“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, we could find justice. And the news of its decision was the worst, last blow of all. For Magnus it was the last—positively the very last.”
“Poor, poor Derrick,” murmured Cedarquist. “Tell me about him, Pres. How does he take it? What is he going to do?”
“It beggars him, sir. He sunk a great deal more than any of us believed in his ranch, when he resolved to turn off most of the tenants and farm the ranch himself. Then the fight he made against the Railroad in the Courts and the political campaign he went into, to get Lyman on the Railroad Commission, took more of it. The money that Genslinger blackmailed him of, it seems, was about all he had left. He had been gambling—you know the Governor—on another bonanza crop this year to recoup him. Well, the bonanza came right enough—just in time for S. Behrman and the Railroad to grab it. Magnus is ruined.”
“What a tragedy! what a tragedy!” murmured the other. “Lyman turning rascal, Harran killed, and now this; and all within so short a time—all at the SAME time, you might almost say.”
“If it had only killed him,” continued Presley; “but that is the worst of it.”