Some of the affability faded from MacDougall’s face as he too rose, and the worried look in his little grey eyes intensified, as though he sensed the fact that this was an evasion. None-the-less he said good-bye cordially and promised to write the letter.
Ramon went back to his office, his mind stimulated, working intensely. Never before had he thought so clearly and purposefully. He got out an old government map of Arriba County, and with the aid of the deeds in the safe which contained all his uncle’s important papers, he managed to mark off his holdings. The whole situation became as clear to him as a checker game. He owned a bit of land in the valley which ran all the way across it, and far out upon the mesa in a long narrow strip. That was the way land holdings were always divided under the Spanish law—into strips a few hundred feet wide, and sometimes as much as fourteen miles long. This strip would in all probability be vital to the proposed right-of-way. It explained MacDougall’s eagerness to take him as a partner or else to buy him out. By holding it, he would hold the key to the situation.
In order really to dominate the country and to make his property grow in value he would have to own more of the valley. And he could not get money enough to buy except very slowly. But he could use his influence with the natives to prevent MacDougall from buying. MacDougall was a gringo. The Mexicans hated him. He had been shot at. Ramon could “preach the race issue,” as the politicians put it.
The important thing was to strengthen and [pg 126] assert his influence as a Mexican and a Delcasar. He must go to Arriba County, open the old ranch house he owned there, go among the people. He must gain a real ascendency. He knew how to do it. It was his birthright. He was full of fight and ambition, confident, elated. The way was clear before him. Tomorrow he would go to Julia.
CHAPTER XVII
He had received a note of sympathy from her soon after his uncle’s death and he had called at the Roths’ once, but had found several other callers there and no opportunity of being alone with her. Then she had gone away on a two-weeks, automobile trip to the Mesa Verde National Park, so that he had seen practically nothing of her. But all of this time he had been thinking of her more confidently than ever before. He was rich now, he was strong. All of the preliminaries had been finished. He could go to her and claim her.
He called her on the telephone from his office, and the Mexican maid answered. She would see if Miss Roth was in. After a long wait she reported that Miss Roth was out. He tried again that day, and a third time the next morning with a like result.
This filled him with anxious, angry bewilderment. He felt sure she had not really been out all three times. Were her mother and brother keeping his message from her? Or had something turned her against him? He remembered with a keen pang of anxiety, for the first time, [pg 128] the insinuations of Father Lugaria. Could that miserable rumour have reached her? He had no idea how she would have taken it if it had. He really did not know or understand this girl at all; he merely loved her and desired her with a desire which had become the ruling necessity of his life. To him she was a being of a different sort, from a different world—a mystery. They had nothing in common but a rebellious discontent with life, and this glamorous bewildering thing, so much stronger than they, so far beyond their comprehension, which they called their love.