“The men here don’t like little thin women,” said Teresa, wistfully.
“One doesn’t care what the men like,” said Kate. “Do you think Don Ramón wishes you were a plump partridge?”
Teresa looked at her with a smile in her dark, big bright eyes, that were so quick, and in many ways so unseeing.
“Who knows!” she said. And in her quick, mischievous smile it was evident she would like also, sometimes, to be a plump partridge.
Kate now saw more of the hacienda life than she had done before. When Ramón was at home, he consulted his overseer, or administrator, every morning. But already Teresa was taking this work off his hands. She would see to the estate.
Ramón was a good deal absent, either in Mexico or in Guadalajara, or even away in Sonora. He was already famous and notorious throughout the country, his name was a name to conjure with. But underneath the rather ready hero-worship of the Mexicans, Kate somehow felt their latent grudging. Perhaps they took more satisfaction in ultimately destroying their heroes, than in temporarily raising them high. The real perfect moment was when the hero was downed.
And to Kate, sceptic as she was, it seemed much more likely that they were sharpening the machete to stick in Ramón’s heart, when he got a bit too big for them, than anything else. Though, to be sure, there was Cipriano to reckon with. And Cipriano was a little devil whom they quite rightly feared. And Cipriano, for once, was faithful. He was, to himself, Huitzilopochtli, and to this he would maintain a demonish faith. He was Huitzilopochtli, Ramón was Quetzalcoatl. To Cipriano this was a plain and living fact. And he kept his army keen as a knife. Even the President would not care to run counter to Cipriano. And the President was a brave man too.
“One day,” he said, “we will put Quetzalcoatl in Puebla Cathedral, and Huitzilopochtli in Mexico Cathedral and Malintzi in Guadalupe. The day will come, Ramón.”
“We will see that it comes,” Ramón replied.
But Ramón and Montes suffered alike from the deep, devilish animosity the country sent out in silence, against them. It was the same, whoever was in power: the Mexicans seemed to steam with invisible, grudging hate, the hate of demons foiled in their own souls, whose only motive is to foil everything, everybody, in the everlasting hell of cramped frustration.