In the dry clean air of the Southwest all things change slowly. Growth is
slow and decay is even slower. The body of a dead horse in the desert does
not rot but dessicates, the hide remaining intact for months, the bones
perhaps for years. Men and beasts often live to great age. The _pinon_
trees on the red hills were there when the conquerors came, and they are
not much larger now—only more gnarled and twisted.
This strange inertia seems to possess institutions and customs as well as
life itself. In the valley towns, it is true, the railroads have brought
and thrown down all the conveniences and incongruities of civilization.
But ride away from the railroads into the mountains or among the lava
_mesas_, and you are riding into the past. You will see little earthen
towns, brown or golden or red in the sunlight, according to the soil that
bore them, which have not changed in a century. You will see grain
threshed by herds of goats and ponies driven around and around the
threshing floors, as men threshed grain before the Bible was written. You
will see Indian pueblos which have not changed materially since the brave
days when Coronado came to Taos and the Spanish soldiers stormed the
heights of Acoma. You will hear of strange Gods and devils and of the evil
eye. It is almost as though this crystalline air were indeed a great clear
crystal, impervious to time, in which the past is forever encysted.
The region in which Ramon’s heritage lay was a typical part of this
forgotten land. In the southern end of the Rocky Mountains, it was a
country of great tilted _mesas_ reaching above timber line, covered for
the most part with heavy forests of pine and fir, with here and there
great upland pastures swept clean by forest fires of long ago. Along the
lower slopes of the mountains, where the valleys widened, were primitive
little _adobe_ towns, in which the Mexicans lived, each owning a few acres
of tillable land. In the summer they followed their sheep herds in the
upland pastures. There were not a hundred white men in the whole of Arriba
County, and no railroad touched it.
In this region a few Mexicans who were shrewder or stronger than the
others, who owned stores or land, dominated the rest of the people much as
the _patrones_ had dominated them in the days before the Mexican War. Here
still flourished the hatred for the gringo which culminated in that war.
Here that strange sect, the _penitentes hermanos_, half savage and half
mediaeval, still was strong and still recruited its strength every year
with young men, who elsewhere were refusing to undergo its brutal
tortures.
For all of these reasons, this was an advantageous field for the fight
Ramon proposed to make. In the valley MacDougall’s money and influence
would surely have beaten him. But here he could play upon the ancient
hatred for the gringo; here he could use to the best advantage the
prestige of his family; here, above all, if he could win over the
_penitentes_, he could do almost anything he pleased.
His plan of joining that ancient order to gain influence was not an
original one. Mexican politicians and perhaps one or two gringos had done
it, and the fact was a matter of common gossip. Some of these _penitentes_
for a purpose had been men of great influence, and their initiations had
been tempered to suit their sensitive skins. Others had been Mexicans of
the poorer sort, capable of sharing the half-fanatic, half sadistic spirit
of the thing.
Ramon came to the order as a young and almost unknown man seeking its aid.
He could not hope for much mercy. And though he was primitive in many
ways, there was nothing in him that responded to the spirit of this
ordeal. The thought of Christ crucified did not inspire him to endure
suffering. But the thought of a girl with yellow hair did.