en so staunch, so rigidly
upright, so loyal to his convictions, so bitter in his denunciation of
the New Politics, so scathing in his attacks on bribery and corruption
in high places; was it possible that now, at last, he could be
brought to withhold his condemnation of the devious intrigues of the
unscrupulous, going on there under his very eyes? That Magnus should not
command Harran to refrain from all intercourse with the conspirators,
had been a matter of vast surprise to Mrs. Derrick. Time was when Magnus
would have forbidden his son to so much as recognise a dishonourable
man.

But besides all this, Derrick's wife trembled at the thought of
her husband and son engaging in so desperate a grapple with the
railroad--that great monster, iron-hearted, relentless, infinitely
powerful. Always it had issued triumphant from the fight; always S.
Behrman, the Corporation's champion, remained upon the field as victor,
placid, unperturbed, unassailable. But now a more terrible struggle than
any hitherto loomed menacing over the rim of the future; money was to be
spent like water; personal reputations were to be hazarded in the issue;
failure meant ruin in all directions, financial ruin, moral ruin,
ruin of prestige, ruin of character. Success, to her mind, was almost
impossible. Annie Derrick feared the railroad. At night, when everything
else was still, the distant roar of passing trains echoed across Los
Muertos, from Guadalajara, from Bonneville, or from the Long Trestle,
straight into her heart. At such moments she saw very plainly the
galloping terror of steam and steel, with its single eye, cyclopean,
red, shooting from horizon to horizon, symbol of a vast power, huge and
terrible; the leviathan with tentacles of steel, to oppose which meant
to be ground to instant destruction beneath the clashing wheels. No,
it was better to submit, to resign oneself to the inevitable. She
obliterated herself, shrinking from the harshness of the world,
striving, with vain hands, to draw her husband back with her.

Just before Annixter's arrival, she had been sitting, thoughtful, in her
long chair, an open volume of poems turned down upon her lap, her glance
losing itself in the immensity of Los Muertos that, from the edge of
the lawn close by, unrolled itself, gigantic, toward the far, southern
horizon, wrinkled and serrated after the season's ploughing. The earth,
hitherto grey with dust, was now upturned and brown. As far as the eye