A few days later one bright morning Ramon was sitting in the sun before
the door of his friend, Francisco Guiterrez, feeling still somewhat sore,
but otherwise surprisingly well. Guiterrez, a young sheep-herder, held the
position of _coadjutor_ of the local _penitente_ chapter, and one of his
duties as such was to take the penitent to his house and care for him
after the initiation. He had washed Ramon’s wounds in a tea made by
boiling Romero weed. This was a remedy which the _penitentes_ had used for
centuries, and its efficacy was proved by the fact that Ramon’s cuts had
begun to heal at once, and that he had had very little fever.
For a couple of days Ramon had been forced to lie restlessly in the only
bed of the Guiterrez establishment. The Senora Guiterrez, a pretty buxom
young Mexican woman, had fed him on _atole_ gruel and on all of the eggs
which her small flock of scrub hens produced; the seven little dirty brown
Guiterrez children had come in to marvel at him with their fingers in
their mouths; the Guiterrez goats and dogs and chickens had wandered in
and out of the room in a companionable way, as though seeking to make him
feel at ease; and Guiterrez himself had spent his evenings sitting beside
Ramon, smoking cigarettes and talking.
This time of idleness had not been wholly wasted, either, for it had come
out in the course of conversation that Guiterrez had been offered a
thousand dollars for his place by a man whom he did not know, but whom
Ramon had easily identified as an agent of MacDougall. Tempted by an
amount which he could scarcely conceive, Guiterrez was thinking seriously
of accepting the offer.
Now that he had won over Alfego and had gotten the influence of the
_penitentes_ on his side, Ramon’s one remaining object was to defeat just
such deals as this, which MacDougall already had under way. He intended to
stir up feeling against the gringos, and to persuade the Mexicans not to
sell. Later, such lands as he needed in order to control the right-of-way,
he would gain by lending money and taking mortgages. But he did not intend
to cheat any one. Such Mexicans as he had to oust from their lands, he
would locate elsewhere. He was filled with a large generosity, and with a
real love for these, his people. He meant to dominate this country, but
his pride demanded that no one should be poor or hungry in his domain. So
now he argued the matter to Guiterrez with real sincerity.
“A thousand dollars? _Por Dios_, man! Don’t you know that this place is
worth many thousand dollars to you?”
“How can it be worth many thousand?” Guiterrez demanded. “What have I
here? A few acres of chile and corn, a little hay, some range for my
goats, a few cherry trees, a house.… Many thousands? No.”
“You have here a home, _amigo_,” Ramon reminded him. “Do you know how long
a thousand dollars would support you? A year, perhaps. Then you would have
to work for other men the rest of your life. Here you are free and
independent.”
Guiterrez said nothing, but he had obviously received a new idea, and was
impressed. Ramon never returned to the direct argument, but he missed no
chance to stimulate Guiterrez’s pride in his establishment.
“This is a good little house you have _amigo_,” he would observe. And
Guiterrez would tell him that the house had been built by his grandfather,
but that its walls were as firm as ever, and that he had been intending
for several years to plaster it, but had never gotten time. Before he was
out of bed, Ramon was reasonably sure that Guiterrez would never sell.
The house was indeed charmingly situated on a hillside at the foot of
which a little clear trout stream, called Rio Gallinas, chuckled over the
bright pebbles in its bed and ran to hide in thickets of willow.
Sitting on the _portal_, which ran the length of the house and consisted
of a projection of the roof supported by rough pine logs, Ramon could look
down the canyon to where it widened into a little valley that lost itself
in the vast levels of the _mesa_. There thirsty sands swallowed the stream
and not a sprig of green marred the harmony of grey and purple swimming in
vivid light, reaching away to the horizon where faint blue mountains hung
in drooping lines.
By turning his head, Ramon could look into the heart of the mountains
whence the stream issued through a narrow canyon, with steep, forested
ridges on either side, and little level glades along the water, set with
tall, conical blue spruce trees, pines with their warm red boles, and
little clumps of aspen with gleaming white stems, and trembling leaves of
mingled gold and green.
Ramon spent many hours with his back against the wall, his knees drawn up
under his chin, Mexican fashion, smoking and vaguely dreaming of the girl
he loved and of the things he would do. The vast sun drenched landscape
before him was too much a part of his life, too intimate a thing for him
to appreciate its beauty, but after his struggles with doubt and desire,
it filled him with an unaccountable contentment. Its warmth and
brightness, its unchanging serenity, its ceaseless soft voices of wind and
water, lulled his mind and comforted his senses. The country was like some
great purring creature that let him lie in its bosom and filled his body
with the warm steady throb of its untroubled strength.
After a week of recuperation, he bought a horse from Guiterrez for a pack
animal, loaded it with bedding and provisions and rode away into the
mountains. His task was now to find other men who had fallen under the
influence of MacDougall, and to persuade them not to sell their lands.
Some of them would be at their homes, but others would be with the sheep
herds, scattered here and there in the high country. He faced long days of
mountain wandering, and for all that he longed to be done with his task,
this part of it was sweet to him.