CHAPTER XXXV
His forebodings were confirmed in detail the next morning when Cortez came into his office, his face wrinkled with worry and darkened by exposure to the weather. He was angry too.
“Por Dios, man! To go off like that and not even leave me an address. If I could have gotten more money to hire men I might have saved some of them … yes, more than half of the lambs died, and many of the ewes. There is nothing to do now. They are on the best of the range, and it has begun to rain in the mountains. But it is too bad. It cost you many thousands … that trip to New York.”
Ramon gave Cortez a cigar to soothe his sensibilities, thanked him with dignity for his loyal services, and sent him away. Then he put on his hat and went outside to walk and think.
The town seemed to him quiet as though half-deserted. This was partly by contrast with the place of din which he had just left, and partly because this was the dull season, when the first hot spell of summer drove many away from the town and kept those who remained in their houses most of the day. The sandy streets caught the [pg 255] sun and cherished it in a merciless glare. They were baked so hot that barefoot urchins hopped gingerly from one patch of shade to the next. In the numerous vacant lots rank jungles of weeds languished in the dry heat, and long blue-tailed lizards, veritable heat-sprites, emerged to frolic and doze on deserted sidewalks. The leaves of the cottonwoods hung limp, and the white downy tufts that carried their seeds everywhere drifted and swam in the shimmering air. The river had shrunk to a string of shallow pools in a sandy plain, the irrigation ditches were empty, and in Old Town the Mexicans were asking God for rain by carrying an image of the Virgin Mary about on a litter and firing muskets into the air.
Quickly wearied, Ramon sat down on a shaded bench in the park and tried to think out his situation and to decide what he should do. The easy way was to sell out, pay his debts, provide for his mother and sister and with what was left go his own way—buy a little ranch perhaps in the mountains or in the valley where he could live in peace and do as he pleased. Wearied as he was by struggle and disappointment, this prospect allured him, and yet he could not quite accept it. He felt vaguely the fact that in selling his lands, he would be selling out to fate, he would be surrendering to MacDougall, to the gringos, he would be renouncing all his high hopes and dreams. [pg 256] His mountain lands, with their steadily increasing value, the power they gave him, would make of his life a thing of possibilities—an adventure. Settled on a little ranch somewhere, his whole story would be told in one of its years.
This he did not reason clearly, but the emotional struggle within him was therefore all the stronger. It was his old struggle in another guise—the struggle between the primitive being in him and the civilized, between earth and the world of men. Each of them in turn filled his mind with images and emotions, and he was impotent to judge between them.
His being was fairly rooted in the soil, and the animal happiness it offered—the free play of instinct, the sweetness of being physically and emotionally at peace with environment—was the only happiness he had ever known. Vaguely yet surely he had felt the world of men and works, the artificial world, to contain something larger and more beautiful than this. Julia Roth had been to him a stimulating symbol of this higher, this more desirable thing. His love for her had been the soil in which his aspirations had grown. That love had turned to bitterness and lust, and his aspirations had led him among greeds and fears and struggles that differed from those of the wild things only in that they were covert and [pg 257] devious, lacking the free beauty of instinct fearlessly followed and the dignity of open battle. Of civilization he had encountered only the raw and ugly edge, which is uglier than savagery. He knew no more of the true spirit of it than a man who has camped in a farmer’s back pasture knows of the true spirit of wildness. It had treated him without mercy and brought out the worst of him. And yet because he had once loved and dreamed he could not go back to the easy but limited satisfactions of the soil and be wholly content.
So he could not make up his mind at first to surrender, but in the next few days one thing after another came to tempt him that way. MacDougall made him an offer for his lands which to his surprise was a little better than the last one. He learned afterward that the over-shrewd lawyer had misinterpreted his trip to New York, imagining that he had gone there to interest eastern capital in his lands.
His mother and sister were two very cogent arguments in favour of selling. The Dona Delcasar, a simple and vain old lady, now regarded herself as a woman of wealth, and was always after him for money. Her ambition was to build a house in the Highlands and serve tea at four o’clock (although it was thick chocolate [pg 258] she liked) and break into society. His one discussion of the matter with her was a bitter experience.
“Holy Mary!” she exclaimed in her shrill Spanish, when he broached a plan of retrenchment, “What a son I have! You spend thousands on yourself, chasing women and buying automobiles, and now you want us to spend the rest of our lives in this old house and walk to church so that you can make it up. God, but men are selfish!”
He saw that if he tried to save money and make a fight for his lands he would have to struggle not only with MacDougall and the weather, but with two ignorant, ambitious and sharp-tongued women. And family pride here fought against him. He did not want to see his women folk go shabbily in the town. He wanted them to have their brick house and their tea parties, and to uphold the name of Delcasar as well as they might.
One day while he was still struggling with his problem he went to look at a ranch that was offered for sale in the valley a few miles north of town. It was this place more than anything else which decided him. The old house had been built by one of his ancestors almost a hundred years before, and had then been the seat of an estate which embraced all the valley and mesa [pg 259] lands for miles in every direction. It had changed hands several times and there were now but a few hundred acres. The woodwork of the house was in bad repair, but its adobe walls, three feet thick, were firm as ever. There were still traces of the adobe stockade behind it, with walls ten feet high, and the building which had housed the peones was still standing, now filled with fragrant hay. In front of it stood an old cedar post with rusty iron rings to which the recalcitrant field hands had been bound for beating.
Every detail of this home of his forefathers stirred his emotions. The ancient cottonwood trees in front of the house with their deep, welcome shade and the soft voices of courting doves among the leaves; the alfalfa fields heavy with purple blossom, ripe for cutting; the orchard of old apple trees and thickets of Indian plum run wild; the neglected vineyard that could be made to yield several barrels of red wine—all of these things spoke to him with subtle voices. To trade his heritage for this was to trade hope and hazard for monotonous ease; but with the smell of the yielding earth in his nostrils, he no more thought of this than a man in love thinks of the long restraints and irks of marriage when the kiss of his woman is on his lips.