin hand to the back of his head.

"It is a nightmare," he murmured. "A frightful nightmare, and it's not
over yet. You have heard of it all only through the newspaper reports.
But down there, at Bonneville, at Los Muertos--oh, you can have no idea
of it, of the misery caused by the defeat of the ranchers and by this
decision of the Supreme Court that dispossesses them all. We had gone on
hoping to the last that we would win there. We had thought that in the
Supreme Court of the United States, at least,