CHAPTER XVI
About two weeks after the Don’s funeral, Ramon received a summons which he had been vaguely expecting. He was asked by Mr. MacDougall’s secretary over the telephone to call, whenever it would be convenient, at Mr. MacDougall’s office.
He knew just what this meant. MacDougall would try to make with him an arrangement somewhat similar to the one he had had with the Don. Ramon knew that he did not want such an arrangement on any terms. He felt confident that not one could swindle him, but at the same time he was half afraid of the Scotchman; he felt instinctively that MacDougall was a man for him to avoid. And besides, he intended to use his lands in his own way. He would sell part of them to the railroad, which was projected to be built through them, if he could get a good price; but the hunger for owning land, for dominating a part of the earth, was as much a part of him as his right hand. He wanted no modern business partnership. He wanted to be “el patron,” as so many Delcasars had been before him.
Here was a temptation to be dramatic, to hurl [pg 116] a picturesque defiance at the gringo. Ramon might have yielded to it a few months before. Sundry brave speeches flashed through his mind, as it was. But he resolutely put them aside. There was too much at stake … his love. He determined to call on MacDougall promptly and to be polite.
MacDougall was a heavy, bald man of Scotch descent, and very true to type. He had come to town from the East about fifteen years before with his wife and his two tall, raw-boned children—a boy and a girl. The family had been very poor. They had lived in a small adobe house on the mesa. For ten years Mrs. MacDougall had done all of her own housework, including the washing; the two children had gone to school in clothes that seemed always too small for them; and MacDougall had laboured obscurely day and night in a small dark office. During these ten years the MacDougalls had been completely overlooked by local society, and if they felt any resentment they did not show it.
Meantime MacDougall had been systematically and laboriously laying the foundations of a fortune. His passion was for land. He loaned money on land, chiefly to Mexicans, and he took mortgages on land in return for defending his Mexican clients, largely on criminal charges. Some of the land he farmed, and some he rented, [pg 117] but much of it lay idle, and the taxes he had to pay kept his family poor long after it might have been comfortable. But his lands rose steadily in value; he began selling, discreetly; and the MacDougalls came magnificently into their own. MacDougall was now one of the wealthiest men in the State. In five years his way of living had undergone a great change. He owned a large brick house in the highlands and had several servants. The boy had gone to Harvard, and the girl to Vassar. Neither of them was so gawky now, and both of them were much sought socially during their vacations at home. MacDougall himself had undergone a marked change for a man past fifty. He had become a stylish dresser and looked younger. He drove to work in a large car with a chauffeur. In the early morning he went riding on the mesa, mounted on a big Kentucky fox-trotter, clad in English riding clothes, jouncing solemnly up and down on his flat saddle, and followed by a couple of carefully-laundered white poodles. On these expeditions he was a source of great edification and some amusement to the natives.
In the town he was a man of weight and influence, but the country Mexicans hated him. Once when he was looking over some lands recently acquired by the foreclosure of mortgages, a bullet had whistled close to his ear, and another [pg 118] had punctured the hood of his car. He now hired a man to do his “outside work.”
Thus both MacDougall and his children had thrived and developed on their wealth. Mrs. MacDougall, perhaps, had been the sacrifice. She remained a tall, thin, pale, tired-looking woman with large hands that were a record of toil. She laboured at her new social duties and “pleasures” in exactly the same spirit that she had formerly laboured at the wash tub.